by Tayte, Megan
But she was oblivious. ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ she said. ‘I was thinking of taking a holiday there. Palm trees. Sandy beaches. Sea turtles. Grass skirts. Blue Hawaii cocktails. Ooo, you could come! You and Luke, if you like. Don’t they surf there?’
‘Er, thanks, Mum.’
‘But…?’ She drew the word right out.
‘It’s just…’ I rubbed a hand across my forehead. Stupid, impulsive. I shouldn’t have called.
‘What is it, darling? Is it Luke? Are you two having problems?’
I stared at the patch from Grandad’s overalls. ‘You could say that,’ I admitted.
‘Oh, Scarlett. I’m sorry. Would it help to talk?’
‘Probably not.’
‘Okay. I understand. Always here, though, if there’s anything I can do.’
I thought for a moment, then closed my eyes and said casually, ‘Did you ever… when you were my age… did you ever…’
‘Fall in love just like they do in fairytales and then discover real life isn’t like a fairytale?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Oh yes, Scarlett,’ she said. ‘Remember I told you, when you came to stay last year?’
I did remember. I remembered her words clearly:
‘A long time ago, before I knew Hugo, there was another man... I fell for him so hard and so fast. I barely knew him, but I loved him... But it wasn’t meant to be. We were too different.’
‘I fell in love, and I was deliriously happy,’ said my mother. ‘Rafe was everything to me. But then reality crept in, and I realised loving him wasn’t enough. Sometimes love isn’t enough.’
With that, abruptly, I was done with the conversation. I couldn’t take it further. Not now. Not like this. So I invented a Chester emergency requiring immediate attention, and with Mum’s ‘Good grief, down the toilet? Go! Quickly!’ ringing in my ears, I ended the call.
I wasted no more time but stood up tall and fixed my eyes on the opposite wall. On the whitewashed plaster were twenty or so mismatched photograph-sized frames. Like a visitor at an art gallery, I scanned each one in turn. Many I recognised from Hollythwaite – shots of Sienna and me at varying ages, with Nanna, with Grandad, with Nanna and Grandad, with Mum. But some of the pictures were unfamiliar.
A picture of my mother wearing pink dungarees that housed a mountainous baby bump.
A landscape photograph of what looked to be Dartmoor on a downcast, windswept day.
A Polaroid of a chubby-kneed toddler standing between her smiling parents – a young Peter and Alice.
A drawing in thick black pen depicting four stickpeople holding hands on a sunny hill.
An impression of tiny baby footprints in yellow paint.
A candid shot of a picnic on the beach with my grandfather and my grandmother and my mother and my father and my sister.
I got it. This blue room was my mother’s haven, and this was her memory wall. For all those years with Hugo, she’d been wife and mother. But now she’d taken back her life – all of it. Now she was the little girl who’d grown up in the cove with her parents. Now she was the young woman who’d fallen in love and carried babies in her belly.
These were the years that had been locked away. The childhood ones, because they didn’t belong in Hollythwaite, with stuck-up Hugo and his shame of the simple Jones family. And the coming-of-age ones, the young woman ones? Because they didn’t belong anywhere near Hugo. Because they were nothing to do with that man.
I fought to breathe steadily as I leaned forward and studied the most interesting of all the pictures.
My mother sat cross-legged on a picnic rug. Her long red hair was flying in the breeze and her loose sundress was clinging to the swell of her stomach and her mouth was open in a wide smile. She looked so young and so at ease in her skin. She looked, I realised, not like the mother I’d grown up with, but like the woman I’d seen outside earlier today.
Beside Mum, my grandmother was rummaging through a wicker picnic hamper, and behind, my grandfather was piling rocks around the pole of a beach umbrella to anchor it down.
And at the foreground of the picture, back to the camera, was my father, his arms flung high as he lifted his baby daughter into the air. Sienna’s fists were waving and her face was lit up with a gummy grin and I could almost hear her delighted shriek.
