by Imogen Clark
Ursula just waves a dismissive hand at Skyler. ‘You think whatever pleases you,’ she says with a roll of her eyes, but I think I see the shadow of a smile flit across her lips.
‘And she . . .’ Skyler nods at her mother. ‘She banned me from telling you who I was even though I knew from the moment you said she was your aunt.’
I look at Ursula quizzically. ‘Why? Were you ashamed of me?’
‘No,’ she replies, but so slowly that I am not convinced that that was not the reason. ‘It was more that I needed to get things straight in my head before we all started playing happy families. You’ve met Skyler. You must understand what I’m saying. I’d never have heard the last of it.’
I want to ask what would be wrong with that, with talking about me and where I came from, but already I can feel that there is no point. From the little I’ve learned about Ursula so far, I know that she’ll do things in her own time, in her own way.
And so the evening passes. We order in Chinese food and chat about nothing important but it feels good, like an easy evening spent with old friends. Around midnight, I cannot stifle my yawns anymore. I look at my watch.
‘I ought to go,’ I say. ‘I can barely stay awake.’
‘Don’t bother with sleep,’ says Skyler. ‘You can sleep on the plane.’
But Ursula is nodding her head.
‘Let her go. She’ll be back, won’t you, Cara?’
‘I hope so,’ I reply. ‘And of course you two are welcome in England any time you want to come.’
I stand up and from nowhere I feel like I am going to cry. I need to hold that back so I focus on practicalities.
‘Can we call me a taxi?’
‘I’ll do it,’ says Skyler and disappears, leaving me alone with Ursula. She eyes me quizzically and I realise that she doesn’t miss much.
‘You okay?’ she asks.
I nod.
‘I’m glad you came,’ she says.
‘Me too.’
As I take the short ride back to the hotel, I run over the last three days in my head. I have an aunt and a cousin, which is lovely, but more importantly I have a greater sense of who I am. I feel more grounded somehow. This part feels nice but the rest of what I have learned is more difficult to process. It’s obvious now that this whole sorry mess can be dropped firmly at Dad’s door. My growing up without a mother is entirely his doing and on top of that, because he told me that she was dead, I’ve also wasted the years since I became an adult. I could have hunted for her so much earlier but his lies have stolen that chance from me.
And what about Michael? How much of all this did he already know? I have always assumed that he ran at the first chance he got because he couldn’t get along with Dad, but what if there was more to it than that?
I have to speak to Michael and suddenly this becomes the most compelling issue in my confused world. I can’t ring him now – he’ll be asleep – but I have to talk to him as soon as possible. Face to face.
When I get back to the hotel, any suggestion of tiredness has left me. I get on to my laptop and change my flight so that I land at Heathrow rather than Manchester. Then I email Mrs P to tell her that I will be a few hours later than originally planned and Michael to tell him to meet me when I get to London. I ponder for a moment over where to suggest. It needs to be somewhere central, easy for him to get to from his office but where we can talk without having a row, and if we can keep walking as we talk then there’s less chance of him walking out on me.
I choose Tate Modern.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
The journey back to the UK is straightforward but long. I try to sleep on the plane, knowing that I will need as much energy as I can muster for the day ahead, but my brain will not quieten. The air stewards turn down the lights and hand out fleece blankets and tiny pillows but I stare out of the little oval porthole at the blackness of the night sky. Why has this all come out now, when my father is too ill to explain himself? I could have stumbled across the postcards at any time. The key to unlocking these awful secrets has been sitting in the attic – but it never occurred to me to look because I didn’t know there was a secret to find. My life was just my life. Small, quiet, as it had always been. How could I have known that it was based on lies?
And now, when my head is exploding with questions, I have nowhere to turn. Dad’s lies, his twisted reasoning, any doubts or regrets that he might have had are all lost in the chaos of his shrinking mind. I will never know what he thought and that is something that I’m going to have to learn to come to terms with, somehow.
