‘You must visit Ana,’ Esma tells me. ‘Women in the Balkans can live a long time if men don’t kill them in wars.’ She adopts a brisker note. ‘I think she makes you sad when she asks about your family. How you get on with letter to your son, your David?’
‘How have I been getting on?’ I repeat. ‘I’ve been drafting it.’
She looks at me.
‘I’ve made a good start.’ One paragraph.
Naida gets up. She brings my writing pad and envelopes from my desk and places them in front of me on the kitchen table. ‘We take him out for a walk,’ she nods towards the toddler crouching down outside to examine my terracotta pots. ‘When we come back, we post letter.’
‘We post the letter,’ I correct her. She gives me the smile that is always so sudden and sweet it makes my heart ache.
‘You have one hour.’ Esma’s tone reminds me of the one used by Ana long ago, when she thought I needed shaking up.
It’s obviously the approach I need. I write.
I have never stopped thinking about you, David. For years – decades – I wanted to write to you, but I thought having a mother in a mental institute would be an impossible burden for you, that it would be better for me to keep in the background. I thought that if you wished to see me, to get to know me, you would come to me. I realise now that I was wrong, a coward, why should you seek out the parent who hadn’t bothered to make any contact with you? My only excuse is that the years of living in institutions has perhaps robbed me of the confidence to behave as a normal mother would. Please forgive me.
There is so much to tell you, but it’s not for a letter. If you could find it in you to meet me, I would love to see you.
Your loving mother
Maud
As I write the address in Durham on the envelope, I wonder what David does up there. I don’t know the north of England well. In 1943 a train carried me to the Highlands for training, but it travelled up the other side of the Pennines to cross the Scottish border at Carlisle.
When Esma and Naida knock on my door, I show them the stamped and addressed letter. ‘We post for you,’ Esma says, taking it, a glint in her eye.
Just in case I change my mind.
When they’ve gone I go outside to smoke. A snail is leaving a trail on the patio tiles, a series of curls that look like question marks, preceded by a long and almost perfectly straight line. I should pick it up and throw it over the fence, but I can’t bring myself to do this, convinced the snail is writing out my fate for me.
I wait. Weeks pass and it’s autumn again, days before my son’s birthday, before the anniversary of my finding the telegram in Robert’s desk drawer and the last encounter that ended with him lying bloodied on the floor. I write to Ana, not saying much but telling her how thrilled I am to hear from her. I would love to visit you, I write. I will come soon.
Summer isn’t relinquishing its hold without a struggle. I still sit out in my sheltered little garden some lunchtimes. When I go to visit Esma and Naida in the flat in Vauxhall that their two families share, Esma serves me coffee on the balcony. Sometimes only one of them is there, looking after the children while the other works. ‘Naida’s working now, but she goes to Liverpool this weekend,’ Esma tells me. ‘Visiting a cousin of ours.’
I have struggled to grasp their family relationships. Esma tells me of the young woman from a village a few kilometres away from theirs who has apparently found her way to the Mersey.
‘A long trip for Naida,’ I say.
‘Not too bad. Goran will drive her.’
Goran is another cousin of theirs, a young man who has lived in London for three years now.
‘M1 a lot of the way. Fast road, if you leave very early. You have been on M1, Maud?’
‘No.’ But I remember watching a television documentary when it opened. The closing of railway stations and the opening of all these fast highways passed me by. When transferring me from one institution to another, the social worker driving me was supposed to take us on a motorway. I don’t know the number, but it was somewhere to the south of London. I was excited, but the motorway was closed owing to a lorry having shed its load, a not-uncommon occurrence, the social worker told me.
I held a driving licence in my youth. Perhaps it can be renewed if I take some lessons. There’s a tunnel under the Channel now: I could drive to Paris. The thought makes me smile. I answer Esma’s unspoken question by telling her I would like to travel before I am any older.
‘You’re only seventy-one. The world is your mussel,’ she tells me in English. I laugh for the first time in days. My world is a muscle I can strengthen.