I looked at my father.
Despite the evident heat of the day, he was dressed in black trousers and a black t-shirt. Tight, clinging to a well-built frame. His hair was close-cropped and of an indeterminate dark colour. His hands, around my sister’s torso, were large and square.
Hugo, though, was not well built.
Hugo, though, had hair that was wispy and blond.
Hugo, though, had delicate hands – hands for piano-playing and canapé nibbling and patting children absently on the head, not throwing them joyously into the air.
And I was quite certain that Hugo – the man I had always called Father – did not, as did the man in this photograph, have the word Serviam tattooed onto his inner arm.
16: THE DARK SECRET LOVE
‘So your dad’s not your dad.’
‘Yes.’
‘But your mum is your mum.’
‘Yes.’
‘And your mum’s human.’
‘Yes.’
‘But your dad – your real dad – is a Cerulean.’
‘Yes.’
‘And you’re the daughter of a human and a Cerulean.’
‘Yes.’
‘Which means you were half-Cerulean.’
‘Yes.’
‘Until you died.’
‘Yes.’
‘Of being half-Cerulean.’
‘Yes.’
‘But your mum’s the daughter of a human and a Cerulean, and she didn’t die. She’s just a plain old human.’
‘Yes.’
‘And your mum knew you weren’t Hugo’s and she lied to you all your life.’
‘Yes.’
‘And your not-dad – that Hugo chap – knew you weren’t his and he lied to you all your life.’
‘Yes.’
‘And somewhere out there is some Cerulean bloke you don’t even know called Rafe who’s your real dad.’
‘Yes.’
‘But you don’t know who he is?’
‘No.’
‘Or where he is?’
‘No.’
‘Or why he left?’
‘No.’
‘Or why everyone’s been lying?’
‘No.’
Cara leaned back on the sofa and let out a long, loud ‘Hmmmmmm’, followed quickly by, ‘D’you know, I feel like I’ve been sucked into a soap opera.’
Beside her, Si said, ‘One of those soaps you need to take notes to follow.’
Luke said nothing. He just stared at me from across the room. He’d been doing that since I’d sat them all down in his living room after dinner and dropped the bombshell, and it was freaking me out a bit. But then I suppose I’d done my fair share of staring into space when I’d got back from Hollythwaite yesterday afternoon. And in the evening. And in the night. And this morning. And this afternoon.
‘Are you sure about this?’ said Cara. ‘I mean, no one told you this – not that Evangeline, not Jude, not your mum. You just worked it all out from a photo in your mum’s bedroom?’
I shook my head. ‘It’s not just a hunch based on a photo. It’s much more than that. It’s that Mum has always been so haunted, like she’s carrying some inner pain. It’s that she never seemed to like Hugo, much less love him. It’s that she never called him my father, always his name. It’s that Hugo always seemed awkward around Sienna and me, and distant. It’s that Sienna and I have bits of Mum – Grandad, even – in the way we look, but nothing of Hugo. It’s that Mum hid those photos for all these years, like they weren’t appropriate for her home with Hugo.’
I looked around. Everyone was watching me intently, but I couldn’t read their expressions.
‘And a family line of Ceruleans makes sense,’ I went on, ‘where this Potential business doesn’t. And the Serviam tattoo on the man’s arm in the photo – he’s a Cerulean, he must be. And in the hospital last year, after I collapsed at the zoo, when Mum met Jude she got really weird about his tattoo – it was like she’d seen a ghost.’
Si was nodding soberly now, and Cara threw up her hands and said, ‘Well, I don’t know what else it can all mean then!’
But still Luke was frozen.
‘It’s the truth,’ I said, eyes locked on his. ‘My family makes sense now. I make sense.’
‘You want to believe this,’ he said, and it sounded like an accusation.
‘No, Luke, I don’t want to believe that my mum has been lying all my life and my real father abandoned us.’
‘Maybe he died,’ Cara pointed out.
