Not My Father's Son

by Alan Cumming

  As I rang for the elevator to take me down to the streets of Soho my phone rang. It was him.

  “Hello there. This is Alex Cumming.”

  At first I didn’t recognize his voice. There was kindness in it. And of course he didn’t say, “It’s your dad,” so I was thrown all the more. I had started my day determined to take control of my feelings and my situation. Now I panicked. The bell of the elevator pinged to signal its arrival. My phone would lose signal when I stepped in.

  He went on: “I’m sorry I missed your calls yesterday, I was—”

  “I can’t speak to you now,” came from somewhere inside me. “I have to go to work.”

  There was a pause.

  “Well, don’t worry about it. We’ll get this sorted out.”

  Who was this person? He sounded concerned.

  I suddenly remembered reading in one of the hundreds of e-mails sent to me with the details of my week that I would be done by 5 P.M. this afternoon.

  “I’ll call you back at five o’clock,” I said firmly. I couldn’t believe how calm and forceful I was being.

  “Okay, five o’clock. I’ll talk to you then, Alan.”

  I hung up, the elevator door opened, and I stepped in. My legs buckled from under me, my stomach churned, and I burst into tears. I longed for that elevator to break down, to trap me there, to give me time to recover and regroup. Aside from “Hello” and “Take care” at my granny’s funeral, those were the first words I had spoken to my father in over sixteen years.

  I spent the next few hours being filmed wandering round Covent Garden watching the street entertainers. This material would be used for the beginning of my episode of Who Do You Think You Are? with the sonorous voice-over setting the scene for my story. It was a sunny day, and I looked like I didn’t have a care in the world.

  Nobody knows, I thought as I watched a sinewy topless man do a handstand walk over a line of hapless prone tourists. “Nobody knows.”

  I was just so relieved to have a break from the constant buzz in my head that had started three days ago. Now I had new things to think about, new people to meet. I’ve never been one of those performers who purports to believe that acting is a welcome refuge, something to deflect or cover up things they can’t or don’t want to deal with in their real lives. I just like acting; that’s why I do it. But that day I completely used acting to push away my present, to gain some respite from the chaos and, yes, the fear I knew I’d immediately drop back into when my attention was no longer diverted. It was just that today the part I was acting was myself, or this casual celebrity strolling around pretending not to notice the cameras.

  We went to an apartment nearby to do an establishing interview about my reasons for doing the show and what I hoped to find out.

  “I sort of pride myself on being connected to my Scottish heritage,” I began. “But in more specific ways, I realize that I don’t really know much about my family beyond the ones that are alive.”

  Every word I spoke seemed to me dripping with irony. And it got worse.

  “You base who you are on your immediate lineage, and so if there are gaps in that, and mysteries in that, there are mysteries in you.”

  I switched the focus back on the direction the show was going to take, the investigation of Thomas Darling. “And my mum’s dad is the family mystery. He’s the black hole.

  “There’s a picture of him on my hallway wall and each time I go past him, it’s a big zero. I know nothing.”

  It was true. Tommy Darling to me was just a face, a handsome face in an open-necked shirt with a strip of military honors just above his chest, a little black moustache. His expression was blank. I didn’t yet know that this picture was taken only a few months before he died.

  “He didn’t come back after the war, and he never came home,” I went on. “He died in a shooting accident. But at my granny’s funeral someone sort of intimated to me that it wasn’t an accident.”

  This, I think, had been the inadvertent catalyst to my taking on this whole odyssey and agreeing to do this show. At Granny’s funeral, just five years prior, my main preoccupation had been to make sure my mum was doing okay. My other preoccupation, sadly, had been to keep away from my father’s partner who, earlier, in an act that redefined inappropriateness, had blurted out that she needed to get my autograph for her granddaughter as she shook my hand in the crematorium receiving line mere minutes after we had sent my granny’s coffin into the flames. I was literally struck dumb. Next to me I actually could feel the ire exuding from my brother’s body and quickly placed a hand on his forearm to calm him. I hoped that my mother, just a couple of feet away, had not heard.

  In a way, perhaps, the woman did me a favor. Because she had so appalled me, I was jolted out of the agitation I had been feeling as my father appeared, next in the line of people passing by.

  “Hello,” I nodded curtly and looked past him to the next mourner in line.

  Later, as we raised a glass to Granny at a hotel in Inverness, I caught the woman’s eye across the room and could see she had not been shamed but fully intended to pursue her goal. She made to approach me. I gave her a look that I hoped made clear my utter lack of willingness. It was the visual equivalent of “Back off, bitch!” Hell no, I was not to be trifled with, not at my granny’s funeral, and not by this woman.

  I talked to as many of Granny’s old friends as possible. In one corner were a few older men, all of whom had known her for decades. We got chatting about old times. They wondered if I remembered Sam, her second husband. I said I didn’t, though I loved the fact that she used to come and visit us when I was a little boy on the back of his motorbike. It was one of those memories that I had no true visual of, but a very vibrant manufactured one in my mind. It was so Granny.

  “Did you know Tommy Darling?” I asked one of the men.

