This Much is True: How far will a mother go to protect her shocking secret?

by Jane Sanderson

  ‘Annie,’ he said.

  She started, surprised to be spoken to.

  ‘Make your mother a cup of tea then sit with her while she drinks it,’ he said.

  From the bedroom, Lillian’s voice came at them like a shrill wind. ‘Don’t bother,’ she shouted. ‘I’m not that desperate.’

  Harold pursed his lips and dithered for a moment and Annie watched him closely to see what he would do, which turned out to be nothing. He didn’t even risk another look at his little girl to see how she’d taken this latest insult, but merely continued on down the stairs, along the hall and out of the front door to the safety of the outside world, where his status as a man to be reckoned with was inviolable. Annie was pleased he’d gone. She was perfectly reconciled to her mother’s casual unkindness, perfectly used to solitude.

  ‘Ann-nie?’

  Her mother was calling her now in a different, wheedling tone, the one Annie recognised as repentant. She didn’t answer, but stood and crept away down the stairs, treading delicately, silent in her ankle socks. At the door she slipped on wellington boots and coat, and took herself off on the long walk to the secret spot she believed was hers alone. She had to walk for ages and the wind was cold and raw on her face, but then she was there, on the fringes of the countryside outside the city, where a shallow, narrow river left the outside world and passed through a culvert to flow in the dark, underneath Coventry. She squatted in her boots and posted sticks and leaves through the teeth of the culvert, and said goodbye to each and every one of them. She wondered where they’d end up. She wondered, too, what it could be like for a river to be sent out of sight, forced underground, away from the sunlight and the sparrows and the tender, dipping boughs of the willow tree.

  Two years later, on a dank late November morning, Lillian escaped. On the surface of it, she was merely answering a distress call from her sister Doreen, whose fourth child was due any day and whose husband Bill was refusing to pay for a mother’s help, let alone a nanny. In her heart, however, Lillian was making a run for it. Bill and Doreen lived humbly and frugally in a Peckham terrace – she had married him on an impulse before his mean streak had revealed itself – and ordinarily Lillian wouldn’t dream of staying with them. But Peckham, truthfully, was only an excuse, a staging post, for beyond Peckham, who knew what adventures lay? To Harold, though, she said she was going to poor Doreen’s aid. No, she had no idea when she would be back.

  ‘Well I’m not sure about this,’ Harold said, as though he had any bearing on the matter.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Lillian said. ‘I’m off and that’s that.’

  Harold puffed himself up to look bigger. ‘And how am I meant to manage in the meantime?’ He was thinking not so much of practicalities, because Lillian was as good as useless around the house, but how it would look – his wife absent indefinitely, and no one on his arm at the National Provincial Christmas do.

  ‘There’s Annie,’ she said. ‘And Mrs Binley can hold the fort.’

  He gave her a measuring stare and she met it with triumphant defiance. She was offering him their dullard daughter and the charlady, just as he had offered the same to her two years previously. Annie, who was witness to this exchange, wanted to ask about the pantomime. Her mother was supposed to be taking her to see Julie Andrews and Norman Wisdom in Jack and the Beanstalk at the Coventry Hippodrome. The tickets were propped behind the heavily ornate mantel clock in the dining room. It’d been planned for Annie’s birthday and it was all she wanted – not just to go, but also to go with her mother, on a winter’s night close to Christmas, when the street lamps were glowing and the air smelled of fried onions. Lillian would wear her fur jacket and her red court shoes and Annie would wear her frilled tartan pinafore and her plum wool coat. She’d been looking forward to it since August.

  ‘But Mother,’ Annie said, ‘what about my birthday?’ Lillian looked at her, astonished, not because she’d forgotten about the tickets – although she had – but because Annie’s voice had a sort of forthright urgency that was quite new.

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘Will you be home by then? It’s just, the pantomime …’

  ‘Aha!’ said Harold. ‘Indeed. Of course. The pantomime. Just so.’ He rocked on his heels, happy that Lillian’s trip to London would now be finite: confident, all of a sudden, that his wife would be home in time for the bank’s gala night. His smug certainty was maddening to Lillian. Plus, she felt cross with Annie for choosing this particular moment, of all possible moments, to finally speak up for herself.

