Not My Father's Son

by Alan Cumming

  The date of the broadcast of my episode of Who Do You Think You Are? approached. Because of filming in New York I wasn’t going to be able to watch it on the BBC with my mum as I’d hoped, but we were both sent a DVD. It lay in my bag for days before I had the courage to watch it. It felt like I was taking a chance on opening up a wound that had only just healed. And it certainly didn’t pull any punches. There I was receiving the news that my grandparents had separated, that Tommy Darling’s medical records had been removed due to the psychological damage he’d suffered, and eventually of course the gory and shocking details of the Russian roulette.

  It was so strange to feel sorry for myself. The few months since, combined with the change in my physical appearance (my body hair had grown back in—I no longer resembled the pale, hairless man-child on the screen), had ensured that there was a healthy distance between the me then and the me now, so I could empathize with as well as relive the experience.

  Also there was the experience of seeing myself completely off guard. Even in a show like this, where one is supposedly ignoring the cameras and the viewer is a fly on the wall, there is always of course some awareness of being filmed. Several times on my episode, all that was stripped away as I received information that completely floored me. I saw myself as I never truly have seen myself on-screen before: completely unadulterated, vulnerable, and authentic. It was fascinating but not very pleasant.

  I could tell Mum was very anxious about the show being broadcast. It’s easy to forget how exposing being on television can feel at the best of times to people who aren’t used to it, but having very personal details of your parents revealed publicly was something she had no experience of whatsoever.

  In the end Mary Darling decided she wanted to watch the show alone, and spent the rest of the evening answering her phone, which was ringing off the hook with people from all parts of her life wanting to speak to her about what they’d just witnessed.

  For the next few months, people contacted her constantly about Tommy Darling’s story. Some she knew; others were strangers who had known him or known my granny. I think it was good for her. Much in the same way that I felt I had to keep telling my dual family narrative, she was able to talk it out in this way and was also fascinated to find out more details about the father she never knew. She has since met several relations from her father’s family, and continues to explore both sides of our family tree, armed with all the initial research that was done for the show before they realized my grandfather’s story was the one to focus on. I delivered to her two large binders bursting with documents, and she has had a field day with them.

  I began to look into PTSD organizations with a view to arranging a charity screening of the program in honor of my grandfather. I discovered one called Give an Hour that I decided to contact. The premise of this group was that mental health professionals would give free hourly increments of mental health services to returning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan, and then in turn the people who received this free care would give an hour of their time to some form of community service.

  I liked the way it was so simple and straight to the heart of the problem, and also that the veterans who were receiving the care were also able to give something back in return.

  I hoped that in some small way I would be able to help some people in need, ensuring that they were given the professional psychological care that was never available to my granddad. But that wasn’t the only reason. I didn’t quite know it at the time, but now I understand that this event was a gesture to my father too. The more I have talked about him and what happened in my past, with both friends and mental health professionals, the more I have come to believe that he too suffered from some undiagnosed mental condition. It’s not just his violence, his volatility and mood swings, it’s his complete lack of empathy, his seemingly utter inability to consider the feelings of anyone else. And of course my dealings with him over the course of that summer only underscore this. I was not talking to a sane man in those phone calls. There was a disconnect and an egotism that was at times breathtaking: His insistence that I must have known I was not his son all along. His question “Did you not notice we never bonded?” And worst of all, the utter absence of an apology or any hint that he understood what he had put me through when I eventually was the one to break the truth to him. All these things regularly float through my mind and convince me of his madness.

  I am not a psychologist (though I’ve spent a lot of time in their company!) and although I have speculated about what exactly my father’s condition or conditions might have been, I am weary of it all, weary of the wondering. This much I know: the benefit screening I held at the Tribeca Grand Hotel on Sunday 7th November 2010 was a gesture to both Tommy Darling and Alex Cumming.

  “This past summer has been really difficult for me, and so tonight is in some way a form of closure,” I’d said in my speech before the program was screened.

  I had no idea just how much closure.

  The next day I woke up to the news that my father had died that night.

  THURSDAY 17TH FEBRUARY 2011

  Once a year I go to Boston to record the introductions for Masterpiece Mystery, just to annoy Patti Smith. It’s a fun annual jaunt. My assistant and my friend Michael, the groomer, had come up with me on the train from New York the afternoon before. That evening we had dinner with my old chum John Tiffany, who was doing a sabbatical at Harvard and so living in Boston at the time. John had directed me in The Bacchae for the National Theatre of Scotland. Soon we would begin work on our next project together, Macbeth.

  After much mirth and a chilly walk back to the hotel in the snow, we were up bright and early the next day and at the WGBH studios to start shooting. I was sitting in the makeup chair checking my e-mails when I saw one from my brother.

  Hi Alan. Hope all is well.

  See the attached which you need to respond to.

  That’s odd, I thought. Tom wasn’t usually so enigmatic. But then I opened up the attachment and I saw why. Our father had once more, even from beyond the grave, entered our lives.

