“While I’m thinking of that, what of Charles and Monika?”
“As far as I know they are well. They still live at Sandhey, looking after Max.”
“Have they married?”
“No, they will not. You know Monika had awful experiences during the war – she will never marry.”
“No. I didn’t.” He thought for a while “Is Charles queer?”
She was not surprised by his question “No I don’t think so. He is just” she sought the right words “just sensitive, vulnerable, careful, damaged.”
“Aren’t we all.”
“Some more than others.”
The conversation was more on an equal footing now.
“Are you going to stay with Phyl tonight?”
She was going to ignore the question that hung over them. She was going to carry on and let him turn the conversation back if he wanted to. She knew Kathleen well enough to see elements of her in her son now. He was weighing up pros and cons, all the while he was making polite conversation he was thinking.
Kathleen used to say that you could always make any decision by tossing a coin. You didn’t necessarily do what the head or tail told you to – it was just that you knew what you wanted the coin to do as it was falling to earth. That was what Charles was doing now. Their conversation was the equivalent of that coin spinning in the air – he was going to know very shortly which way up he wanted it to land.
“I have another night at the pub, perhaps tomorrow?”
“Will you have answered that question in your mind by then?”
“I’ve answered it now.”
“Well.”
“Maureen, may I call you that? I have loved Susie since she and I were in the nursery. I have always loved her. I will always love her. I can’t do anything about that. If I find anything out about her life I will only interfere if I can make it better. I would never, ever, do anything to hurt her. I’ll only do what she wants me to.”
“I believe you. But, and I ask this question carefully, how would you know whether you’d hurt her? How could you know whether you’d be good for her?”
“I would know.”
“Ah, the confidence of youth.”
“I will wait for her to make the first move.”
They finished their tea in silence.
“Will you meet me tomorrow – we can answer the questions then. I must give you the day to change your mind, a cooling off period if you like.”
“At the pub? At 12.30?”
“Done.”
They left the café, and although both should have headed in the same direction, Carl turned the opposite way so they would not be embarrassed. He walked through the town and out into the surrounding woods, imagining Susannah and her life. He had been lucky bumping into Maureen but it was Susie’s postcards, that he’d kept despite everything that had led him here. He found he’d walked to the gates of Polesden Lacey.
He’d try to find out the next day how Maureen knew so much about him.
The next morning The Bull was crowded. Carl made his way to the bar and asked for his pint.
“And a gin and tonic Dave, thank you.”
She had been waiting for him.
“Come over here, I’ve saved a table. It always gets crowded here on a Wednesday, never could work out why Wednesday.”
“Well...” once they were sitting down and he had drained half the pint in his anxiety.
“What? Here? It seems so – public.”
“No one is listening to us.”
“How’s Alicia?” He thought he would start on safer ground.
“She is very ill, the doctors have done what they can and she may go into remission for anything up to 7 years but they don’t hold out a great deal of hope.”
“She’s so young.”
“46. She will be lucky to make her 50th.” “Do they – Charles – Susie – do they know?”
“No, and she won’t have them told.”
“Sad.”
“Yes. Sad.”
“Anyway,” she continued after a suitable pause “have you decided what you want to know?”
“Yes. I have thought about this.” Maureen recognised some of Kathleen’s more annoying characteristics in his answer. “If I don’t know and can do nothing, I might do harm by inaction. If I do know I can either do something or do nothing, either way I may do harm or I may do good but if I don’t know, really know, then I don’t have the choice. I need the information to be able to make the decision. It’s then up to me to make the right one.”
“You have thought this through haven’t you!”
“Yes. I have.”
“Well,” and she took a big breath. “Susannah is married. No don’t interrupt until I have finished. Susannah is married, she has two children, a girl, 3 years old called Josie, and a boy, Jack who was born last month.”
She paused, waiting for the blows to sink in.
“What about her degree? Her career?”
“She did study for a degree but only just got it, not a good one at all, simply a pass. She has no career. She is a wife and a mother.”
“Oh. I thought she was going to do more than that.”
“So did we all.”
They sat for a few moments, Carl wondering how wrong all his other ideas of her life had been. But he had to ask the most important question.
“Is she happy?”
“From all accounts she is. Her husband is doing well in business in Liverpool, she has help with the family.”
“Monika?”
“Monika.”
“So there really is nothing I can do. If I was in her life I would do nothing to help her?”
“Probably not.”
“Nothing?”
“No. It doesn’t seem so.”
“Ouch.”
He had to ask “Who did she marry?”
“You might know him. His name is Joe Parry.”
“Not one of the fishing Parrys! I used to go out with Jimmy on his boat, he’d be Joe’s eldest brother. His sister worked behind the bar at the Lighthouse Keeper. Jesus Christ! She couldn’t have married one of them! Absolutely not! They were..... they were.....”
