He wasn’t sure where he could go but thought he would try the Forsters. They lived a few minutes away and, although Crispin was sort of a friend at school, they hadn’t spent much time together and, most importantly, he didn’t know Susie.
In the ten minutes he spent walking to the Forsters Carl tried to think up what he was going to say to them and how he was going to explain his arrival at lunchtime on a Sunday with a rucksack and a request to stay.
They were finishing their lunch, but they sat him down and Mrs Forster put together a full plate of a roast dinner “Sorry there’s no crackling left but you look like you need a decent meal” she apologised, “blame Olly and Crisp for guzzling it all” said their young sister. “Eat first, explanations later. Explanations are always easier on a full stomach.” their father said firmly.
The contrast between the family meals Carl had been used to and this one could not have been greater. There was friendly banter and teasing here. Carl could remember the tense meals at Millcourt – at Dunedin Avenue they had rarely all sat down to eat together.
The family stayed around the table watching him eat. He hadn’t thought he was hungry but he ate, and felt a little better. When asked what the matter was he told them the whole story. He told them how he and Susannah had always been close, how they’d grown to love each other and how, that afternoon, it had all been shattered.
It was perhaps the best thing Carl could have done.
By the time they left the table to all join in with the washing up it was all but settled. He would live with them as long as he needed a home.
The Forsters were something of an unconventional family. The father, Jeffrey, was an internationally respected professor at Liverpool University. All the family called him Jeff and when he was away, which was quite often, the house was a quieter and emptier place. His wife, Pat, always wore long flowery skirts with one of her husband’s shirts, her long grey hair tied in a pony-tail at the nape of her neck with black ribbon. She wrote poetry and taught occasionally. At the time Charles joined the family she was working with a group of energetic like-minded people to turn an old chapel into a theatre in Liverpool. It took up a lot of her time, but she seemed always to have had the energy to cook fresh meals, keep the house clean and tidy, badger the boys about their homework and always ‘be there’ when one or other of the children needed to talk to her about something important.
It was a house full of love, with no shortage of laughs and hugs.
Pat had briefly come across Alicia some years before when she had almost joined the local drama society but she had found the whole thing a little too organised “not much fun arguing with a lot of middle class ladies full of their own importance.”
Crispin and Oliver were twins, younger than Charles but in his year and house at school. Despite rarely seeming to work they were always heading the class lists and intended to follow their father into academic life, that was if they didn’t get diverted into playing sport professionally – they would both have been capable of it. They had boundless enthusiasm for anything and everything, masses of energy and a confidence born of loving parents and a secure and happy home.
They recognised Carl was different, they saw his unhappiness and they took him under their wing.
Carl had had no idea there were so many interesting things to do after school. He became involved in clubs and playing sports that he never thought he would be interested in. With Susie all he had wanted to do was to dash off to meet her as soon as the school bell had rung to spend hours listening to records, chatting with their friends in the coffee bar and just being together. None of their old friends had thought it cool to be interested in school.
Oliver and Crispin didn’t care about what other people thought and were confident enough to do what they wanted and if that was to work hard then it wasn’t for others to say they were wrong. It didn’t hurt that they were so good at sports, Crispin pipping his brother to be School Captain of Rugby, Oliver had to be content with only Captaining his house.
Perhaps it was because there were the two of them, Carl thought, perhaps having the unquestioning love and loyalty of your family gave you both an edge over the rest of the world – where other people were on their own.
The final member of the Forster family, Linda, cheerfully called herself ‘the afterthought’. Being only 9, she was 7 years younger than her brothers who teased her incessantly and treated her exactly as they would have done a younger brother.
They were the most informal and uncritical of people and took Carl into their home as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
On the day after he had arrived Jeff Forster had called the school and arranged that Carl would stay with them until the end of the following year, when he would, he was confident, go up to Cambridge and not need to have any contact with his family.
That evening Oliver went back to Kathleen and Arnold’s to pick up the rest of Carl’s gear. Carl himself never went near the house or his parents again.
I met the Forsters when Max asked me to draw up ‘some sort of document that makes it all a bit official’. Professor Forster was to be in loco parentis and Carl was to live with that family until he had completed his full-time education. No money would change hands, Carl would contribute exactly what Crispin and Oliver did to the household as and when they were earning.
It wasn’t necessary to get Social Services or any other agencies involved. It was simply an arrangement made by the headmaster between two families that suited both.
I visited the family a few days later, and saw for myself how relaxed Carl was. I hadn’t had much to do with him before but found him charming.
He explained, very maturely, that he was genuinely trying not to be a problem for people but he was determined that he could never go back to live with his mother. We talked about the arrangements and I satisfied myself that he would be safe and well looked after.
I didn’t mention Susannah – it was Carl turned the conversation towards the family.
“It must be Charles’s 21st about now.”
