Family Secrets

by Liz Byrski

  ‘All the same …’ Phillip begins.

  ‘Look, I have resented it. Especially when he got sick and I could see what the years ahead would involve. I was in my late fifties and Gerald had just retired. I thought it was my turn, and I’d been offered a job in a very nice private school for girls quite near where we live. Music is one of their specialities and they wanted someone to start and run a choir. I was so looking forward to it. Gerald wasn’t very keen on the idea but I told him it was my time … we knew he was sick by then, just not what it was or what it would mean. But the diagnosis came a couple of weeks before I was due to start, and the very next day he had his first serious fall …’ She hesitates, moving her spoon back and forth in her soup, gazing down into it in silence. ‘And so I knew that I wouldn’t be able to do it. I wouldn’t be able to be reliable, that the job of caring for him had begun and it would last until … well, until he died.’ She pauses again, flushing, and looks up. ‘This sounds awful, but I was so angry and resentful that I could hardly bear to speak to him. I had always been there for him, and I’d waited for my chance to do something I wanted and then suddenly I was losing my own life to his yet again.’ She puts down her spoon. ‘I hope he didn’t know it and I tried hard not to let him see it, but that resentment stayed with me to the end. It’s strange, really, there had been so many things that I’d forgiven, things that I felt were really unreasonable and demanding on his part. And yet the one time when it wasn’t his fault I couldn’t forgive him. Trying to hide that from him, and from the children and grandchildren, became a terrible struggle. It’s stood between us – separated me from them, and that’s affected every one of us.’

  Twenty-one

  Kerry sits at the kitchen table scrolling through the photographs that Andrew has sent to her phone, photographs her mother had sent to Brooke. She has looked at them several times a day since she and Andrew spoke on Sunday evening. Now it’s Thursday and she’s still drawn back to them, still trying to see more deeply into the pictures, to work out what she actually knows about her mother.

  ‘Do you think you ever saw Mum and Dad as other people see them?’ she’d asked him on the phone a couple of days ago. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever even considered who they were outside those roles and all the assumptions that go with them.’

  ‘I’ve tried,’ he’d said, ‘a few times, but more now, now that Dad’s gone. I feel I knew him more clearly than Mum, because he was always a person of extremes, always telling you what he thought, what mattered, how we ought to see things. I think of Mum and what I get is reassurance and love, and I suppose safety, and I feel guilty because I think my relationship with her has been just that, always wanting but never really taking the trouble to get to know who she is, other than just Mum.’

  ‘That’s what I’m feeling too,’ Kerry had said. ‘But I’m wondering about Dad too. I was always so desperate for his attention …’

  ‘Looking for his approval?’

  ‘Yes … and never feeling I got it. Unlike you.’

  Andrew laughed. ‘If I did have it I never knew. He always had me on the end of a piece of string – he’d tug it to get me to do something or behave in a particular way, and I’d do it but I never felt it got me anywhere with him or won me any approval.’

  ‘But he adored you,’ Kerry said. ‘You could do no wrong. “My number one son”, he called you. He was incredibly proud of you.’

  ‘Well, he only had one son, and if he was proud of me he never really let me know. He never thought I was tough enough, or smart enough, or capable of making difficult decisions.’

  Kerry was silent.

  ‘Are you still there, Ker?’

  ‘Yes, yes, I’m thinking. It looked so different to me. I was very jealous.’

  ‘And I was jealous of you. He called you his “little princess”, he was always stroking your hair and telling you how lovely you were, and letting you sit on his knee. I wanted him to hug me and he hardly ever did.’

  ‘Why haven’t we talked like this before?’ she’d said eventually.

  ‘You never think of it, do you? I suppose I took everything for granted, and then Dad got ill … and everything else seemed to go downhill too.’

  ‘I want to talk to you properly – face to face, spend time together. Will you come over in the holidays – you and Brooke? She and I used to be real chums but I’ve lost touch with her. I feel I hardly know her.’

