Family Secrets

by Liz Byrski

  Andrew’s head keeps spinning; new dimensions of the disaster that is his domestic life rear up like octopus tentacles wrapping themselves around his brain in a constantly tightening grip, destroying his concentration and paralysing his efforts to devise a plan of action. He is awash with rage and hurt, but his physical distance has disabled him. He feels burnt out, as though he would like to lie down in a darkened room for a very long time rather than go from the airport in a taxi to engage in combat with his wife and her lover.

  He wonders what his father would have done in this situation, but the idea of his mother even having a lover, let alone moving him into their home, renders it ridiculous. The reverse would have been a more likely scenario and, anyway, Andrew knows that he is not really his father’s son, much more his mother’s boy, and for the first time ever he is struck by the hideous sexism of those images: a father’s son as someone to be proud of, a mother’s boy as someone weak and shameful. The truth is that his mother was always a much finer and stronger person than his father. He was all action and bravado; a rousing speaker, adept at winning arguments, and ruthless in negotiating deals. But Connie was substance, endurance and compassion; and it was only as he aged that Andrew had learned to recognise this, to see the fortitude and wisdom and most of all the compassion that so often went unnoticed. Gerald had needed that hard edge in order to do all that he had done: run for Parliament, win, survive another two elections, lose a fourth, and then slip effortlessly into a high level consultancy and a couple of directorships.

  Closing his eyes and trying to concentrate on the music, Andrew reminds himself that his father was not a bad person, but a man who did what had to be done in order to achieve what were largely admirable ends. In politics and in business he was essentially fair and ethical, but he could always justify cutting corners if it guaranteed the desired result, and he was easily able to convince himself that riding roughshod over his opposition was simply the way of things. On the few occasions when someone rode roughshod over him he took it with good grace and didn’t bear a grudge. ‘That’s politics,’ he’d say, or alternatively, ‘That’s business. It’s not personal, one has to rise above these things, see them for what they are.’

  Thinking now about his father, Andrew recalls hearing two rather different versions of the past. First is the story, cemented into family history, of how Connie’s mother, running for a bus, had tripped and fallen into the path of an accelerating car, never regained consciousness and died four weeks later, leaving Connie alone in the world. Gerald had stepped in as protector, advisor and eventually as lover and they married some months later. Andrew had never totally believed that Connie was as needy and helpless as his father’s version of events made her sound. It didn’t fit with a toughness that he had seen in her as he grew up, an emotional fortitude under that mild and accommodating exterior. So it hadn’t come as much of a surprise to him when, towards the end of his life, his speech tortured but still coherent, Gerald had mustered the strength to deliver a few sentences on the subject.

  ‘She’s the strong one,’ he’d said one day as he and Andrew watched Connie carrying bread out to the bird table. ‘She would never have married me if her mother hadn’t died as she did. I moved in on her when she had no defences. God knows where I’d have ended up without her.’

  Sometime later Andrew had repeated this to Kerry and to his surprise she had let out a bark of sarcastic laughter. ‘Well, we all know that, don’t we? He couldn’t live without her and now he refuses to die without her, however long it takes and even if he destroys her and us in the process.’

  At the time he’d been shocked – Kerry rarely had a critical word to say about their father – but later he’d thought she was right. He remembered occasions in the past when he’d felt that Gerald had insinuated himself between them – between Andrew and Connie, between him and Kerry. But in those years his father’s illness and dying had somehow insinuated itself between all of them, divided their loyalties, and isolated them from each other. They were sucked down into the black hole of need that was Gerald’s last years, leaving them reeling, fragmented, cut off from each other.

  Andrew shifts in his seat and pulls the window blind down halfway to shade his eyes from the sun. He thinks about Connie and Gerald, young, hopeful and in love. Two young people setting a course for the future just as he and Linda had done, filled with hope and trust and love, and the very different course their lives had taken. Marriage, he thinks, is either a blessing or a disaster, maybe both at different times. He wonders now about his mother, what she might have become if she hadn’t married his father, and he’s shocked to realise that he’d completely forgotten that she’d wanted a career as a singer. For the first time ever he wonders why she didn’t pursue that – was that Gerald’s doing? What does she think about it now? Alone in his seat he feels his face flush with the shame of having never shown the remotest interest in what that might have meant to her.