As we fly towards the dawn, the sky slips silently from velvety ink, through violet, to a startling crimson. The beauty of a sunrise never fails to lift me. Although it happens every day, and has happened every day since the dawn of time, I never tire of watching the colours seep into one another. It soothes my jagged mind. For a few moments, I let myself think of Simeon. Despite the mixed messages that he must have been getting from me, he keeps coming back. That must mean that he likes me a little bit. Am I being over-cautious? Maybe I should just relax into the whole thing and let it take me where it wants to go? With the disaster that the rest of my life is becoming, would it really be so bad if I just had a little corner of something good to retreat into? I decide that, if he gets in touch again, I will let myself enjoy whatever it is that we have without guilt or fear. As I watch the sunrise, I feel a tingle of excitement deep inside me, in spite of everything else.
Tate Modern stands on the edge of the Thames, majestic, its former life forgotten. My world is all about reinvention today.
I see Michael before he sees me. He strides, his head held high, his coat tails flying out behind. He looks so much like our father did. As he approaches, I see that he is talking into his phone, though when he sees me he ends the call abruptly. I thought I was angry with him for whatever his part is in this mess, but now that he is standing in front of me I can’t seem to retrieve that fury to use against him. He’s still my big brother, my protector, my port in a storm.
‘Cara,’ he snaps, starting to talk before he has reached me. ‘What is this all about? I’m incredibly busy. I can’t just drop everything to meet you. Well, I can, as it turns out, but it better be important.’
‘Did you know?’ I say without any preliminaries. ‘Did you know that not only is Mum not dead but that Dad took out an injunction to prevent her from seeing us?’
I see instantly from his face that he does.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
Michael seems to age twenty years in five seconds. The frown lines in his forehead deepen as his skin blanches and then blushes. I can see tears glistening in the corners of his eyes but not a drop escapes on to his cheek. He clenches his jaw, takes a deep breath and says, as I knew he would, ‘Let’s walk.’
We turn into the gallery and walk down the central concourse. The huge, grey space of the building towers above us, with echoing footsteps and voices blending together to make a low rumble of dull sound. It feels almost like a cathedral. The air is still and I half expect to see people with their heads bowed in prayer. Halfway down the slope Michael stops abruptly and turns to face me.
‘It’s not like you think,’ he says. ‘I don’t remember much and what I know I’ve pieced together myself over the years. Dad would never talk about it. The row, the last row, the one before I left for uni. That’s what that was about.’
‘What did you know?’ I ask, impatient to hear it all now.
‘Like I said before, I can remember the woman, Mum’s friend.’
‘Tilly?’ I say.
He nods.
‘I didn’t like her. She was never interested in us. If you tried to talk to her or show her something you’d made, she’d just dismiss it as rubbish. It used to annoy me, the way she brushed you off, even though you were just a baby.’
So he was protecting me, even then, aware of how I felt when I was only two. My heart swells.
‘But Mum liked her,’ he cont
inues. ‘Mum didn’t see her the way I did. Tilly became the centre of her world – more so than us, it felt like. She was like the cuckoo in the nest, pushing us away. And she was always there. To start with, she’d disappear before Dad got home, but gradually it felt like she never left. Mum and Dad argued about her a lot. I was in bed but I could hear them shouting. I didn’t understand but I could see why Dad didn’t like her. I was kind of on his side.’
Michael sets off again, striding down the slope, and I scamper after him like a little girl. ‘Then one night there was an almighty row. Mum was screaming at Dad but I couldn’t hear what she said. There was a lot of door slamming. I snuck out of bed and sat on the stairs. There was a suitcase in the hall. I thought we were going on holiday.’ He takes a deep breath, running his hand through his greying hair. ‘I couldn’t work out how Mum had packed stuff for all four of us in one bag,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘Then Tilly arrived and Mum left with her and that was it. I never saw her again.’