“Awful” she finished the sentence for him flatly.
“I was going to say ‘dirty’.” There was defeat in his voice.
That evening, as Carl lay on the narrow bed in the pub he allowed himself to think about the Susannah he had known, bright, intelligent, inquisitive, energetic, selfish – yes she had been a bit selfish but that came from her being so unhappy as a child – she grabbed what she could when she could as if she knew it was going to end soon. There was always so much more to her than a spoilt middle class child whose every move in life was pre-planned by her parents and her parents’ money.
He thought of her, married with a growing family. He was being selfish himself thinking that she was like him, ambitious, wanting to do something. Maybe she hadn’t ever wanted to be anything other than a housewife and mother.
Maybe he was wrong thinking that she couldn’t be happy as a mother and housewife. There was nothing wrong with that, even in these days of women’s lib and burning bras, the ‘swinging 60s’. It was important to have good mothers for children. It wasn’t everything to have a career.
He mustn’t think that there was anything wrong with ‘just’ being a wife and mother.
But he found it difficult to cope with knowing she had married one of the Parrys. She had had a choice and she had chosen a Parry.
But, he fought with himself over the answer, had she had a choice? She had a child of three. It must have been conceived so soon after he had left home. What had happened? Had she had to get married? How could she have thrown everything away like that? Was it a dreadful mistake?
Maureen and Carl met again the next lunchtime at the Bull. When they were both seated at what he was beginning to think of as ‘their usual table’ Maureen opened the conversation.
“You still haven’t asked me w
hat you really want to know have you?”
“And what would that be?” he asked – knowing that she knew the question as well as he did. Would she give him the correct answer?
“You want to know if Susannah is your sister don’t you?”
He was surprised at the question, he had hoped that what Kathleen and Arnold had said that afternoon four years before was not true – but it hadn’t occurred to him that others might have wondered.
“They said she is. Why would they lie?”
“Oh, Carl, there are lots of reasons why people lie. Many of those reasons may actually seem good at the time. That’s not to say they should lie, or that lying is a good way to run your life, but it does happen and sometimes can be the lesser of two evils.”
“Are you saying they lied?” He didn’t want to think that they had – but if they had? What then?
“No. I’m saying that what they said may have been the truth as they saw it at the time, but it may not actually have been the truth.”
“You’re playing with words here, but what I think you’re saying is that they said we were brother and sister because that was what they believed at the time but they now know we aren’t?”
“No I’m not saying that. I’m saying that the truth is often not really the absolute black or white you young people would like it to be.”
“Either Susie is my sister or she isn’t. That’s pretty damned black and white to me.”
“Well it’s not to her parents.”
“Well who are her bloody parents then?”
He hadn’t realised that his voice had risen so high until he noticed two pairs of eyes turned towards them from the bar. He lowered his voice but he was beginning to lose patience.
“I’m sorry. It’s just that you are talking in riddles, deliberately leading me on. It may not be important to you but it bloody well is to me.”
“Carl, you are an academic, at least I understand you will be soon. You know that there are always more than several sides to every story. Also, you know that you cannot live in the ‘what ifs’ of life. What if Napoleon had won Waterloo? What if Josephine had had a son by him? What if General what’s his name hadn’t stormed that bridge at Salamanca.”
“Picton. It was General Picton and it was Vitoria, not Salamanca. And how do you know that’s my area?”
Not answering his questions she continued “Your father was a pedant too. Anyway, what would you do if it turns out you’re not Susannah’s brother?”
“Are you saying I’m not?”
“No. I am asking ‘what would you do if you weren’t?’ Think about it.”
He did think about it. He thoughtfully drank the rest of his pint, walked up to the bar and bought another round. Returning to their table he sat down and calmly replied:
“I would want to know how we aren’t. I’m obviously Arnold and Kathleen’s son so I would want to know how Susie isn’t Arnold’s daughter.”
“Good boy, you’re thinking now.”
“Susie’s birthday is the end of August. She would have been conceived at Christmas time. 1945. The end of the war. Was Arnold away? Did he serve away?”
“No. He served – as you so flatteringly describe it – in Yorkshire, at Catterick.”
“Would they have spent Christmas together? If they didn’t who would she have spent it with. Charles was, what, four years old?”
“Three”
“I was....?”
“about five months gone in your mother’s womb.”
“Arnold would have wanted to spend Christmas with Kathleen, wouldn’t he? She was having his baby – me?”
“Good, you’re getting warm.”
“So. What have we got? A cosy family Christmas with Arnold and Alicia, with their toddler and the nanny, was Monika with them then? and Kathleen and Henry, Kathleen quite pregnant – with me. Who else?”
“No one else. Though you have one or two details wrong. Charles wasn’t with them he was left behind with his nanny, and no, Monika didn’t join the family until well after the war.”
“So it was just the four of them.”