‘Naida seemed to go on her trip on a whim,’ I say. ‘She didn’t mention this cousin before.’ I explain what a whim is.
‘Oh, my sister, that’s how she is.’ Esma makes a face that combines irritation, amusement and something else: a deep knowledge of her sibling, born of growing up and sticking together as adults.
It strikes me as I leave the flat that nobody has ever really known me very well for long. My parents did until I left for my war work. Those most vital, most important years of my life were lost to them, so they didn’t really know me again when I returned. Naomi had an insight into me – not always a flattering one – born of a short but intense spell together in Cairo. And Ana, following a similarly brief period in Yugoslavia.
Robert knew me best of all, looked deep into me, found the person who’d respond to a call to arms such as the one he offered me. But then he had me thrown into an asylum, took my child away and divorced me.
Yet he knew me.
And now nobody exists who can see the whole of my life as a single line. Even if I find him, my son will know so little about me. But I need to try to see him. Until he appears, my world lacks its sun, my son.
The post has arrived when I return home. I pick it up, heart pounding. There is no letter from David.
I’m thinking of making a last cup of tea the following Sunday. In my kitchenette I pick up a cloth to dry a mug that doesn’t need drying because it’s sat on the draining board for a whole day. I stare at the linen fabric. I’m wearing my reading glasses and can see the tiny gaps in the weave, holes that are vast enough to swallow me up because I am nothing, nobody, someone whom my own child does not wish to acknowledge.
I give myself a pep talk: very self-indulgent: staring at an inanimate object and coming over all metaphysical. What would Ana say? It isn’t so much what she’d say as how she’d look: those fierce eyes. I put the cloth back on the hook.
There’s a knock on my door. Peering through the spyhole I see Naida. I open up. ‘What’s wrong? Is there news from Bosnia?’ Fear rushes in to replace my lethargy. ‘Is one of the children ill?’
‘Nothing bad.’ She takes my hand. ‘May I come in, Maud?’
She sits me at the table.
‘He’s outside in the car.’
I stare at her.
‘Your David.’
I stand up, not understanding.
‘Goran drive me to Durham. Not Liverpool. We lied. Sorry.’
‘Drove me.’ Even now, I have to be pedantic.
‘He take me to the address of your son. I knock on door and ask him why he doesn’t answer your letter.’
My lips are moving, asking silent questions.
‘David was in hospital. Just back.’
‘He’s sick?’ I’ve left it too late. I will lose my child, too.
She nods, pointing at her head. ‘Brain problem.’
I freeze. Does he have some kind of mental illness? Is there a hereditary disorder I have passed on, despite the doctors’ assurances?
‘Is better now. I bring him in?’
‘What?’
‘I told you, he in the car.’
‘David?’
‘Who do you think, John Major?’
‘No. I can’t—’ I sit down again, my stomach in my mouth. I’m not even wearing the outfit I bought for this meeting. My scarred wrist is expo
sed in the three-quarter-sleeved jumper I’m wearing. ‘I mean, yes, bring him in.’
‘It’s been a long journey. He is a man. He has been ill, not allowed to drive down here in his own car. He needs to eat and drink.’ I almost smile at her insistence that a male could not be expected to last a car journey without sustenance. She waves me down. ‘Here.’ She pushes my handbag over to me. ‘Brush your hair and put on lipstick. Where’s that scarf you bought?’ Her quick glance finds it folded on the table by the front door. In two or three folds it is tied around my neck. ‘That’s better. Like the Queen but more fashionable. He will like.’
Meekly I tidy myself up and sit, clutching the base of my chair as though the wood will anchor me to the world. A car door opens and closes. They walk inside.
‘I wait in car with Goran,’ Naida says.
