‘But I want to see him! He’s mine!’
A bright, shiny, noisy alarm bell started clanging insistently in my brain.
‘Haven’t you any children of your own?’
‘What does that mean, of my own? David’s my own, isn’t he?’
It was on the tip of my tongue to retort, ‘No he bloody well is not!’ but that might have confused him. ‘I meant—with your wife.’
‘No. She can’t have any.’ He gave a dry laugh. ‘Do you know, I had to go through all those hideously humiliating tests because she wouldn’t credit otherwise that it wasn’t my fault? And all the time I was aching to tell her I had a son, but I couldn’t, of course.’
‘Why of course? It was all long before you met her, presumably.’
There was a pause, and then he said shortly, ‘It wouldn’t have mattered with her, if it had all been before she was born.’ Whereupon, needless to say, I realised he didn’t love her and that this marriage, like his first, had been a mistake; I realised, too, that there might be another reason why he had been waiting, half-dreading, half-hoping, but always dreaming that I might contact him—and fill up empty spaces in his life.
Fatal. Fatal. No.
‘Terry. I’m sorry, I’ve changed my mind. I—’ I half-choked on the pompous lie—’I don’t want to endanger your marriage.’
‘Don’t you worry about that.’
‘Well, I do worry about it. And I don’t want to get mixed up in anything. I—I don’t want David to get mixed up either, any more than he has to be. It’s better for him to—lack a father, than to have one who—flits.’ I felt his hurt like a living wave humming along the wires, but I had to be ruthless. ‘I’m sorry, love.’
He sensed I was about to hang up, without giving him my address, and he suddenly shouted ‘Jane! Jane!’ down the phone at me like a drowner. ‘It’s not fair! I always wanted to be his father, but you never gave me a chance—’ I knew that if I gave him even a minute longer, a minute in which to plead, I would weaken, if only because once, long, long ago, long before David was conceived, I loved him. So I put down the phone.
That’s all, about Terry. Except that I live in dread of the day when he’ll inevitably walk into Heal’s and see me there, or deliberately run me to earth. I am as sure as it’s possible to be, that he’ll turn up one day. Now I stop to reason it out, nothing except a happy marriage and a family could have completely insured me against him. His marriage, I meant; but I suppose if I were safely immured behind the barrier of wedlock, I would feel much less vulnerable.
I wish and wish that I had never phoned him, never brought David and me back into the forefront of his mind. The danger to David is considerable. And yet … one day when he’s older, he may seek Terry out. But in the meantime … I don’t know. I just don’t know. The more I watch him, the more I gain confidence as a mother, the more I realise that I am, at my very best, exactly half of what he needs. Sometimes I watch him playing with Amanda; he is quieter and gentler than she is, shares more easily, hits back less readily; and I feel proud of him; but then I wonder whether that is normal for a boy, whether he oughtn’t to be more aggressive, noisier … He is very affectionate; he comes to me and climbs on my knee or straight up my legs into my arms for a kiss, and I hold him tight and cuddle him, and then suddenly I put him down. Because I’m not sure, even about that. And surely my very uncertainty, my underlying doubts, whether they’re psychologically justified or not, about my ordinary instincts towards him as his mother—surely they must in themselves affect him? One should be confident all the time that one is doing the right thing, and I would be, if only the masculine element was there as a counterbalance.
Whenever a man comes along, any man, even the new postman, who is youngish and tall, David runs to him—he used to throw his arms round every man he saw, when he was about three, until he saw it embarrassed them; now he just stands and stares, as if they exuded some aura he needed to be in. Twice I have seriously contemplated making a dead set for men-friends just in order to secure a father for David. Each time I was lucky; they did something or other that put me off them so entirely that I ceased to be able to contemplate living with them, even for David’s sake—I might do it for him, even so, if only I thought I was capable of hiding my own irritation or unhappiness. But in any case it’s no easy matter to find a man who is willing to father another man’s son. If only John were …! Oh well. If only he were normal, and more mature, and better educated, and had other work—and were white … Just the same, he’s the nearest thing to a father-figure in David’s life, and David’s heedlessness of his colour or any other thing about him has led me to reassess my own ideas. These biasses are obviously not born in us; David recognises him instinctively for what he is, a thoroughly good man. Oh, rarity! Good (as Dottie said) from side to side, right through the middle.
That’s nearly all. How inconclusive it all seems! Stories shouldn’t end in the middle, but the middle is where I am—the middle of my life (I’m thirty-four). Let me finish off with a word about Toby. So few marriages really work these days that it needn’t surprise anyone to hear of two failed ones inside a couple of pages. This time it’s sadder because of their children. Whistler got pregnant, according to Billie’s sardonic account, the minute Toby hung his trousers over the bedrail. It was a girl and they called her Rachel, and then two years later they had another girl called Carissa, which I believe is the name of a shrub in Hebrew. Billie relayed this information dryly, but with ill-concealed anxiety. Toby and Whistler, it seemed, were getting caught up in Zionism. ‘It’s all my fault, I had to go and force her to join the Youth Movement … I thought it might do as a framework, instead of a religion … idiot that I was. But how could I guess it would take hold of her like this? Most kids grow out of it, like Scouts and Guides … Christ! What shall I do if they want emigrate to Israel? Surely he won’t be such a damn fool—what do you think, Jane?’ She always talks as if I know him better than anyone, even though I haven’t seen him for all these years. I said I had no idea, he’d certainly never mentioned Israel to me, in fact at that time he’d hardly seemed to think about being a Jew in any way. ‘Oh, how he’s changed;’ Billie said—with what seemed to me an ironic note of disapproval. ‘He’s Jewish to his backbone these days. Do you know, I believe they light candles on Eve of Sabbath? Not when I come, of course; they don’t want to shock me with all that rubbish; but for the children.’ I was surprised she thought it rubbish; after all, the big synagogue wedding … And she wouldn’t have wanted Melissa to marry a non-Jew, would she? She wagged her head from side to side in an unconsciously typical movement. ‘Oh well of course … that’s the point where all us Jews get pretty Jewish, I suppose. But there’s no need to carry it to extremes!’