“Yes, Carl.”
“No.” Realisation of where Maureen was leading him to was dawning. “They didn’t do things like that then.”
“What makes you think that?”
“You’re saying that Alicia and Henry....”
“I am not giving details, Carl, I am simply describing a scenario. Make of it what you will.
“You are telling me, sorry, you are ‘describing a scenario’, where Henry is Susie’s father. That my father – sorry ‘the man I always thought of as my father’ was Susie’s father not mine?”
“I am telling you nothing Carl. I am simply identifying a possibility.”
His voice was very quiet, he spoke trying, not altogether successfully, to keep his emotions in check. “What you are saying is that my parents are Kathleen and Arnold, and Susie’s parents are Henry and Alicia. We are not related at all.”
“If that is what you choose to read from our conversation Carl, go ahead. It is a possible, indeed I would go so far as to say a probable, scenario. It is also, I am afraid, completely impossible to prove one way or the other.”
Carl sat over his drink, taking in the implications of what Maureen was saying.
“What were they thinking that day when they told us that we were brother and sister?”
“Ah. You have me there, Carl. They both, of course, knew who your parents are and Alicia is, of course Susannah’s mother but as to the father – I do believe at the time they both thought it was Arnold.”
“Thought”
“‘Thought’, ‘think’ whatever.”
“So that’s a definite maybe to Susie’s parentage.” He tried to make a joke of it but her tone of reasonableness was beginning to get on his nerves.
“I think it’s a little more than that.”
“Please Maureen, what has Alicia told you? What does she know that she will not say? Will she talk to me? Will she tell me the truth?”
“Carl, the problem in all this is that she is very ill. She doesn’t need all this history raked up, it will upset her far more than she can cope with at this time.”
“I am trying to be bear that in mind but fuck it, this is our lives we are talking about. It is all in her past, but this is our future, mine and Susie’s. We must know. She must tell us.”
“You are already making decisions, Carl. You are already talking about ‘us’ and ‘our’ you’ve already decided you’re part of her life and she’s part of yours.”
“Of course I have.”
“Don’t tread on too many dreams. Don’t upset too many people, my boy. Wrong upon wrong, lie upon lie, they don’t cancel each other out. If you do anything do it openly, do it without subterfuge, without causing any more pain.”
“I’ve got to see her, talk to her, sort this mess out.”
“Think carefully, you and she are not the only two involved in this. There’s the husband, the children....”
“....who exist because of the lies that have been told.”
“But they can’t be proved to be lies. You can’t prove any of this.”
They sat for a few minutes, Carl trying to find an answer.
“Blood tests. We could have a paternity test done. We could check that way. Arnold and Susie can do blood tests – we would know then if they were related or not...”
“Unfortunately no, there is one thing I haven’t told you.”
“I don’t think I’m going to like this am I?”
“I don’t think you are. Arnold is dead. He died last June.”
She went up to the bar for another drink while she let that information sink in, but Carl had felt absolutely no emotion at being told his father was dead.
He had never felt Arnold’s son, the years they all lived at Dunedin Avenue had been when he was growing up – his interests were Susie and his friends – not his family – and his mother had been so tied up with
Arnold and the failure that he was coping with. The impact of his father’s death was a practical not a sentimental one.
Maureen put the glasses down on the table and looked at Carl. He was very clear as he looked back at her.
“That’s it then. No paternity test. No confirmation. No proof.”
“No.”
“Shit.”
“I did warn you that answers to questions more often than not throw up more problems than they solve...”
“I know. But still shit.”
“You could always forget her. Get on with your life.”
He had to clear something up that had been niggling in the back of his mind.
“Will you tell me something, Maureen? How do you know so much about me, the family, the Peninsula thing? Just coming from the Wirral isn’t enough.” She sipped at her drink while deciding how to answer.
“You won’t remember a man in your father’s old office – not the factory, the lawyers in Liverpool – there is a man called Ted. He used to work for your father and he always had a special interest in the family. I never did understand exactly why, as he had many clients and there were other partners in the firm. I think it was probably that Arnold used to get him to do things that he should have done himself.”
“Was he the one who used to drive Charles to school – the one who lost him in Anglesey that time?”
“Well he didn’t exactly lose him – Charles gave him the slip – but yes that’s the chap.”
“He always used to turn up at odd times – tall, rather stuffy, big nose, nice face.”
“That’s him. Well he keeps in touch with me. I think he cares very much for Alicia. Sad really. He tells me what’s going on with the people she used to care about and I, well I tell her the things I think she should know, the things that won’t hurt her. She really has been very ill for a long time you know.”
“Will you tell her about me?”
He waited a few moments for her answer. “Well, will you?”
“Do you want me to?”
Carl stayed at Phyl’s that night. He was beginning to know so many important things, but he felt there was still so much more to learn.
The Last Dance Page 26
