‘In the last days, Alfie. She must have said something.’ I’d moved from my sofa to his, and he was pulling miserably at his chin.
‘Please, Alfie. She must have let slip . . . something.’
‘I don’t know what you want me to say, Lara.’
‘I just want you to try—’
‘I’ve already told you. She was – confused. You know that. The way she’d just ramble.’
‘But something, she must have said something. Something you didn’t know, or something that stuck with you. Please, Alfie, think.’
‘Why is it suddenly so important?’
One of the twins was sawing out a bowdlerised version of Carnival of the Animals. Alfie winced, and smiled. He wanted me to comment, but I didn’t.
‘You haven’t drunk your tea,’ he said.
‘Nor have you,’ I pointed out. He took a gulp and looked at me.
‘Why are you like this, Lara?’
‘Like what?’
‘I think you must be very unhappy. I wish you’d let us . . .’ He stopped; shrugged; smiled at me lopsidedly.
‘Let you what, Alfie?’ I said, keeping my voice even. ‘You wish I’d let you what?’
‘Don’t do this, Lara. Help you. I wish you’d let us—’
‘Help me. By having me round on Sundays and giving me double helpings of pity with lashings of pity and sprinkles of pity on top.’ I knew I was behaving badly. What is it about your siblings that regresses you, brings out your worst? Half an hour with Alfie, and he was eight again, and I was twelve, and goading and loathing and envying him.
I took a breath. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean – I just need to know. If Mum left Dad when she found out about him, about Michael.’ He winced as I said the name, but I ploughed on. ‘If she did, and where she went, and why she went back to him. Why it went on for a further eight years – eight years, Alfie – and what they planned to do when we were too old to be lied to any longer. And even that holiday, I’ve been thinking about it, and why did she agree to go in the first place? Surely she knew it would be a disaster? Do you think – because here’s what I think – it was a sort of, forcing the cards? Knowing that I was turning twelve, and maybe thinking that the time had come, sort of thing, or do you think—’
‘Lara.’ Like our mother, Alfie rarely raised his voice, but he raised it now. His voice is too high-pitched to be raised; it sounds ridiculous. ‘You have to let it go, don’t you see that? We’re not them. They had their lives, and we’ve got ours. I know – everything with, with Jeremy and that. But you’ve got to – and don’t take this the wrong way – you’ve got to try. Otherwise – otherwise, Lara . . .’ He was leaning forward and gripping his mug in both hands, and his thick knuckles were white and shaking. He was craning to meet my eye. I looked slowly up. His eyes were almost watering with intensity. ‘Well, Danielle said it. She said it better than I did.’
‘Danielle,’ I said, before I could stop myself. ‘How can she understand? She’s not one of us.’
Alfie looked away. ‘I know you’ve never liked her, Lara,’ he said. ‘But I wish you’d have more respect. Danielle’s my us.’
The elephants lumbered to the end of their minuet, squashing a few cawing swans underfoot. Neither of us said anything in the silence that followed. Alfie stood up, and gathered up our mugs. I tried to find something to say, or a way to say it. Danielle came in.
‘Oh, you’re still here, Lara.’ Bright, artificial, tolerant. ‘Freddie, the girls are dying to play you something. I’m sure they’d be thrilled if you popped up, too, Lara.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, and got to my feet. I was surprised to find how shaky my legs felt, as if they were turning to water beneath me. ‘But I think I’d better head back. Early start tomorrow. Another time.’
I brushed the cheek she offered to me and turned to go, pretending not to notice Danielle’s glances at Alfie and his almost imperceptible shakings of the head: the secret sign language of couples. I was surprised, after the way I’d behaved, when Alfie hugged me; and even more surprised at the strength of the hug, but I managed to hold it together until I was safely outside in the car.
