The Other Child

by Charlotte Link

  You thanked me for my letter and told me not to worry. After all, I did not know that Brian was as badly off as I had believed in the heat of the moment (I remember your expression word-for-word!). And I should consider what the alternative was: a care home – that was the only other option – was probably no picnic for a boy like Nobody. The patients there were strapped to their beds and left to vegetate. Lying helplessly in their faeces, they were washed down with cold water. Often there was abuse and unexplained deaths …

  You painted such a gruesome picture of it that Charles Dickens could not have done better. Even today, looking back on it, I have to admit that you were probably not far wrong. In the forties care homes for mentally disabled people were not comparable with what we have today. And even today we are regularly shocked by scandals where a reporter uncovers sick and old people being got rid of.

  However … now I am almost eighty years old, Chad. As my own death approaches (it won’t be all that long now), I no longer want to lie to myself and other people.

  The path we chose was not right. And since Semira Newton uncovered the scandal at the start of the seventies, not even you can actually believe that it was, in any of its twists and turns.

  It was a horrific, irresponsible, unconscionable path to take. Selfish and cowardly. Yes, perhaps that is our defining characteristic: cowardice.

  Simply cowardice.

  16

  What came next? I did what I had rejected before. I went to secretarial college and learnt typing and shorthand, and then worked in a number of offices in London. By the way, as I remember now, my mother once asked about Brian in that time. It came out of the blue one Sunday morning over breakfast.

  ‘What happened to that other child?’ she asked. I choked on my tea in fright. ‘You know … the little … what was the name of that family? Somerville, if I remember rightly. The boy you took up to Yorkshire with you …’

  ‘He was put in a care home long ago, Mum. Years ago,’ I replied, dabbing at the tea I had spilt on my jumper. ‘You know, he was rather …’ I tapped at my forehead.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Mum, and that was that. She never mentioned him again. That settled it for her. After all, it had just been a question that had shot through her head briefly. She had never really been interested in the answer.

  In August 1949 I married the first boy friend I had after you. Oliver Barnes was a nice history student in his last term. I met him during a temporary job at the university library. I think I was besotted with him, but it was not real love. Perhaps at twenty you are not old enough to know what is. I married him because he was nice and because he adored me. He still lived with his parents, but he had his own basement flat in their large house, so I could move in with him. That was how I finally escaped the confined conditions with Harold and Mum. I was certainly taking a big step up the social ladder, something which impressed Mum immensely. She liked Oliver and until the end of her life she was convinced that he was the love of my life. I let her believe it, why should I have got her worried?

  I was barely twenty-one when my daughter Alicia was born. And I was twenty-eight when my husband, who by now was an assistant lecturer, was offered a post at the University of Hull.

  Was it chance or fate? I was heading back to Yorkshire.

  I have no wish to bore you with all the subsequent years.

  The catastrophe had occurred in our lives. At the all-important crossroads we had chosen to go in different directions, and we could never undo that. For me that was, and still is, tragic. I don’t know if you feel the same. I can’t talk to you about such things. Over the years you became more and more of a loner. You retreated more and more into your shell. It was left to me to keep our contact going, to visit you, and to try to draw you out of your shell. That was still true after you married, at forty-five, a woman who was twenty years younger than you and who wilted visibly with your inability to talk. It makes perfect sense to me that she, although she was so much younger, died before you. She reminds me of a flower which, denied water, dries up and then disappears.

  Gwen has also suffered from your character, but she is your daughter. Since the day she was born she has only known a father who hardly speaks and who withdraws completely torn his family. Someone who is there and at the same time not there. She was able to develop mechanisms that allowed her to survive in the desert. Although your wife was young, she was too old to do that. You wore her down. In the end she died of worry and frustration. The tumour in her breast was simply the physical expression of this unhappiness.

  Why am I so merciless in telling you this? Because I have been merciless in putting myself in the dock too. I have asked myself if I too carry the blame for your having been so distant from your family, for your taking so little part in it and, although officially husband and father, for your not taking on those roles in reality?

  I insisted we live in Scarborough, although Hull would of course have been much easier for Oliver. As usual, he let me have my way. Back then we did not live in Prince of Wales Terrace, but in a charming little house further up, in Sea Cliff Road. The road looks like it ends in the sea. It is lined with trees and its houses are spacious with pretty gardens. We could have been a proper happy family, and I could have thrown myself into that life. Instead I was always going back to the Beckett farm. For a long time I was not aware of how much time I was spending there, but then there was an ugly scene with my daughter Alicia. She was twenty or twenty-one, and already a mother to little Leslie. She was living a dissolute, messy life, and I tried to tell her how much more she could make of herself and her life.

  ‘You had everything!’ I exclaimed. ‘You aren’t deprived, like some other young people can claim. Did you ever lack anything?’

  Her skin was already an unhealthy yellow colour by then; she had continual problems with her liver and gall bladder because of her drug-taking and her completely deficient eating habits. I remember how the sick colour deepened as she replied violently, ‘Anything I lacked? My mother! I always had to do without my mother!’

