‘In the middle of the night.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Thanks for the warning.’
‘You’re welcome. And about those fingerless mittens—’
‘Too provocative?’
I nodded. ‘Bit of a double message. Possibly not one you intend.’
‘It never crossed my mind… It’s a minefield, isn’t it?’ He was thoughtful for a moment, then said, ‘I can see a relationship with a wardrobe mistress could have wide-reaching repercussions.’
‘ “Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.” ’
‘Who said that?’
‘Mark Twain.’
‘Well, you can’t argue with that.’
As we approached Creake Hall, I started to feel uneasy. As if reading my mind, Marek said, ‘I’ll come in with you. Just to check everything’s OK,’ he added vaguely. ‘You’ve got a key?’
‘I put it in my coat pocket when I left.’
We stood at the back door and stamped snow off our shoes. I unlocked the door and we walked into the lobby. As we wiped our feet, Marek laid a hand on my arm and pointed to a light under the kitchen door. ‘Someone’s up,’ he whispered.
‘No, I must have left the light on. I was in an awful state when I left the house.’ His arm went round my waist and he pulled me against him in a protective gesture. I held on to him for a moment, then opened the door to the kitchen, blinking against the light. As my eyes adjusted, I was horrified to see Hattie asleep at the kitchen table, her head pillowed on her arms. I turned round quickly to send Marek away but she was already stirring. ‘Gwen! Where’ve you been? I was so worried about you.’ She sat upright, sweeping her long curls away from her face, then smiled uncertainly. ‘Tyler! What on earth are you doing here so early?’
He didn’t answer and I watched Hattie’s face as she reached her own conclusions. It wasn’t a comfortable experience, for her or for me. Shocked and clearly unhappy, she said, ‘Does Alfie know? About you two?’
‘There was nothing to know until last night… I went to see Tyler - Marek - because I was very upset.’
‘I know. I heard you crying when I went to the bathroom. I thought maybe you’d rung Alfie and had a row. Then I heard you get up. I didn’t know whether to come and find you or not. I never know what to do when someone cries. Some people like to be left alone, don’t they?’ I didn’t answer her question and Hattie went on. ‘I came down to check up on you, but by the time I got to the kitchen, you’d gone. The light was on, so I thought you must have gone out for some fresh air or something. But I was worried, so I waited… I must have fallen asleep. What time is it now?’
Marek looked at his watch and said, ‘Six-thirty’.
‘Is it really? I’ve been asleep for hours then.’ She got to her feet and stood the kettle on the hot plate, then turned round and leaned against the Aga. ‘Why were you so upset, Gwen?’
I took off my coat and slung it on the back of a chair. ‘I found out about Alfie.’
Hattie turned pale. Her mouth twisted and for a moment I thought she was actually going to scream. She stared at me, her eyes wild, like an animal’s. It was horrible. Barely able to control her voice, she said, ‘What do you mean?’
‘I read Freddie’s letters to Rae. The fragments sewn into the quilt top. They said that Alfie died. As a child. Freddie said that’s what drove him away - Rae’s fantasy that her dead son still lived.’ Hattie lifted both hands and covered her mouth. I could see from her shaking body that she’d started to cry, but I was too angry to care. ‘You’re all in on it, aren’t you? Every one of you.’
She dragged her fingers away and stood with her shoulders hunched, her fists clenched at her side. She swallowed down a sob. ‘We do it… for Rae.’
‘Why?’
‘I can’t tell you, Gwen!’
‘Hattie, for five months I’ve been sleeping with a man who is an impostor. He’s lied to me about his name, his childhood, his family - everything. You’ve all lied to me! This Christmas was a lie, this whole family is a lie! You have to tell me why. Somebody owes me that, surely? Tell me why and then I’ll leave. I’m not going to wait for Alfie. I don’t want to see him ever again. I’m going to pack my things, then I’m going back to the mill. When the trains start running again, I’m going back to Brighton.’
‘Please don’t go, Gwen! Not yet! Please stay and explain to Alfie. He’ll be so angry.’
I exploded. ‘He’ll be angry? Give me strength!’
‘He was so worried one of us would let the cat out of the bag! He’ll think it was me, I know he will! He made us promise we wouldn’t say anything in front of you. He really cares about you, Gwen. Honestly! All this deception, it isn’t really Alfie’s fault. It’s mine. All of it.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. Rae must have started all this when you were a small child. How can it be your fault?’
