The Sleeping Truth : A Romantic Thriller (Omnibus Edition containing both Book One and Book Two)

by Irvine, Ian C. P.

  There is a pile of books and magazines on the floor beside the armchair opposite me, and underneath the dining room table are four blue and red bowls for feeding the cats, the red ones full of water, the blue ones still half full of food.

  Apart from the floral wallpaper, the rest of the walls are adorned by several prints, all quite dark, one of which I recognise is a copy of the famous ‘Hay Wain’ picture by Constable. The sound of a clock ticking drifts in from the hallway, and I am surprised that I haven’t noticed it already, the steady rhythmic “tick, tock, tick, tock,” loud and almost hypnotically relaxing, washing over me, and lulling me into a false sense of security, reminding me of a time, long ago, long since forgotten. For a second or two I wonder if I have heard this clock before. In another house, at another time, part of a family long since destroyed. Or have I been here before, long, long ago?

  The small serving hatch to the kitchen bursts open and a plate of biscuits is thrust through on to the

  table beneath.

  “Help yourself,” she says, walking through into the room with two cups of tea. She hands me mine, without smiling, and sits down in her chair, settling down into the back of it. One of the black cats immediately rushes into the room and climbs up onto her lap, swiftly followed by the other who hides under the chair, poking its head out and resting it on my mother’s slippered feet.

  “Pinkie and Perkie,” she says. “This one’s Perkie. Pinkie is the shy one.”

  “I don’t like cats,” I say, stupidly, immediately regretting it but incredibly relieved when she leans forward and says, “I’m sorry. I’m a little deaf, you’ll have to speak up.”

  “I said ‘I like cats’,” I lie, trying now to establish some rapport.

  “I don’t,” she says. “But they like me, and they adopted me when my husband died. They used to belong to the neighbours.”

  “You remarried?” I ask automatically.

  “Help yourself to the chocolate biscuits. And can you give me one? I don’t want to disturb Pinkie,” she replies, ignoring my question.

  I get up, and picking up the plate from the table I offer the biscuits to her.

  “When did you re-marry?”, I ask again.

  “Oh, I never remarried,” she replies.

  “But…?” I start.

  “Andrew, so…what brings you down here now, after so many years? Did you suddenly start to miss your mother, or are you just looking for all those years of extra unpaid pocket money that you probably feel are owed to you?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, I do know, but it’s hard to explain.”

  “Well, try explaining it then. Has the cat got your tongue?”

  We both look at Perkie in her lap, and I shudder at the thought.

  “I’m sorry, maybe I shouldn’t have come, or at least, maybe I should have written first.”

  “Which leads to another interesting question. How did you find the address?”

  “We found it written on a piece of paper in one of dad’s drawers when he died…”

  “Your father is dead?” she asks, raising her eyebrows.

  “Yes, three years ago. A heart attack at work.”

  “Best place for him,” she says totally matter-of-factly, raising her cup to her lips and sipping from it.

  “What did you say?” I ask, quite shocked, immediately rushing to my father’s defence.

  “Nothing. I don’t want to talk about him. Let’s talk about you, Andrew.”

  There is something about the way she inflects the word Andrew that I do not like. I am beginning to feel uncomfortable. I sense no warmth at all from this woman, and I am even more surprised to realise that in return I also feel absolutely nothing towards her.

  “Mum,” I start, but am immediately cut short.

  “Please do not call me that,” she says.

  “Why not, would you rather I call you Alice?”

  “No. Don’t call me Alice either.”

  “What should I call you then?”

  “Can I have another biscuit please?” she asks.

  I do not reply for a moment, beginning to question the sanity of me being here. Perhaps Hannah was right. This is serving no purpose at all.

  “Sure,” I succumb, offering the plate to her one more time. She takes one of the biscuits, breaks it in two and offers one portion to the cat underneath the chair, and the other to Pinkie, who both start licking the chocolate off the top before moving on to trying to crunch the biscuits in the corners of their mouths, like miniature lions chewing on the meat of some freshly killed prey.