You wouldn’t recognise Alfie now, if you had known him then. Then, he was slight and fair and almost pretty, his Tintined quiff of hair and pale, translucent skin, his sandy eyelashes and blue-veined temples. Now, only in his mid-thirties, he is tall and beefy in an ungainly, apologetic way. His eyes are big and bloodhound-sad with a tendency to water, which makes them bloodshot. Though that could be the alcohol: he drinks too much, and not in an exuberant way. When Alfie drinks it is in a steady, determined, sinking-the-pints sort of way. His hair is receding rapidly at the temples and on the crown of his head, I’ve noticed that lately, and the little gingerish goatee he’s grown since Christmas makes him look like a used-car salesman. Or, I suppose, the estate agent that he is. That Alfie, shy, imaginative little Alfie, should end up an estate agent, of all things – although, then again, you don’t need to be a psychologist to see how directly it’s related to everything that happened after our father died.
I shouldn’t deride it so much, I know. He helped our mother buy a house near him in Welwyn and after Jeremy he helped me, too. Besides, who am I to talk? An agency carer with barely an A level to my name; I’m not exactly setting the world on fire. You look at your sibling, though – the little brother you loved so much and protected and fought for as well as with and you think: your life wasn’t meant to be like this, either, and you’re unhappy because of it. Danielle is a sharp, pointy-chinned woman who doesn’t let anything pass her by. She does yoga and Pilates; is always on some diet or other; gets her roots done every six weeks and her nails every fortnight. I’m always terrified she’ll leave Alfie. He adores her, hopelessly, and the twins, who make a game of teasing him and inventing elaborate stories and scenarios at his expense. He takes it as affection but it’s all too plain to see that in a few years, when they’re teenagers, their friendly disdain for Daddy will become derision, and eventually they’ll despise him. Alfie thinks I’m wrong for trying to uncover our past: he’s just as wrong, I think, for trying to bury it.
We had a childhood that made us a lot closer, I think, than most sisters and brothers. Our mother didn’t have many friends, and the two of us picked up on this: we rarely invited people over, either, and instead relied on ourselves, our tight little unit. Perhaps we sensed that we were different from other families we knew, and we closed ranks. We did everything together, Alfie and I. We’d shared a bedroom all our lives: even at the time of our father’s death, when I was twelve and he was eight, we were still sharing one room, with bunk beds. Our room was small – big enough for the beds and a wardrobe, little else – and airless in summer. I’d started to hate sharing that bedroom with Alfie. Since that Easter time, when I’d begun to notice things weren’t quite right, I’d become hyperconscious of the changes in my body, too, of the small, hard, aching lumps of my breasts budding; of the soft, light brown hair like the pelt of an animal furring my underarms; of the sparse, crunchy twists of pubic hair. One night I was climbing the ladder to the top bunk, knickerless under my knee-length nightie, when I felt Alfie’s curious gaze. I turned and challenged him and he replied, with all the matter-of-fact simplicity of a seven-year-old, ‘You’ve got hair on your bottom, you know.’ I jumped down and slapped him, hard, and he cried and I lay awake most of the night burning with embarrassment and hating both of us. It felt wrong – mortifyingly wrong – to be sharing such confined space with my younger brother. Other girls in my class had bedrooms of their own, or bedrooms they shared with their sister, where there was no Lego or train tracks or boys’ socks underfoot, where you could sit and crimp your hair or paint your nails or make origami fortune-tellers, pretend to fancy Home and Away stars in Big! and read aloud the personality quizzes and problem pages in discarded, older sisters’ copies of Just Seventeen. When I built up the courage to raise the issue with our mother she just went quiet and wouldn’t look at
me.
I understand better, now, her reaction: what, after all, could she possibly do? My father, and of course I had no idea of any of this, had already lied to his wife about why he needed to move from his one-bedroom mansion-block flat to a bigger place around the corner. I think – I remember asking my mother about this, after he died – he made up some story about structural problems, or one of the people opposite wanting to buy up two flats and knock them together, and making him an offer he couldn’t refuse. How, though, could he invent, without raising suspicion, an excuse for needing an even larger, three-bedroomed apartment?