  ‘We’ll come,’ he said. ‘Give Mum time to get back and over the jetlag. We’ll come then. But why do you think Mum told Brooke about Flora and not us?’

  ‘Maybe because it was easier for her,’ Kerry says. ‘She probably hoped Brooke would tell us, and thought that by the time she got home we’d have sorted out how we felt about it. Not that there was any real sorting out to do.’

  ‘I wonder too if she felt bad about never having told us – I mean, all those years, she must have known it wouldn’t have mattered to us. So I guess she was just being loyal to Dad.’

  ‘And I wonder how Flora feels about that!’ Kerry had said. ‘Messy, isn’t it?’

  Staring now at the picture of Connie taken in Brighton with Flora, Kerry sees someone complete and separate, not simply a daughter’s projection tinted and tainted by time. And she feels – yes – she actually feels something. It’s a longing to reach out to Connie, and have her reach out in return. It’s like a bullet entering her chest in slow motion and emerging from the other side, then gone. But it is – was – a feeling, the first she has had since the fierce burst of anger she’d felt when she stopped the car and got out the day they were driving home after the funeral. A real feeling, a tiny crack in the wall.

  ‘What are you looking at, Kerry?’ Samira asks, peering over her shoulder.

  Farah has gone out to see a patient who needs to be checked every four hours, and Kerry is alone in the house with the twins.

  ‘Some pictures of my mum,’ she says, turning the phone so that Samira can see.

  ‘I like your mum,’ Samira says. ‘She’s always nice to me.’

  Kerry nods. ‘She’s nice to me too.’

  ‘Do you miss her?’

  She hesitates. ‘I do, I miss her a lot. I’ve missed her for about ten years.’

  ‘That’s silly. You can’t miss someone when they’re here.’

  ‘Actually, I think you can,’ Kerry says. ‘You can be at a distance from them even if you’re close by.’

  Samira shakes her head. ‘I don’t think so,’ she says with great authority. ‘Like, I miss my dad more than anyone because he’s dead and he’s not coming back.’

  Kerry smiles at her. ‘I know what you mean. I miss my dad too, but I really think I miss my mum even more than him. I know that sounds funny.’

  ‘That’s totally weird,’ Samira says. ‘Who’s that other lady?’

  ‘It’s my Auntie Flora,’ Kerry says, studying Flora’s face, trying to see more than just the family likeness, seeking memories here too.

  ‘Is she nice?’

  ‘I think she is, but I haven’t seen her since I was younger than you are now, so I can hardly remember.’

  ‘Did you miss her?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Kerry says. ‘I haven’t really thought about it until now.’ And Samira shrugs and races off to the lounge where Lala is calling her to see something on the television.

  The trouble with a photograph, Kerry thinks, is that it captures a mere second, a look, an expression, and freezes it in time. A look that may not even be characteristic. What sort of person is this long distance aunt? What does she care about? What makes her laugh or cry? She thinks of Flora, isolated from her family and her best friend all those years, for simply being who she was. She remembers the beach, the chill of a shadow blocking out the sun, her eyes flying open, how she snatched her hand away from Jennifer’s, her father’s eyes dark with anger, and the steely control in his voice.

  ‘Come along, you two, time for a swim or a walk. I’ll come with you.’

>   And she’d scrambled to her feet, her face blazing with fear and shame, heart pounding, knowing he must have seen their linked fingers. In the ten days since Jennifer had arrived to stay, a current of electric sensuality had developed between them. They dared not speak of it even to each other though no words were needed. But that afternoon she was terrified. Once on her feet she thought her legs would crumple under her and she shivered despite the warmth of the sun.

  After that they were never alone. Her father was on holiday and they went everywhere as a family. Only Andrew was exempt, and Kerry knew that as soon as they were out of the door he would be off on his bike to meet his girlfriend at Battery Point. The tension was paralysing, but somehow they got through the final few days until it was time to deliver Jen back to her parents.

  ‘I’d like to talk to you in my study, Kerry,’ her father had said when they got back. ‘Right away, please.’