  “Oh aye,” he replied. “I knew him fine.”

  “He never came back after the war, did he?” I said.

  The man really looked at me. Something cleared behind his rheumy eyes.

  “No,” he said enigmatically.

  “And he died in a shooting accident?” I fished.

  “Well, they called it an accident,” came the reply.

  “You don’t think it was?” I tried not to sound too shocked.

  Suddenly a hand was on my shoulder and a departing cousin took my attention. It wasn’t till much later that night that I recalled the man’s remark at all.

  Back in Covent Garden we were wrapping up the interview.

  “I sometimes feel that other parts of my life have been like an episode of Dallas, so I don’t know why this shouldn’t be too,” I joked for the camera, but it was also true.

  Some of the details of my family’s dystopian past were much more in step with the plotlines of a histrionic television show than an everyday tale of country folk. For example, the husband of the woman who was chasing me around my grandmother’s wake for an autograph had taken his own life when she told him she was leaving him for my father. Oh yes. And his son was in my father’s employ at the time. And the doctor who was called to identify the body and sign the death certificate became, a few years later, my brother-in-law, when he married my ex-wife’s sister. Thank you, cut to commercial break.

  “I’m forty-five, you know, time’s marching on. I just think you do become more curious about the past and . . . you want to know.” God! Yes you do, Alan! Yes you do!

  Elizabeth, the director, then steered me towards the first port of call in my quest. The next day I would be in Mary Darling’s front room, asking my mother questions about who her father was.

  I was told that we were leaving immediately for the train station. I thought we were staying that evening in London, but the early finish was in fact to facilitate travel. At 5 P.M. that afternoon I would not be sitting comfortably in the privacy of my own flat dialing my father’s number, but on a train zooming north through the English countryside towards Scotland.

  THEN
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  Train stations will forever mean Granny for me. When she came to visit us, my mum and I would go to Arbroath to collect her from the train station. I can still feel the excitement building in my tummy as we waited for her to appear amid the throngs. Finally I’d spot her, and as soon as she caught my eye her little face would burst into a grin, her suitcases would drop to her sides, and her arms would fling open to greet me as I sped down the platform towards her like a bolt of lightning.

  I loved my granny. I think she was the first person to let me know it was okay to be different. The crafts I made at school that my father scoffed at and I was afraid to show him were not only praised by Granny but hung up on her wall. After she died my mum sent me a cross-stitch sampler I had made in primary school for her birthday.

  I laughed when I saw it, all those years later, the wrong stitches, the size of my name dwarfing hers, but Granny had greeted it as though it were the most magical work of art.

  When we went to stay with her in her little flat in Inverness she’d let Tom and me lie in bed with her, read comics, and eat sweets. Indeed, Granny not only encouraged us to bend the rules, she was usually the instigator. She was the one who’d first pulled us into the middle of the Grant Street pedestrian suspension bridge in Inverness and started jumping up and down to make the whole thing wobble, sending us into giggles and screams in equal measure. Of course after that, we did this every time we crossed.

  When I was a little older, maybe eleven or so, and staying with her on my own for a weekend, she took me to the cinema. The only movies playing were X-rated, but that did not deter my granny. Somehow or other I was smuggled into the theatre for a David Essex double feature of That’ll Be the Day and Stardust. David Essex was a huge UK pop and movie star at this time and I felt so incredibly sophisticated getting to see him in action, in an X-rated film no less!! I remember vividly a scene in which he is being pressured by his manager to write more songs for his album and he says the immortal line “I’m an artist, not a machine!” Granny and I thought this was hilarious and repeated it all weekend long, and indeed I still use it today. Talking of hilarious, that was her favorite and most-used word. Except in her Highland accent she pronounced it “hil-AH-rious,” which somehow made it even more, well, hilarious.

  As I got older I had to work every school holiday, and so my visits to see her in Inverness became fewer and far between. When Granny came to visit us, the atmosphere in the house changed. Her spirit infected everyone. My father was in better spirits and we felt safer when she was near. Even if she was there when I had to work all day, it still felt like a holiday knowing she would be at home when I returned from the forest, or as I sped down the sawmill yard for lunch. But gradually, my father’s behavior became more obvious to Granny, especially when he would disappear out every night even when she was staying. I could see the concern on her face as she glanced at her daughter when my dad popped into the living room for his “That’s me away.” I never heard Granny say a bad word about my father, but I know she was incredibly supportive of my mum leaving him. She always wished the best for everyone. I think I have inherited some of her mischief and joie de vivre, and I hope her compassion.

  The last time I saw her was just after she’d had a heart attack and wasn’t well enough to make her eldest son, Tommy’s, sixtieth birthday celebrations. So we all gathered at her little assisted-living house before the party. She was very frail and looked a little overwhelmed at having so many people in her home, but she was still the same old Granny.

  I had cropped blond hair at the time (maybe for a film role but maybe just because it took my fancy) and it was the cause of much scoffing by some family members.

  “What’s this, another weird haircut, Alan?” said one.

  “Well, I like it!” Granny’s frail little voice piped up from deep in the chair she was sunk into.

