The Accusation

by Zosia Wand

  My father.

  My hands are trembling. I can hear Mum grumbling in the kitchen, Milly approaching. I shove the address in my pocket, sliding the drawer shut.

  *

  We find the dice in the Snakes and Ladders box. Milly is eager, never having played Ludo before. Mum’s reluctant at first, but we manage to persuade her to join us while the cake is in the oven. Milly unfolds the board and I help her set out the counters. ‘Which colour do you want to be, Milly?’

  ‘I’ll be red,’ says Mum. She was always red when we played together.

  Mum told me she didn’t know where my father was. He left when I was not much more than a baby and she never heard from him again. I have no memories. There are no photographs. She told me she burned them all after he’d gone.

  Milly frowns. ‘Me be red. Pleeeeease.’

  I try and persuade Milly to take another colour. ‘You can be green, yellow or blue. Why don’t you take blue? That’s a lovely colour.’ I can feel my chest tighten.

  Why does she have his address?

  ‘Want red!’

  Mum snaps back, ‘Well, I’ve chosen red.’

  Neither of them is going to budge and I don’t know what to do. All I can think about is the letter. Did he write to her? Was he asking after me? Milly shakes her head, her mouth set in a stubborn line. ‘I choosed red. I want red.’

  ‘I want doesn’t get.’

  I try and laugh this off. ‘Come on, Mum.’

  ‘Fine.’ Mum pushes the board around so the red counters are in front of Milly. Why didn’t she tell me she had his address?

  A memory: I’m thirteen years old, sitting at this same table. She is sitting opposite with my maths homework open in front of her. I want to be at Naz’s. It’s her birthday and there’s a party. I wanted to get there early to help set up, so I rushed the homework, but she insists on checking it before I can go. ‘I’m disappointed in you, Evangeline.’ She shakes her head. A long silence for me to register this sufficiently. ‘Just like him.’ I know she’s talking about my father. She doesn’t do this often, but when she does it’s like she shines a torch on something inside me. ‘Always looking for a shortcut, hoping for someone else to bail him out.’ I don’t want to be like him, but what he’s planted is deep and festering. ‘Well, I’m here to teach you there are no shortcuts in this life. If you want something you have to work for it.’ She is here to help me be a better person. She loves me, despite the rot inside. She is my ally. I don’t seek details from her because she is protecting me from the rancid truth.

  I shudder. I don’t want to be here now. It’s like playing Ludo with two children, Milly smugly triumphant, Mum seething with resentment, and I’m stuck in the middle, trying to keep the peace, and so the game continues and it’s not a bonding experience but an excruciating ordeal and my mind is elsewhere, trying to make sense of it, trying to understand why he wrote, why she kept the address.

  Mum lightens up as soon as she starts winning and there’s something rather ugly about this. When she gleefully snatches the last of Milly’s counters and sends it back to base, Milly’s eyes brim with fat, wobbling tears. I snap, ‘Mum!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘This is a game. It’s meant to be fun! Milly’s never played before.’

  She looks at Milly. ‘You took my counter. Fair’s fair.’

  The tension around the table is sour in my mouth and I’ve no doubt Milly can taste it too. I stroke her head. ‘Do you want to stop, darling?’

  She nods. Mum gives a loud tut. ‘Nobody likes a poor loser, young lady.’

  ‘That’s enough.’ I take Milly’s hand and lead her out of the room without looking up. I’m not in the mood to see my mother’s injured face right now.

  *

  There’s nowhere to go but my bedroom. It’s raining outside and this house is so small. I can feel the walls creeping in, the ceiling lowering towards our heads. There’s no escape. I want to get away. I want to get Milly away. Where did Mum get that address? When? Has she been in contact with him? Spoken to him? Seen him?

  I find my old Ladybird books and pull out a copy of Little Red Riding Hood. This edition was published in 1974, three years before I was born. On the cover is a painted image of a rosy-cheeked girl, in a red hooded cape, and a small deer, which reminds me of Bambi. We curl up together on my bed with the book. Milly can’t read, but the pictures fascinate her. While she examines each page in detail, I take out the scrap of paper.