  I feel really strange.

  “Drink your tea, Andrew. It’s going cold.”

  Almost childishly, I obey. The tea is already lukewarm, but I buy myself some time by drinking several mouthfuls.

  “Did you ever think of me?” I ask her, blurting out the question.

  “I’ve already told you I did,” she replies.

  “I thought of you,” I reply.

  “Oh, I don’t think you did. In fact, I would be prepared to bet you money on it,” she insists, laughing lightly to herself.

  “How can you say that? For twenty years I have wondered almost every single day of my life, where you are, why you left me,…and Hannah…and why you never came to see us,” I say, a little aggressively, feeling the beginning of anger building within me.

  She reaches behind her with one hand, switching on the reading light and bending the flexible curved spine which holds up the light so that it is shining towards me. Sitting in the deep armchair with the light shining directly on my face, I suddenly feel as if I’m being interrogated by the Gestapo. She sees me wince from the brightness, and bends the light away from my face, so that it is no longer shining directly at me.

  “You’re the spitting image of my father. It’s uncanny,” she says, pointing to the big photograph on top of the marble fireplace. “That’s him there.”

  I stand up and bend over towards the fireplace, looking at the man, but not immediately seeing the resemblance. “You have his ears and jaw,…and his nose,” she says, as I raise my finger subconsciously to touch my own nose.

  “When you were a little girl you looked just like Hannah,” I reply softly.

  “What did you say? Speak up, boy.”

  “I said, you look like Hannah in the photograph, ….your daughter.”

  “I don’t have a daughter called Hannah…”

  “Mum, come on, why are you denying us? Whether you like it or not, you have a son and a daughter, and there’s nothing you can do about it. We’re not going to go away, we exist, we…” I feel the anger flare within me, accompanied by a sudden realisation of how futile this all is. Placing my tea cup on top of the mantel piece, I turn towards her, “…Fine. Okay, this is a big mistake. I shouldn’t be here. I think I’d better leave... Goodbye.”

  I turn towards the door and I am already in the hallway before I hear her call after me.

  “And you are not my son, Andrew.”

  I stop dead, fuming, turning on the spot and heading back towards her.

  “Okay, fucking fine, I am not your son. In fact, I don’t want to be. For twenty years, I have wondered how on earth a mother could abandon her children and just walk out on them. And in spite of what you did to us, for twenty fucking years, I have wondered what you were like.” Tears are welling up within me now, and I can’t hold them back. They erupt from my eyes, pouring down my cheeks. “For twenty fucking years,” I say, choking on my tears, “ … for twenty fucking years I have fallen asleep at night, wondering how on earth it was that after all you did to us, how it was still possible … that I missed …my mum.” I am sobbing now, on the verge of losing control. “…and just how on earth it was that I felt so lost without her. I used to dream about you at night, …you’d be smiling and laughing and holding my hand, and …”

  I turn away from her, covering my eyes with my hands, struggling to regain control.

  I feel a hand upon my shoulders, a gentle hand, a to
ken gesture of offered comfort. It rests there for a few seconds, but then it is withdrawn. I stop crying, and I turn to face her.

  “Andrew, if you would let me finish…I was saying, that you were not my son, because I am not your mother… I am your Aunt Claire. Alice,…your mother,… is my sister.”

  .

  Chapter Thirty Five

  .

  .

  The bus back into London is quiet. Too late for most people to be going into town, but too early for people to be going home, the bus is eerily empty.

  It occurs to me that this makes it a good time to travel, and the growing discomfort and fear I am experiencing each time I catch a train or a bus or a tube is immediately lessened as I step onto to the bus: a suicide bomber is not going to blow himself up on an almost empty bus. If he is going to kill himself, he will want to go out with a bang, …a bad choice of words, … and only detonate himself during the rush hour on the busiest bus he can find. Looking around at the rows of empty seats, I relax, knowing that for now at least, I am going to be safe.

