Beneath the Surface

by Heidi Perks

  Linda nodded. ‘I look forward to hearing how it goes.’ They shook hands and Kathryn turned back towards Morrie. He was just a friend but sometimes, maybe more than ever, she had a little hope there could be more. She had always had three obstacles, she thought, automatically stretching three fingers out inside her pocket, but none of them were relevant any longer. Not her lies, not Peter, and certainly not her mother.

  *****

  ‘I’ll bring the box in, but then I have to rush off, I’m afraid,’ Morrie said when they pulled up outside Kathryn’s cottage. ‘It’s quite heavy.’

  ‘I’ve no idea what’s in it, but I can’t imagine it’s anything too important,’ she said, leading him to the house and letting him inside. ‘Just leave it in there, and thank you, Morrie. I feel like I’ve relied on you too much lately. You’ve been so good to me over the years. I dread to think what I would have done over the last couple of months if you hadn’t been around.’

  Morrie smiled.

  ‘Why do you do it?’ she persisted. ‘Is it because of the girls?’

  But Morrie didn’t answer; he simply leant forward and squeezed her hand.

  As soon as he’d left, Kathryn pulled the box towards her. After removing the lid, she started rummaging through its contents. A few books, some of which she recognised from the shelves of their library: a very used dictionary, old copies of Dickens and Brontë. None of it meant much to her but she would see if the girls could make use of them.

  Underneath the books was a photograph album. Its pages had lost their stick and had turned brown over time, holding photos that had slipped out of place, loosely held by transparent sheets. The photos were mainly of Eleanor and Charles, taken before Kathryn was born. Her mother had been a beautiful woman to look at.

  Kathryn closed the album and thumbed through the rest of the belongings: a half-completed tapestry still attached to its loom, newspaper cuttings about Charles, a couple of Order of Services from weddings and one from a funeral. It was a sad collection of pieces to sum up her mother’s life.

  She was about to close the box when she saw a bundle of letters tucked at the bottom, held together with string that was loosely wrapped around them. Pulling one free, she turned it over to read the front of the envelope. Her heart plummeted as she saw her own familiar handwriting on the front. The letter addressed to Abigail was still sealed. Kathryn pulled out another, and then another, until all ten lay in front of her, unopened and unsent.

  Kathryn clasped a hand to her mouth, trying to take in what this meant.

  ‘You really did lie to me, Mother,’ she said into the empty air, ‘you told me you’d given them all to her.’

  – Forty –

  Dear Adam,

  I saw my mother again today. For the first time in over fourteen years I saw Kathryn.

  I have often played out this day in my head. Sometimes I would wind up crying, clawing at her to give me the answers I suspected I might not actually want to hear. After all, what exactly could she say? She left me fourteen years ago; nothing could make up for that time. At other times I was fuelled by anger, pumped up with determination that she would pay for what she did to me, and I would find myself coiled up tightly, fists clenched so hard, my knuckles had turned white. Whatever I had played out, it was always determined by my mood that day, and I soon realised I had no idea how I would actually feel when the time came.

  This morning I woke feeling numb. Anything I had planned to say to her had blanked out of my head. I couldn’t predict what would happen, how she would look, or how I would feel, but still, walking into Morrie’s living room and seeing her again was a shock.

  ‘Your mother has made an effort today,’ he whispered in my ear as he stood aside to let me walk through. My first sight of her took my breath. She looked so much younger than I’d imagined, so much like the mother I remember from my childhood. Her hair was neatly trimmed and blow-dried, her nails were short and painted cream and she was wearing a soft blue sweater and black trousers.

  In an instant I was pulled back to a time before my daddy died, when we were in our small living room in London, waiting for him to come home from work.

  ‘Mummy,’ I could hear a tiny voice inside me saying, ‘can you help me with my buttons?’