Michael looks defeated and I can see that maintaining his composure is taking every ounce of strength that he has. I don’t care. I need to know it all.
‘Didn’t she say goodbye or anything?’ I ask. ‘She just left?’
‘She didn’t realise she wasn’t coming back. That’s what I think anyway. They rowed. She left with Tilly and she assumed that she’d be back the next day to get us. But Dad changed the locks and went to the lawyers and that was that. Well, I didn’t understand that at the time, but I pieced it all together later.’
‘But no access at all? How could that be? She was our mother, for God’s sake.’
‘I’m not sure that that was what Dad was aiming for, but he just got lucky. The judge allocated to the case was a real “hang ’em, flog ’em” sort. He thought that lesbians were the spawn of the devil and absolutely could not be trusted with the care of delicate little minds. I’ve read the court papers: I looked them up in the National Archives. Dad couldn’t have had a more sympathetic hearing if he’d designed the judge himself and built him out of Plasticine.’
I can’t believe what I’m hearing. Michael has read the court papers? I have only just found out that there was a case and he’s read the bloody papers! I can’t unpick this now, though. We have to keep moving forward.
‘Ursula said that Mum had no money to fight the court case and that Tilly refused to bankroll her,’ I say.
‘That makes sense. Tilly was a selfish cow. I think she was just having fun. I don’t think it crossed her mind how much damage she was doing to us. You were only two, Cara. You had no idea what had happened. All you knew what that your Mummy wasn’t there anymore. You cried for weeks and weeks. We moved to Yorkshire and you still cried. Dad couldn’t stand it. That’s when he started retreating to his study. He didn’t even get any help. I suppose he was worried that someone might somehow find out the truth and spoil his widower cover story. So I looked after you, to the extent that I could, and I held you when you cried. And, eventually, you stopped.’
I can’t get my breath. How could Dad have done this to us? A mother forms the entire world of a two-year-old child. If she disappeared overnight then what damage would that do to you? And what if you were the big brother trying to make things right for his little sister? Oh my God, poor Michael. A tidal wave of pure hatred for my father washes over me. How could he put us both through that?
Then something else occurs to me.
‘So you knew she wasn’t dead. You’ve always known.’
He nods and I see in his eyes how great a burden this has been on him. They are imploring me to understand.
‘But why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I couldn’t,’ he says, his voice catching. ‘You’d been hurt so badly already but you’d made something of your life, despite everything. I was trying to protect you from any more harm, Ca. You’d been damaged enough.’
His eyes drop to my hand. I grasp it with my good hand, rubbing my fingers across the puckered skin.
‘What do you mean?’
Michael takes another deep breath and I can see how much it is costing him to tell me everything. He lets the breath out and his body shudders.
‘It was about six months after Mum had gone. Dad was in the garden in Ilkley. He was having a bonfire in an old steel bin, burning bits of paper, I don’t know. You had gone to bed but you wanted a drink so you’d climbed out of your cot and wandered downstairs. You must have spotted Dad in the garden and gone out to see him. I remember you were wearing a little pink nightdress. I could see the outline of your bedtime nappy. You had nothing on your feet.’
He swallows hard, determined to keep going.
‘Dad didn’t hear you coming. He was too intent on putting things into the fire. You arrived just as he threw Mum’s sketchbook into the flames. She was always drawing. Do you remember that, how she drew stuff? You put your hand into the fire to save it . . .’
Michael can’t hold it back any longer. His shoulders start to shake and his breath comes in ragged sobs.
‘I couldn’t stop you,’ he says. ‘I was too late.’
He throws his arms around me and buries his head into my shoulder. People turn to stare at us as his whole body heaves with the release of decades of buried emotion. I just hold him as tightly as I can and let it flood out of him. I can’t be angry with him, with Mum, with Dad, even. They each, in their own twisted way, thought they were doing the right thing. Everyone has been trying to protect me. I was the baby and each of them was trying to keep me safe.