  And she had followed him upstairs, fear churning her gut, and perched awkwardly on the edge of the chair facing him across his desk.

  ‘I will not have that girl in this house again,’ he’d said, ‘and I want your promise that you will have nothing more to do with her. Nothing at all.’

  ‘But, Dad …’ she’d begun.

  ‘I don’t want to discuss this, Kerry. And if I were in your position I wouldn’t be butting in or asking questions. This is not negotiable. If you can’t promise me that then I shall have to talk to her parents, tell them what you were doing.’

  ‘But we weren’t …’

  The icy chill of his look silenced her. ‘I want you to tell me that it will never happen again. I want the best for you, Kerry, in every possible way – a good career, a fine husband and a happy marriage with beautiful children. Your behaviour has put all that at risk. And you will say nothing of this to your mother. She would be deeply hurt if she knew about this.’

  It’s many years since Kerry has given this exchange even a passing thought and now, as she digs into this little pocket of memory, she is torn between feeling it cruel and ignorant, or simply laughable.

  Humiliated and shamed she had walked out of his study and down the stairs. Her cheeks burned with her usual embarrassing blush, tears pricked her eyes, and she wanted to roll up in a corner and die. As she reached the foot of the stairs Connie walked in from the garden towards the kitchen and caught sight of her.

  ‘Oh, Kerry darling, you’re upset.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ she’d said, gritting her teeth.

  ‘I can see you’re upset. You and Jennifer were having such a lovely time, but she can come other times, you know, whenever you like, and anyway school starts again soon so you’ll see each other every day.’

  She’d opened her mouth to speak but couldn’t, and ran instead into Connie’s arms.

  ‘Poor darling, come on, let’s make some tea and take it out into the sunshine. I’ve got your favourite cookies …’

  And life was normal again, except for that terrible secret she now shared with her father. She maintained a sort of friendship with Jennifer but they never visited each other’s homes again. There was a tension between them, his tension, which could never be released.

  ‘We were just girls being girls,’ she’d told Andrew on the phone the other night. ‘Usually it’s a passing thing, part of teenage discovery, but Dad obviously didn’t see it that way.’

  Kerry stares again at the photographs of Flora, remembering that on the few occasions she has thought of her it has been with fierce disapproval. She flushes with shame as she recalls her self-righteous and hostile remarks to Connie about her. All these years they had believed Flora guilty of some terrible sin or crime when all she was guilty of was being herself in a way that harmed no one else. It shocks her now that they had been encouraged to forget about Flora, and they had shown no curiosity about that. She’d always known that Connie kept in touch with her, but why has she not asked her mother about it? And how could Connie go along with it for so long and never talk to her or Andrew about it? None of it seems to make sense, until she thinks again of that day on the beach and, later, facing her father in the study. And she remembers his words, his orders, the expression on his face and the way it paralysed her. He had always had an extraordinary power to silence them when it suited him, to remove what he didn’t want to see or hear, and she remembers the thing he always used to say: ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ And the thing about not asking questions, said in a way that made her feel completely powerless, always followed it: ‘If I was in your position I wouldn’t be asking questions.’ She’d heard him say that to her mother, and it was only when she’d been at university in the late eighties that she learned that this was the means some men used to silence women – the power of concealed threat – and once again it takes Kerry’s breath away.

  *

  Early on Saturday morning Andrew wheels the bikes out of the shed and leans them against the wall, thinking that cycling was just one of the many things that had fallen by the wayside in the slow disintegration of his marriage. This ride means a new start. Although a real new start would mean a new job too – the present one feels like a ball and chain that he drags behind him with little enthusiasm and dwindling energy. It was his father who had steered him towards the public service and it has served him well for years but it has never really been what he wanted. At university he had wanted to study art history or literature or both, but Gerald had dismissed this with a grunt and a wave of his hand.

  ‘And what sort of job will that get you?’ he’d demanded. ‘Do you want to end up mouldering away in some university? What sort of career is that, where’s your ambition?’