  Kathryn stood up and took a step towards me and I almost found myself waiting for her to kneel down and button up my cardigan again. The air filled with her perfume, its scent so overpowering and familiar, and I felt a pull, like I wanted to move closer to her. I wanted her to tell me it was all OK and she was back.

  ‘Abigail,’ she said. I hadn’t heard her voice in fourteen years – was that how it had always sounded?

  I took a step back, my legs shook as I found the armchair behind me and slumped into it.

  Kathryn sat back down on the sofa, balancing on the edge. She held out her hands to me, then dropped them back in her lap and started playing with the seam on her trousers. Neither of us knew what to say. I was sure the look of panic on her face mirrored my own.

  You must want to know what was going through my head but I’m not sure I can articulate it. You see I was such a ball of mixed emotions I don’t actually remember thinking anything. I remember staring at her – the new lines on her face, the way the skin on her neck ruffled now, the silver ball earrings she had in her ears that I’d never seen before. She always used to wear gold. I wanted to feel something; anger, bitterness, sadness, anything, but I didn’t in that moment.

  ‘I like the way you have your hair,’ Kathryn said to me eventually.

  My hand automatically reached out to touch the ends before I pulled it away again. We weren’t there to talk about my hair, and even though I don’t know what I expected her to say, it wasn’t that.

  ‘And your sandals are pretty,’ she smiled, peering over the top of her knees to get a better look at my feet.

  ‘Don’t do this, Kathryn,’ I said, pulling my feet back.

  ‘Do what?’ She looked surprised. Was she expecting to spend the time making small talk?

  I sighed and looked out of Morrie’s small window onto his back garden, studying the tubs of perfectly manicured bushes as I took deep breaths.

  ‘I read your letters,’ I said, looking back at her. The night before, when Morrie had picked up Hannah, he’d handed me a package, asking if I could read its contents before meeting Kathryn, telling me they were important. There were ten letters that Kathryn had relied upon Eleanor to pass on, but of course she had never done so.

  Kathryn nodded. ‘I hope they went some way towards explaining that I hadn’t wanted to leave you.’

  ‘Yet you did,’ I said simply.

  ‘Yes, but—’ she stopped. ‘She made me believe things that weren’t true.’

  ‘You never stopped to ask me. You just ran off and left me in the worst way possible,’ I cried.

  Her hands trembled and I could see her trying to hold one still with the other.

  ‘I wasn’t well,’ she said. ‘I realise that now, I never knew.

  ‘She told me you were threatening the girls,’ she continued when I didn’t respond. ‘She said you’d cut her.’ Kathryn looked at me, imploring me to believe how awful that must have been for her. ‘I was scared, I didn’t know what to do.’

  ‘That was the scar wasn’t it? Hannah said she had one. She turned up one day with a gaping cut and told me it was a tree branch.’ Abi laughed. ‘Oh my God, the mad woman must have done that to herself. I never cut her, Kathryn.’

  ‘I’m so sorry—’

  ‘You never stopped to ask me,’ I said again. ‘Not once did you listen to me, you always took her word for it.’

  ‘I know, I realise that now, I—’

  ‘She ruled you, Kathryn. And you let her,’ I said.

  ‘If I could turn back the clock, I would,’ she cried, holding her hands out to me. ‘I’m sorry, Abigail, I’m so sorry for what happened.’

  I stared at her outstretched hands, her futile attempt at an olive bra
nch and resisted the urge to slap them away.

  ‘Well, sadly, we can’t,’ I said calmly.

  Do you know what I realised then, Adam? That no matter what words were spoken, I would never get what I needed because that was impossible. My mother left me, she took my girls away, and yes, she might have tried to contact me, but the fact was, she lived another life without me for fourteen years. So whatever we said to each other then it didn’t really matter because what had happened was unthinkable, it had changed my life too much and there was no going back. No explanation would ever be good enough.

  Maggie had asked me yesterday if I wanted her back in my life.

  ‘I never wanted her out of it,’ I told her honestly. ‘But I don’t know if I could take her back.’

