I’m straining the bounds of my memory, here. I’m writing what could have happened, what probably did. And fiction is no use to me: I need facts, I need the truth. Except that I have no proof: a few flashes – but nothing solid. So what can I say? We take a ferry to Ireland. I sleep. The ferry sails through the night; we wake up in Belfast.
There is a website called CAIN that tells you exactly what was happening in any given year, month, or even day of the Troubles. You just click on the time frame you’re interested in and it summarises the main events. Here is what was happening in Northern Ireland that August.
There was a series of firebomb attacks in Belfast and Lisburn, Co. Antrim.
The Queen began a two-day visit as part of her Jubilee celebrations. It was her first time in ‘the Province’ for eleven years.
The IRA planted a small bomb in the grounds of the new University of Ulster campus. It exploded after the Queen had left and no one was injured.
Jimmy Carter, then President of the USA, gave a keynote speech on Northern Ireland. In it he called on Americans not to provide financial or other support for groups using violence there.
This, of course, in addition to a background of general sniper murders (British Army soldiers by the IRA, members of the UDA by the IRA, officers of the RUC by the IRA, members of the Provisional IRA by the Official IRA, and vice versa), beatings, maimings, kneecappings and all the rest of the ugly business that forms a low-level hum to these ‘bigger’ events.
I’ve also found out that the mean temperature in Belfast for the last week of August in 1977 – I don’t have the date, or any way of finding it out, so that’s as good a guess as any – was about 13°C. For the last eight days of the month, it rained, frequently and heavily. There were two days of thunderstorms and pretty bad winds. I wonder what I was wearing, what my mother was wearing. Try as I can to think myself back into that day, I just can’t. A rare surviving photo from that winter (a Christmas tree, Alfie a tiny red-faced scrap) shows me in a navy duffel coat with wooden toggles and a red-lined hood, but the fact that I’m wearing it indoors suggests it’s new, a Christmas present, perhaps, or a recent purchase I’m proud of. So it can’t have been that. Besides, even if Mum had checked the weather forecast, it was August: we wouldn’t have worn our winter coats in August, even to Belfast. More likely I am in a thin anorak and Start-rite sandals, a cotton summer dress or pinafore. My mother, six months pregnant, might have been in a Laura Ashley smock, or an empire-line maxi dress. She had a rust-coloured jacket, too, that she’d made herself – she was good at sewing, and made a lot of our clothes from patterns. It had long, flared sleeves and a Nehru collar and it tied under the bust with a yellow ribbon. She loved that coat. Perhaps she wore that – her favourite outfit – or perhaps she dressed smartly for the occasion, bought a sober-coloured jacket and discreet maternity skirt from a department store. What do you wear to meet the wife of your lover – the father of your daughter and unborn child, the man whose flat you’ve been living in for five years? Do you dress, defiantly, as yourself, or do you try to dress in deference to the occasion? As if you are going to a funeral, say – which in many ways you must feel that you are.
I have had a sudden flash: I seem to remember Mum doing her make-up and fluffing up her hair in the tin-floored cubicle of the toilets at the Belfast terminal. But I could be imagining it; my mind leaping to be helpful, to fill in the gaps in the story. I’m sure she did, though. A touch of blusher to warm up her pale, early-morning, ferry-sick cheeks; a smudge of eyeshadow to accentuate her eyes; the lipstick that she never left the house without, even if we were just going down the road to the library or to Mr Patel’s. You don’t want to look tarty when you meet your lover’s wife, but you want to look confident: self-possessed and groomed. Perhaps she curled her hair, too, in the Velcro rollers she kept in a velvet pouch. Just to add a little volume to her wind-whipped, slept-in hair. Her hair was fine and wavy, lighter brown than mine, and she used to wear it centre-parted and loose, except when she was going to work. If my father was coming, she curled it in heated rollers so that it fell around her shoulders in fat sausages. I’m sure, now that I think about it, that she would have tried to recurl it. Dampening it in the sink with her fingers, winding it up in the rollers and stooping to dry it beneath the hand-dryer.
Did they even have electric hand-dryers in the Belfast ferry terminal in 1977?
I wish I knew what we did all day; how the day unspooled. It would still be early in the morning: the Heysham to Belfast crossing takes eight hours, so if we sailed at 10 p.m., as they do these days, it would only have been six in the morning at this point. Maybe we took a taxi into the city centre and found a hotel we could have breakfast in. Hotels were often targets for bombs at this time. The Europa became the most-bombed hotel in the world at one point, and if you go there today you can still – apparently, and a strange sort of boast – see bullet marks behind the reception desk. My mother wouldn’t have chosen a café, though: she wouldn’t have chosen anywhere small, where people would be curious at her accent, and ask questions. I’m instinctively sure of this. So let’s say we made our way into the city and found somewhere to eat. It must have been an adventure for me, the fish and chips and the ferry, the overnight sea, and perhaps this sense continued, when my mother let me order sausages and bacon and breakfast muffins, and post slices of bread through the toasting machine. Or perhaps I was fractious, tired and bemused by the long journey, picking up on my mother’s nervous tension. Perhaps it was raining, dreary and incessant, and my mother’s carefully coaxed curls went limp again. The woman behind the desk looks at us oddly and says that breakfast is for residents only and turns us away into the chill, wet morning. There’s no way of knowing. I can only surmise.