  “And if I was young again I’d have my hair a different color every week. I’d be a freak like Alan too!”

  The day after her funeral, I had a sudden desire to go to the Grant Street suspension bridge and say my own good-bye to her. Funerals sometimes are to be endured, and as I’ve said, my main concern that day was looking after Mum. As Grant and I walked across, my heart sank. I was jumping up and down but it didn’t feel nearly as bouncy and magical as it had all those years ago. But when we got to the middle it was completely as scary and fun as I’d remembered and we both leapt up and down like five-year-olds.

  “Good-bye, Granny!” I shouted out to the sky. “I love you! Thank you!”

  Grant was taking pictures and laughing with me. We stopped bouncing and had a hug. I felt really close to Granny in that moment and was so happy Grant was there to experience it. They had never met but I knew they would have loved each other. Still giddy we began to race back to the car like schoolboys in the playground. As Grant tried to pass me I put out my arm to stop him and suddenly his camera flew out of his hand, up, up into the sky. It banged against one suspension wire with a huge metallic clang, then another, before plunging into the freezing waters of the River Ness below.

  We both stopped in our tracks, utterly shocked.

  “That was weird,” said Grant.

  “That was Granny,” I replied, quite certain.

  I’m not religious in the slightest, but I do truly believe that people’s energies can be present or invoked after they’re gone. It was as if she wanted to be part of the fun on that bridge too. And losing the camera was her way of telling us to use our imaginations more, enjoy our memories but live in the moment. At least, that’s what I have chosen to think. And whatever happened, I certainly had the moment of connection I’d craved with Granny.

  MONDAY 24TH MAY 2010, LATE AFTERNOON

  Outside the window, England slid by in a bucolic blur. I took deep breaths. I cleared my throat, laid out my pad and pen. This wasn’t going to be easy. I needed to be strong. I had nothing to be ashamed of. I remembered the wise words of an American president that so connected with me I had them written in neon on the kitchen wall of my London flat: The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. I knew an awful lot about fear. I waited till five o’clock and pressed “call.” He answered after a few rings. “Hullo?” His voice. Fainter than I remembered, but with the same Highland upward inflection as always.

  “Hi, it’s Alan.”

  “Uh-huh. How are you doing?” he asked.

  “Well, obviously, I’m not doing so great.”

  Don’t. Don’t get riled.

  “I have a lot of questions I’d like to ask you, and so I’d just like to get started.”

  I was being blunt on purpose, keeping him at bay, not allowing him to derail or entangle me.

  “All right. I’ve had that reporter fellow down here again,” he said, doing exactly that.

  “Okay, I’ll talk about that later. But do you think we could stick to the issue of me not being your son, for now?”

  Don’t mess with me, old man.

  “Aye aye. I know you must have a lot of questions.”

  I looked down at my notes. I had made a list, with careful spaces for me to scribble down his answers. I needed to remember every second of this conversation.

  “Are you certain? Are you absolutely certain?” I tried to sound flat and scientific.

  “I’d never have brought it up if I wasn’t certain, Alan,” said my father. “I wrote you a letter about it, years ago. It’s in my will. But when I heard you were doing this TV program I didn’t want you to find out that way, so that’s why I called Tom.”

  The next question was difficult to ask. I was born on January 27, 1965, and I needed the math to make sense. I needed it all to make sense, and so I said it.

  “So you’re certain you didn’t have sex with Mum at any time during the months of April or May of 1964?”

  “No, Alan, no. Sex had been sporadic with your mother for some time before that.” Okay, that was definitely more than I wanted to know. A simple “no” would have sufficed, but I chose t
o be encouraged by his openness instead.

  “It’s why we had to move away from Dunkeld, Alan,” my father proffered.

  “Why?”

  “The shame,” he said. There it was. I knew it would rear its ugly head before too long.

  “The shame of Mum having sex with someone else?” I asked, wondering if, like me, he’d imagined how this conversation would pan out, and if he thought we’d go this deep so soon.

  “The shame of people knowing,” he sidestepped slightly.

  “I was compromised in my work because I had dealings with him.”

  That made sense. We moved away from Dunkeld to the west coast of Scotland, near Fort William, when I was just under a year old, and stayed there till I was four, when we moved to Panmure Estate. And I remembered enough from growing up to understand how a small rural community like Dunkeld could be unbearable when everyone knew your dirty laundry.

  This also made some sense of my father so blatantly flaunting his mistresses as we were growing up. Did he want my mother to feel that same pain, that shame, that slight on his manhood that he’d carried all through the first year of my life, pain that hurt so badly he moved his young family across a country to forge a new life away from it?

  “Does my real father know?” I moved on.

  “Oh yes, he knows. He must know. You see, he and his wife had a child, I think a son, shortly after you were born—”

  “Wait, what?” I hadn’t really thought through the new siblings issue. I mean, I suppose I presumed my real father had other children, but a half brother of my own age was something else.

  “His wife was pregnant at the same time as Mum was?” I asked.

  “Yes, they had a couple of other kids too, but she divorced him. And then, well . . .” His voice trailed off to nothing.