A Family Affair

by Janet Tanner

It was Billy Edgell. David nodded, but otherwise ignored him.

  ‘Too big to speak to me, eh?’ Billy taunted, planting himself right in front of David. ‘What have you got to be so full of yourself about?’

  ‘Get out of my way, Billy,’ David said quietly. ‘I’m not looking for trouble if you are.’

  ‘I’m not looking for trouble if you are,’ Billy mimicked. ‘Quite the gent, aren’t you? But what’s it feel like to have two fucking whores for sisters? That’s what I’d like to know.’

  ‘You what?’ David said. ‘What did you just say?’

  ‘You heard. A pair of fucking knocked-up whores.’

  He never got any further. David’s fist connected with his jaw and he went head first and backwards down the steps. For a moment he lay there, half-stunned, and David bent over him threateningly.

  ‘If you ever – ever – say anything like that about my sisters again, I’ll break your bloody neck, Edgell.’

  Then, his friends staring after him in amazement, he marched off along the street.

  ‘I gave Billy Edgell a bloody nose tonight,’ he said to Carrie.

  Her hand flew to her mouth. ‘Oh my Lord! You did what? But why?’

  ‘I don’t think you’d want to know,’ David said.

  ‘Oh, you shouldn’t have! I mean, you shouldn’t fight with anybody, but especially not those Edgells. They can make a lot of trouble for us. I think I ought to tell you …’

  ‘Mum, don’t,’ David said. ‘There’s things in this family you want swept under the carpet, that’s up to you. Just leave me out of it. I know what you’re talking about – or I can have a good guess, and I’ve done my bit. But I don’t want anything to do with the tangles you’ve got yourself in. I’ve got enough to worry about without that.’

  ‘Oh, David.’ Tears sprang to Carrie’s eyes. She knew David didn’t always approve of the way she stage-managed family life and his good opinion was very important to her. ‘You shouldn’t upset Billy Edgell, though,’ she said anxiously. ‘He’s trouble, just like his mother, and he won’t forget it.’

  ‘Shall I tell you something, Mum?’ David said. ‘I’ve been wanting to give somebody a good hard punch ever since Linda died. Well, now I have, and I’m bloody glad it was that bloody Billy Edgell!’

  Chapter Twenty-One

  ‘There’s someone to see you, Jennifer.’

  Jenny, on her knees trying to retrieve the last bit of fluff that lurked beneath the old claw-foot bath, looked up at the sound of Sister Theresa’s voice, hope flooding through her like warm spring sunshine. Someone to see her! She had had no visitors since coming to the home – visitors were discouraged as unsettling for the girls. So who could it be unless … Bryn! her heart shouted.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In Sister Anne’s office.’ Sister Theresa was one of the younger nuns; she had a kind voice and a nice smile, but Jenny had noticed that when she showed any incipient friendship towards the girls the stricter nuns gave her black looks. Sister Theresa was probably given a talking-to and some kind of penance once they were out of earshot judging by the fact that after such an incident it was always a long time before she showed any signs of being friendly again.

  Jenny followed Sister Theresa out on to the landing, tidying her hair as best she could. There were no mirrors in the home – mirrors smacked of vanity – but Jenny was uncomfortably aware that she did not look her best. The untidy hair, the puffy red hands, the lack of even the lightest touch of make-up and worst of all, the ungainly shape her body had become beneath the ugly voluminous grey smock that all the girls were expected to wear.

  Her feet flew her down the stairs and along the flagged corridor, each stone of which she had personal acquaintance with so often had she scrubbed it. The door to Sister Anne’s study was ajar; outside Jenny hesitated, then knocked.

  ‘Come!’

  She pushed the door open, her stomach knotting with anticipation. Not Bryn in the hidebound visitors’chair. Had she really imagined for a moment it would be?

  Heather.

  Jenny’s initial rush of disappointment was quickly replaced by pleasure. Tears pricked her eyes and she stood motionless for a moment. Then Heather was on her feet and the two girls were in one another’s arms, oblivious of the disapproving gaze of the old nun.

  ‘Oh, Jenny … Jenny …’ Heather was close to tears too, overcome with emotion.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Jenny asked, frightened suddenly that Heather had come to break bad news.