  Andrew had rather liked the prospect of mouldering in a university, he saw himself in an office full of books, preparing lectures, becoming an expert in some obscure corner of the history of art, or early colonial writing. Anything, really, that would allow him to live a quiet life with books. Alternatively he would have enjoyed something physical and had floated the idea of agricultural college. But Gerald had decided that economics was the way of the future and he managed to make it sound interesting.

  ‘You can go anywhere with an economics degree,’ he’d said.

  Andrew knows now that his father was right – it could take him places, had already done so. It’s just that they are not the places he wants to go. It’s time, he thinks, to take a risk in order to find the sort of life he wants for himself, not the one that Gerald had wanted him to have. He doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life living out his father’s vision.

  ‘Are the bikes okay?’ Brooke asks, appearing beside him in her cycling gear.

  ‘They’re fine. I just need my helmet and then we’ll get going. Remember when we last did this?’

  ‘Yonks ago,’ Brooke says. ‘We went with Mum to that café she likes. When she comes back we could see if she wants to do it again. I bet Zachary doesn’t ride a bike.’

  The thought of Zachary on a bike strikes them both as hilarious and they double up with laughter. Andrew runs inside, collects his helmet, phone and wallet, and they set off slowly down the shallow slope, getting used to the feel of the bikes again.

  ‘That house really is embarrassingly awful,’ Andrew says as they cruise to the end of the road. ‘Is that where Donna’s boyfriend lives?’

  Brooke nods. ‘Yep. Gross, isn’t it?’

  Andrew slows down and comes to a stop. ‘That looks like Zachary’s car. It can’t be, surely?’

  Brooke looks away and then back at him and he sees her face is flushed.

  ‘Why are you looking like that? Is it his car?’

  ‘Yep. That’s his. Donna says he goes there sometimes.’

  Andrew slips back into the saddle again and starts to move on. ‘How odd. Do you know why?’

  Brooke ignores his question. ‘Let’s get going,’ she says, ‘I want my breakfast,’ and she pulls away, cycling faster so she can put more distance between herself and the house.

  Andrew follows her w
ith a distinct feeling that something is wrong. She’s been strange, subdued, since the day he came home to find her sitting on the floor in the darkened kitchen. The row with Donna had really upset her but he’s convinced he hasn’t quite got the whole story yet.

  ‘Is there anything you haven’t told me about all that business with Donna?’ he calls, pulling alongside her.

  ‘Dad! We’re cycling. Don’t spoil it by talking.’

  Andrew smiles and speeds up, thinking how much she has grown in so many ways since they last rode together. Back then it was always him saying ‘don’t talk, pay attention to the road, don’t talk’. And they ride on side by side in silence and then speed up as they get on to the river path. It’s a glorious morning, the air is blistering cold on his face but the sun cuts through the trees casting jagged patterns on the concrete. More of this, he thinks, more of this is what I need, a more natural, active life, and as they ride on through the sunlight his heart suddenly soars with a sense of possibility – the possibility of being different, being true to himself after so many years of doing what is expected of him. His breath comes faster and he feels the pull of his calf and thigh muscles, the tightening in his chest that warns him how unfit he is, but it’s glorious here, the wide road on one side, the long stretch of grass down to the water on the other, his lungs bursting in the clear cold winter air. He pedals faster, cycling as hard as he can, passing Brooke, needing to push himself to the limit.

  ‘Slow down, Dad,’ Brooke yells, ‘look where you’re going!’

  And her voice is the last thing he hears before his front wheel cracks into the concrete bollard and the bike rears up, spinning away from under him as he is thrown sideways, off the cycleway onto the road, and into the path of the oncoming traffic.

  *

  ‘I can’t tell you how good this feels,’ Chris says, grasping Kerry’s hand as they edge their way through the Saturday crowds in the Salamanca markets. ‘I thought … well, I thought lots of things but the worst was that it was all my fault and that you were going to leave me.’