by Louise Voss
Mack, I thought. He’d be delighted with this unexpected corollary of his documentary. As for Stella, she’d be over the moon.
‘Why don’t you come up and meet her? She’s – well, we’ve all – had a bit of a shock tonight; something happened earlier. I won’t bore you with the details now. But I’m sure she’ll be ecstatic about meeting you.’
I began to push myself up to standing, still feeling a little wobbly, but more optimistic.
‘You know,’ I said, ‘I had this secret hope that my birthmother might have seen the documentary and got in touch; but this is almost as good. And who knows, she still might.’
‘She won’t,’ said Uncle Tony, putting his hand on my arm.
I froze, palms flat, stuck like a barnacle halfway up. ‘Pardon?’
I felt stiff all over, not just from the tennis but anaesthetised with shock, like a pillar of salt. I wished Robert was there, to lick me back into life.
‘You’d better sit down again. I think I should tell you now, while we’re alone.’
I felt myself turn pale, and the black spots on the hall tiles detached themselves and began to dance in front of my eyes again. Uncle Tony peeled my hands away from the wall and held them in his – oh his hands! They were Dad’s hands, down to the half moons on the fingernails and the fine black hairs between the knuckle and the first joint. I couldn’t pull away from him this time.
‘You knew my mother?’
‘Yes. And I’m so, so, sorry, Emma, but she died, some time ago.’
My lips trembled violently, cartoonishly, and I bit down hard on the lower one to stop it. I couldn’t swallow the lump in my throat; it just seemed to be inflating itself, bigger and bigger, as I looked into the brown eyes in front of me. I thought of Dad comforting me in the larder over Pat Short, with those same eyes, the same hands.
Finally I forced the lump down far enough that I could speak again. ‘How…did you know my mother?’
A tear sprang out of his eye and I watched it, with something approaching detached fascination, slide down his cheek until it disappeared into the undergrowth of his beard. I was a little embarrassed at his emotion, too. Dad had never cried; not to my knowledge. In fact, I’d never seen a grown man cry before. Why was he crying, anyway? It was I who should be crying. He’d just told me that my birthmother was dead.
A big lorry thundered past outside, with a rumble which shook the house very slightly. Tony gulped, and stared intently through the fanlight above the door, above my head.
‘Emma. The reason that I knew your mother was because I’m your natural father.’
Chapter 39
It turned out that the pyramid lady, Holistic Ann - she of the orange lipstick and deep voice - had been kind of right when she’d announced that she would be the one to make it all fall into place for me. This thought occurred to me much later that night, as Tony – my father – and I sat alone at the kitchen table, drinking tea. He talked himself hoarse, and I mostly just listened, gazing at him with awe. My father. How had I managed to overlook the probability of his existence for all those years?
Of course, there had been a few scenarios involving him which I’d concocted when I was younger: that he was a one-night stand from a party, whose name Ann had never asked; or a holiday romance conducted with love as an interpreter when the language barriers became too great. Perhaps he was a beautiful fading consumptive whose dying act was to create a baby as a lasting memorial to his love for my mother; or even a prisoner of conscience, languishing in a dank cell with rays of distant sun slanting through the bars onto the one tatty photograph he had of the girl he adored (well, I was much younger when I came up with the last two).
But he’d always been a fictional character to me, someone whose speech I read in mental inverted commas. Because I’d had Ann’s name and not his, I’d always assumed that I wouldn’t stand a chance of tracking him down unless I found her first.
Stella had gone to bed, some time earlier. She hadn’t really taken it in, on top of everything else that had already happened. Ruth did go up to forewarn her, and Stella had come crashing down the stairs, two by two, to meet her uncle. But soon afterwards she lapsed into uncharacteristic silence, just staring from him to me and back again, pensively rolling her tongue stud. I knew it would take her a few days to get her head around it all.