  ‘Control yourself, Jennifer,’ Sister Anne said tartly. And to Heather: ‘Jennifer can show you to the library. You can talk there.’

  Jenny couldn’t let go of Heather’s arm for even a moment. She hung on to it like a lifeline as she led Heather back along the stone flagged corridor.

  ‘What a weird place!’ Heather said with a small shiver as she took in the oppressive atmosphere of the wood-panelled walls and the small statues on their plinths in the various niches, the mingled smells of incense and carbolic, the queer-shaped patches of light that crept in through the small vaulted windows and only managed, somehow, to make the surrounding dimness deeper and more shadowy.

  ‘It’s supposed to be haunted.’

  ‘I’m not surprised! Are you all right here, Jenny?’

  ‘All right.’

  She wanted to say it wasn’t the ghosts she was afraid of. It wasn’t the ghosts that made her existence here such an ordeal but the flesh-and-blood women whose sole purpose in life seemed to extract a penance from her and the other girls for their sinful behaviour. But she didn’t want Heather to know how unhappy she was. In any case, it wasn’t quite true that the ghosts played no part. They added to the aura of oppression – and not simply the spirits of the long dead, either. Since the manor had become a mother and baby home, the thick walls and the wooden panelling had seen too much unhappiness and despair, soaking it up like a sponge so that the atmosphere was thick with it.

  The library had once been a drawing room. Shelves filled with religious and improving books lined three walls. The fourth was given over to a massive old fireplace surrounded with more dark panelling. No fire was ever lit here, even in the depths of winter, and the library was little used. Once or twice Jenny had tried to read here, but that same oppressive atmosphere which pervaded the entire house was intensified here by the smell of musty paper and disuse.

  Heather and Jenny sat down side by side on the worn leather sofa.

  ‘Are you getting proper medical care?’ Heather asked.

  ‘The doctor comes once a week.’

  ‘And you’re keeping all right? He’s happy with the baby?’

  ‘He’s never said that he’s not. Did you know they’ve found a couple to adopt the baby – as long as it’s a girl? I wrote and told Mum.’

  ‘Yes, she told me.’

  There was a small silence; Heather looked increasingly uncomfortable.

  ‘It’s lovely to see you,’ Jenny said, ‘but I never expected … I mean, Sister Anne doesn’t like us to have visitors.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘So – is there any special reason why?’

  Heather dropped her eyes, catching her lip between her teeth and biting hard.

  ‘It’s not Mum or Dad, is it?’ Jenny asked, worried. ‘Nothing’s happened to them?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Gran, then? Or David?’ It didn’t occur to her to add Vanessa to the list. If anything had happened to Vanessa it wouldn’t be Heather who was here.

  ‘No – it’s nothing like that, Jen. But I do need to talk to you. There’s something I have to tell you before you come home and hear it from someone else.’

  ‘You’re not splitting up – you and Steve?’

  ‘No – no. It’s, oh Jenny, I don’t know where to start.’

  Jenny waited, puzzled and apprehensive, and after a moment Heather said: ‘You remember when you first found out you were pregnant? And I suggested maybe I could bring your baby up – preten
d it was mine?’

  ‘No!’ Jenny said. ‘If you’ve come to try to persuade me to change my mind, the answer is no. I couldn’t. It would be even worse than …’ She broke off, gulping; her fingernails – what was left of them – were digging uneven crescents in the palms of her hands as she contemplated the awfulness of what was to come. ‘Don’t ask me, Heather, please.’

  ‘I’m not asking you.’

  ‘That’s all right then, because …’

  ‘Jenny, you’re making this so hard for me!’

  She was close to tears again. Jenny gazed at her, puzzled.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Being so against the idea …’

  ‘I can’t help it, Heather. I know you’d do your best but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.’

  ‘… because it’s what I did.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh, Jen, I know this is going to come as an awful shock, but … well, the same thing happened to me when I was … well, younger than you, actually.’

  ‘You mean … you had a baby?’ Heather nodded, not speaking. ‘You! But what happened to it? You had it adopted like I’m going to?’

  ‘No.’ Heather’s mouth worked but no more words came.

  ‘Then what? Did it die?’

