The Things We Never Said

by Wright, Susan Elliot

  ‘Do you have any contact with him? Leonard?’

  ‘We write, but we have different lives now.’ She thinks about Leonard for a moment, wonders how happy he really is. ‘They looked after you for a few weeks, Leonard and Sheila. The hospital wouldn’t let me see you – Carver said it would be upsetting for us both.’ She can feel tears beginning to gather, so she takes a tissue from the box next to her chair and presses it quickly to her eyes when he’s not looking. ‘Then two social workers came. They’d found a couple who wanted to take you straight away, and who could give you a happy family life.’ She thinks she sees a shadow flit across his face at this point. Has he had a happy life? Oh, please let him have had a happy life. He’s looking at her intently now. ‘Go on,’ he says.

  ‘They said that even when I got better, I wouldn’t be able to give you the sort of life this couple could. I knew they were right, of course, so I signed the papers.’ She pauses, trying to retrieve that particular memory, but it’s one that’s always been elusive. ‘I didn’t remember any of this until much later, and I’m still not sure I remember actually signing the papers, or just the social workers telling me about it.’

  She stops speaking and silence rushes in to fill the space. All she can remember clearly is feeling frustrated that nothing would stick long enough for her to think it through, and the nagging feeling that there was something she needed to do and she had thirteen weeks in which to do it. Had she asked the staff? Had they told her? It’s your baby, Maggie. You’ve got thirteen weeks to decide whether you’re sure about giving him away. Perhaps they had, and she’d just forgotten again. Or perhaps they’d told her not to worry, to give her brain a rest and stop trying to think too much.

  Her son gets to his feet. Is this it, then? Is he leaving now? But he walks over to the window and looks out onto the railings and the pavement beyond, where all you can see is people’s legs as they pass. His hair is darker than when he was a baby, almost brown now, but with flashes of gold where the light catches it. He is tall, like her, and his back is broad, like her own father’s was before he became shrunken with illness. She can see the tension in Jonathan’s shoulder blades. I am the cause of that, she thinks.

  He turns back to face her and she drops her gaze.

  *

  Jonathan looks across the room at his mother. It seems odd to think of her as that: his mother. She looks pale, diminished; and she’s pulled the tissue she’s been holding to bits, making a heap of snow around her chair. He should go; let her rest. But first he must ask her. He has to know.

  ‘What would have happened if my sister hadn’t died?’ He can hear the edge in his voice.

  ‘Sorry? I’m not sure what you mean.’

  ‘I mean, you had a breakdown because Elizabeth died, and I was adopted as a result. But if she’d lived, if you hadn’t had the breakdown – would you have kept me?’

  She turns her head slightly to the side and he wonders if she heard him properly, but then she nods.

  ‘I’d have done my level best. As soon as you were born I knew I wanted to keep you, but it was harder than I’d thought, and they were right about me not being able to cope. It sounds silly, but I didn’t realise I wouldn’t be able to control everything. I thought all I had to do was feed you, change you and put you to bed. But I missed the fact that the minute you were born, you became real, live, independent beings; you were miniature people. Which meant things could happen that I couldn’t control, like illness.’ She pauses. ‘Sorry, Jonathan, I’m going off the point.’ It sounds odd when she uses his name, even though it was she who chose it. ‘What I’m trying to say is, I wasn’t a . . . a good mother.’

  He nods. Should he just leave it at that? But he knows he hasn’t made himself clear. By ‘you’ she means both of them; she thinks he’s simply asking whether she’d considered having them both adopted. He clears his throat. ‘And if it had been me who died . . .’ He runs his hand through his hair; his scalp feels hot, slightly feverish. ‘. . . would you have kept Elizabeth?’

  His words imprint on the air; he can hear them coming to definition as they hang there. He waits for her to answer.

  ‘No, Jonathan,’ she says eventually. ‘I was ill. I loved you very much; both of you.’ She reaches down for another tissue and immediately starts to pull it apart. ‘I’m not sure I always showed it enough, but I did, I really did.’