And then she began to report quarrels, and once Whistler came running home with an infant daughter under each arm and stayed for a week. Toby, who was in the middle of a novel at the time, failed to come and demand their return, so in the end she went back by herself.
Since then they have been muddling along somehow, but Billie, who’s at her wits’ end about the situation, has recently begun saying that as it’s sure to end in the divorce courts anyway, then the sooner the better, ‘before Melissa conceives again during one of their innumerable reconciliations’. She admitted to me once—she’d taken me out to dinner and accidentally got a bit tight, most unusual for her—that it’s mostly Whistler’s fault. ‘Madness to get married at that age! I was wrong, I should have encouraged them to have an affair and find out by living together that she was far, far too young and selfish and volatile to be a good wife yet. She could have been, would have been—but later, later. What a tragedy, Jane! That’s what it seems to me. A tragedy.’
And Toby? Well, she says he’s a wonderful father, but not such a wonderful husband. The writing obsesses him more and more. His first was good, but nothing special in the way of a popular success. The second was better, but somehow didn’t get the right reviews. Then came
the third, born, I could see, of his disappointment in his marriage; and did I, in that one, discover parts of myself—broken up, dispersed, reassembled as all-but-recognisable fragments of two different characters, but there? He even quoted me a couple of times. The funny, disturbing, wickedly demoralising thing was, that both the women that had bits of me in them were very important in the life of the hero, and the hero was Toby all right, my Toby, overlaid and disguised and changed, but nonetheless the Toby I knew and remembered … And that book was a best-seller.
I don’t love him any more. I don’t hope and dream that one day he will come to me. He is not, any longer, the father I would want for David—a man with his affections divided: how could he love my child as much as his own? But when I read that third novel I felt a clutching at the heart, that what-would-have-happened-if? feeling that is perhaps the saddest thing in the world. Toby wasn’t ready for marriage either, five years ago. No doubt it wouldn’t have worked any better with me … He writes so maturely now; that flippant joyous put-ting-of-the-finger on things has jelled into wisdom and insight, even into himself. (How that book must have hurt Whistler if she understood it! She has failed him worse than I did.)
I do yearn for him a little, still … Zionism and all … Of course I’d be no use to him there. Oh, rubbish, what am I talking about him for? I only meant to tell what had happened to him, and here I’ve dropped back five, no, six years … It’s Billie’s fault, really. She said straight out the other day that he should have married me and not Melissa. And then, damn her eyes, she had to add: ‘I think he thinks so, too.’ I sat there in her office, struck dumb, not knowing what to say or think. I remember thinking, if she doesn’t go on and tell me what she meant, I’ll never know another moment’s quiet—but I could not, for my own sake I dared not, ask the question that would have brought out the elaboration. She was sitting there like a bright-eyed, rather wicked bird, the tip of her long little-fingernail between her teeth, her eyes fixed on me, waiting … and I didn’t ask, and she didn’t go on, so now I’ll never know what he said to her, if anything … Or if it was just one of her bits of feminine naughtiness, dropped like a stone into a pool to stir up the water-beetles and watch the ripples she’s caused.
I see I’ve got nowhere as a person. I haven’t changed (does anyone, ever?) and I haven’t even grown up in the sense that I most wanted to, of becoming strong and independent. What play or book was it, in which one spinster says wistfully to another: ‘Tell me—when did you give up hope?’ Jo and I use this as a catch-line every time a man leaves our lives—somehow in a perverted way it cheers us up, if only because each of us has said it about the same number of times to the other. I would like to give up hope, I’m sure all my relationships would be quite different if I could; just settle for being one, instead of this haunting feeling of being half of some double animal, the absent other half of which one keeps feeling for at one’s side. And how often is Dottie’s backward shadow upon me! More now than ever, seeing that it is over David too.
Was I wrong to have him? I’ve even asked myself that. Life is tough and getting tougher, I mean harder to succeed in without the negative virtue of impenetrable toughness, and I see no signs of this in David … which is probably my fault.
In one of his last letters before his quiet, unobtrusive death, Father remarked: ‘Don’t make the error of bringing David up to be too sensitive and gentle. Let him stamp on caterpillars and play with toy tommy-guns and bash other children and kill little furry things with a catapult. Ah, don’t look so horrified, my darling. He’s a male, and that’s our world; he must train for it, or he will shrivel up inside himself and die at the things he’ll have to see and do later if he wants to survive.’
Darling Father. He knew what he was talking about. He once told me that when he was in the trenches in the First War, he felt sick every time one of his pals killed a rat, although he loathed the things. The other, greater horrors, the human deaths, he could never talk about … His vulnerability punished him all his life.
But I swear I don’t know how to blunt that quality in David which I love so much. The trouble is, I simply can’t want to … Whenever I read that letter of Father’s, I can only think desperately to myself: ‘He was right about so much. But about this, he’s got to be wrong.’
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Copyright © Lynne Reid Banks 1970
Lynne Reid Banks has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
The Backward Shadow was first published in 1970 by Chatto and Windus
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