  She asked me what I hoped to get out of the meeting, and I said I didn’t really know, maybe it was just to be able to move on.

  Kathryn had started rummaging in her handbag and I half-expected her to pull out a strip of pills, but instead she produced another large padded envelope. ‘I’ve got something for you,’ she said, holding it tightly in her hands for a moment before passing it over to me.

  ‘What is it?’ I took it off her cautiously.

  ‘Some things I took away that I should have left out,’ she said.

  I looked inside and pulled out a photo, and then another and another: all pictures of my dad.

  ‘Oh!’ I threw my hand to my mouth. ‘Daddy!’ Tears rolled down my face.

  ‘I have a boxful – they’re yours when you would like them. I never threw them away,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t.’

  ‘Why?’ I gasped, ‘why did you take them all away from me?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Kathryn was shaking her head. ‘I … I thought I needed to move on.’

  ‘You thought?’ I cried out. ‘Or she did?’ I stared at my daddy’s face, pictures I hadn’t seen for so many years. He looked so full of life and hope. ‘It could have been so different,’ I said.

  My mother stared into her lap, twisting the bottom of her sweater into a tight ball. Under the cover of her pretty clothes and neat haircut her nerves were still fragile. Those were snatches of my mother when I was a teenager that I saw: the one who let me down again and again.

  ‘Maybe we could start—’ Her mouth snapped shut without finishing the sentence, and her brow was furrowed as if she was trying to find the right words to explain what she wanted from me.

  ‘Start what?’ I asked coldly. ‘Not start again, surely?’ Suddenly her appearance, her words felt like a charade. Did she really think we could brush over what had happened so easily?

  ‘Well, maybe we could talk about—’ she drifted off again. ‘Or you could tell me about yourself. Or, I don’t know, there must be so many things we could tell each other about our lives over the years.’

  Like the fact I ended up sharing a house with drug addicts and spent most of Eleanor’s money on alcohol and clubbing, or that I didn’t allow myself to trust anyone for years for fear that they would leave me like she did. Or that I ruined my marriage because I was too scared to have children with the man I loved. Yes, Kathryn, I could have screamed, there are many things I could tell you, but do you know what? I actually don’t want you to be part of any of it. Not the good times or the bad times. Not the really, really low times when I thought there was no way out, or when Adam came into my life and showed me there was.

  ‘No,’ I shook my head. In the end all I could say was, ‘I can’t do it.’

  Kathryn looked up at me, wide eyes searching for a reason why. ‘But now you know about me, and that I didn’t know I had—’ she stopped, hands reaching out as if she truly believed she had given me a good enough reason to rebuild a relationship.

  ‘But you left me,’ I spluttered. ‘You walked away from me when I was the same age as the girls are now. And I had to grow up all on my own and along the way I’ve made some shitty choices that I’ll have to live with forever because of you.

  ‘I’m sorry you were kept in the dark,’ I went on. ‘I’m sorry you were never told you’re schizophrenic, and I know that goes a long way to explaining many things – but not everything. Because you could still have come looking for me.’

  Kathryn looked up at me, her eyes so full of remorse and longing.

  ‘You still shouldn’t have left me. You were so controlled by that woman,’ I cried.

  ‘I can see it now,’ she said quietly.

  I gave a short laugh and shaking my head, sat back in my chair, my heart thumping wildly.

  ‘Can’t we move on from here?’ Her eyes pleaded with me, so full of hope. ‘We can take it slowly and see how things go.’

  *****

  I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a tiny part of me that was tempted: she’s my mother. She was supposed to be my role model, the one person I could turn to and rely on, no matter what. Every daughter wants a mum in their life if they have the chance, surely?

  But I couldn’t forget, and to be honest, I don’t think I can ever forgive her for what she did. So actually it’s too late for her to be a mother to me now. I spent fourteen years wishing she was still in my life but now I realise that isn’t what I need.