  ‘But what about . . .’ He knows he’s pushing it, but it’s like worrying at a spot and he can’t leave it now. ‘What about my . . . the man who . . . you know; Jack?’

  The name seems to paralyse her. He can see it’s hurting her, but he carries on, relentless. He must know. ‘It must have crossed your mind that, well, having a son . . .’

  For a moment she looks as though she’s going to say something, but she doesn’t.

  ‘I mean, I wouldn’t blame you,’ he continues. ‘No one would, but you must have thought . . .’ He’s gabbling now. Stop, he tells himself. Shut up and let her answer.

  Slowly, slowly she shakes her head, so slowly that he wonders if she’s ever going to speak. ‘Sometimes,’ she says eventually, in a voice gone small and thin, ‘sometimes, before I had you, I used to imagine a tiny baby with Jack’s face. But the moment you were born it was so clear. How could I have looked at you, two of the sweetest angels God ever sent to this Earth, and connected you with . . . with that man?’ She lets out a deep sigh. ‘No, from the second I laid eyes on you, I never felt you were anything to do with him – not in any way that mattered. You and your sister, you were so different; so new. That was one of the things that shocked me – I never expected you to be quite so individual.’ She looks up at him with a faint smile. ‘You’ll find that yourself, you know, when your baby comes.’

  At the mention of the baby, Jonathan becomes aware of a sudden lightness, a casting off of some of the tension that has been almost choking him. He can feel his shoulders starting to relax. A silence opens up between them, and he allows himself to float on it for a while.

  After a few moments, she clears her throat. ‘Would you like some more tea?’

  He can hear the worn-out clock making that strangulated sound before it ticks, as though straining to move its hands. It is a few seconds before he says yes, please, he would like some more tea.

  *

  Maggie feels shaky and a little light-headed as she pushes the kitchen door open. Sam is at the table reading the paper, but he stands up and comes to her immediately. As he hugs her, she can feel the tension starting to leave her body. She can hear Jonathan’s voice as he talks to his wife on the phone. I’ll be a bit longer, he’s saying. No, I’m okay; everything’s okay.

  ‘You’re doing fine, hen.’ Sam kisses the top of her head. ‘Just fine.’

  ‘Sam,’ she whispers, grabbing his hand. ‘Should I tell him to bring her round, when she’s up and about again?’

  Sam shakes his head. ‘You’ll no’ want to pressure the lad. Maybe, if . . .’ He pauses, then sighs. ‘Maggie, you’ve got to think about the possibility that . . . well . . .’

  ‘That what?’

  ‘Och, I don’t know how to say this, but you need to be prepared for—’

  ‘What, for heaven’s sake?’

  ‘Your boy – he might no’ want to come again.’

  She freezes. He’s right, of course; Jonathan is only here to find out who he is. This may be the only time she sees him. She sighs and leans briefly against Sam’s warm chest. In one way, she’d been dreading this meeting, but now she doesn’t want it to end. It is difficult to think of how life will continue after this; how is she going to get through tomorrow, and the next day, and the next?

  When she takes the tray back into the sitting room, Jonathan is looking at the cluster of photographs on the wall. ‘Who’s this?’ He points to the school photo.

  She puts the tray down, picks up her glasses and goes to stand next to him. ‘Sam’s sister’s children – Kate and David.’

  ‘And this?’
>
  ‘That’s Kate again, grown up, and that’s her husband.’

  He nods. ‘And this one?’

  ‘Ellie, our old next-door neighbour.’ Then she realises what he’s looking for, and she points to an old black and white photo in a silver frame. ‘This one’s of my parents – your grandparents.’ Should she have said that? ‘They’re very young there. She was twenty, he wasn’t much older.’

  He lifts the picture down from the wall and studies it for a long time. ‘Did you look like her?’ he says. ‘When you were younger?’ He doesn’t take his eyes from the picture.

  ‘A bit, I think. And people said I looked like my father too. Here’s one of Leonard and me just before our mother died. It’s a bit blurred of me, but you can see Leonard.’