‘I thought of that,’ I told her. ‘But then why would Mum have lied at all?’
‘Well, maybe he didn’t abandon you all – maybe she left him?’
‘Even so, eighteen years and not a squeak from him? Constitutes abandonment in my book, Cara.’
‘You sure no one turned up at some point and said, “Luke, I am your father”?’
I stared at Cara, mystified.
‘Star Wars,’ explained Si. ‘But more importantly: Scarlett, if your mum was with a Cerulean, do you think she knows about them?’
‘I don’t see how. If she knew about Ceruleans, she’d know about her father, and about Sienna and me.’
I wanted to spell out, ‘She’d have known the children of a human parent and a Cerulean parent are half-Cerulean,’ but I couldn’t say it. Not to Luke. I wasn’t ready for that conversation.
‘All Mum’s grief over Sienna – that’s real,’ I went on. ‘She can’t have known that at eighteen we’d both either die or be Claimed. She’d never have played dumb if she knew.’
Cara and Si were nodding.
‘But this is all just guesswork!’ protested Luke suddenly.
I turned away, to the bag I’d left by the door, and withdrew from it some folded computer printouts. Mutely, I crossed the room and handed them to Luke. He gave me a long, worried look before unfolding the papers. Cara clambered over and Si leaned in so they could read together. I sank down onto the nearby coffee table to watch their reactions.
The first sheet contained only a few lines and was dated last summer, the day Hugo had left my mother.
~
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Re: ‘Family’
Dear Scarlett,
No doubt your mother’s been in touch and explained the situation.
I’m sure you’ll agree that, in the circumstances, there’s nothing to be gained by our continuing with some semblance of a father–daughter relationship. Your mother detests me and says she wants me nowhere near you, and you understand that I must respect that.
I wish you well.
~
‘Ouch,’ said Cara. ‘Nice Dear John.’
‘My thought exactly at the time. Now, though, it’s clear he thought Mum had told me I wasn’t his daughter.’
‘But after this letter he transferred a load of money into your account,’ said Luke. ‘Which would imply he cared. Like a father.’
‘He did care, in his own way. And money was his way of showing it.’
Luke opened his mouth to argue, but I gestured to the next printout. It was of an email exchange from yesterday, the first sent in the mid-afternoon, the reply sent near midnight.
~
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Re: Paternity…
Dear Hugo,
There’s no easy way to ask this, so I’ll get straight to the point. Are you my biological father?
Scarlett
~
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
[Re:] Re: Paternity…
Dear Scarlett,
Your email was a complete shock to me. I thought your mother had dealt with this! She threatened to tell you often enough. I believed her in our final row, the day I left.
I can only imagine how impossible you will find it to get the truth from that woman, so after careful thought this evening, I have decided to tell you what I know.
No, I am not your father.
I met your mother when she was pregnant with you. She was sitting on a bench by the Serpentine in Hyde Park, holding a howling Sienna and was crying herself. I went over and asked whether I could help, and when she looked up at me and I saw her eyes… I felt then I would do anything for her.
We sat together on that bench and we talked. She told me that your father had hurt her terribly, and that she had come to London for a new start. She wanted nothing more to do with her provincial life. She was determined to make something of herself and create a secure, stable life for her children.
I was young. I was enchanted. I had never met such a beautiful, passionate woman. I always did have something of the poetic in me – that William Blake connection, of course – and I saw myself as the knight in shining armour rescuing the damsel in distress.
We were married two months later, just before your birth – a quiet civil ceremony. My father threatened to disown me over it, but doing so was pointless: already my trust fund had passed to me and I’d purchased Hollythwaite.
The rest, as they say, is history.
I know nothing more of your biological father than what Elizabeth told me that day, other than that she was adamant that the man was gone from her life for good. I never asked her about your father. I did not want to know, and she clearly did not want to share.
