This Much is True: How far will a mother go to protect her shocking secret?

by Jane Sanderson

  Almost from birth, he hated to be touched, except on the rare occasions that he was hurt, when he might endure a swift hug. He especially hated to be held – most especially when he was unclothed – and he shrank from the warmth of human contact like a feral kitten born in a hay barn. When he was older he wouldn’t take her hand even to cross a road, although he submitted to reins, which was a relief to Annie, who was unequal to his wilful ways and could never persuade him to do anything he didn’t want to do. The child seemed to have come into the world with a lifetime of dislikes already in place: a comprehensive list of rules and requirements with which his mother must comply if they were to get along. She didn’t understand him, not at all, but as time passed his oddness became routine, and it was only when Vince paid them a visit that Michael’s behaviour came back into sharp relief.

  But then, Vince was so rarely there, and when he left again, it was for weeks at a time – months, sometimes. He was vague about his exact whereabouts, but when people asked, Annie always said his job obliged him to live in Sunderland. This was where he went when he first left, in February 1964, but she knew he’d moved around a lot since then, and that he wasn’t even working for the same company any more. He hadn’t entirely forsaken her, though. Every month he sent a generous sum – guilt money, Annie called it – in small buff-coloured envelopes, and the postmarks on them told her more than Vince did: Newcastle, Sunderland, Hartlepool, Durham: places in the north-east that Annie was never invited to visit. She pictured them as grey and inhospitable, gritty and industrial; she wouldn’t want to go to such places even if he did ask.

  She didn’t socialise with her father and Mrs Binley. They never asked her round or called in at the Sydney Road house, and Annie never invited them. When Michael was born Vince let Harold Platt know, sharpish, in case the arrival of a grandson might unlock the coffers, but all they sent was a basket of fruit, wrapped in cellophane and tied with an oversized bow. Vince wouldn’t let Annie eat any of it and left it outside by the dustbin, still beribboned: a shocking waste, but she wanted it no more than he did. Then Vince went again and Annie and Michael were alone together for weeks and weeks.

  Those were difficult days. At the clinic they said they’d seen some miserable infants in their time but never one like Michael Doyle: a newborn with the personality of a grumpy old man. The nurses laughed at the baby’s impotent fury as each week Annie handed him over, burning with shame, believing wholeheartedly in her own inadequacy because her baby hated to be undressed, hated to be weighed, hated to be dressed again. He balled his hands into miniature fists and screamed at a high, hysterical pitch that set everyone’s nerves on edge. Inside the damp cavern of his open mouth, his little tongue quivered like the string of a bow, lending to each outward wail a warbling quality that tore at Annie’s heart, but the nurses showed no pity. They were extra brisk when they dealt with him; they rushed, Annie knew they did. At home his rage filled the house, and he wouldn’t be pacified with milk or a dummy or cuddles. When he deigned to settle to a feed, he either slid his dark eyes away from her with blank indifference or glowered at her over the bottle. Generally, when he slept, it wasn’t because he was content but because he’d worn himself out. Annie was worn out, too. Once, in despair, she laid him tenderly on a blanket on the hard pantry floor then closed the door and left him there among the tinned peaches and Carnation milk, while she shut herself in the bedroom – upstairs and at the opposite end of the house – and tried in vain to sleep.

  But he was her baby so she gritted her teeth and loved him, and whether he liked it or not, he couldn’t manage without her. She was sure of that, at least; his dependency was complete. Sometimes she wondered if he understood this, and hotly resented it. Might the nurses at the baby clinic have been right? Might he actually be an old soul trapped in a new body: an ancient Chinese despot, fetching up in Coventry in 1964?