  But mulling over his parents’ marriage is getting him nowhere. He has to get his head around dealing with his own, and Andrew puts his seat into an upright position, catches the attention of the flight attendant and orders a double scotch, in the hope of reigniting his initial determination to walk straight into the house, grab Zachary by the throat, hurl him back against the wall and king hit him.

  Twelve

  Flora sits alone on the pier with an ice cream cone, a 99, with one of those short stubby chocolate flakes stuck in it. She’s disappointed by this because like many of the people strolling on the pier today she can remember the days when a 99 was much cheaper, much larger and had a full size flake in it. The present version is a rip-off by comparison; it is also quite delicious.

  Flora loves the pier; for her it epitomises the essentially English seaside she recalls from the fifties and sixties: slot machines, ice cream stalls, crude postcards, little shops selling shell necklaces and boxes, artists waiting to draw your likeness in charcoal in a mere ten minutes, and the scent of fish and chips and candy floss mixed into the salty sharpness of the wind off the sea. A noisy, jostling group of children pass her heading for the funfair at the end of the pier, arguing about the merits of the big dipper versus the helter skelter, and what they’ll do if they win a furry toy in the shooting gallery.

  Brighton had been on Connie’s visiting list because she had often come here with her mother, who had also been a fan of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock. So she and Flora had booked into a hotel here for a few nights and discovered that the latest adaptation of the book was screening at one of the local cinemas. Connie hadn’t liked it much, she’d wanted the original 1940s black and white version – Richard Attenborough as Pinkie, trilby hats, gabardine raincoats, and the menacing shadows of The Lanes at night – but Flora had enjoyed the new version, the setting revived memories of the Brighton she remembered from her teens, when she’d ridden pillion on a scooter behind a boy in a pale blue suit.

  Today Connie has gone for a nostalgic drive along the coast to Hastings where her grandmother once lived, while Flora takes time alone to sort out the strange mix of feelings that surround her decision to leave Port d’Esprit.

  ‘I love the place and the hotel, and I think Suzanne and I have done remarkably well together all these years,’ she’d said to Connie at breakfast. ‘I need to leave now, before it sours. It’s odd, isn’t it, how you can go on for a long time, years in fact, doing the same thing, putting up with things you don’t like, and then something happens and you allow yourself to question it. Then quite suddenly you know you absolutely have to change.’

  ‘Mmmm. We cling to safety, I suppose. Take the easiest option.’

  She feels, in fact, that to go back now would be a sort of death, an admission that as a single woman in her late sixties, she is fit for nothing else. A cutting off of hope – although hope of what she doesn’t know yet, just something different, somewhere different, something of her own. For the first time in years she has let go of her share of the responsibility
of the business, has accepted that Suzanne can and will manage without her – and may indeed be glad to do so. The relief is glorious, and the gaping hole of the future is terrifying.

  Flora feels her insides clenching as always when she thinks about the future and she forces her mind away from the subject and onto the conversation she’d had a couple of days ago with Phillip when she’d called to say they would be in London on Friday. She racks her brains trying to recall whether or not she knew a woman called Bea who, according to Phillip, ‘goes back to the old days too’, and whom he’d said he would invite to dinner with them.

  ‘Do you know someone called Bea?’ Flora had asked Connie when she got off the phone.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Connie had said, shaking her head. ‘Is that his wife?’

  ‘No, Lorna was his wife’s name and they apparently split up a long time ago. He said Bea was at university with him and Gerald. I may have met her but I can’t really remember.’

  ‘So are she and Phillip … ?’

  ‘I didn’t get that impression,’ Flora had said, ‘he just mentioned that she works in the bookshop.’