  .

  I sit at the back of the lower deck again, just above the engine, always my favourite spot, thinking about the last hour and trying to recall and store every word that was said.

  “I shouldn’t be talking to you now, Andrew,” my aunt had said. “Alice would be furious. I’m just letting curiosity get the better of me. I’ve always wondered what you would be like.”

  “Why would she be furious?”

  “I can’t tell you. Honestly, there’s nothing I can tell you about her. I promised her that if ever, ever, either you or Hannah came looking for her that I would never tell you anything about her. Nothing.”

  “So where can I find her? Where does she live?” I had asked her, following her back into the dark room at the rear of the house, and sitting down in the armchair again.

  “Another cup of tea or a biscuit?” she had asked.

  “No, no thank you,” I had said, “I didn’t come here for the biscuits. I came to find my mum.”

  “You came twenty-two years too late, Andrew. Twenty-two years.”

  “I was bloody six years old twenty-two years ago, how the fuck was I meant to find her? And she left me. She dumped us and fucked off.”

  “Please don’t swear. Daniel didn’t like swearing in his house.”

  “Who on earth is Daniel…” I start to say, but notice the way she is looking at the picture of her husband and two girls on the mantelpiece. “Okay, sorry. That’s funny, I didn’t even know I had an Aunt Claire till five minutes ago, and presumably also an Uncle Somebody Else”, I say, pointing at the other picture on the mantelpiece of what surely must be Claire, my mum and a boy standing with their parents. “In fact, until five minutes ago, I knew nothing about anybody on your side of the family. That’s something your sister, my mum stole from us when she ran away from Scotland without us.”

  “Andrew, I can’t tell you anything. Honestly I can’t. It took a long, long time for Alice to find a life without you. The last thing she needs now, or anytime, is for you or Hannah to suddenly pop up in her life. You’ve got to understand.”

  “You’ve got to help me find her, Aunt Claire.” I demand of her.

  “I like you saying that Andrew. I like the idea of having a nephew in Scotland. I always have. But you see, I can’t. It wasn’t just you that lost your mother, I also lost my nephew and my niece. I love children. Daniel and I have two daughters, but we always wanted a son.”

  I look again at the photograph on the mantelpiece.

  “I have two cousins?” I ask, it only dawning on me now that the two girls standing with Aunt Claire and ‘Daniel’ are related to me.

  “Yes.”

  “What are their names.”

  She hesitated then, considering the wisdom of letting me know.

  “Oh dear, perhaps I shouldn’t tell you. I think that maybe I have told you too much already. If Alice knew…”

  “Forget what Alice wants, if they are my cousins, I have a right to know who they are. So does Hannah. We don’t have any other relatives.”

  Aunt Claire looked at me then, her face suddenly very serious, her eyes now cold and expressionless.

  “I am sorry young man. I think that given the circumstances, perhaps it would be better if you left now. And that you didn’t come back.”

  She stands up, both the cats who had in the meantime fallen asleep in her lap, hissing at being woken up so abruptly and once more disappearing hastily out of the door and bolting up the stairs.

  “Why not? There is so much you can tell me. So much I need to know.”

  “Please leave now.”

  “Why?”

  “Andrew, …oh dear, this is all so confusing…so difficult,” she had said.

  Then, her eyes closed for a second and she swayed forwards, and for a moment I thought that she would fall against me. I quickly reached forwards and held out my arm for her to steady herself against, but as she opened her eyes she waived it away.

  “Thank you. I’m okay. But I would like you to leave. Now. Please.”

  My mouth is open, desperate to understand what on earth was happening. So many questions, a lifetime full of questions…

  “Does she live here? If she does, I’m going to come back!” I announced resolutely.