  They spent a lot of time outside because Michael was more settled when on the move, and Annie herself felt less worn down out of the house, bouncing Michael along in the splendidly sprung baby carriage that Auntie Doreen had sent up from Peckham. She walked for miles, just as she always had done, just as she did as a little girl; she took her baby all the way to the river, on the outskirts of the city, and together they watched the water dance innocently into the mouth of the culvert to be gobbled up by roads and buildings. She lifted him out of the pram to show him and he fought to be put back. She walked a long figure of eight through the city, from the edges to the centre, in and out, looping round to parts of Coventry that she barely knew, and it was on one such outing, when Michael was approaching six months old, that Annie stopped at the window of a haberdasher, remembering that she needed pearlised buttons for a knitted matinee jacket. When the pram came to a halt, Michael frowned even before he opened his eyes, and then, when Annie reached in to lift him out, he arched his back and stiffened his legs and began the rapid, hiccoughing protest that always preceded his outbursts of rage. If she was quick, Annie thought, she could be in and out before he reached full throttle, but it was an unrealistic ambition. She pulled a pack of buttons from the display and raced to the counter, but he was already scarlet-faced and square-mouthed, rearing away from her and bellowing his displeasure.

  ‘I had one of them,’ the woman behind the counter said, taking the buttons and slipping them into a paper bag.

  Annie looked at her. She was quite elderly, but with a spry and playful air that was apparent even in this brief transaction; her smile worked like balm on Annie’s spirits.

  ‘Yes, right little devil my Peter was,’ the woman said. Her eyes twinkled merrily at the memory. ‘Unhappy in his own skin.’

  ‘That’s it,’ Annie said. ‘That’s exactly it.’ She felt a wave of excited gratitude at the diagnosis.

  ‘Your first, is he?’ The woman had to raise her voice above the racket.

  ‘He is, yes,’ Annie said. ‘Probably my last, too,’ she added, which was meant to be wry but came out sad, and the woman clucked at her sympathetically.

  ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Pass him over, m’duck.’ She reached out, and Annie gave him to her without a pause. It was simply wonderful to have someone take him.

  ‘Now then, my Peter could never resist a ball of wool.’

  ‘Wool!’

  ‘Wool. He was the only one o’ mine I used to bring to the shop, because he was never more content than here.’ By now she’d plonked the squally little infant on the counter and was busy unbuttoning him, releasing him from his layers. She pulled off his hat then blew in his soft black hair, and when he looked up at her in shocked surprise she blew in his face too. He blinked and fell utterly silent. Annie watched in a sort of trance, awed by the other woman’s deft competence. She wanted to say, don’t undress him, he hates to be undressed, and yet there he sat, down to his vest, and the frilled plastic pants that covered and contained his bulky nappy, and all he was doing was staring.

  ‘Now then,’ the lady said. ‘That’s better, little man.’ She picked him up, sitting him on her hip, and carried him to a large round wicker basket on the floor. It was three-quarters full of balls of wool: a mish-mash of colours and sizes. ODDS and ENDS said a sign attached to the front.

  ‘Worth a try,’ she said, and she sat Michael in the midst of it all, then picked up a ball of yellow wool and gave it to him, poking his little fingers into the strands so that he didn’t immediately drop it. He’d been quiet now for approaching five minutes.

  ‘Won’t he spoil it?’ Annie said. She meant the balls of wool, some of which were already flattened underneath his bottom.

  ‘Nothing to spoil, m’duck,’ said the woman. ‘They’re all ends or seconds. See now?’

  Michael had extracted his fingers from the yellow wool and was now concentrating hard on getting them back in. He still looked fierce, thought Annie, but it was a calm fierceness, if such a thing was possible; he made small effortful noises as he worked.

  ‘Now,’ said the woman. ‘I’m Barbara a
nd you’re …?’

  ‘Annie Doyle,’ Annie said, looking at her saviour in wonder. ‘And that there’s Michael.’

  ‘Well, Michael can stay put. You come this side o’ my counter in case another body comes in, and I’ll make you a cup of tea in my back room. I expect you could do with a bit o’ peace.’

  ‘Oh!’ Annie said feelingly. ‘Oh, I could,’ and Barbara laughed. She left Annie at the till where all by herself she sold a packet of crochet hooks and a dress pattern, and watched Michael in his pool of wool. Then Barbara came back with the tea, and it was two hours later when Annie left the shop, by which time she had a part-time job as Barbara’s assistant, on the understanding that baby Michael would come along too.