I told him there was to be a quiet family dinner, nothing elaborate, and, yes, I had been invited.
“You’ll see Susie then.”
I told him she was at Sandhey, omitting any reference to the circumstances of her arrival.
“They’ll look after her won’t they?”
I said I was sure Charles would always look after his sister and that Max was very fond of her and Monika would always see her as ‘her little girl’.
“I’d look after her if I could. But I can’t,’ he said with finality.
“Well anything, long term would be” I tried to choose my words carefully “difficult.”
“Because we’re related?”
“Absolutely.
“Not legally. Our birth certificates don’t overlap. We could get married when we’re 21. There’s nothing to stop us. And anyway, who needs to get married these days? There’s nothing really to stop us being together.”
I told him he was doing the right thing. That not putting them through the deception was absolutely correct. I told him he was being honourable.
“It’s got nothing to do with being honourable.” He replied “it’s got everything to do with it being impossible!”
I couldn’t say anything. I thought I understood his reasons. Whatever he said about being brother and sister not mattering he must have known that it did.
“She probably thinks I don’t love her, but it’s just because I love her. We could live together but we could never make it official. She’ll want children. I couldn’t do that. I can’t do that to her. It wouldn’t be fair on the children. We could be together but we could never have children and she’ll want children. I can’t do that to her.”
It was hard to listen to his pain especially as by then I was aware that Susannah was getting involved with Joe. I couldn’t tell him what she was getting into. At the time I didn’t see how bad it was going to get.
; When I left I had a great liking for this young man.
He appeared to have fallen on his feet with the Forsters and I wished him luck, telling him that whatever he did, wherever he went, he must be sure to keep in touch with me.
Just in case.
The final contact I had with Arnold regarding his son was a brief note enclosing a sealed letter to be kept on file and sent to Carl on his 25th birthday, 1st May 1971. It seemed like an impossibly long time ahead but was less than 10 years. Neither Arnold nor Kathleen ever tried to contact their son again. It was as if, once the formalities were dealt with, they simply decided to forget he existed. For the first few months after he left home Carl was living less than two miles away from them but they never made any effort to see him so she could explain.
Or apologise.
Kathleen tried to explain their reasons to me several years later when we looked back on the events of that year. She claimed that she had wanted to keep in touch with her son, however much he now hated her, but Arnold’s health was so bad, his grip on reality becoming so tenuous, that she had thought it best to get him well first. Then, when his health was improved, he wanted to run away to the Lake District and start a new life. Carl was in university, the time for recovering the relationship had passed.
All I could think of at the time to excuse her was that she must have loved Arnold a very great deal. Why else would she give up all contact with her son? Either she loved Arnold very much and did as he wished, or she loved Carl so much she reluctantly gave him up to a better life.
I have liked to think it was this latter.
That Summer Jeff Forster left Liverpool to work in London and the family, along with Carl, moved to south London.
So Carl wasn’t in the area to read the newspaper notices of Susannah’s marriage to Joe Parry. He didn’t know that Arnold, and some time later his mother, had moved away from the district too, the newspapers noting the termination of the long links the Donaldson family had had with the district and how both George and Arnold had served so well on the Council, how sad for local employment that his business had failed.
In 1965 Arnold had finally accepted that his business was never going to survive and that none of his so-called friends and colleagues was going to help him so he had fallen back on his original degree and got a job teaching in a girls’ school in the Lake District to earn a living for the first time. It seemed like an attempt at escape though why he chose the Lake District, which must have held sensitive memories, only Arnold would have known. Kathleen had not joined him until over a year later when she got a job in the office of the school where Arnold taught, having finally sold Dunedin Avenue and her shop. I wondered how much of a marriage it was, they had been apart for over a year.
I received a letter from Carl in 1967, just after his 21st birthday. He was finishing his finals at university, he had been studying history and he hoped to get a First. He was going travelling in Europe for the summer. Would I please let his mother know that he was well. He didn’t want her to worry about him.
In the same post I received a letter from Professor Forster, which gave a little more information.
Despite moving schools during his final year of A-levels Carl had done well and had been offered a place at Cambridge but had not taken it up. Instead he had studied at Sussex. He had done exceptionally well. He would undoubtedly get a First and they were very proud of their ‘third son’.
Carl was to take a year off before taking up his new position teaching and developing his interest in the Napoleonic Wars. He was to spend the time travelling around Europe.
This letter confirmed that, now Carl was 21, the Forsters had no further responsibilities ‘in place of parents’.
I forwarded a copy of the letter to the last address I had had for Kathleen Donaldson. I hope they were both as proud of their son as the Forsters were. I trust they received my letter before Arnold died, little more than a month later.
It was early in June 1967 that a letter was received in the office informing us of Arnold’s illness, and another followed shortly afterwards saying he had died. That set various legal procedures in train but it was not too difficult. Kathleen got everything there was to have – not that they had much that hadn’t belonged to her in the first place.