  It was a letter to Tom from our father’s solicitor.

  My heart was thumping as I read it. The title in bold was “Your Late Father’s Estate.”

  The man introduced himself as the person who had been dealing with the winding up of the estate and said he was writing with regard to our “potential Legal Rights claim.”

  I made as if to speak, but the whirr of Michael’s hair dryer filled my ears, and anyway, I didn’t quite know what to say. I had no idea what this could possibly mean. On the one hand I felt like I was suddenly a living manifestation of one of the plots of the Mystery shows I was about to introduce, and on the other I just couldn’t believe that my father was still able to exert such an influence. He was the embodiment of those buried mines left long after a conflict had ended that occasionally erupt, and the pain of the past as well as the carnage of the present combine in a perfect storm.

  As you know, your father left a Will in which neither yourself or your brother Alan was bequeathed any items.

  The idea that my father would have left anything to us had never crossed my mind, though I had wondered if I would ever receive that letter he had spoken of, the one that originally would have been the harbinger of my true lineage. In the intervening months I had often thought how lucky I had been to have had the chance to talk to him and get to the bottom of all this whilst he was still alive, rather than be presented with a letter after his death. The idea that I would never have had the chance to question him, challenge him, and of course be able to tell him he was wrong was completely inconceivable to me now.

  Under the terms of Scots Law you are entitled to a share of your late father’s estate irrespective of his Will. This share is called Legal Rights.

  What?! Irrespective of his will?! Scotland has a law that overrules a father’s will?

  Legal Rights are calculated by taking the net moveable estate (the moveable estate exclude
s any property such as houses or flats) and dividing it into two. One half share is made over under the terms of the Will and the second half forms what is known as the legitim or bairns’ part.

  It was all starting to come clear. “Bairns” is a Scottish word for children. Basically my country, at some point in its history, saw fit to enact a law to stop errant fathers from not providing for their offspring after their own death.

  It is this share that is then divided between the number of children. In your father’s case it would be divided between you and your brother Alan.

  Over the next few days my brother and I were thrown into yet another tailspin of my father’s doing. We swung between thinking we should take the money—it was ours, after all, legally—and then thinking that by taking it we would be in some way accepting blood money.

  We truly felt that passionately and extremely about it. It wasn’t about the money, though obviously that was a nice surprise; it was more the feeling of being beholden to someone we did not respect, who had made it clear he did not respect or love us.

  Both of us were so riled that we were so riled, and we knew our father would have loved to think of us spending so much time agonizing over an edict of his.

  Eventually I spoke to the solicitor.

  “We haven’t decided exactly what to do yet, but I wanted to ask you a couple of questions to clear a few things up,” I began.

  “Fire away!” he replied.

  “Did my father know that this would be the outcome of his will? I mean would he have been told about this?” I asked.

  “Absolutely,” the lawyer said unequivocally. “He would have been told about the Legal Rights issue when he made his will.”

  “And so, even though he knew that we were entitled to half his financial estate, he still made a decision to not name us?” I was incredulous, and couldn’t bear to think where this conversation was going.

  “That is correct,” the lawyer said.

  “So he decided to actively keep us out of his written will in order that we would have to make the decision to take the money that was legally due us?” I responded.

  “That would appear to be the case,” came the reply.

  I then called my father a name that I rarely use and do not approve of but in this case was the only appropriate moniker for such a loaded and manipulative and cowardly gesture.

  So basically my dad wanted my brother and me to be having the dilemma we were having right now. It was one last blow to our hearts, one last fuck with our heads.

  I could see my father’s face as he was told the ramifications of making his will as he did. I saw him thinking of Tom and me being made to question and struggle and suffer as we interpreted his actions, and enjoying the prospect of us doing so.

  That was it for me. After a short chat with Tom I called back the solicitor and told him we were taking the money. I was calling the old bastard’s bluff.

  I wanted him to be the provider, finally, of something positive in our lives. I wanted to use the cash to do something as a family that would be happy and meaningful and positive, and I knew exactly what that would be.

  TWO YEARS LATER

  Me, Grant, Tom and his wife, Sonja, and Mary Darling made what I suppose can only be called a pilgrimage to Malaysia, and retraced both my and Tommy Darling’s steps.

  We flew from London, and even after a seven-hour layover in Abu Dhabi we arrived not exhausted, but refreshed and lean, as we had slept the sleep of champions in our first-class pods and had massages in the lounges of both our ports of call. I could see, watching Mary Darling, where I got my lounge addiction from.

  We had a driver, Khairy, who had been on the Who Do You Think You Are? shoot, and were helped by Alan D’Cruz, who had been the show’s fixer, as it is called in filmy circles.

  The first night we met up with Alan for drinks at the Coliseum Café, and I could see the gleam in my mother’s eyes as she sat having a drink and imagining she was in a bar where her father had once been.