‘Hello.’ The man has a deep voice, a little like his father’s perhaps, with that near-purr in it. He is a bit taller than Robert. I think his face has something of my own father’s in it. I blink repeatedly, like a fast-action camera, trying to fill my mind with his image. My hands lift, I want to touch him, but I don’t know how. I think of my mother, how she would greet me after a long school term, and go to him, pulling him into a hug. He is tight in my arms to start with, and then he softens. I want to rest my head on his chest, which is broad like his father’s was. Don’t overdo it.
I release him and gesture towards a chair. ‘Would you like something to eat and drink?’
‘It seems a bit mundane,’ he admits, ‘on first meeting you, but I would give anything for a coffee.’
I try to read his tone. Wary at the moment, I think. Can you blame him, dragged hundreds of miles south by two Bosnians to meet a mother he doesn’t know? I remember Goran and Naida, still in the car outside, and go out to apologise and tell them to go home; David can sleep on my sofa tonight or in a local hotel if that is too much, too soon. Naida gives me a wink and instructs Goran to drive her home.
‘I hadn’t a chance to reply to your letter,’ David says when I return. ‘I was admitted. Bit of a nuisance.’
‘What is . . . ?’ It seems impertinent to ask my own child what the problem was.
‘I sometimes have seizures.’
Relief and then anxiety flood me.
‘I’ve had them all my life, but the medication sometimes needs tweaking.’
‘All your life?’
‘Yes.’
I think of David’s birth, not that I can remember any of it. But could a baby born so suddenly, with an unconscious mother who couldn’t assist in any way, suffer some kind of injury that might cause seizures? Perhaps they used forceps on him, damaged his head, while I was unable to protect him. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Oh, most of the time I’m fine. Doesn’t stop me doing anything.’
I go into the open-plan kitchen to prepare the food and drink, and hear the chair creak behind me. He’s going towards the display cabinet. ‘Those minerals are from the mine where your grandfather was engineering director.’ How can it be that I am talking so normally? Inside I am like a cold jelly, shaking and sliding.
‘Interesting. It’s my line, too. I’m a geologist by training.’
So he’s not just Robert’s son: something from my side has been inherited, too.
‘Tell me about yourself. Do you have . . . ?’ The words can’t pass my lips. I’m being greedy, asking for too much.
‘A family? Yes. Paula, my wife. Two children, Sophie and Michael. Both at university now.’
Sophie and Michael. And Paula, my daughter-in-law. I repeat the names silently to myself.
‘Your father, Robert, what did he say about me?’ My shoulders stiffen as I ask the question.
‘Not much. Dad told me you were very ill, in hospital, when I was old enough to ask about you.’
How often did you ask? I want to know.
‘Then later, at about the time I was starting school, he said you were dead.’ The words have a flatness to them. I try to imagine what it must be like to believe someone dead and decades later receive a letter from them.
‘Did you know what was wrong with me?’
‘When I was old enough to ask questions he said it was a serious mental illness. It sounded like some kind of psychosis.’
‘It wasn’t.’ I sound so defensive. ‘I mean . . . the psychiatrists tell me it was probably a series of traumas or something triggered by childbirth.’
His eyes widen. ‘After she had Sophie, Paula had something the doctors called postnatal depression. I’d never heard of it before. She was lucky, they treated her quickly and she didn’t suffer again the second time round.’
‘Did she find it hard to remember things?’
He nods. ‘Usually it was things that didn’t matter, but she panicked that she’d forget she had a baby.’
The silence between us feels easier. ‘It must have been a huge shock to find out I was alive. I’m amazed you agreed to leave your house with Naida and Goran at all.’
‘Paula is convinced that I’m part of a Balkan kidnap plan aimed at subverting the peace process in Bosnia.’
I hear my own laugh. The cold, sliding feeling starts to disappear. ‘People from that part of the world can have a certain persuasiveness to them.’ I think of Ana persuading me that her son Miko was not going to harm me or my operation. Then I think of the persuasiveness of my ex-husband, how well he could spin a line. Deceiving his own son? Not a problem. But then perhaps Robert hadn’t intended to be cruel.