As I write all of this I realise yet again how little I know about any of it. The sheer logistics of it, maintaining two families, two entire lives! How did he explain electricity and gas bills, which would have been extortionate, given that the flat was only meant to be in use when he was there, which was approximately two long weekends a month and a couple of fortnights at Easter and in the summer? Did he have separate accounts? I suppose he must have done. Lied about what he was earning, siphoned off some here and there for us. He used to give our mother cash, I remember: a folded white envelope every time he saw us. Even cash leaves traces, though. Did his accountant back in Belfast, the one who helped him with his taxes from his private practice, know about his double life? And she, Catriona Connolly, did she really have no idea? Did she never want to come to London, escape the tensions and troubles in Belfast? He owned a flat, after all – they owned a flat, rather. It was – the audacity of it – held in her name. How did he put her off coming, all those years, because she must have wanted to – mustn’t she? The children must have, at least. Wanted to see the Tower of London and Madame Tussauds. The Egyptian mummies in the British Museum and the Dungeon and Hamleys and all the rest of it. How did he put them off, and how on earth did they never suspect? Everything loops back to it, again and again, no matter what other stories I try to tell. The banalities of it all, the practicalities, the layers and layers of lies and counter-lies and supporting lies, the sheer balancing act of it all, temples of playing cards. And yet it went on for more than twelve years, the whole of my life until he died. Would it have come out in some other way, if it hadn’t died that November? Would I have been the catalyst?
I often think that I might. Our flat on Eardley Crescent was on the second floor of a terraced house, bigger than Allenby Mansions where we’d moved from, but it was starting to feel small, especially when my father was with us. In the summertime, as I’ve said, Alfie and I would go out to play in Brompton Cemetery and if it was rainy we’d get a bus to the cinema. But on the coldest, darkest November or February nights when it was lashing down with rain and besides, we had homework, I’d wish with every fibre of my being that there was somewhere else to go. We’d be sitting in the living room with the television on, and our parents would be in their bedroom – our father would have just arrived – and without discussing it we’d know and hate what they were doing. We never said a word to each other: just sat there, hot and stiff and embarrassed, and occasionally turned the volume up louder on whatever we were watching.
So it had been building, anyway, but since Fuengirola and learning the terrible secret of our family, I had been wanting my own space, my own privacy, with an intensity I don’t think I can put into words. I’d stopped talking to my father. I don’t think, between the start of August when we saw him again and the start of November when we saw him for the last time, I exchanged more than a few words with him. Certainly none of my own volition. I took a perverse sort of delight in staring straight through him – or else I’d use a trick we played on supply teachers at school, where you focused on the tip of their left ear rather than meeting their eye. It’s surprisingly unsettling, if you’ve never tried it. The victim can’t meet your eye, whatever they do, and it’s not obvious enough for them to realise you’re playing a trick on them. I took a seething, tight pleasure in doing this. If I had to – my mother threatening me with being grounded, or Alfie begging – I’d speak to our father in a monotone, blanking all traces of myself or emotion from my voice. He tried, several times, to talk to me or to get me on my own – in my bedroom, or out for a walk – but I shut him out. I think a conflicted part of me enjoyed it, the whole and sustained focus of his attention on me. I could have threatened to contact his wife and other children and blow his secrets into the open – in bed at night I rehearsed, over and over, what I would say – but I never did it. I knew I could, though, and I enjoyed the power. It gave me a different power at school, too. I’d always been quiet and unremarkable in my primary school, the child whose name teachers struggled to remember on parents’ evening. Starting secondary in September, with the fury and force of the summer’s revelations behind me, made me powerful in a way that other children sensed, even if they didn’t understand. It made me reckless – made me stop caring what teachers or other people thought, made me stop trying to please people or to be obedient. I fell in, almost immediately, with the bad crowd in my year, the ones who even at twelve were already drinking and smoking and sniffing tubes of glue squeezed into plastic Londis bags, and although I was never the leader of any of the cliques I was never their target because they somehow knew that they had no way to hurt me. Often, that autumn, and especially when my father was over, I would spend the evenings roaming the streets and the parks with my new-found friends and come home deliberately stinking of cigarettes, just daring my parents or Alfie to say something. They never did. They felt out of their depth, perhaps, or guilty, or perhaps they were hoping the whole thing would blow over or settle down; that my rage would work itself out. And my mother: was she still, endlessly, yet again, drearily hoping that now things would resolve themselves; that now we knew, my father would have to act, make a decision, that something would have to change?