It must feel strange to be in a city you’ve seen so much in the papers, and in the news. The city you know your lover’s from, the city where he lives. You must feel like an impostor, being there and him not knowing that you’re there. Every street, every building, must seem significant. As if he’s just around the corner, as if each cigarette left smouldering in an ashtray is his and he’s just left the room, the air not yet settled into the shape of his leaving. You’re terrified, on account of the bombs and the shootings, jumping out of your skin each time a car starts up behind you, a horn goes, but nonetheless – and the rain’s let off, for now, the rainclouds thick and replenishing themselves but having a momentary break – you wander through a few of the streets, the central streets, Chichester Street and Bedford Street and Donegall Place, the square around the City Hall – and you can’t resist telling your daughter to pay attention, even though she’s too young to understand, because this place is in her blood. You must have fantasised about coming to live here, wondering if you could, or would, or if he’d move to London permanently, instead – would want a new start. Belfast’s no place for raising kids, you think, although of course plenty of people do. He does.
In London it’s easy to keep thoughts of his other family at bay but here they press close. You feel that everyone’s looking at you, that people can tell, that they know. People are looking at you: fashions are more conservative here, and at least a decade behind. In your yellow maxi dress and terracotta jacket you look like an exotic bird of paradise. Perhaps it gets too much. Perhaps the rain starts again. You duck into a department store and kill time by letting your daughter ride the escalator up and down and look at toys in the toy department. You have a cup of tea here and when it’s finished you order a bun, or a scone, which turns to thick paste in your mouth for the few bites you take. You’ve still got time to kill so you wander around some more, try to look at patterns, but you can’t concentrate. Your daughter is bored, misbehaving, on the verge of a tantrum. You go back to the café and let her have her Rice Krispie bun, millionaire’s shortbread, cream bun, anything to keep her quiet. You decide you’ll go at ten o’clock this morning but this suddenly feels too early, so you think: half past ten, then eleven o’clock, and you wa
tch a big clock counting down the minutes, the seconds. At eleven o’clock precisely, your make-up and hair redone for the second or third time already this morning, the crumbs brushed from your daughter’s mouth, you leave the store – Robinson & Cleaver or C&A or Anderson & Macauley – and you hail a black taxi in the street and give him the scrap of paper with the address, an address you secretly copied once from the driving licence in your lover’s wallet, and the driver nods and the taxi shudders into motion.
*
It’s as close to what must have happened as anything. What happened next I do remember, though hazily. The black taxi drove through the town, down ever leafier, ever wider streets, until it dropped us outside the drive of a big, square, red-brick house set back from the road. My mother paid, we climbed out, walked down the drive.
How her heart must have been thumping.
On the doorstep, she spat in her hanky and wiped my face once more, then rang the bell.
Nobody came.
We waited; rang again. We could hear the bell echoing in the house, but no footsteps. We tried a third time, then we tried to walk around the back, but there was a locked gate in a high fence and you couldn’t get through.
My mother can’t have planned for this. The adrenalin must have been surging. Here she was, she’d come all this way – and her nemesis, the enemy, the woman whose heart she was going to break and whose life she was going to break up wasn’t in. It was as banal as that.
We walked back down the drive to wait for the woman to come back. Something in my mother, some stubborn nugget of pride, or decorum, must have prevented her from sitting down right there, on the porch.
For a while, we stood against the wall of the house across the road. But it was raining, I was grumbling, and my mother must have worried that someone would come out and ask her what she was doing: this was the height of the Troubles, and an unknown woman, even one with a small child, standing outside a house watching another house was enough to stir up fear and paranoia. So we walked a little way down the street and took shelter in a bus stop. I don’t know how long we waited there. An hour? Two? Half an hour? Two buses came past, but each time my mother said that we were waiting for a different one.