  “No! No. She doesn’t live here. She did. But she left over eighteen years ago…Now, please…” Aunt Claire says, holding the front door wide open. “Please go…”

  I step up beside her, searching her face for answers, for compassion, for knowledge, for some humanity. There are tears in her eyes and for the first time I see just how old she really is, probably seventy years old. My mother would be much younger. I am surprised that I never noticed it before.

  “Please, tell me where she lives?” I ask one more time, deploring her to help me.

  The tears are flowing now from her old, tired eyes, and she turns her head away from me towards the stairs. In a quiet voice, almost a whisper she says.

  “Please go, Andrew. This is more than I can bear…” and a moment later I am back outside on the red, tiled path, the large green door closed in my face.

  I get off the bus at Tooting Broadway station. Too nervous to face a ride on the tube, I wait half-an-hour for a bus to take me into the city centre. I need a drink.

  .

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  .

  I am numb now. For the second Friday night in a row, I am completely lost. I am alone, and once again wandering aimlessly through the streets, struggling to make sense of life. I feel devastated, destroyed. I desperately want to be with Hannah, the only person left on this planet that truly loves me, and yet, I know that I cannot tell her what happened tonight. At least, not yet. How am I go to explain it to her? Hannah never wanted anything to do with our mum: she loved dad and he was the centre of her world, but I know that sometimes she too must have thought about what it would have been like to have a proper mother. Since dad died, like me, her thoughts must have turned more towards mum. Even though we both know the whole story of how she slept with someone else and then ran off with him, leaving dad alone and struggling to bring us both up, until the day we die both Hannah and I will remain our mother’s little children, and no matter how much we hate her, there will always be moments when we will think of her.

  What was I thinking off? What did I realistically expect? After twenty-two years of completely ignoring us, of refusing to acknowledge our existence, did I honestly expect my mother to open her arms and take me to her bosom, just because I ring her doorbell? And even if she had been there, and I had caught her unawares, what type of person would she have been? Any woman that can abandon young children and erase them from her memory has to be cruel and heartless. Not someone worth knowing, and certainly no one that I should ever consider loving.

  I realise now, just how foolish and so bloody stupid I have been. This was the only real result that I should have expected. As far as my mother is
concerned, Hannah and I died a long time ago. I have to let her rest in peace.

  The world seems a very large place tonight, and I have never felt more insignificant in my life. For the first time ever I have an inkling what it must feel like to be an orphan, to have to exist in this universe without anyone else that belongs to you. And at the same time, never have I loved my sister Hannah more. Never have I felt closer to her. Never have I needed her more.

  By eleven o’clock, I am half-way to a hang-over. The bar I am in kicks us all out into the street, and soon I am in a telephone kiosk, dialling Hannah’s number. When the she picks up at the other end, I spend a few minutes mumbling on to her about just how much I love her, and how I thank God every day of my life for giving her to me. She tells me that I am drunk and she asks about Sal and Guy. I tell her, and then luckily the money runs out before I start to say anything about my trip to find mum.

  With no change left to call Gail, and my mobile phone battery very, very dead I wander around Convent Garden without purpose or any set destination.

  There is a hollowness in my chest tonight that I have never felt before that desperately needs filling, and although I try to seek solace in a pint of beer in a bar that mercifully is still open with a late license, at 12 o’clock I am once again cast out into the streets to fend for myself.

  Walking back across the bottom of the square at Convent Garden I find myself staring at the entrance to the Road House, and moments later I find myself standing at the end of the bar inside, watching Dianne talking to a man and a woman a few metres away. I watch her for a few minutes, then walk across to her. They look at me, and I introduce myself to the man and the woman, “Hi, I’m Andrew, a friend of Dianne’s. I’m sorry, there’s something that I need to discuss with her quite urgently. Would you excuse us for a moment?”

  The man and the woman mumble some form of “Hi” in return, but before we can strike up any conversation I firmly grab Dianne’s hand, and lead her away from her friends to the entrance to the club.