  Is she imagining the similarities between Jonathan’s features and her own? When he smiles, his lip seems to go up slightly at one corner, just like hers. She watches him hang the picture back in its place and carefully straighten it. Then he points to the tiny colour photo in the cracked clip-frame that she keeps meaning to replace. ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘Oh, that’s just me in some silly play.’

  ‘You went back to the theatre?’

  ‘Not properly. I’m involved with a local amateur theatre group, that’s all. I still take the odd part but it’s mainly stage managing – making props, like I did when I was younger.’

  ‘I’m in an am-dram group too!’ He’s smiling as he turns towards her, and she cherishes this detail; this real connection.

  ‘Do you have any other photographs I could look at? Of the family, I mean?’

  Another hour passes as they go through the pictures, and when Jonathan says he needs to call his wife again, she can’t resist it. ‘I’d love to meet her as soon as she’s up and about. You could bring her round for tea or . . . or for dinner.’

  It’s kind of her, he says, but Fiona’s on bed rest until the baby’s born, so they’re not really making plans just yet.

  Maggie could kick herself.

  After another half-hour, he says he should be going. There is one photograph he’s put aside, she notices. It is the one of him and Elizabeth, bundled up like little Michelin men and propped against the snowman she and Leonard made in the front garden. The twins weren’t much more than four months old, but it was one of the few occasions when Elizabeth wasn’t ill.

  He picks up the photograph. ‘Would you mind if I kept this one?’

  She’s tempted to say he can borrow it, because then he’d have to bring it back. ‘Of course you can,’ she says. ‘I have others; you should have a picture of your sister.’

  He stands to leave. ‘Oh, I almost forgot.’ He reaches into his jacket pocket, pulls out a piece of velvet and unwraps it to reveal seven little stones, all with a single hole through the middle. ‘Do you have any idea why I have these?’

  She stares at the stones; a voice is telling her that this is impossible, but there they are, the stones her own mother carefully gathered over sixty years ago. She resists the impulse to reach out and touch them. ‘Wait,’ she says. ‘I need to check something.’ She hurries along the hall into her bedroom, pulls out a small box from her wardrobe and takes off the lid. Sure enough, there are her seven stones, wrapped in faded black velvet, just like Jonathan’s. As she stands there, acutely aware of her son waiting in the other room for an explanation, she is transported back to a rainy autumn day in 1947, her seventh birthday. She was snuggled on the settee in front of the fire, replete with fishpaste sandwiches, jam tarts and birthday cake, when her mother handed her the hard, knobbly parcel. She’d known what it contained; she’d wanted her own stones ever since Leonard had received his on his seventh birthday two years before.

  Now, over sixty years later, Maggie feels a wave of grief wash over her, both for her long-dead mother, and for the closeness she once shared with her brother. For a moment, the desire to see Leonard again grips her so tightly she can barely breathe. She picks up her stones one by one, traces the smooth surface with her fingers, then wraps them up again and takes them through to show her son.

  ‘It’s an old Hastings myth,’ she tells him. ‘If you take seven single-holed stones from Hastings beach, no matter where you go in the world after that, you’re destined to live in Hastings again before you die. My mother gave them to each of us on our seventh birthdays; Leonard must have given his to you.’

  Jonathan looks at the two sets of stones, then rewraps his own set carefully, almost tenderly, she thinks.

  ‘I . . . I’m glad,’ he says, his voice unsteady. ‘I’ll keep them.’

  She follows him to the door, where he shakes Sam’s hand and then turns towards her. She looks at her son, standing at her front door, almost filling the frame, and she fixes the picture in her mind so that she can remember it properly later.

  ‘Thank you,’ he says. ‘It’s a lot to take in, and I’m not sure . . . well, I just don’t know how to feel at the moment.’

  There is an awkward moment when she wonders whether she too should shake his hand. He appears equally ill at ease, but then he leans forward and kisses her cheek so fleetingly that she wonders whether she imagined it. He’s looking at her; she doesn’t know what to say.

  ‘One more thing,’ he says. ‘That man, Jack; do I look like him?’

  ‘No,’ she lies. ‘Not a bit.’