  But a previously unknown friend of Gerald’s doesn’t surprise her; she’d never known much about Gerald’s life, even when he was living at home, and once he left for university she knew even less. What does surprise her now that she thinks of it is that she ever met Phillip at all, but presumably Gerald needed a second female to make up a foursome that day on the river.

  Flora feels the cool wriggle of melting ice cream creeping down her wrist and licks it before reaching for her tissues. She finishes off the soggy remains of the cone, gets to her feet and begins to walk slowly back along the pier towards the town. Glancing down at the wooden slats beneath her feet she remembers walking here as a small child, a 99 in her hand then too, staring nervously down through the gaps between the boards at the seawater churning beneath them. Suddenly she had tripped and fallen, hurting her knees, but worst of all she had dropped her ice cream and the flake had slipped between the boards into the sea. She had howled for her lost flake, demanding another.

  ‘You should be more careful, Flora,’ her mother had said. ‘I’m not wasting any more money on another one.’

  But Gerald had bent down, picked up the cone and, after whisking off the specks of dirt with a rather grubby handkerchief, had handed it back to her.

  ‘Here, hold this,’ he’d said, and he’d taken the remains of the flake from his own cone and pushed it into hers. ‘There,’ he’d said, taking her hand. ‘C’mon now, Flo, eat your ice cream. I’ll look after you ’til we get home, I’ll always look after you.’

  She stands still now, staring ahead of her, remembering him, a side of him that she had completely forgotten; he would have been about thirteen then, and she had adored him. As a child he had been her hero, and he had, frequently, taken care of her, protected her, stood up for her when she needed it. It was when she was old enough to argue with him, challenge him, suggest he might be in the wrong that he had begun to withdraw that protection.

  His death has caused her a deeper and stranger grief than she had initially realised; a grief threaded through with remorse, anger, regret and, perhaps most of all, frustration at all the things left undone and unsaid. But there is still a part of her that grasps at a simple childhood memory of a brother who had once cared for her.

  That day he had led her back towards the car ahead of their parents, and on the ride home to Tunbridge Wells she had fallen asleep leaning against him in the backseat, his arm around her. What she remembers is the tenderness with which he had comforted her. Tenderness, she thinks; that’s how he won Connie when her mother died. Tenderness; such a seductive quality in a man, and in his youth Gerald had it in spades and used it judiciously. Did he have it in later life? She can’t remember now whether she saw it during the time she lived with them in Hobart, but she thinks not. Perhaps time and age had erased that rare and precious quality. And she feels an ache of regret that she had not known him as an older man, and bleakness because she can’t remember when she last felt the tenderness of someone who loved her.

  *

  Kerry is making a cake, a passionfruit cake that she’s never made before. In fact there are not many cakes that Kerry has ever made, cakes are not really her thing, and she can’t actually remember the last time she made one, but cake has become an issue since Mia made friends with a new girl at the start of the term and the two have been joined at the hip ever since. Tanya’s family lives just two streets away so visits after school to one home or the other happen several times a week.

  ‘There is always cake at Tanya’s house,’ Mia announced recently. ‘Her mum always makes cakes.’ And there followed tales of banana cake, pineapple upside down cake, apricot and almond, and Mia is still raving about last Monday’s chocolate sponge. Kerry has met Tanya’s mum only fleetingly and she seems a very nice woman, so much so that were it not for her present state of mind she might by now have arranged to meet her for a coffee, even teased her about her cake baking; as it is she’s merely thankful that Mia has a nice friend close by.

  Last week, as she drove them both home from school, the seriousness of cake took a grip on her.

  ‘We never have cake,’ Mia had said, ‘not real cake from the oven, we only get cake from Coles.’

  In the driving mirror Kerry had seen Tanya pull a disgusted face. ‘Yuk,’ she’d said. ‘That would make me sick.’ She’d caught Kerry’s eye then and blushed, remembering perhaps that only a couple of days earlier Kerry had given her the task of removing a Coles Swiss Roll from its packet, after which she had eaten three large slices. The old Kerry might have challenged Tanya about this but the present Kerry decided that she should try to do something to restore domestic honour. And so, today being Sunday, she is making a cake, and she puts butter and sugar into the mixer, switches it on, and stands by as the machine does its work.