She shook her head, vehemently. ‘You don’t understand, it is my fault. They did it to spare Rae.’ Her voice dropped to a whisper. ‘And to spare me.’
‘You’re not making any sense, Hattie.’
She spoke rapidly then, the words tumbling over themselves, her eyes beseeching me to understand. ‘Rae wouldn’t accept that he’d died, you see. She went out of her mind! She insisted that the baby was still alive. She talked about him, she talked to him! She kept the nursery just as it was, with all the little baby clothes in drawers, all the toys on shelves. We had to pretend - all of us - because if we didn’t, it would have destroyed her. She was mad with grief, Gwen! And the pretence seemed harmless. No one was being hurt. No one was being deceived, not then. We all knew what was going on. And why… My father found it very difficult apparently, but even he went along with Rae’s fantasy. It just became a way of life. The doctors said Rae would recover, that she’d snap out of it eventually. But she didn’t. Well, not before Freddie left her. He stuck it for five years, then he gave her an ultimatum. She must accept Alfie was dead or he would leave… But she couldn’t do it! It wasn’t fair to ask - she wasn’t in her right mind. So my father left us… I was eleven. He asked me if I wanted to go with him, but I wanted to stay with Viv. She was really the only mother I’d ever known. She’d looked after me while Rae was ill, you see. So I chose to stay at Creake Hall. With Viv.’
‘Go on,’ I said, sitting at the table.
‘Rae’s version of what happened was that Freddie had taken Alfie to live abroad. She said Freddie believed she wasn’t a fit mother, that she was too ill to be allowed to look after a small child. It was all lies of course, but we pretended it was true. For her sake. We let her play the martyr.’ The kettle came to the boil. Hattie took it off the hotplate, turned back and looked at Marek, then at me, her eyes pleading. ‘What else could we do?… It was another five years before Rae came out of it. One day she just started writing. A story started pouring out of her, about a twelve year-old boy, called Tom Dickon Harry. She stopped talking about Alfie. She stopped sitting in the nursery for hours, playing with the toys and talking to herself. She sat at her desk, day after day, scribbling away at this book. Then when she finished it, she started another.’
Hattie pulled out a chair and sat down at the table again, her head in her hands. ‘TDH took over her life. She talked about him as if he was a real person, as if he was her son. But she knew he wasn’t. It was just wishful thinking and she knew it. In those days she wasn’t mad. But she wasn’t quite sane either… When the first book was accepted for publication, she told her new editor that TDH was based on her son, who lived abroad with his father. A harmless lie, we thought. You see, no one expected the book to sell. It was so old-fashioned! But to everyone’s surprise, it was a huge success. Word got out about Rae’s “inspiration”. Interviewers asked her about Alfie and she just… lied. Lied and lied! She had to, or she would have been discredited. So Viv took charge and tried to limit the damage. She was wonderful. She dealt with all the PR stuff. She vetted the questions put to Rae
and she stopped her doing interviews in person. She even did telephone interviews herself, pretending to be Rae! We thought everything would be all right. Rae was writing all the time and answering hundreds of letters from children. The books made her so happy! And they made an awful lot of money, enough to allow us to stay on at Creake Hall, to maintain the garden and the fabric of the building.
‘Then one day the BBC rang. They wanted to make a documentary. About the books. And our family. Viv was out and Rae took the call. They sold her the idea. She was going to be presented as the new Enid Blyton, only better. The film would acknowledge her position as one of Britain’s foremost writers for children. Well, Rae was always susceptible to flattery. She just lapped it up. And she said yes. When Viv found out, she hit the roof! She said it was just impossible. The filmmakers would want to know all about Alfie, would actually want to interview him and Rae would be exposed as a fraud. Viv insisted she withdraw. But Rae wouldn’t! So we had to find someone to pretend to be Alfie. Just for the documentary.’
Hattie looked up then, startled, as if she’d heard a noise. Her eyes became fearful again, but I pressed her. ‘That was eleven years ago, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘So Alfie’s been playing the part for eleven years.’
‘Yes… But it was never meant to be like that!’ she added hurriedly. ‘Things went wrong, you see.’
‘Hattie, you have to tell me - who is Alfie?’