‘Robert might have thought that it was kinder to let you think I wasn’t . . . around.’ I’m going to try hard to be reasonable. The mad woman will be rational.
‘Who knows what my father thought.’
I turn and squint at him, to see what his expression is.
‘I tried to find out about you,’ David says. ‘About five years ago now, I made quite an effort. Of course, I didn’t realise you were still alive or I’d have searched the telephone directories.’
He reads the unasked question in my face. ‘I tracked you to Stoke Park in Kent. I wrote to the regional health board, but it seems there was a fire and all the patient records were destroyed. So I decided to go back to your time at Woodlands and see if your psychiatrist there knew anything more about you.’
For a second I see a boy’s vulnerability in my middle-aged son’s features. I tell him how I’d relocated from Stoke Park to The Mandalay in Sussex and then on to here.
‘I did find your first psychiatrist, though,’ he says. ‘I wrote to her.’
‘Dr Rosenstein?’ Dr Rosenstein of the slender, expressive fingers with the photograph of her little girl in her office.
‘She was very old, dying in fact, so she couldn’t write back to me. But she asked her daughter to reply, saying she remembered treating you. She said she was sorry and shocked to hear you’d died young. She also said she had no doubt about the truth of what you told her. Of course, I didn’t understand what she meant by that then. She said something about a senior civil servant telling her that she was not to treat you or talk to you again.’
A senior civil servant. Could it have been another of Robert’s cronies? I’ll never really know for sure. I doubt there are any surviving records I could use to prove it. Robert probably never put down on paper how he researched exactly who was at Woodlands with me. All the same, I’m still certain he sent that mysterious visitor to threaten Jim and force him to help with the plan to keep me locked up. Robert knew that the sight of the flames that burned when the Lysander was blown up had haunted me, and he was clever enough to work out how he could use an assault on the dovecot to arouse that trauma.
I never stood a chance against him.
‘What did my father really do in the war?’ David looks directly at me with Robert’s hooded eyes. ‘Because this is what it was all about, isn’t it? Covering something up? Before he died, when he was starting to lose his mind a bit, James Holdern let something slip.’
Not for the first tim
e.
‘Robert was a very effective operator in the Balkans, opposing the Germans,’ I tell him. ‘He aided the Partisans, but felt anxious about growing Communist influence in that part of the world as the war ended. He started helping the Partisans’ rivals in an attempt to keep Tito from heading north into Slovenia and then possibly into parts of southern Austria. He prevented the exfiltration of a German intelligence officer who would have exposed him.’ Years of mulling it over have given me the ability to précis Robert’s activities fairly neatly.
‘I’m imagining he went against express orders to offer no assistance to the anti-Partisans, the Chetniks?’
I nod. ‘If anyone found out, he would have been in trouble.’ A traitor. I don’t use that word.
‘Would you have . . . ?’ David shifts in the chair.
I think about it. ‘I’m not sure. I did care for him. But bad things had happened to other people I was fond of.’ I tell him briefly about Naomi and what had almost happened to Ana. ‘Even then, who knows what I would have done. I was about to give birth.’
There’s a silence while I consider all this as I serve coffee, bread, cheese and fruit. I remember that I have a bottle of slivovitz given to me by the sisters. I pour us small shots. ‘To us.’
‘To us.’ We drink and help ourselves to bread and cheese.
‘So Dad had you committed. No doubt with James Holdern’s help. That man could pull a lot of strings.’
‘Was he unkind to you?’ My fingers tighten on the cheese knife.
‘James? No. He treated me like a rather distant nephew, but he was kind enough and had my seizures treated by a specialist.’ He butters a slice of bread. ‘So you confided in your psychiatrist?’
‘Not all of it. Not exact locations and names. I’d signed the Official Secrets Act. But enough to make Robert and whoever else he was working with worried.’
‘But he managed to keep you locked away?’
‘I think he leaned on someone I was close to inside Woodlands to push me into a kind of nervous breakdown.’ I explain my theory about Jim.
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