  Out in the garden Erin is raking leaves off the lawn and Chris is clipping the hedge, while Mia and Ryan pile leaves and clippings into the wheelbarrow. They look, Kerry thinks, like a real family, connected to each other, while she hovers disconnected on the perimeter. Kerry loves Erin, has loved her since the first time they met sixteen years ago when she and Chris got engaged and took a trip to Galway to meet his family. She had felt immediately at home with Chris’s parents and his three sisters but it was Erin, the eldest, and ten years her senior, to whom she had felt then, and still remains, closest, and who has visited them twice before here in Launceston. Erin’s two sons are in their twenties now and her husband, a first officer on cruise ships, is often away for long periods. In a few weeks his ship is due to dock in Hobart and Erin will join him there and sail on to New Zealand for a holiday with him.

  She switches off the mixer and begins to spoon in the flour, and then the passionfruit pulp, one eye still on the action in the garden. Erin has always had enormous energy which Kerry could usually match, but now it is a daily reminder of how hopeless and helpless she feels. The effort required to get through a normal day weighs heavily on her alongside Erin’s ability to keep going, taking everything in her stride. She wants to make her sister-in-law feel welcome, to get back into that warm, sisterly friendship that began when they first met, but enclosed, as she is now, in her own darkness it seems impossible. Erin is cautious around her too, more solicitous than usual, less ready to drop into the joshing manner that has been a feature of their friendship.

  And Chris has certainly noticed the difference, too. A couple of days after Erin arrived Kerry had walked out of the shower when Chris, just back from his run, appeared in the bathroom doorway and stood there for a moment just looking at her.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she’d asked, the anxiety in his eyes obvious.

  He’d pulled a big towel from the rail, wrapped it around her and pulled her towards him. ‘What is wrong is that I think you might not be telling me the whole truth – about the doctor, I mean.’

  Her breath stopp
ed and she’d struggled to steady herself. She had let out a huge sigh, really more like a groan, and leaned into him.

  ‘Maybe you got the results from the blood tests and you don’t want to tell me. Or you never went to the doctor in the first place.’

  And so she had owned up.

  ‘So maybe I should make the appointment, and come with you?’ he’d said, and she could tell that he was trying desperately to help but also bracing himself for her to tell him not to interfere because she was perfectly capable of doing it herself.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, nodding. ‘Thanks, I think that’d be a good idea.’ And for a brief moment he’d been quite obviously stunned by her acquiescence, and then hugged her closer and said he would go right now and make the call.

  Emotional exhaustion, certainly, the doctor had said, possibly depression. It was what she had feared most, the ‘D’ word that had stopped her from making the appointment herself. Each day she had been waiting to feel better but a diagnosis of depression seemed to banish that possibility. Depression could last for months, years even. She’d read of people unable to go outside the house, incapable of relating to anyone, and no one seemed to know how long they might remain that way. How strange that something so alien can hover over her life and yet she remains detached from it.

  ‘You’re taking a very bleak view,’ the doctor had told her. ‘It can be like that but sometimes it improves much more quickly. You also have an underactive thyroid which will be contributing to the way you feel. That’s a real drain on energy, very exhausting.’ So, she’d given her tablets for the thyroid, and for the depression, both of which she’d told her would take some time to kick in. ‘Weeks, probably,’ she said, ‘so don’t be too impatient. Come back in six weeks and we’ll see how you’re going.’ And she referred Kerry to a grief counsellor. ‘Sometimes depression is triggered by the loss of someone you love,’ she’d said. ‘It might help to see a grief counsellor, think about that and if you decide to go ahead I can recommend someone. Meanwhile, take some time off, look after yourself,’ and she’d looked across at Chris: ‘You need to make sure she rests,’ she’d told him.