  I was frankly astonished. ‘Me?’

  ‘Unfortunately I don’t have another one.’

  ‘But I—’

  ‘You were never there,’ she interrupted me. ‘You were always hanging around on that farm, tagging along after Chad Beckett. Practically every day when I came home from school, all I found was a meal you had made earlier and a note that said you were at the Beckett farm and would be back later. I wish I had kept those notes. I could have filled a shipping container with them!’

  Now I know that she was right. I never let you go, Chad. However reserved and difficult you became in the end, to me you were still the wild, handsome wartime boy I used to sit with in the bay in the twilit hours of evening, who wanted to go to war and save the world. The boy I idolised, and whom I believed was going to be everything to me. I had woven a whole world around him in my dreams – without realising that it was only in my dreams, and not in yours. For decades I had romantic thoughts about you, and romanticism is not something you could normally accuse me of. I pulled the wool over my own eyes, I convinced myself that someone – I! – had to help you. After your father died, you were alone on the farm for many years. You had to work off the debts. You were overworked and had your worries. I cooked for you, I took your laundry away to wash it. I talked to you about harvest problems and falling prices for grain. I knew more about your life on the farm than about my husband’s life at the university, which did not interest me in the slightest. Above all, I lost touch with what was going on in my daughter’s head, soul and life. I knew the price of a kilo of sheep’s wool. I did not know the date of the school show in which she was a solo singer.

  And after you married, and became a father, I was so used to that strange life with you that I did not manage to stop. I was unable to let go of you, just because there was now another woman. I persuaded myself that I needed to support her too. She was young, inexperienced, and had too much on her plate. I was read
y to help and always there in an emergency. Except that was never the case. The family had no insoluble problems. Probably the only real problem was me.

  Chad, sometimes your wife must have been sick to death of me. But she was a submissive, fearful kind of woman. She suffered in silence.

  The strange thing is that we never had an affair.

  Physically, we never cheated on our spouses. Perhaps an affair would have made everything easier, at least clearer. Perhaps Oliver would have asked for a divorce if he had found out. Perhaps your wife would have had the strength to leave, if she had found us together in bed. But as it was, no one really knew what to accuse us of. Especially as I was acting in the guise of a good Samaritan.

  My recurring question is whether everything would have turned out differently without Brian. Whether we would have married, had a few lovely children and been happy. Or am I deluding myself there too? Perhaps our relationship would have survived the whole incident with Brian if we had really been made for each other? It is both depressing and fascinating to think that the lives of two people, and so also the lives of their later spouses and children, could be decided by a chance event. If my mother and I had left for the station earlier or later on that morning in November 1940, we probably would not have met Miss Taylor and Brian. And some things would have happened differently. Maybe everything.

  We survived the 1970 scandal better than was to be expected, in spite of the storm thrown up by Semira Newton, the police and the press. Surprisingly, no one blamed me, because I had been a child when the decisive incidents occurred, and because people assumed I knew nothing of Brian’s horrific later fate. I was not hounded in the press, only mentioned in passing occasionally, and normally not by my full name. In your case there was a willingness to blame your parents and not you. It was generally assumed that your father alone had given Brian to Gordon McBright. You did nothing to deny that. Of course, that was not so much because you wanted to lay the blame on your father, but rather because your general approach was not to talk to people. Not just in this case. You had started at that point to avoid almost any communication with those surrounding you.

  The case caused quite a commotion. The forgotten child was one newspaper’s headline, another’s was The child with no name. Naturally the press had a field day, but thanks to how young we had been, we got away lightly. Public opinion blamed Arvid Beckett, the man who had never wanted Brian and barely shown any interest in him. You and he did it together, and indeed Arvid was a sick, at times even confused, old man, who probably did not realise the full extent of what he was doing.

  But who would it have helped, if I had gone public and put ourselves and our families at risk?

  I know you well, Chad. Perhaps better than any other person I have met in the course of my life. I know that if you have even read all of this, or at least skimmed it, you will be sitting there now with a furrowed brow asking, So what? I still don’t know why she’s dishing up this old story …

  I am not sure my reason will convince you, but I will try to explain.

  I wrote it all down because I wanted to face the truth, and I can only do that completely clearly and unsparingly if I write it all down. Thoughts get interrupted, fly off at tangents, lose themselves, are not taken to their logical conclusions. In writing there is nowhere to escape to. Writing forces you to concentrate and to express precisely what cannot be said. You finish your sentences, even if your mind twists and turns and your fingers would rather not touch the keyboard. You want to run away, but you write it down.

  That is how it was for me.

  And why have I sent it all to you?

  Because you are part of my story, Chad, and part of my truth. Because our fate and Brian’s are intertwined. The direction each life took is not imaginable without the other two people’s lives. I feel connected to you two in a beautiful, sad and certainly very special way. So it would not have seemed right to keep our story to myself.

  Maybe there is also a certain wish for fairness behind my sending you these chapters. Chad, it was not easy to face the truth. Maybe it just seems fair to me for you to have to do it too. Of course I cannot force you to read all of this. Perhaps you will just press the delete key, as soon as you see what this is about.