  ‘No. Oh, Jenny …’ And suddenly the tears were coursing down her cheeks and she reached blindly for Jenny’s hands, squeezing them so hard that it hurt. ‘No, she didn’t die, and she wasn’t adopted. Well, not the way you mean. Oh, don’t you see? Do I have to spell it out to you? Oh, Jenny …’

  ‘No!’ Jenny said. She couldn’t – wouldn’t – believe the thought that was occurring to her. It couldn’t be! She was mad to think it for even a moment. ‘No! No! Tell me I’m going crazy! It’s not … Heather. You’re not saying … are you … that I … ?’

  Heather didn’t need to answer. It was there in her eyes, written all over her face.

  ‘Heather! Tell me!’ Jenny was screaming now.

  Heather was crying in earnest, her face crumpled, the sobs coming from deep inside.

  ‘Yes, Jenny, it’s true. Mum’s not your mother. I am. You were my baby, Jenny. I’m not your sister. I’m your mother.’

  ‘Oh God!’ Jenny whispered. The room was spinning round her, she thought she was going to faint. She tore her hands away from Heather’s, seeing her through the mists, seeing not the familiar, the loved, but a stranger. A stranger who had lied to her, deceived her, for the whole of her life. A stranger who was now taking away from her everything that formed the foundations of her world – her parents, her very identity. ‘Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!’

  ‘Jenny, please …’

  ‘Oh God! Oh God!’ In shock, she repeated those same two words over and over again, as if she had been wound up like a clockwork toy. She could hear them escaping her lips, monotonous and inevitable, meaningless yet filled with every emotion she could imagine and some she could not. And she simply could not stop.

  ‘Jenny – is it so bad? Please, I love you! I’ve always loved you! You don’t know how many times I’ve wanted to tell you, but I couldn’t. It wouldn’t have been fair to Mum. Not after all she did … I was just a child, Jenny. It was either give you up completely, or this. I didn’t want to give you up! And Mum didn’t want it either. It was her idea. She said she’d bring you up as her own, so we moved out from Bristol, away from anybody who might have guessed. And she did. And I … Well, at least I hadn’t lost you. Not completely. I could watch you grow up – be there for you. I could even pretend sometimes when I was looking after you that everything was the way I wanted it to be. You were my little girl. My darling little girl. And you were with your real family – not with strangers … Jenny, it’s not that bad, surely? That I’m your mother? Oh please, Jenny, tell me you forgive me.’

  Jenny leaped to her feet. The atmosphere of this horrible room was suffocating her, there was a thundering noise in her ears, she thought she was going to be sick.

  ‘How could you?’ she ground out through chattering teeth. ‘How could you live with a lie like that?’

  ‘Jenny …’

  ‘Go away, Heather! I never want to see you again!’

  She turned and ran from the room. All the ghosts and unquiet spirits, all the whisperings and tumult, all the roaring and shaking of a world disintegrating, went with her.

  Sister Theresa came to her room.

  ‘Jennifer? You can’t stay up here. You must come down.’

  Jenny turned her face into the pillow, not replying.

  ‘Jennifer? Did your sister say something to upset you? It’s all right, she’s gone now. Look – you must come down. Sister Anne …’

  ‘I don’t care about Sister Anne,’ Jenny muttered. ‘What do I care about that silly old crow?’

  Sister Theresa pretended not to have heard.

  ‘Dinner is ready. It’ll be getting cold.’

  ‘I don’t want any dinner. I feel sick.’

  ‘Should I fetch the doctor?’

  ‘No. I don’t want the doctor.’

  ‘Then you must try to calm down. This is very bad for you and for your baby.’

  ‘I don’t care.’

  ‘Don’t care! About your baby! Come on now, you mustn’t be so selfish.’

  ‘Why not?’ Jenny muttered, and she meant it.

  She felt like being selfish, if that was what thinking about yourself first meant. She couldn’t think of anything but herself. In the most fundamental way. Like – who was she? For all of her life she had known – or thought she had known. Now the things she had taken for granted had been stripped away and she no longer knew. Not just who she was now – but who she had ever been. Jennifer Simmons ceased to exist. She was in a vacuum and it was the most terrifying thing that had ever happened to her.