I had attended the funeral, in a lovely quiet church on the edge of the fells.
It is an easy thing to say ‘he would have loved it here’ and ‘what a lovely place to spend eternity’ – rather like the platitudes one voices at the weddings of unsuitable people – meaningless clichés that no one believes but which provide people with something to say that fills empty spaces in conversations.
There were a number of Sixth formers and other teachers from the school but otherwise it was not a large gathering. I was the only person who had travelled north from the Wirral. Charles and Susannah had refused to go for their different reasons and both had asked Max not to go either. I couldn’t help but contrast Arnold’s funeral with that of his father, the newspaper then had taken up several column inches just in naming the mourners.
Kathleen was elegant and reserved, she showed regret rather than grief. I stood with her, having known Arnold far longer than any of the other mourners.
As we stood around the grave I wondered if they had ever actually been in love. They had had, as far as I knew, a relationship for over 30 years – certainly since well before the war. They had both been married to others yet had ended up married to each other. Perhaps that had been expedient, useful to both of them. Certainly Kathleen seemed to have gone along with his wishes but I just don’t think Arnold was capable of doing anything that didn’t put his own comfort first.
As we walked down the narrow lane back to her house after the funeral she told me how she had worked on ciphers during the war. She had been one of the code-breakers, pushing the bounds of knowledge and logic. While she was doing such interesting and essential work he had been involved in low level legal tasks, standing as ‘friend of the accused’ in courts martial – mainly defending petty criminals who happened to have been conscripted into the army, or prisoners of war who happened to have been caught making love with a land girl. She was quite bitter as she explained that she was far more intelligent than Arnold, though he was the one who had had all the advantages of education and expectation. And money. “If I’d had the use of all his father’s money what could I have done with that!”
Such a story of waste, she told me. Waste of her life, waste of George’s money. ‘I should have had some of that money’. I didn’t then understand quite what she meant.
I had a brief memory of the gossip of the time, Kathleen’s mother and Arnold’s father, but we had reached the house, other people were there, the conversation moved on and I forgot.
I received a postcard from Charles four months later.
The message was very short.
“Would you be kind enough to tell Susie that I wish her all the best on her 21st birthday. I’m sorry this message is a little late.”
The picture on the postcard was of a sunflower, just one large yellow sunflower against a dark blue sky. The stamp was French but the postmark indecipherable.
So he hadn’t forgotten her.
But I regret to say that, although I kept the card in the Donaldson’s file, I didn’t pass the message on.
Why didn’t I let Susannah know that her Carl was still thinking of her? Probably because she had just had a child, her second, and I knew that she was feeling rather depressed. She had just completed her degree, where she scraped a third. She should have got a First, but then she had been maintaining a house, looking after a young child and her husband all through her course, and had been heavily pregnant through her finals. I believe she did very well to get what she did. I could not upset her by raking up old wounds.
She had had a quiet 21st, there had been a small family party to which I was invited but declined. As far as I knew at that time she was happy in her marriage with Joe. Josie was a deli
ghtful child and Jack, to all appearances, a welcomed addition.
What would have happened if I had been honest then with Susannah, at that vulnerable time, when she had just had a baby, when she was depressed.
What would have happened if I had told her Carl had been in contact? What would have happened if I had reminded her then of Carl, told her that he still cared for her, still thought of her. Still loved her.
I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t upset her like that – even though I’d known for some time that they were perfectly free, legally and biologically, to be together. If only she hadn’t had a husband already, and the small matter of two young children.
So I said and did nothing.
Because I didn’t tell her she stayed in, what I later discovered to have been, a desperately unhappy marriage.
Perhaps I did the right thing. I wish I knew what could have happened had I told her. Was I right? Was I wrong? I stuck to the status quo. For better or for worse.
It was only when I spoke with her leaning against the railings at Pier Head three years later that I understood anything of the way she had really felt.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Carl was 21 years old, his final exams were completed, his degree assured. He had money in the bank, at least six months to do what he liked and it was 1967 – a good time to be young.
Photographs taken at the time show that he was tall with a shock of dark hair that reached, in the fashion of the time, well below his shoulders. The black and white photos couldn’t entirely do justice to the most striking feature of his looks, the piercing blue of his eyes. Had Arnold Donaldson lived a generation later this was more or less what he would have looked like.
Although Carl had spent all four Christmases since he had left home with the Forsters in Dulwich he had not wanted to take advantage of them so, during all his other vacations he had travelled around the country and worked. He had picked fruit in summer and vegetables in winter. He preferred working outside even though the money was never very good – he could be alone and he could think. In the times he had worked in factories or in bars and restaurants the noise had been far too great to compensate for the money.
The Last Dance Page 23