  The next day we went to the Malaysian archives and were shown to a private room by the lovely Gowri. We pored over the correspondence detailing Tommy Darling’s death and the ensuing stream of letters back and forth to Granny. Tom, Mum, and I all marveled at the idea of seeing Granny’s handwriting in a little room of an archive on the other side of the world. We found out more about Tommy Darling’s life there, and again it was wonderful to see my mum so engaged with her father’s legacy.

  The next day we went down south towards Cha’ah and I knew to a part of the trip that might be very painful for my mother. I needn’t have worried.

  As we turned the corner into the street where Datuk Rahman and Raji Ali lived, I was shocked to see it so busy. Car after car was parked all around the house, and I saw a marquee and crowds of people all waving at us. I realized that these two little old men had got out the bunting, quite literally, for the arrival of the daughter of Tuan Darling.

  The whole town seemed to have stopped. All the elders of the village were gathered for a feast at the brothers’ home, and Mary Darling was the guest of honor. If she had not understood the magnetism and the legacy of her father, she must now, surrounded by people who, for the most part, had never known him but who had felt his influence and his charisma in the very fabric of their lives.

  After lunch we went to the town square, walked along Darling Walk, and sat in Darling Recreational Park. The brothers told Mary Darling the details they had told me of that morning in 1951. I could see her try to maintain her composure. As fascinating and revelatory as all this was, and as kind and beautiful as these men were, she was still the little girl finally understanding where her father had been. At one point they wanted to take a picture of her at the very spot where he had shot himself. I could see her steel herself for it, not wishing to appear rude, but I could also instantly tell the toll it was taking just imagining the horror.

  “Are you okay, Mum?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she gulped, unconvincingly.

  “You don’t have to take the picture if you don’t want to.”

  She signaled to me she didn’t, and I subtly but firmly broke the moment.

  At a market I admonished my mum for constantly running off and then made her promise to tell us if she was going to go to a stall in another direction.

  “I’m worried I’m going to lose you, Mum,” I had said, and let it hang in the air for a moment before she nodded and we both knew that something had altered forever. It was as though Tommy Darling hung over us, and we all were made aware of the frailty of life, the importance of family, and the power of love.

  Eventually we drove to Singapore, and it was there, after we all visited his grave, that I heard my mother say something that made my heart fly. It made me take heart to hear that I had done a good job in arranging this trip, but more importantly, that doing this TV show, in fact, being famous, was all worth it.

  I had walked away from the grave and gone to stand under the nearby tree to take a video of everyone else leaving. I was shooting Grant and Mary Darling as they walked towards me, and just before they left my frame I heard my mother say,

  “Well, they say dreams do come true. . . .”

  When we arrived back in New York, Grant made an observation.

  “You know the best thing about this whole trip?” he asked.

  “What?” I replied.

  “Your father wasn’t mentioned once!”

  And it was true. We none of us ever mentioned him at all. Not through some desire to expunge him from this experience, not because we felt awkward that he was inadvertently paying for this amazing odyssey. No, none of that. We just didn’t think of him. He wasn’t that important to us. He no longer had any power over us.

  Part Four

  POSTSCRIPT

  That was supposed to be the end, you know.

  Under that tree, beneath a cloudless Singaporean sky, with Mary Darling walking past me saying her dream had come true, with the man I love accompanying her, a
nd my amazing brother and sister-in-law following them. That was supposed to be the end of this book.

  Then, about eight months later, just after Christmas 2012, Jack, my mum’s companion for twenty-five years, died after a long illness. Grant and I flew to Scotland for the funeral.

  The night before the funeral we all stayed over at Mary Darling’s—me, Grant, and Tom. At dinner I said that on our way back from Forfar, where Jack’s funeral was, I’d like to go to Panmure Estate, have a drive around, and show Grant where I’d grown up.

  I knew that over the years the estate had ceased to operate as I had known it. The farms and the plantations were divided up, the sawmill closed down, and the various workers’ houses were sold off to whoever wanted them.

  We entered from the east gates, late afternoon sun throwing long shadows of the leafless trees across our faces like a strobe machine.

  It was so beautiful. I realized I had grown up in spectacular beauty but I hadn’t noticed. I suppose my mind was elsewhere.

  We drove the route that Tom and I had walked on that last visit with our father nineteen years before.

  We stopped at the bridge and I hopped out of the car and ran the path along the top of the cliff, though it is too leafy and sloping to really call a cliff. I arrived at the stone engagement seat that some earl or other had built at some point for his fiancée to sit on during their courting walks through the forest. Grant ran behind me, trying to keep up, snapping away with his camera.

  I felt so free. Isn’t that funny? I felt at home and happy. This was not an emotion I had ever expected to feel that day.

  The drives, once pristine and manicured, were now rowdy and overgrown.

  As we drove down through the sawmill yard towards the house, the walk I’d feared twice every school day, I gasped repeatedly.