  I told my mother I wished her well and for the sake of the girls I hoped she would look after herself and accept the help she’d so obviously needed for many years. But I said I couldn’t have her in my life. We were too broken for that, and I didn’t have the energy or even the wish to fix a relationship that had shattered so far beyond repair.

  Maybe one day I might change my mind, I don’t know. Maybe one day I might want to talk to her about what happened, but to be honest I don’t think she has the answers any more than I do.

  There are many things I will never know for sure. Like why my mother let Eleanor rule her life. I imagine her condition played a huge part in that. It is a sad thing she was never allowed to get the help she needed – I believe if she had then our lives would have been very different. I imagine my mum was desperate for a love she never received as a child, and in her skewed mind believed that in letting Eleanor control her, she might earn it.

  Strangely, I find Eleanor easier to understand. Everything about her was unambiguous. I believe she was a narcissistic woman, heady with the lifestyle, the money and the power her marriage brought her. She was ashamed of her daughter’s condition, so much so she would do anything to make sure no one found out about it. My grandmother thought about no one but herself. She was never cut out to have a child; she was far too selfish to be a mother. I hope that in climbing to the top of her ladder she never actually made herself happy. I hope that she at least had a moment of realisation that it wasn’t worth it if you didn’t love and be loved in return. But I accept I will never know that for sure.

  *****

  I will miss talking to you, Adam. It’s a cathartic process, laying your life out in black and white, but it’s time for me to stop because I need to move on. I have Hannah in my life. And Lauren too, of course – we are both working at our relationship, and I have no doubt we’ll get there.

  I still feel sad I’ve missed out on so much of them. Every time I see them I picture them as babies, curled towards each other, Lauren on the right, Hannah on the left. I can’t believe I haven’t seen them grow into the beautiful girls they are today, and that breaks my heart. Time is one thing you can never get back.

  I try not to let the past control me anymore, but I still regret never giving us the chance to be parents. I always knew you would make a wonderful dad, but now I know I could have been a good mum too. I have it in my heart, I always did. At first I wasn’t given the chance to show it, but then with you, I no longer had the confidence to try.

  *****

  I didn’t know Hannah was going to look for you, Adam. If I had, I would have stopped her long before she found you, and told her what happened at the end.

  The last time I saw you in St James’s Park, you kissed me on the cheek and said, ‘Look after yourself, Abs.�
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  We’d been through so much in those last few months, after you told me you wanted to work things out. At first I couldn’t see how we could because I knew I still couldn’t give you the baby you wanted. But you didn’t push me, saying that we were more important. And so I finally believed that it could be OK.

  The moment you kissed me and walked away I had a sense that something was wrong. I told myself not to be stupid, what a ridiculous notion, I couldn’t possibly know anything like that. You were only going on a business trip – you were coming home. But still I couldn’t shake the unease. I stood up and almost ran after you, begging you not to go. How I wish I’d done that, Adam. But I knew you wouldn’t have taken me seriously – you would have held my face in your hands and laughed and told me not to be so silly. Then you would have kissed my forehead and walked away, as you did, leaving me in St James’s Park to watch the back of you fade into the distance. Watching you run your fingers through your hair and put your other hand in the back pocket of your jeans, turning round as you were about to walk out of sight to grin and wave at me.

  I replay that moment again and again and again in my head until it hurts so much, I need it to stop.

  The following day, when I saw your father at the front door I knew immediately something was wrong. His face was grey, his eyes heavy with sorrow. He could barely look me in the eye and when he spoke my name his voice cracked through the ball of grief lodged inside his throat.

  ‘Let’s go inside,’ he said, leading me into the kitchen.

  ‘Don’t,’ I cried once inside. ‘Don’t tell me.’

  I didn’t want to hear what he was about to say. Because if I didn’t hear it, I didn’t have to believe it and then I didn’t have to deal with it.

  ‘There’s been an accident,’ he said, ignoring my plea.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘No!’ I remember saying that over and over: no, no, no. It couldn’t be true.