  Mum was not her mother at all but her grandmother. Dad – not her father but her grandfather. David, her uncle. Vanessa, her sister. Heather …

  Hatred welled up, choking her. How could Heather have done that to her? How could any of them? It was the fact they’d kept it from her she couldn’t stomach. That they’d known, all of them, something so completely fundamental about her and she hadn’t. As a betrayal it ranked with the worst. All her life they’d pretended. All her life, nothing had been as it seemed. Nothing! And they’d known it and she hadn’t. They had conspired to keep it from her and the conspiracy made a unit of them somehow, a unit of which she was no longer a part. She’d been Jenny Alone all the time and she’d never known it. Separated from them by the enormity of a truth she’d never so much as guessed at. A lie. It had all been a lie. Everything. Always.

  It explained a great deal, of course, like why Carrie had always been so protective of her. Carrie had been desperately afraid that she, Jenny, would go the same way as Heather. Not following in a sister’s footsteps, but taking after her mother.

  And she had. She had! That was the supreme irony of it. For all Carrie’s precautions she had ended up just like Heather. Just like her mother.

  She wanted to scream. She wanted to cry. And she could do neither. She simply lay staring at the ceiling while the emotions rolled over her in relentless waves, leaving no room for coherent thought.

  Maybe if they’d told her before this she could have coped with it. But not now. The enormity, in her heightened emotional state, was simply too much. And Jenny couldn’t imagine she would ever get over it, ever feel any differently.

  Afterwards Jenny was never quite sure at what point she decided what she was going to do. She was never quite sure, come to that, if it was a conscious decision at all, or just a reaction. Of only one thing was she perfectly, absolutely certain. The whole of her family had become strangers. Only one living being in the whole world was hers and hers alone.

  Her baby. Not her baby and Bryn’s – he, like the rest of them, had abandoned her, deceived her, let her down. But the baby, the tiny helpless life inside her … it was the one constant she could cling to. Whatever it took, Jenny was de
cided on one thing. Nothing in heaven or on earth would persuade her now to part with her baby.

  Joyce Edgell liked the fact that her kitchen window overlooked the Green. Some might say it was a topsy-turvy sort of house, and they would have preferred the living area to overlook the front garden rather than the rows of cabbages and potato haulms that most people grew in the vegetable plots to the rear, but since the Edgells’gardens, both front and back, were identical – uncultivated wastelands of weeds and rubble left over from the time when the houses had been built, with sparse patches of field grass that had sprouted from seed blown in on the wind and a rusty bicycle and old gas cooker as ornamentation, this was hardly a consideration where she was concerned.

  Having the kitchen at the front meant that when she was working at the sink, which in spite of her slovenly habits she had to do surprisingly often since she did not own a washing machine, she was able to watch all her neighbours’comings and goings.

  One Saturday morning in late June as she plunged socks and underwear into a sink of soapy water she saw Joe come out of the Simmons house and ride off on his bicycle and a little later Carrie and David emerged and got into David’s car, which he kept parked on the Green.

  Joyce didn’t agree with people parking their cars on the Green. Once upon a time, when they had first moved in, only Tom Glass at Number 22 had owned a vehicle – a small blue van that he used in his business as a jobbing builder. Now the cars were springing up like mushrooms and for some reason their owners had taken to driving them up over the low kerb and on to the grass, where they left ugly tyre tracks and got in the way of the children who wanted to play football. Served them right if the cars got scratched or had a window broken, Joyce thought, and she always smiled with satisfaction when she heard the thud of a football on metal.

  This morning she had seen David paying close attention to one of his wheel arches – a dent perhaps – and Carrie too had a look before she got into the front passenger seat. She had her shopping basket with her and Joyce guessed David was taking her down to market.

  At this distance Joyce had been unable to see the expression on Carrie’s face, but she could picture it. Worried. Carrie always looked worried these days – and with reason. Joyce pulled a handful of socks out of the water and wrung them out with gusto. How she’d enjoyed that altercation with Carrie! She only wished she could think of a way of getting more mileage out of it. As yet, she’d said nothing to anyone, not spread the gossip at all. Once it was common knowledge she would lose the lovely sense of power that came from being the only one who knew. She was not ready to relinquish that until she was sure there was no better way of eking out her pound of flesh.