She was about to reply when she suddenly turned her head and, looking over my shoulder, uttered an indeterminate cry. I wheeled round and saw Alfie standing in the kitchen doorway, his face haggard and unshaven. He didn’t smile. ‘Who am I, Gwen?…’ His body sagged and he leaned against the doorframe. ‘That’s a very good question.’
‘Alfie… You’re back.’ Hattie stood up and for a moment I thought she might throw her arms around him, but instead she said, ‘I didn’t hear the car… Have you slept at all?’
‘No. By the time I’d finished clearing up, I just wanted to get away… I parked on the road. I didn’t want to wake anyone. It didn’t occur to me you’d organise a reception committee.’ He looked at me, then at Marek. ‘So tell me, Tyler, are you enjoying a nocturnal intrigue with my sister or my girlfriend?’
‘She’s not your sister,’ I said. ‘And I’m not your girlfriend. Not any more.’ Alfie flinched, almost imperceptibly. His eyes narrowed and he looked at me, his expression unfathomable. I felt frightened then, afraid of this man about whom I knew almost nothing, but anger came to my rescue. ‘Who the bloody hell are you, Alfie?’
‘Not sure I can answer that,’ he said, removing his coat. He pulled out a chair and sat down. ‘But I can tell you who I was. And what I was…’ He paused, looked up expectantly and waited. Hattie sat but Marek didn’t move from his position leaning against the kitchen worktop, his arms folded. He stood between Alfie and me and I was glad of that.
Alfie looked at me for a long moment, then leaned forward and rested his hands, loosely clasped, on the table. He appeared to study them. ‘What I was… was unwanted. I can hardly remember my mother, but my father - if he was my father - certainly made an impression on me. With whatever blunt instrument came to hand. Dad was a drunk and he used to beat Mum up when he’d had a skin-full. Eventually he beat her to death. In front of me. I ran out into the street screaming for help and I didn’t stop running. I never have.’ After a pause Alfie said, ‘I’ve always wondered whether he wasn’t actually my father, just my mother’s pimp. Money seemed to change hands frequently. It would be nice to think that bastard was no blood relation. But perhaps any father is better than none. Would you agree, Gwen?… But I digress. The man I called Dad was put away and when they found me, I was taken into care. I was fostered by a succession of worthy women, but no one ever wanted to adopt me. I wasn’t surprised. I was a fat, unprepossessing child, too old to feed the fantasies of the childless. Then, in my teens, I got difficult and started throwing my considerable weight around. Chip off the old block, perhaps? At thirteen I was as tall as I am now and my foster mother couldn’t do anything with me, so she asked the authorities to take me away. And they did.’
Alfie was silent. His head was bowed and I couldn’t see his face, but his hands no longer looked relaxed. They remained clasped but the knuckles were white. He took a deep breath and continued. ‘I was put in a children’s home and there I stayed, for the rest of my childhood, surrounded by all the stories, the personalities, the triumphs and the tragedies of the children who lived there.’ He looked up and smiled. ‘It was a wonderful training ground for an actor, growing up with the dregs of humanity. Well, let’s face it, I was the dregs of humanity. I dare say I might have followed in my nefarious father’s footsteps, if I hadn’t been sent to a good school. Just the local comprehensive, but I was bright and adaptable. I was able to associate with a different class of child there and I absorbed their accents, their lives, the way they moved, their self-confidence. I didn’t have it, but I learned how to imitate it. I was a sponge. I soaked up everything.
‘I came to the attention of the English teacher. Mrs Gower. She discovered me. She was a teacher of the old school and she set us poetry to learn by heart. I actually learned it. And liked it. Liked the sound of my own voice, I suspect, but my enthusiasm was duly noted by Mrs Gower and she encouraged me. And I responded… One day she took us to the theatre to see Hamlet. I’d never been to the theatre before and I… fell in love. With the theatre, with Shakespeare, with the idea of being an actor, of pretending to be somebody else. Which is what I did anyway, all the time. It had never occurred to me you could get paid for doing it. But here was this guy on stage, this actor, pretending to be a man who was pretending to be mad. Or was he?’
Alfie spread his hands. ‘I wanted to be him. I’d spent my whole life wanting to be other boys - thinner, richer, more good-looking boys, boys with families, pets, proper homes, but now I wanted to be that man. An actor. I asked Mrs Gower how you got to be an actor and she told me about drama school. I said I wanted to go. She said if I worked very hard at school, I might get a grant or a scholarship. So I did. I worked so bloody hard, they said I should try for university instead, but I said I wanted to be an actor. I was going to go to drama school. And I did.