  ‘Good for business,’ Barbara said. ‘Nothing sells wool like a real live baby.’

  Michael hadn’t cried once. He was allowed to keep the yellow wool and as Annie wheeled him out he held it aloft like a trophy.

  Barbara’s haberdashery was called Sew and Sew’s: jaunty name, jaunty owner. She was the friendliest, most cheerful person Annie had ever known. Sometimes women came into her shop just to chat, but Barbara didn’t mind at all. ‘Oh, they’ll buy next time,’ she told Annie. ‘Or the time after that.’

  Annie hadn’t noticed the shop before, for all that she’d paced miles along Coventry’s pavements over the years. Part of her believed that it had sprung up by magic, to rescue her from the pit of despair. This wasn’t the sort of nonsense she’d ever voice, but nevertheless she couldn’t entirely shed the fear that one day she’d find it gone, without a trace. ‘How long have you been here?’ she asked Barbara, more than once, and Barbara always said, ‘Oh for ever and a day, that’s what it feels like anyway,’ or ‘Since Noah built his ark, dear,’ and this jocular evasiveness only added to Annie’s suspicion that Barbara and her shop were enchanted: the work of fairies, or benevolent gods.

  For three years, Annie worked on Thursdays and Fridays; Barbara fetched in a second stool and they perched together behind the counter while Michael sat on the shop floor taking balls of wool from the basket, then putting them back again. Barbara told customers he was stocktaking. The shop was no busier on Annie’s days than any other, but she made herself as useful as possible; dusting the fittings when there were no customers, tidying the stockroom so that everything down to the tiniest press stud could be found in a trice, lining the bay windows with new yellow cellophane to keep the light off the knitted clothes and bolts of cloth. She kept the books for Barbara too, and totted up the week’s takings in a ledger, offsetting income – in black ink – against outgoings – in red – with net profit marked in green at the end of each page. She found she had a talent for it; she was, after all, a banker’s daughter. Her wages were paid in cash from the till, and were little more than pin money, but she would’ve worked for nothing. No, she would’ve paid to work. And in all this time, Vince didn’t ever know she had a job, which only added to the pleasure she took from it. His own life was full of secrets so now she had one of her own; that was how Annie looked at it. Tit for tat. It gave her confidence and a new defiant air around Vince that puzzled him, although he never really tried to get to the bottom of it, never did know anything about Sew and Sew’s even though now and again Michael talked about Barbara and her wool shop right in front of his father, making Annie’s heart skip in alarm. In time though she learned not to worry; Vince paid even less attention to Michael than he did to Annie. Still, it was Vince, in the end, who scuppered everything.

  They were at home; Annie was peeling potatoes and Michael was hunkered down under the kitchen table, running a toy truck on the floor, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, until Annie feared he’d make grooves in the green lino. All the time, through the legs of the chairs, he flicked his eyes between her and the truck, as if he couldn’t be absolutely certain of either of them. The wireless was on, so nobody heard the front door open and shut, and anyway it was a Wednesday and Vince, when he came, only came at weekends. There he was though, out of the blue, striding into the room with a fat blonde baby boy tucked under one arm like a rolled-up towel.

  ‘There,’ he said, and put the baby on the floor, on his tummy. ‘Bloody hell, he’s heavy.’

  The baby pushed himself up by the arms and took in his surroundings; his level gaze settled on Michael, who scowled and edged away, reversing further under the table, so that his back was against the wall.

  ‘Who’s this?’ Annie said.

  The baby heard her speak and turned his eyes away from Michael’s stony profile and up to Annie, who was looking at Vince. Vince was filling the kettle as if nothing unusual had happened, but he looked shifty, Annie thought: shifty and possibly even nervous.

  ‘Vince?’

  ‘Right, don’t blow your top,’ he said.

  ‘Do I have reason to?’

  She’d thought nothing Vince said or did could shock her, but still she almost lost her footing when he said, ‘He’s called Robert, and he’s mine.’