  ‘Oh that,’ Lillian said. ‘Mrs Binley can take you.’ And then, because she didn’t want to give the game away, she added, ‘Or I will.’

  Little Annie narrowed her eyes as if she was trying to see into her mother’s heart, and Lillian felt so uncomfortable that she had to turn away and make a performance of fastening her suitcase and buttoning her coat and checking the time on her gold wristwatch.

  By the end of the second week of Lillian’s absence, Mrs Binley was ruling the roost. Annie had always quite liked their charlady, who sang while she cleaned and called Annie ‘m’duck’. She had two grown sons she called ‘useless lumps’ and a parrot in a cage, and she tried to make Annie smile by telling her the things he said, such as ‘much obliged’ when she passed him a monkey nut. But now a creeping unease settled on the child as with each consecutive day, Mrs Binley grew perkier and ever more comfortable in those parts of the house that she wouldn’t ordinarily inhabit. Her own home was two bus journeys away from the Platts and this was perfectly fine when she came Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, ten till three. But Mrs Platt had asked her to do six days a week with Sundays off, and the only sensible way forward was for Mrs Binley to live in. This she had done so eagerly, so greedily you might say, that Annie wondered if she’d planned it all along: a sort of domestic annexation, such as Hitler pulled off with Austria. Mrs Binley had been given a guest bedroom at the back of the house on the second floor, but one afternoon Annie crept in from school and found her rifling through Lillian’s wardrobe while in the air around her hung motes of fragrance from a recent puff of Je Reviens. Another time she found the bathroom occupied and, issuing from inside, the unmistakable splish-splosh sounds of Mrs Binley wallowing happily in water. But worst of all was the day Annie came home and discovered the char lady comfortably settled in the drawing room with Lillian and Harold’s wedding album open in front of her on the coffee table.

  ‘Look here,’ she said to Annie, without a speck of embarrassment, only budging up on the couch and patting the seat so that Annie had to join her. ‘Your mum picked two fat bridesmaids! Oldest trick in the book that one.’

  ‘This one’s Auntie Doreen,’ said Annie in spite of her disapproval, pointing at a plump blonde girl who looked hot in her tight pink taffeta. ‘She’s the one having the baby.’

  Mrs Binley looked a little closer. ‘Is that right? You’d never know they were related. Mind you,’ she said, glancing across at Annie, ‘you’d never know you were, either. It’s a shame when looks skip a generation. You have a look of your aunt, though.’ She licked her finger and turned the page. Arm in arm, Lillian and Harold stared out at them with oddly shocked expressions, as if they were witness to something startling behind the photographer. The picture didn’t flatter either of them and Mrs Binley gave a sharp snort of laughter through her nose, then she licked her finger again and drew it across the stiff black paper, leaving a snail-trail of spit and creasing the corner of the page as she turned it. The next photograph was of Lillian alone and this time her face was lively and natural, and no one could say she looked anything but beautiful. She was laughing at the camera and her delicate crown of waxy white flowers looked to Annie as if it had been twisted and threaded by the nimble fingers of woodland sprites.

  ‘Humph,’ said Mrs Binley. ‘It’s cockeyed, that headpiece.’

  Annie sat on quietly, but inside she fumed.

  5

  By the time Annie got to Fl
etcher’s Bakery the custard slices were all gone, so she bought a chocolate éclair, and wasn’t sorry to have the decision made for her. She wondered about a loaf, and then remembered that Michael had stopped eating bread. Every morning now he had a large bowl of pale porridge, the leftovers of which clung to the insides of the saucepan like wallpaper paste in a decorator’s bucket. The shop assistant was a young girl, who asked Annie if that was all, in a disbelieving tone, as if one éclair was hardly worth spoiling the paper bag she put it in.

  ‘Thank you, yes,’ Annie said. ‘It’s just a little treat for later – I don’t make a habit of eating cream cakes and I was thinking about a sliced granary as well but we don’t get through so much bread as we used to now my son’s given it up.’