  Milly glances up. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Nothing important. You look at your book.’

  Is it important? Maybe she contacted him, but he wrote back to say he didn’t want to know. Maybe she didn’t tell me because she didn’t want me to feel rejected again.

  Milly pokes at the page in front of her. ‘Grandma!’

  I look down. She’s right. The picture does look like my mother: apple cheeks and a kindly smile. But looks can be deceptive. My mother is no gentle granny, she’s made of steel. A proud woman. If she did get in touch with him, it will have been for my sake. There was a time, when I was fourteen, fifteen and she was struggling, that she might have gone to him for help. And I did ask about him then, seeking an alternative, more liberal parent who might allow me the freedom I craved. What was her response? ‘Forget about him, Evangeline. He doesn’t want us. Good riddance to bad rubbish.’

  Outside the bedroom window, the birds sheltering among the branches of the old apple tree vie for attention. We can’t see them, and I don’t know which birds make which sound, but Milly decides to give them names and I half listen, smiling and encouraging, suggesting Trish for the bird that trills, while Milly insists on Monty for the one that croaks and there’s Wendy the warbler and Letitia who titters, but my thoughts are tugged back to this father who left and never came back.

  Eventually, Mum calls us and we head dutifully back downstairs. The Ludo has been cleared away. I can’t look Mum in the eye, but she doesn’t seem to notice. ‘Do you think you could pop to the shop?’ she asks. ‘There’s a few bits I need.’

  I grab the opportunity to escape the house and am about to suggest we stop at the swing park when Mum gives Milly a little push towards the living room. ‘There’s a DVD on the table. Do you know how to put it on?’

  Milly doesn’t need to be asked twice. The film is Bedknobs and Broomsticks. Memories of damp winter afternoons snuggled up next to Mum on the sofa. I clap my hands in delight, ‘I love this film!’ Has she remembered this? Is she trying to make amends for the Ludo fiasco?

  She looks tired. Elderly. Red Riding Hood’s grandma. No one will ever love me like she does. She should have talked to me about my father. I should be angry, but it’s difficult to be angry with someone who is acting out of love. She will have been protecting me. Right now, we’re making progress. Milly is the focus. ‘Shall we watch the film together when we get back from town?’

  ‘Let her watch it while you get the shopping and then you and I can have a little catch-up when you get back. I’ve barely seen you.’ She presses the list into my hand. ‘You can get everything in Sainsbury’s.’ Milly is examining the DVD cover. Mum takes it from her. ‘We’ll put it in the machine.’ As Milly settles herself down on the sofa, perfectly happy, I feel flat and a bit tearful, which is silly. Milly would clearly prefer to watch a film and I need to get out of this house and get some air.

  *

  I walk past Sainsbury’s and turn off the main road towards the residential streets. The shopping can wait. Something is stirring inside me, that I hadn’t realised was dozing, and it isn’t comfortable. I left Hitchin for university at nineteen and I have been leaving it ever since and yet here I am again. It’s like a loop I can’t escape. My first attempt was university, but I was back every few weekends and for much of the holidays. Then Neil and I spent a year travelling. Mum was frantic. It was something we’d been planning since we first got together and I knew it wasn’t going to be easy, but we worked up to it slowly. Every summer t
hrough the university years we went on mini expeditions for weeks at a time. Europe first, then South-East Asia and India. A week after I graduated, Neil took me to Trailfinders in London to book a round-the-world ticket. He’d been working for a year, saving for the trip, and was desperate to get away as soon as possible. All the staff were young travellers, fresh from their own adventures, full of enthusiasm and I wanted a taste of what they had. Neil was so determined to prevent Mum scuppering our plans, he lent me the money for my flight. There was no going back.

  We had to come back, of course, but it was always temporary, always with another trip in the planning. Australia, then the year teaching in Greece. Neil was good at that, creating little oases of hope until we finally packed up entirely and headed north.