  The potato peeler was still in her hand but now she began to shake and it fell to the floor. The baby made a valiant dash for it, half-crawling, half-sliding across the lino, and instinctively Annie bent down to stop his soft hands closing around the blade. They looked at each other and he smiled at her, a wholehearted, generous smile as if he couldn’t be more pleased that she had won the race for the peeler, fair and square.

  ‘Yours and whose?’ Annie said. She was crouching on the floor now, leaning against a cupboard door; she didn’t think she had the strength in her legs to get upright, and anyway she was half-mesmerised by the baby. He raised a plump hand to her knee and patted it in a friendly way. Michael, alarmed, shuffled forwards again.

  ‘That’s neither here nor there,’ Vince said, with an attempt at bravado that Annie sensed was only skin deep. ‘Fact is, he’s staying here for the time being.’

  Annie reached for the baby, who was irresistible. She perched him on her knees and he studied her face as if he was trying to memorise it. Annie felt her pulse quicken. She forced herself to look away from his beguiling eyes.

  ‘You’ve had a baby with another woman, and it’s neither here nor there?’

  ‘Not your business,’ Vince said, but he had the good grace to blush and his voice lacked conviction.

  Annie gave a disbelieving laugh and the baby laughed too.

  ‘Tell me everything,’ Annie said. ‘Or you can pick him up and take him away and never come back.’

  She didn’t mean to let the baby go; in fact she was already picturing him in Michael’s old high chair, already looking forward to his next smile, but Vince didn’t know that and the steel in her voice startled him. Michael, scuttling out sideways from under the table, pointed and said, ‘Put that down,’ but no one paid him any attention.

  Vince cleared his throat and began to speak.

  She was called Martha Hancock, and she was only sixteen, he said: fifteen, in fact, when he first met her, but she’d looked older, otherwise he never would have got involved. It was a devil of a business, he said, because when she fell pregnant they’d only done it once or twice.

  ‘Which?’ Annie asked. ‘Once, or twice?’

  ‘Six times.’ He was startled by his own truthfulness.

  ‘Right. Go on,’ she said.

  Vince cleared his throat and swallowed dryly, like a man in the dock. They’d got chatting in a café, he said. She worked behind the counter in the place he used for breakfast.

  ‘Breakfast?’ Annie said. ‘You have breakfast in a cafeteria?’ She was shocked at his extravagance: more shocked at this than at his infidelity, which she now realised had been a given. He looked at her helplessly.

  ‘Go on,’ she said again, and he took up the narrative in a flat voice. She’d been determined to have the baby, he said. He’d found a clinic where she could have been seen to, but she wouldn’t hear of it.

  ‘I should think not,’ said Annie. ‘But now she doesn’t want him?’

 
He shrugged.

  ‘So where is she, this Martha Hancock?’

  ‘Beats me,’ he said. ‘Vanished. Upped and left.’

  ‘But she dumped him on you before she went?’

  Vince hesitated, and Annie knew at once that there was more to this: knew that if he wasn’t exactly lying, neither was he disclosing the full truth.

  ‘Were you together? Were you actually a couple?’

  He stared at her dumbly, and to her horror and fury, tears welled in his eyes. If anyone should be crying, it was her.

  ‘Well?’ she said. ‘Were you?’

  ‘She’d moved in with me.’

  ‘At sixteen! Living in sin!’

  ‘It didn’t feel sinful,’ Vince said. His face was a mask now, shuttered and closed, but his voice shook with emotion and Annie found it hard to bear. She’d coached herself to feel nothing for him, but still, she wished he had once loved her the way he now loved Martha Hancock.

  ‘She went out for a loaf a fortnight ago,’ he said, and now his voice rose a little with bewildered hurt. ‘She went out for a loaf, and she didn’t come back.’

  17

  Bailey and Andrew were washing up together in the kitchen, and as Annie moved about upstairs she could hear their murmur of conversation and the gentle crash of crockery being stacked in the cupboards. They’d be putting everything away in the wrong places again. Annie cared less about this than she might have expected, but not Michael. This morning his mouth was a thin line as he opened the cupboard doors and slammed them shut, looking for the right bowl, the right glass, the right spoon.