  This was too much, Annie knew. She had a habit of sometimes running on with a one-sided conversation, words spilling unchecked from her mouth in a torrent of inconsequence. The girl behind the counter said, ‘Sixty-four pee,’ and held out her hand; then while Annie fumbled in her purse and counted out the coins into the girl’s palm, she turned her head and stared moodily out of the shop window.

  It felt like a relief to be back out on the street. Annie trotted back to her car and all the things she might have said to that rude young woman ran through her head, so that by the time she unlocked the door and climbed in, she felt all the satisfaction of having actually said them. The inside of her car had the pungent, fishy smell of wet dog so she drove home with the windows down and Finn pushed his head over the back of her seat and closed his eyes in a state of bliss, twitching his nostrils in the wind. In Beech Street she buzzed the windows up again and pulled up outside her house.

  ‘There we are,’ she said. ‘Home sweet home.’

  Annie’s house was the only one on the street with a front porch. She’d had it built soon after moving in, because with an extra door she felt safer, more battened down. What burglar would bother picking two locks when he could go to any other dwelling, left or right, and pick his way into only one? But the porch had also brought a dash of unexpected character to the bland little dwelling; its bottle-green eaves were like upward-tilting, quizzical eyebrows. Home so soon? it seemed to say.

  She let Finn out of the boot of the car, and hung on to his collar with one hand while she fumbled in her handbag for the door key. Once, Finn had shot off up the street after a jogger, woofing and careening about so that the man – furiously silent – had to halt and wait for Annie to catch them up, red-faced with exertion and embarrassment. Now the dog stood docile and patient but she clung on anyway, which meant she had to stoop at an awkward angle while blindly delving through the innards of her capacious leather bag. Gingerly she groped around the éclair, trying not to squash it, and when the door flew open from the inside, it was so unexpected she thought she might die of shock. She let go of the dog and stood up straight, and Michael loomed over her, filling the doorframe with his aggravation.

  ‘Well finally,’ he said, spitting the words. ‘I don’t know where the dickens you were, but you’ve been gone so long that the nursing home fetched me out of work!’ His voice soared high with indignation as he reached the end of his sentence and Annie stared stupidly at him, catatonic with confusion. Finn, released, walked calmly into the house, brushing against Michael’s trousers as he passed and leaving a swathe of fine golden hairs on the grey flannel.

  ‘I was only just there, not long ago,’ Annie said, finding her voice. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘He’s had some sort of fit and now he’s unconscious. Twitching and foaming when the nurse found him.’

  Annie looked sceptical. He must be making up the details, she thought; they never would use that language over the phone.

  ‘So where were you?’ her son asked again. ‘I have to say, Mother, this isn’t part of my brief.’

  ‘Pardon?’ She really had no idea what he meant. Brief? What could he be getting at?

  ‘This,’ he said, flinging his arms wide. ‘Rushing back here because you were nowhere to be found, being interrupted in my workplace by a call that you should be dealing with, my whole day going to pot. I’ve a lesson in Gawber that starts in fifteen minutes and not a hope in hell of getting there now.’

  ‘Well I only went to Fletcher’s,’ Annie said. She was standing outside still, and she shivered suddenly with cold. ‘And I was at Glebe Hall only just before that. It must’ve happened just after I left.’ In fact, she thought, they probably hadn’t even bothered ringing her at home; they would’ve phoned Michael’s mobile phone instead. ‘Can I come in?’ she asked, stepping over the threshold at the same time. ‘It’s bitter, this wind.’

  What annoyed her was that Michael was here and not at the nursing home. He must have cycled all the way home, when he could have gone instead to the home and been better placed from there to get to Gawber. Oh yes, he was an awkward customer all right; Annie could always rely on Michael to turn a molehill into a mountain. He’d shut the door now and was standing in the porch in a huff, his arms folded, spoiling for an argument. He was so like his father, Annie thought. Vince had always been quick to fly off the handle, too. How strange it was that such things could be genetic, in the same way as the size of your nose or the colour of your hair.