  As the door closes behind him, she feels tears prick her eyes. She collapses into Sam’s arms like a puppet with its strings cut. ‘Will he forgive me, do you think?’

  ‘Och, shush.’ He strokes her hair. ‘There’s no’ anything to forgive. You were sick; a distraught, grieving mother. Your boy can see that, for certain.’

  Maggie holds onto Sam and they stand there in the hallway for several minutes. She is so wrung out that she is half-expecting one of her episodes, but despite a sharpening of sound and colour, her breathing remains steady and her mind stays in the here and now.

  ‘Do you think I’ll ever see him again?’ she asks Sam without looking up.

  He kisses her forehead. ‘I don’t know, hen.’

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  Before going home, Jonathan walks down to the water’s edge and stands there looking out to sea. Several minutes pass, or perhaps it’s hours, he really can’t tell, but by the time he becomes aware once more of the hiss and pull of the waves on the shingle, the sky has darkened and bloated rain clouds are gathering on the horizon.

  *

  He picks Fiona up from Lucy’s, and of course she wants to know everything. Where does he start? ‘Well,’ he says. ‘She’s not hard or heartless. In fact, she’s had a pretty tough time.’

  Fiona nods. ‘What’s the story?’

  ‘It seems I’m the result of . . .’ Again the word threatens to knock him sideways. ‘It turns out that . . . that she was raped.’

  Fiona’s hand flies up to her mouth. ‘Jonno, my God!’

  Then he tells her the rest, and she listens without interrupting, then shakes her head slowly. ‘The poor woman,’ she says. She looks again at the photograph of the two babies in the snow, runs her finger over it. ‘So this is your sister.’

  Jonathan nods. ‘My twin.’ He too looks at the picture for a long time.

  Later, when he goes downstairs to make something to eat – Fiona fancies salty eggs and buttered toast – he notices the ‘messages’ button on the phone is flashing. He dials 1571: two new messages, both from his mother. She wants him to call back, but he can’t face her questions now; he’ll call first thing tomorrow.

  ‘Are you going to see her again, do you think?’ Fiona stifles a yawn.

  ‘No. Maybe. Oh, I don’t know.’ There’s a pause. ‘Fi,’ he says. ‘I’m not sure I’ve done the right thing.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I told her about Hutchinson, that he’s looking for him – for Jack. And I gave her his number.’

  Fiona props herself up on her elbow and looks at him. ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She di
dn’t. She just looked at the piece of paper, then put it behind her clock.’

  ‘She wasn’t upset?’

  He shakes his head. ‘I don’t think so. But was it, I don’t know, appropriate? Considering she didn’t report it at the time?’

  ‘I don’t know, but all you’ve done is given her the number; it’s her choice now.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ He leans back on the pillow, exhausted suddenly. He tries not to think about what happened to his mother. Instead, he thinks about his lost sister, pictures her toothy smile and pudgy arms. In his imagination, she’s sitting on the beach, watching the waves. He walks across the pebbles and lifts her into his arms. Now he imagines his own baby, not yet born but already loved more than he knew was possible. The baby reaches out, and as he gathers its soft little body to him, he has the sensation of stepping back into himself.

  He doesn’t realise at first that he’s been asleep, so it takes him a moment to register that the telephone’s ringing. It feels like the middle of the night, and as he hurries downstairs, he’s aware of his heart thudding.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Darling, it’s your mother. I—’

  ‘Mum, what is it? What’s wrong?’ But as he says it, he sees that it’s not as late as he thought. Not yet ten, in fact.

  ‘Nothing’s wrong, dear. Rather the reverse, in fact. Anyway, how did it go today?’

  His heartbeat is slowing now. ‘Fine. Well, it was . . . it went fine. It’s a long story but I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow.’

  ‘Oh, I am glad,’ she says. ‘I really am, Jonathan. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, Mum. I do know. And thanks.’ He is about to say goodnight when she continues, ‘Anyway, your father’s solicitors telephoned yesterday. It’ll take a while, of course, to get probate and so forth, but it appears your father did rather well with some of his investments. When everything’s sorted out, you should receive just over forty thousand pounds.’