I solemnly promised your mother on our wedding day to take you and Sienna as my daughters, and although you may doubt it, I did try to be a father to you both. If I may just offer one final piece of advice in that capacity now: don’t look for the man. It was always apparent to me by the darkness in your mother that he had devastated her. She was William Blake’s sick rose – you remember, of course, the poem? – and he was that invisible worm whose ‘dark secret love/Does thy life destroy’.
With best wishes,
Hugo
~
‘Ohhhhhhhh,’ said Cara. ‘Well, that settles it then. Poor old poetic Hugo. I know he was a cold fish all your life, but he’d had good intentions once.’
I smiled at her but said nothing. It was good of Hugo to have replied and been open with me at last, and I understood him a lot better now, but I wasn’t about to go rushing off to ‘poor Hugo’ and attempt to resurrect our faux father–daughter relationship. He’d done us both a big favour in ending that charade.
‘What about your mum? Why did you go to Hugo, not her?’ asked Luke softly. He looked troubled, but I couldn’t tell why – for me, for my situation? Or for us somehow?
‘Softly, softly, catchee monkey,’ Cara butted in. ‘Better to confront her with proof – right, Scarlett? Then she can’t wriggle out of telling all.’
I shifted uncomfortably on my table-top perch. ‘Actually, I’m not sure I’m going to confront her.’
‘What!’ Cara looked appalled. ‘But she lied to you, Scarlett! She has to tell you the truth now! You’re a grown woman, you can take it.’
‘Cara,’ said Si, putting a restraining hand on her arm.
Ignoring him, she said, ‘You have to know where you come from!’
I folded my arms over my chest defensively before replying: ‘I’ve thought about this a lot. I’ve thought about why Mum lied. And I know that above all else she loves me and would do anything, anything to spare me from hurt. She’s protecting me. She always has. And who am I – without understanding her reasons – to tell her she’s wrong to do that?’
Luke was nodding, I saw, and the hard knot in my stomach unwound just a little. But Cara was red-faced and strangling the life out of a cushion.
‘Ly
ing is always wrong!’ she declared with passion. ‘Always. You can’t just go no further. That’s not how life works! You have to root out the truth.’
Suddenly, I was annoyed. And on my feet. ‘This isn’t one of your movies, Cara,’ I said. ‘This is my life – and it’s my choice.’
‘And it’s the wrong choice!’ she yelled, launching herself up to look me right in the eye. ‘You can’t just know you have a parent out there and let it go!’
Si and Luke were up too now, Si muttering in Cara’s ear and Luke moving to stand between us, as if preparing to break up a cat fight.
Whatever Si was saying it wasn’t working: Cara was in full flow:
‘He’s your dad, Scarlett! Maybe he loves you – maybe he wants you! You have to find him – you have to fight for him!’
She was crying now, and concern pierced the anger prickling through me. She’d never shouted at me like this before.
‘Cara –?’ I began.
But she wasn’t even looking at me now; she was shaking off Si’s hand and pointing at Luke and saying in a broken voice, ‘Tell her, Luke. Tell her right now, because she hasn’t got a bloody clue.’
‘No, Cara,’ he said firmly. ‘This is different.’
‘It’s not!’ she shouted. ‘Life is that simple and you know it. Perfect or not, parents are precious.’
And with that she ran, sobbing, from the room.
*
Luke and I took a walk down to the beach, ‘to cool off’ as Luke put it, but he was intent on keeping me warm, keeping me pressed to his side the whole way. On the beach we sat side by side on the dry sand just beyond the tide mark and I leaned my head on Luke’s shoulder and he rested his head on mine.
‘I’m sorry about Cara,’ he said. ‘She’ll calm down. She just… she misses our parents so much. It makes her a little crazy sometimes, the grief. She envies anyone who has a parent – parents.’
‘I understand,’ I said, though I didn’t – how could I? I couldn’t even begin to imagine how being orphaned would rip you apart.
His arm tightened around me. ‘And I’m sorry about me,’ he said. ‘For being so… useless in there. I didn’t know what to say. I still don’t.’