  ‘If you’d only get yourself a mobile,’ Michael was saying. ‘If you’d only catch up with the twenty-first century.’

  ‘We have an answerphone and, look, it isn’t flashing.’ They both looked at the telephone; the red light was steady, not blinking.

  ‘So? It doesn’t alter the fact that you weren’t here to answer it.’

  ‘Do we have time for a cup of tea?’ she asked, ignoring his tone entirely.

  ‘Time?’

  ‘Yes, I mean before we go.’

  ‘Go where?’

  ‘To Glebe Hall.’

  ‘Glebe Hall!’ he said, in the manner of a man pushed to the very limits of his sanity. ‘Glebe Hall! I’m not going, you are.’

  ‘Well, but if you can’t get to Gawber in time,’ she said, ‘you could come to Barnsley with me?’ She knew quite well he wouldn’t, but asking him was her oblique way of letting him know she knew.

  ‘I’ve to be at choir practice by five,’ he said.

  Annie looked at the wall clock, which said half past one.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mother,’ he said, meaning that he wasn’t sorry at all. ‘I’m not risking missing another appointment today.’

  Annie suddenly felt unutterably weary. She felt every one of her seventy-three years, and more besides. She’d drive back to the nursing home – because how would it look if neither she nor Michael turned up to show an interest? – but she couldn’t do it just yet. She walked into the kitchen still wearing her fleece and pushed the switch on the kettle. She wondered if she should change out of her dog-walking clothes; she wondered how she might eat her éclair without Michael seeing; and she wondered, at last, how Vince was, and whether he might finally die.

  The traffic lights in Hoyland always seemed to be red, and if they were green as Annie approached them, they’d craftily change, barely pausing on amber in their haste to stop her. She knew well enough that this was a fanciful notion, but it felt personal, and if she’d had the nerve, she’d just sail on through in blithe defiance. When she’d first lived in Hoyland, in the big house on Hawshaw Lane, there hadn’t been any need for traffic lights at this crossroads because hardly anyone apart from the Platts owned a car. Back in those days their gleaming oxblood Rover had been enough of a novelty to make children in the street tear after it, hooting and squawking like chickens. Annie had a sudden image of the back of her father’s head, his oiled hair as dark and shiny as a bowling ball. She was always in the back seat, directly behind him; even if her mother wasn’t with them, the front passenger seat wouldn’t be offered to Annie but would be occupied instead by her father’s hat. Harold Platt drove with a stately unconcern for the riff-raff on the pavement, although Annie always sank low in the seat and tried to be invisible. Imagine, sh
e thought now, if he’d had to draw to a halt at these lights and let the children catch him up. He would have stared rigidly ahead, refusing to be distracted, while Lillian would have fumed at the inconvenience of being told by a system of coloured lights if and when she was allowed to go. Annie’s memories of her mother were few, and those she had were probably planted in her mind by old photographs rather than real happenings, but she did remember Lillian’s dash, her pizazz, her way of never settling to anything that required her to be still.

  The lights changed, and Annie set off, throwing the car accidentally into third gear and immediately stalling. In a fluster she tried again for first, but forgot to put the clutch down and the gearbox made a grating noise that ran up her spine like nails on a blackboard. The cars behind her began overtaking, some of the drivers shaking their heads at her; she could see them at the periphery of her vision though she tried her hardest not to look. Then the passenger door opened and Josie got in.

  ‘Clutch,’ she said, and pointed at Annie’s left foot.

  ‘Oh!’ Annie said. She engaged the clutch and slipped the gear stick smoothly into first.

  ‘But don’t go yet,’ Josie said. ‘The lights are red again.’

  She was half-laughing as if this was a funny mistake that absolutely anyone could have made and Annie found this so comforting that she had to rummage for a tissue in her pocket and blow her nose briskly, to prevent tears from coming.

  ‘Why are you here?’ she said, which came out a little snippy, unintentionally so.

  ‘I was – I am – on my way to the garage,’ Josie said. ‘The car’s ready. I caught a bus to here and now you can drop me off if you don’t mind?’