‘It’s all right,’ I whisper into Michael’s hair. ‘I understand. It wasn’t your fault. None of it was your fault. I don’t blame you. How could I?’
He lifts his head from my shoulder and looks deep into my eyes. I can’t remember the last time we were this close.
‘Do you mean it?’ he asks, his eyes pleading, desperate. He needs forgiveness. He has carried this with him since we were children. All the anger I felt on the plane has evaporated. So much about him – his distance, his running to London, his lack of involvement with Dad, with me – suddenly it all makes sense. For the first time, I am finally grateful that I was so young. For all those years, I thought that Michael was the lucky one because he had been old enough to remember. I didn’t realise that he has spent his whole life trying to forget.
‘Of course I mean it,’ I say.
‘What will you do now?’ he asks.
Honestly, I have no idea. I have to get home and think through everything that I have learned over the last few days. At the moment I cannot see further than that.
‘Nothing,’ I say. ‘Nothing.’
I leave him at Blackfriars Station and make my way up to King’s Cross, where I catch a train back home. I am exhausted from lack of sleep and wrung out by everything that I have learned over the last few days. Now all I want is to get home.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
I can tell as soon as I approach the house that something is wrong. It’s late and I would expect the street to be quiet anyway, but somehow, like some eerie premonition, I know that all is not well at home.
I’m all fingers and thumbs as I try to find my purse and pay the taxi driver, scrabbling about for some English change, finding only quarters. As he pulls away, I hunt for my house key, which I put somewhere safe but now can’t lay my hands on. It seems like I have been gone forever, though it’s been just a few days. This is a wholly different Cara Ferensby returning home.
Finally, I find the key and let myself in. Silence sits on the house as heavy as a shroud but then I hear the soft sounds of someone moving about upstairs, gently, calmly. I call out as quietly as I can while still hoping to be heard.
‘Mrs P. Is that you? I’m back. Is everything okay?’
Mrs P appears at the top of the stairs. She is fully dressed in her uniform, a white, plastic apron tied neatly at her waist.
‘Hello, Cara,’ she says. ‘Have you had a good trip?’
‘Yes,’ I reply, abruptly dismissing he
r question. ‘What’s the matter? Is something wrong with Dad?’
‘I’m afraid he’s not very well,’ she says baldly and then starts down the stairs towards me but I’m already bounding up to meet her.
‘We’ve had the doctor in. They think it’s pneumonia. It’s quite common, given his other conditions.’
I squeeze past her and run straight to Dad’s room. She calls after me.
‘I didn’t want to worry you, seeing as you couldn’t have got back any sooner.’
But I could have been back sooner. If I hadn’t changed my flight, if I hadn’t been to see Michael . . .
It’s dark in Dad’s room with just the bedside light casting a glow over the top half of his bed. The air is very still and it’s stuffy, the sharp smell of disinfectant masking anything else. An open book and a pair of reading glasses lie on the chair by the bed. Mrs P must have been keeping watch. A drip stands sentinel over him too, the tubes snaking across his chest. I approach the bed with my heart in my mouth, as if something might jump out at me.
Dad is lying with his eyes closed but I can’t tell if he’s asleep or not. His breathing is laboured and every third breath or so just doesn’t come at all. He seems to have shrunk in the four days I’ve been away. He looks no bigger than a child under the crisp, white sheet and his skin, translucent in the half-light, is milky pale. He coughs but it’s a weary sound, as if even this is too much for him.
I look at Mrs P desperately, hoping for some kind of comfort. She comes and places an arm gently around my shoulders.
‘How long has he been like this?’
‘He started with it yesterday. He was right as rain up until then. I called the doctor out in the evening and she said that your father could stay here as I was on hand to nurse him. The antibiotics should start to kick in soon.’
I look at Dad. He is so diminished that it’s hard to see the man I know in this aged, broken shell. ‘Do you think he should be in hospital?’ I ask quietly.