‘Ask Zub to come in to me when they get back, will you?’ she said finally. ‘It doesn’t matter if I’m already asleep.’ Then she paused, and kissed us both goodnight.
‘You’re my cousin now as well as my sister,’ were her parting words to me. ‘How weird is that? Two for the price of one.’
It was Tony’s wife, Melissa, whose attention had been caught by what she believed to be a programme on television about pyramid energy. Since Melissa was herself a t’ai chi instructor, Tony told me, and very interested in holistic practices, she’d stopped channel-hopping and began to watch.
After a short scene in which a gruff, freckly, middle-aged Yorkshire woman explained the principles of pyramid power to an anxious-looking dark haired girl, the camera had panned back to show the banner above the pyramid stall: Love Lines Inc. (Ann Paramor; specialist in Pyramid Energy and Crystal Layouts).
‘I was in the kitchen at the time,’ said Tony, ‘chopping a chilli.’ He paused. ‘I lived on a remote Hebridean commune during the Seventies, where there wasn’t much in the way of spicy food, and I’ve been fanatical about it ever since. She called out to me, something like, “Ann Paramor – wasn’t that the name of your ex, the one who died?” So I said yes, and she said, “That’s weird. There’s an Ann Paramor on TV at the moment, that’s all. It looks like a really interesting kind of programme, actually. Pyramid energy – I’ve always wanted to know more about that. Check it out.”
And so Tony had tipped the chillies into a frying pan of sizzling onions and walked into the sitting room, barefoot, still holding a small sharp knife stained with hot red juice. He’d leaned on the back of the armchair in which his wife sat curled up, and looked at the television, not really noticing the woman with the same name as the woman whose life he’d ruined so long ago. Instead, he had been transfixed by the other person in the frame. A short but attractive bespectacled girl - his words - late twenties, perhaps, carrying a strange electric blue furry garment bundled up under her arm like a small artificial dog, looking earnestly at the pyramids.
I laughed at him having noticed the Furby jacket, but my hands were still shaking, so I cupped them around my warm mug and clung on.
‘There was something about the curve of your jaw, and that slight bump on your nose…. It just seemed so familiar, somehow.’
The camera had panned away and caught another girl in its wide gaze: a taller, younger, beautiful girl with mad blond zigzags for hair and, oddly, an equally familiar face. The camera followed her intently as she approached the pyramid stand.
‘I asked Melissa who the two actresses were. I thought I’d seen them – you – in other things on TV. She told me it was a documentary. She’d thought it was about pyramids, but now she wasn’t so sure.’
Then the blond girl had spoken to the woman with the orange lips: ‘This is my sister Emma, who’s an aromatherapist. We were just passing your stand earlier and something drew me to you. This is a bit delicate… I hope you don’t mind me asking you this, but did you, by any chance, have a baby girl who you gave up for adoption?’
‘My onions were sticking,’ said Tony abruptly. ‘I had to run back into the kitchen. I decided it was all just a figment of my guilty imagination. It still plays on my mind, Emma, all these years later. I’ve done so many hours of meditation, put so many miles between me and what had happened in 1970, but I –‘
He broke off, struggling for composure but still holding my gaze. For a few moments he was unable to speak.
‘Then I heard the voiceover from the television screen and it stopped me in my tracks…’
My voice had penetrated his brain; tiny innocuous word
s like the seeds inside the chilli, with a bite shocking enough to spring tears to his eyes and a burn to his heart. A voice, from out of the television, which he never thought he would hear:
‘The thing is, that I’m adopted, and I’ve recently discovered that my birthmother’s name is Ann Paramor. I’ve found several Ann Paramors, and you’re the first one I’ve actually met.’
Tony spoke slowly and carefully, as if he was concentrating on his own words. ‘Melissa ran straight into the kitchen - I’d told her about you already, of course. She hugged me, and I remember that she made this really strange sound; a cross between a gasp and a sort of…shocked moan, I suppose. But the weird thing was that it was just like the sound Ann Paramor made thirty years ago… when I told her I was leaving her.’