‘While I was there I went to a photographer to have some publicity photos taken, the kind of mug shots you send to agents. A mate of mine recommended Frances Holbrook. Yes, our Fan… Fanny liked me. Women tend to, for some reason I’ve never quite fathomed. I thought Fanny was going to be like Mrs Gower. Though I could see she wasn’t like Mrs Gower. Fanny was… beautiful. She was fifteen years older than me and glamorous and successful. Well, that’s how she seemed to me at eighteen… Fanny knew all about the acting business and she said I’d definitely got something. I didn’t know if she really meant it, but it was what I wanted to hear. I’d lost all the puppy fat by then, I’d got fit with fencing and weight training and I’d allowed the despised blond curls to grow. I suppose I was… presentable. Must have been. Fan made it clear what she wanted from me and I was flattered. She was gorgeous, she was useful, and she fed my fantasies of making it big. So we became lovers. Her first marriage had reached the end of its shelf life and I was Fan’s bit on the side, her bit of rough. She had no idea just how rough… So when the BBC approached Rae about making a documentary, it was Fan who had the brainwave. That they should get someone to impersonate Alfie Donovan. It was a mad idea, but who was to know? Alfie was supposed to have lived abroad with his father for many years. No one knew him in Norfolk and no one had ever known that the baby died because Rae had gone into seclusion and refused all visitors.
‘Fan was worried that my mates at drama school would recognise me and blow the whistle, but I told her I’d always been vague about my background. I’d never talked about my parents - too ashamed of them - and I’d certainly never told anyone I was brought up by foster parents, who dumped me in a children’s home when they’d had enough. No, I’d maint
ained an air of mystery, along with a classless accent. For all my fellow students knew, I could have been anybody. I mean, if you’d been christened “Alfred Donovan”, wouldn’t you have changed your name?…
‘I was perfect for the part. Or I was by the time Fan and Viv had finished coaching me. I even looked a bit like some of the fake photos Fanny had taken for Rae, to flesh out Alfie’s childhood. We agreed a fee and a yearly retainer, which bought my silence as well as my performance for the cameras. Everybody was happy. Nervous, but happy.
‘But things didn’t go quite as planned. I wasn’t allowed to retreat into obscurity. The documentary got a lot of attention. So did Rae’s books. Tom Dickon Harry became a craze with kids, a household name. I got phone calls from journalists asking for interviews, which I refused. But then I started getting calls from casting people who’d seen the documentary. It was one thing turning down money for interviews - though that did hurt - but I wasn’t going to turn down work offers, or meetings that might lead to work offers.
‘There was an added complication, a serious one that no one could have foreseen. The filming upset Rae badly. Or maybe it was me, my performance as Alfie. She’d seemed thrilled with me at the time, but she became unstable again and cracked up badly after the documentary was filmed. By the time it was shown on TV, Rae actually believed the script! She believed I was Alfie, the son who’d died. So the family did what they’d always done… They played along with poor old Rae’s fantasies. She was no longer capable of writing a shopping list, let alone another TDH instalment. It was clear Viv was going to have to step into the breach. What was one deception more or less? So when Rae insisted that Alfie would be coming home for Christmas… Well, Fanny can be very persuasive. Alfie came home.’
He leaned back in his chair. Under the harsh fluorescent light, he looked hollow-eyed with exhaustion. ‘I took Alfie’s name as my Equity name. I adopted Creake Hall as my nominal home and the Holbrooks as my surrogate family. Viv gave me the use of Rae’s London flat, for which I agreed to visit once a year to act out the Alfie charade for Rae. I’ve done that for eleven years. So to answer your question, Gwen, “Who am I?”… There are three of us. “Alfie” is a set of triplets. There’s the man I pretend to be. There’s the man I was - though I don’t remember much about him now. And then there’s little Alfred himself. The late lamented, dear departed. Except that he never really was, was he? He was never loved, never even known. Baby Alfred never achieved boyhood, let alone manhood. That was the book Rae didn’t write, couldn’t even bear to think about: Tom Dickon Harry and the Boy Who Never Was.’
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