I’ve often wondered, increasingly so in recent years, what effect that summer and the subsequent autumn had on Alfie. It’s easy to see my rebellion: it’s almost textbook. The falling-in-with-a-bad-crowd, the drink and the drugs, the warnings at school, the failed exams. I even – and I regret this almost every day – destroyed our family photo albums, stacking the leatherette volumes in a carrier bag and taking them down to the dustbin enclosure. I put them out the evening before the collection was due, and for the whole of that night I enjoyed knowing that nobody had realised they were gone. It was my father’s first visit to us after Fuengirola, and although there’d been tears and apologies all around I’d somehow gleaned that nothing had changed or imminently was going to: not he leaving his wife nor our mother leaving him. If I’d changed my mind, I could have retrieved them – I’d put them in a Hamleys bag, with its distinctive rows of red and black soldiers, which stood out among the smelly black sacks. I wondered if I would: almost did. But I didn’t, and in the morning I watched the binmen in their stained woollen hats and fingerless gloves hurling the rubbish into the jaws of their truck and I felt hot and faint with what I’d done. Even that, though, didn’t make my mother shout or hit me: she just shut herself in her room and wouldn’t answer my knocking. Alfie just stared at me with big, scared eyes; flinched when I moved too near him. At seven and a half he was old enough to understand in principle about our father’s other family, but young enough still to trust in the adults and believe that they’d make things all right in the end. If my reaction was loud and outward, bolshie and bravado, his was inward: he became even quieter than ever, I remember, and I hated him for it. I’d come in from my nights out and clatter about our bedroom, deliberately trying to wake him up so he’d complain and I could shout and Mum would have to get involved, but he’d just lie there, eyes closed though I knew he was awake. Sometimes I’d pry his eyelids open and he’d wriggle away and try to keep under his shield of sleep, and when he couldn’t pretend any longer he’d just lie there watching me, or watching the slats on the bunk above when I yelled at him to keep his eyes to himself, and he’d never say a word. The meeker and quieter he was, the more he shied and skirted round me, th
e more I loathed him and the worse I behaved. To our mother, too, who didn’t, or couldn’t, or wouldn’t say anything: who would just hug Alfie to her and plead at me with silent eyes and weep, weep, silent and pathetic until I hated her for it.
Later events, after our father died, brought Alfie and me together again, but we each, as soon as we could, escaped the trenches and each other. For years we rarely saw one another, until the last months of our mother’s illness brought us back together. Alfie’s help when Jeremy left me brought us closer, to the extent that I started going round on Sundays for a while, but we don’t quite work like we did as children. Maybe we realise, when we’re with each other, how damaged each of us is: something that when we’re alone or with others we can disguise or ignore.
I’ve been skirting around it but should write, now, about what came next.
Sunday 24th November 1985
My father died on Sunday 24th November 1985. You like to think that you’d know these things, you’d somehow feel it: but we didn’t, not for at least another two days. He’d been with us for Alfie’s birthday, his eighth, at the start of the month. We’d gone to the Hard Rock Cafe and I’d scowled at our father as he flirted with the waitress – bantered, he would have said, but for me nothing was neutral now – and I’d stabbed at my burger and said I was becoming vegetarian. I’d stopped calling him Daddy, then, and called him Patrick instead. I said he didn’t deserve the title, and he didn’t try to argue. My mother started to cry. Alfie begged me to be a family, just for his birthday. It was a terrible night. I sometimes wonder if it was because of that night that our father didn’t come over the following fortnight, as he was meant to do. I said this to my mother, once, shortly afterwards, and she said, Of course not, don’t be silly, his schedule had just changed, that was all. But I could see as I said it something quavering in her eyes, some failure to say it with utter conviction. I felt, then, for years, that I was somehow responsible, that he’d died as a result of the force of my hate.
All the Beggars Riding Page 8