It was then that he finally dropped my gaze, and looked away from me, pulling his lower lip in underneath the top one so that a little brush of bristles from the front of his beard popped up horizontally. I studied it, so that I wouldn’t have to see the shame in his eyes.
‘What happened?’ I asked, holding my breath.
Tony told me how he’d met my mother. How, in the space of six weeks in the autumn of 1969, he had wooed her, charmed her into cheating on her much older husband, and, when she told him she was pregnant, persuaded her to run away with him so that they could bring up their baby together. But that long before I was born, the reckless adrenaline rush and forbidden thrill of the affair had palled. Ann’s husband had written to Tony to inform him that he was welcome to Ann, that she was an unstable, hysterical bitch, and they deserved one another; and Tony had realised that he was twenty two years old and did not wish to be saddled with a manic-depressive – for so Ann was emerging to be - or a baby that neither of them really wanted nor could adequately take care of.
I stood up abruptly, scraping the chair legs back with a screech, and marched across to the sink, running the cold tap at full strength; filling a glass; drinking. My mother was a manic-depressive hysterical bitch, and neither of my real parents wanted me, I thought, with a dull throb of horror. It was the worst-case scenario I’d always feared. At the very least I had hoped that they’d given me away because they couldn’t physically afford to raise a baby, not because they simply didn’t want me….
‘I’m sorry, Emma, that was a terrible thing for me to say. It was much more complicated than that. It wasn’t that we didn’t want you, personally, it was the circumstances. Please try and understand. I can’t bear the thought that I’ve hurt you so much. And Ann. I hurt Ann so badly.’
I turned to face him again. He was still seated at the table, his lip trembling. I took a deep breath, refilled my glass with water, and sat down again. ‘Go on,’ I said.
Exercising his powers of persuasion, Tony told Ann the sad story of how his older brother Ted, and Ted’s wife Barbara, were desperate for a child of their own, but were unable to conceive. He explained how it would really be for the best for Ann and himself not to be tied down with a child after all, when they were so young – Ann was only twenty. They needed time for one another, to establish their own relationship; and then maybe they could think about starting a family.
So the deed was done. Tony was briefly delighted at the joy he’d brought to Ted and Barbara, and at the neat solution he believed had been wrought. But Ann, he said, had taken it badly. Instead of getting better, once the threatened burden of unexpected motherhood had been lifted, she went further downhill, until all traces of the high-spirited, outrageous, fun girl Tony had originally seduced were gone.
‘When I first got that letter from her husband I assumed that he was just venting his rage; calling her names. It was only gradually that I realised that he’d been right. She was – oh God, Emma, I hate to say it - but she was unstable. She was lonely too, I suppose, and isolated. She blamed me for everything; badgering me day and night to let her go and see her baby girl. I couldn’t handle it…. Do you want me to stop now?’
He reached across the table and took my hand, icy cold in his warm grasp. I thought again of Dad – Ted – my uncle. Oh God, this was too confusing. Did I have two fathers, or two uncles? I couldn’t bear to think about poor Ann, frightened and confused, railing against Tony, about to discover that even he was leaving her. But I couldn’t not hear it, either. ‘No. I’m OK.’
He continued, not letting go of my hand but holding on to it until warmth gradually flowed back into it, softening the blow of his words.
By then, he said, Ted and Barbara had legally adopted me. It was too late for Ann to get me back – and, despite everything, Tony felt he had done the right thing. At least he knew that I would have a happy, secure future. It was the present he couldn’t deal with. Eventually he announced to Ann that he’d had enough, and headed off to the remotest place he could think of - a commune he’d heard about in the Hebrides.
Ann’s husband Doug Paramor declined to take her back – he’d already settled down with a portly middle-aged widow he met at Bingo, with whom he felt far more content. Ann succumbed to bouts of manic depression and, via Doug, Tony heard that she’d spent several protracted spells in a mental hospital in Wiltshire.