Then it happened. A third bus came by and a blonde woman got off, carrying several shopping bags, ushering a dark-haired little girl in front of her. They must have passed right by us, each party oblivious. They crossed the road and walked down the drive of the house we’d been watching – the house I didn’t know was my father’s house. My mother was deathly white. It must have seemed a game to me, the watching, the waiting. But – and I think this must be why I remember this episode in such detail, when I couldn’t tell you about my first day at school anywhere near as closely – I suddenly realised that it wasn’t a game at all. From time to time you hear people say ‘the colour drained from her face’ and you think it’s a figure of speech, until you actually see it happen. My mother gripped my hand so tightly I cried out and then she stood up and started walking, fast, so that I had to run to keep up with her. We walked back in the direction we’d come, past the house, down the slight incline and out onto the main road, my mother like a creature possessed.
The woman, you see, had been heavily pregnant – even more pregnant than my mother. My father’s wife, like his mistress, was due to give birth that autumn. Once my mother saw that – and what must it have felt like to see that, to realise? – she couldn’t confront the woman. Maybe, with everything that happened later, she wished she had: but in that moment she couldn’t, didn’t.
We spent the rest of the day in the Ulster Museum, looking at the dinosaurs.
Alfie and I
There are too many holes in my story, I’m seeing this already; too much I just don’t know. How could our mother stay with our father when he’d lied to her – when he’d kept it from her that his wife was pregnant, too? And my father: did he intend to break it off with my mother, now that his wife was pregnant again, because his wife was pregnant again, but when he steeled himself to do it she announced that she was pregnant as well? How must it have felt, your wife and your mistress, simultaneously, or just about, having babies? How did he keep the secrets, on both sides, and how did my mother let slip that she knew about Catriona? Did he admit it, or did she ask him outright, and pretend she had a dream, or an intuition? And what did he say, what could he possibly say? Then did she leave him, for a while? I seem to remember that. Going to my grandmother’s in Yorkshire – my grandmother, a woman I was scared of, and hardly knew. I think I remember the train journey there, and the papery, powdery cheek I was supposed to kiss, and I might remember arguments and tears. Why don’t I remember more? Why do I remember the trip to Ireland, and not to Yorkshire, when they both must have happened around the same time, and in similarly emotionally charged circumstances? Perhaps we didn’t go to Yorkshire, at all. My mother’s father was very ill by then – he’d just had the second of the series of strokes that killed him. Perhaps she hadn’t told him about the pregnancy, so as not to upset him. Perhaps she hadn’t told her own mother, either. They barely saw each other by now, corresponding when they did by letter or occasional fraught phone calls. It’s not implausible that six months, a year, could have passed since my grandmother ventured down to London, tied as she was to her querulous, invalid husband. Then again, surely knowing her own father was so ill would be enough to make my mother brave the journey back home, to see him before he died? I just don’t know: I just don’t know. I wish I could ask her. Even just one of the bigger questions: did you leave my father, and for how long, and what made you go back? Was it your own mother’s opprobrium, or the thought of being a single mother of two in your childhood home in the tiny village of Routh? That sounds plausible. But that, surely, is better than going back to the man who has doubly betrayed you. Surely it is? How did my father persuade her to come back to him, how, how? How was his life sustainable, a child and a baby with his mistress, a child and a baby with his wife? It must have felt like a ghastly nightmare, some hellish joke. For my mother, too. I don’t understand, I just don’t and can’t. My mother would never say any more than that she loved my father: but that, surely, isn’t it, or isn’t enough. Love isn’t an excuse, and if there’s a love strong enough to surmount the things she went through: as I said at the start, it’s a love of which I’m incapable.
I went to visit Alfie last night, to see if he could fill in any of the gaps. Although much of what I need to know happened before he was born, and although he’s younger than me and so his memory is even more useless than mine, he was closer to our mother than I was, and I know she talked to him more, especially in the last weeks. He must know something, I thought. However small, however trivial a thing seems, it’s better than the gaping blanks of knowing nothing.
But he isn’t interested. He said that to me, flatly and decisive: I’m not interested in any of this, Lara. Only harm can come of it.
I didn’t dare tell him I was writing all of it down. I just sat there in their nice Welwyn lounge with its ‘feature wall’ and too many scatter cushions, its ‘tasteful’ black and white photographs that look like they came with the frame, drinking my mug of Victoria-Beckham-swears-by-it pu-erh tea.
I sound mean, I know. I sound outright bitchy. Partly it’s frustration. Also, his wife Danielle brings it out in me. She came in, halfway through my pleading with Alfie to rack his brains for something, anything, and she put her manicured hand on my arm and her pained, long-suffering expression on her face and said that she couldn’t help but catch the gist of what we were discussing and she had to say that she agreed with Alfie, it was no good what I was doing, and perhaps I should rethink it, or what I was doing it for, and Alfie looked relieved and shifty all at the same time and said that it was no use digging dead dogs up, or something equally irrelevant.
I waited until she’d gone, back to helping the girls with their music practice, and I tried him again.
All the Beggars Riding Page 7