  I move into narrower streets with two-storey houses. On the corner, where there used to be a butcher’s shop, a girl stands reading a message on her phone. We went travelling before either of us had a mobile, so I was uncontactable for weeks at a time and I remember how delicious that felt. A rope had been severed and I was floating free. Weeks on end where I didn’t have to think about anyone but myself. I didn’t give Hitchin, or, to my shame, Mum, a second thought. We became almost telepathic, Neil and I, a flow to and fro between us, a rhythm. It’s held us together ever since. We could never have that freedom now with phones to connect us at any moment. That ease, being utterly selfish, without responsibilities, came at a price, of course, as everything does. As we approached any major city with a telephone exchange I’d become increasingly anxious, dreading the call home, my mother’s tears, the guilt that would creep like a shadow into the pool of sunlight we’d created between us.

  I try and imagine how it must have been for her when I started to spread my wings. She’d been abandoned by William. She’d had to cope alone, to build a life for the two of us, with no help. She’d kept me on track, a firm grip, but I was going to leave her eventually. University. Neil. Travelling. She was losing me. Was that when she contacted him?

  His address is in London. Is he still there? What took him there? He lived in this town once. He will have walked along this street. Did he come back, like I have, and feel the same disconnection? The same person but different, in this familiar place that’s not so familiar any more. There are patterns imprinted in my bones that nudge me in certain directions. This was the route I took for my swimming lessons in the outdoor pool, holding Mum’s hand – I must have been about six or seven – then through my teens, with Naz, flip-flops, silly sunglasses and beach towels, whatever the weather. I can still remember the excitement of the new indoor pool that was built beside the outdoor one. A few years later, I would walk this way to meet Neil from work when he finished his shift as a lifeguard, and then with Naz and her boys, taking my turn pushing the double buggy on a Sunday morning. I’m a child, a teenager, a grown woman. Daughter, best friend, girlfriend and now mother. Local girl and a visitor from some other place. My multiple identities scuff and rub against one another.

  And William Leonard has known none of them. My father. A stranger.

  But he was here once, with me. There may be another version of me that walked this street with her daddy, a version I have lost.

  She chose not to keep the letter, just the address from the back of the envelope. Maybe he didn’t write to her. Maybe he wrote to me.

  If I’d received a letter back then I would have wanted to know more. I would have been afraid, but I might have contacted him. A letter, not a phone call. Safer, more distance, no need to interact, but an opportunity to find out some details. But if he had written to me, she would have seen the letter before I did. She always collected the post in the morning. She could have chosen to hide it but I don’t think she would have done that. She wouldn’t have needed to. She would have stood over me while I read it. She would have been involved. And I wouldn’t have been able to hurt her. If she’d shown me a letter back then I’d have thrown it away. I would have had to.

  I try and imagine him now. An elderly man. If he’s still alive. All those years. Did he meet someone else? I may have half siblings. I have his address. I could contact him without Mum knowing now. I could do it without hurting her.

  I’ll talk to Neil. I could write to William. I can’t call him Dad. Dad is a foreign word on my tongue. He’ll never be Dad to me. I realise that, until now, he’d been as good as dead in my mind. I had no memories, Mum never talked about him except as an unpleasant episode in her life to be forgotten; he simply didn’t exist any more. But now he does. He’s been in the world all this time, moving through it, forming relationships with other people, friends, family. He exists. He is no longer so easy to dismiss. I will write. I’ll find out more, but I won’t tell Mum anything about it for now. I may never need to tell her. There may be nothing to tell.