  Perhaps you will protect yourself and not make yourself read it. I could understand that.

  But I want to share my life with you. If not in one way then at least in another.

  Fiona

  Thursday, 16th October

  3

  Leslie wondered why she felt so rotten. It could not be the whisky, could it? She could hardly have thrown up more than she did last night. Perhaps she had not slept enough. Two hours at the most. And she had read too much that burdened her. Things had not become any clearer, instead they had seemed to become ever more hazy.

  What had happened to Brian Somerville?

  And who was Semira Newton?

  She left her bedroom. It was slowly growing light outside. A bright red strip glowed above the sea between dark banks of cloud. The sun was rising, but Leslie doubted that it would show itself today. It was going to be a grey autumn day.

  She went into the living room where, to her surprise, she found Dave Tanner already dressed and just picking the phone up from its cradle. He jumped and put the phone back down. He obviously felt bad being caught making a call.

  ‘You’re awake early,’ he said.

  ‘You too,’ replied Leslie.

  ‘I didn’t sleep too well,’ admitted Dave. ‘Too much on my mind …’ He did not go into details, but Leslie could guess.

  ‘You don’t know what to do with your life.’

  He smiled unhappily. ‘That’s an understatement. I’m at a dead end and have the feeling I can’t go backwards or forwards. Talk about taking a wrong turn …’

  She pointed to the phone. ‘Did you want to call Gwen?’

  ‘No. I wanted to call an old friend, but she’s … it’s not important.’

  ‘Ah.’

  He looked at her a long time. ‘You look tired, Leslie. I’d say you didn’t sleep too well either.’

  ‘Not enough, that’s for sure.’ She did not want to tell him about her grandmother’s files and that she had spent ages reading them.

  She pushed aside thoughts of Brian Somerville and Semira Newton, whoever she was, and tried to concentrate on Dave.

  ‘Why did the police not believe your statement about Saturday night?’ she asked. She had been in too much of a state the night before to go into it, but later, as she lay in bed, the question had gone round and round in her mind. He had said something about conflicting reports and then abruptly changed the topic.

  From the changing expressions on his face, she could see that he was thinking quickly about what and how much to tell her, and that he finally, with a kind of relieved resignation, decided to tell her what he and Detective Inspector Almond had discussed.

  ‘A neighbour saw me leaving the house late on Saturday night,’ he said. ‘Although I had said that I hadn’t gone out again. She told the police.’

  ‘And was it true? Had you gone out again?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She looked at him in amazement. ‘But why … and where did you …?’

  He could see the distrust and fear in her gaze and he raised his hands in a calming gesture. ‘I didn’t kill your grandmother, Leslie. Honestly, believe me. But I did go out again, and I didn’t want to mention it.’

  She guessed what was coming. ‘You were with another woman?’

  During their conversation he had been standing in the middle of the room. Now he collapsed into an armchair and stretched out his legs. He was ready to surrender completely. ‘Yes.’

  ‘The whole night?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Dave …’

  ‘I know. I’m a monster. I acted terribly. I lied to Gwen, cheated on her … I know!’

  ‘Who is she?’

  ‘Karen. A student. We used to be together. I broke up wit
h her because of Gwen.’

  ‘Apparently not.’

  ‘I had, actually. But now and then I’ve been weak. She didn’t want to lose me, so she always made it easy for me … But of course, it should never have come to that.’

  She stepped towards him. ‘Dave. You are having an affair with your ex. Last night you wanted to sleep with me. And—’

  He interrupted her. ‘I’m sorry if I—’

  ‘You didn’t hurt me, Dave. At the moment you would probably bestow your favours on pretty much any woman in Scarborough who you found halfway decent. Who didn’t have anything against you. I don’t take it personally that I would have been one of many …’

  He looked at her with affection, as it seemed to her. ‘You would not have been one of many, Leslie. You aren’t one of many.’

  ‘I’m part of your chaotic and incurable situation, Dave. Just like Karen. And Gwen. You are in a crisis, and you’re acting in a wild flap, hoping that some path will open up for you. Your plan for your life has not worked out, or rather: you can see that it was a mistake not to have a plan. That’s the sort of thing people normally notice once they’re about forty. And they tend to have panicky reactions.’

  He smiled a little. ‘Like you?’

  ‘I’m not a murder suspect. And I don’t cheat on anyone. I limit my panic attacks to myself.’

  ‘And a lot of whisky.’

  ‘And I bear the consequences of that too.’

  He stood up, looking more tense now. ‘What do you want, Leslie? You’re not just giving me this little sermon because you have some time to kill. What’s your point?’

  She took a deep breath. ‘I’ve known Gwen for ages. My gran and her father have been friends all their lives. I’ve spent a lot of time on the Beckett farm. I don’t want to claim that I’m close friends with Gwen. We’re too different for that. But I feel responsible for her. She’s almost like family to me. I can’t stand by helplessly and let her …’