After a few difficult years, however, Ann recovered enough to hold down a part time job and live on her own, in a cottage near Salisbury. She’d looked up Dad’s name in the phonebook and begun a sporadic correspondence with him and Mum, enquiring after my welfare and progress at school, in which Mum cautiously participated, because she felt so sorry for Ann.
‘I saw those letters after she died. Doug sent them to me. Your mother – Barbara – hadn’t gone into too much detail, but she did admit that, however much it had benefited her and Ted, they’d been disgusted at my behaviour in arranging the adoption and then deserting Ann. The last time they saw me was just after I walked out on her.’ Tony stopped again, and pulled at his beard.
‘I called in to say goodbye to them both, on my way up to Scotland, and it all blew up into a colossal row. You were just a few months old, and were sitting wailing on Barbara’s lap, with so many harsh words flying back and forth above your head. I remember looking at you and feeling that this was it, there was no going back now. You were my child and I’d never see you again….’
Tony was crying. I squeezed his hand. ‘But you did see me again, eventually.’
He nodded and squeezed back. ‘Thank God. I did. I’m so glad, Emma. I’ve thought of you so often, wondered how you turned out. It’s so fantastic to know.’
So Mum had felt, at least indirectly, in some way responsible for Ann. That would account for the letters, I thought. I wondered what sort of things she’d written to her, how much she’d told Ann about me. Tony appeared to read my mind.
‘I wish I’d kept her letters for you, but I threw them away. I was upset, I suppose, because Barbara wrote that she thought it better that no-one heard from me. At the time I felt that I’d just been written out of your life, but I understand now why she said it. She was only thinking of you. She also told Ann that she hoped Ann would understand, but she did not want you to know that her mother and her birthmother were in communication, not until you were an adult.’
‘But they didn’t tell me anything about Ann, not even after I turned sixteen.’
‘Did you ask?’
I thought back. ‘Well, no, I suppose I didn’t. I was desperate to know, but I was afraid it would upset Mum and Dad if I declared that I wanted to meet her. Besides, I believed that they didn’t even know who she was.’
Tony leaned towards me and took my other hand in his too. ‘Ann really did care about you, Emma. Whatever else she did or said, she loved you very much. But she got much iller again. You’d have been about nineteen, by then.’
‘Which I was when Mum and Dad died.’
‘They must have all died in the same year.’
We were silent, thinking about it.
‘She obviously wrote to Ted and Barbara again, begging to see you. The last letter from them was explaining why they didn’t
think it would be a good idea, not unless you were asking to meet her. The law then stated that a birthmother could not seek out her child; the impetus had to come from the child. I think this suited Barbara and Ted very well. Reading between the lines, they were probably afraid that Ann would put pressure on you to be a daughter to her; or worse, expect you to take care of her. I think they offered to visit her themselves, though, to check that she was OK and properly medicated. I don’t know whether they ever did that.’
I had a horrible, horrible thought.
What if, on the day of the accident, Mum and Dad hadn’t been going to a wedding in Wiltshire at all, but to see Ann? It was too awful to contemplate. But then I remembered Mum all dressed up with her sparkly clutch bag and good shoes on, and Dad brushing lint off the arm of his suit with a funny little sticky roller thing. They must have been going to a wedding. They wouldn’t have pretended otherwise, they weren’t duplicitous.
‘What is it, Emma? You look pale again.’
I opened my mouth to voice my concerns. Then I closed it again, clamping my lips together. ‘Nothing. I’m fine.’
Some things were best left alone.
Ann’s suicide note had been found at the cottage, on top of a pile of all Mum’s letters to her over the years, and a faded, creased photograph of me, aged seven, gap-toothed and innocent of all the heartache I was causing.
Tony had let go of my hands just long enough to pull that same photograph out of his wallet and lay it in front of me, when we heard two sets of feet pounding up the stairs, making us both jump.