  I turn the corner and stop outside the little terraced property that was my first independent home. This was Mum’s gift. She has been generous to me, to us. Without her help, Neil and I would not have the house we live in today, with its space and light, the views over the tarn. Milly would not have that additional garden with her trampoline. My mother has never had much money, but she is canny. She put down the deposit and got in tenants to cover the mortgage until we were ready to move in. I remember holding Neil’s hand, wandering through the empty rooms, thinking, this is the beginning of the rest of my life. The house is double glazed, thanks to her generosity. Neil preferred the original windows, but she insisted. ‘It’s important to be warm, Evangeline.’ The front door, which we painted olive green, is now a deep cinnamon. It looks classy. The small front garden with the privet hedge dividing it from the street has been thoroughly weeded and trimmed back. I try to imagine us in this house now. Me, Neil and Milly. Our car parked on the street outside. I like the cinnamon front door. It’s a much smaller house than the one we have in Tarnside, but if we lived here it’s probably as much as we would be able to afford. Neil might still be working at his old school or any one of a number of secondary schools within driving distance. I might be travelling a bit further afield, possibly into London. I wouldn’t have a flexible job on my doorstep the way I do in Tarnside and I’d probably have to work full time. Mum would be a constant in our lives, which Neil wouldn’t like, but that might be easier than her coming to stay and being under the same roof with us day in day out. This was the future she imagined when she bought me this house.

  This is what she did for me. William was not part of that. He has no claim on me.

  I turn away and head back to the town centre. It was a good start for us, but I don’t want to live in Hitchin. I don’t regret the move north. Neil was right. It was an opportunity for both of us. The park job, the head of sixth form. But more than that. I’d miss Tarnside now. I like the life we’re building there.

  14

  I’m about to head back via Sainsbury’s when Mum phones. ‘We’re in the café on Sun Street. I’ve ordered a large pot of tea and scones. Would you like cream with your scone?’

  ‘I don’t want a scone.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. I’ll see you in a moment.’ She hangs up.

  The café is quiet when I enter. A low-ceilinged Tudor building with middle-aged waitresses in white aprons serving traditional afternoon tea. Mum is sitting at a table with Milly and a pale, twitchy woman I don’t recognise. White hair, papery skin.

  ‘Why are we meeting in a café when you’ve made a cake at home?’

  ‘Oh,’ she waves her hand dismissively, ‘it didn’t rise. I want you to meet my friend. Ann, this is my daughter, Evangeline. Evangeline, this is Ann.’

  Ann shifts in her seat, fiddling with her cuff. All the colour seems to have been sucked out of her, even her clothes. She looks desperate to escape, hovering just above her seat, neither sitting nor quite standing, clearly unsure what to do. I walk over, ‘Please, don’t get up,’ and hold out my hand to shake. ‘It’s nice to meet you.’

  She nods her head, a nervous smile fixed to her face. She’s a
bout my mother’s age, knee-length skirt, sensible shoes.

  ‘How do you and Mum know each other?’

  ‘Oh, we only met last week. I volunteer in the charity shop.’

  ‘Mum in a charity shop?’ I look at my mother. She nods, as if this is completely in character. The woman who insisted on soaking my charity shop purchases in disinfectant, wrinkling her nose in disgust at the thought of ‘other people’s sweat’? She once shrank a beautiful cashmere cardigan by putting it on a hot wash. I have never seen her set foot inside a charity shop.

  Ann says nervously, ‘She was looking for a DVD. I think it was for your daughter.’ She looks down at Milly and her face changes dramatically, all the anxiety dissolving into something warm and longing. She pulls at the edge of a handkerchief tucked inside the sleeve of her cardigan. ‘Did you like the film?’

  Milly glares at my mother. ‘Grandma stopped it.’

  Mum ignores her. ‘Ann has a daughter, a couple of years younger than you. Tina. Tina Lord?’

  Milly points at a photograph on the menu. ‘Can I have tea with rose petals?’

  I have no idea who Mum’s talking about. ‘I’m afraid I didn’t know Tina.’

  Mum adds, ‘But Neil knew her.’

  I shrug. ‘Before my time.’ Ann plucks at her handkerchief and glances towards the window. I feel I should say something, so, out of courtesy I ask Ann, ‘How is Tina?’

  Another glance at the window, those fingers tearing at her sleeve. ‘Tina’s doing well. Thank you.’ She glances at Milly and blinks.

  Mum says, ‘She lives in the north now, like you,’ clearly prompting Ann to elaborate, but Ann is looking back towards the window.