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

by Jane Sanderson

  ‘Isn’t Celtic hair ginger like yours?’ Annie said.

  ‘I like to say red,’ Sandra said. ‘And yes, it can be, but not in my case.’

  ‘Sandra’s from Dudley,’ Josie said, and she laughed.

  ‘Yes, that famous line of Black Country redheads.’ Sandra grinned. ‘Cross us at your peril.’ She proffered the flask and Annie and Josie both held out their mugs for more. Annie took a hearty draught; she felt warm and peaceful.

  ‘Look at Finn,’ Josie said. ‘What a brick.’

  Annie smiled. ‘He has his uses,’ she said.

  ‘What I like about dogs,’ said Sandra, ‘is that they don’t expect anything in return for their devotion.’

  ‘Mmm,’ Josie said.

  ‘Unlike men,’ Sandra went on, ‘who see love as more of a trading position. Here’s a wedding ring, now this is what you owe me.’

  ‘Oh San,’ Josie said.

  ‘Don’t oh San me,’ said Sandra, but not snappily. ‘You’ve never been wed, so you’re not entitled to an opinion.’

  ‘Well anyway, I like Trevor,’ Josie said.

  ‘That’s because you’re not divorced from him.’

  ‘I can’t think why someone like you isn’t married, Josie,’ Annie said, blurting out the words then blushing at her rashness, but Josie only sighed and said, ‘Oh well, I fell in love with the wrong man.’

  ‘Married with four children, the absolute bounder,’ Sandra said.

  ‘Actually Sandra didn’t know him, Annie. She’s right – he was married, and he had children, but he wasn’t a bounder or I never would’ve fallen for him. It was a long time ago.’

  Annie was quiet for a moment then said, ‘My husband was certainly a bounder,’ and Sandra sat up in a trice, sploshing wine from her mug. ‘Ooh, dirty linen, do hang it out,’ she said.

  ‘Sandra!’ said Josie.

  ‘What? Let her spill the beans.’

  ‘No,’ Annie said, shaking her head emphatically. ‘No, no, I should never have spoken. It’s this wine,’ she said. ‘It’s making my tongue loose, not my knees.’ The others began to laugh and in spite of herself Annie laughed too. Next to her, Finn smiled and braced himself to stop her falling over.

  Later, when there was no putting off their departure, Annie had to be hoisted up and off the ground by Josie and Sandra, taking one arm each, and it was no mean feat.

  ‘Bloody Nora, Annie,’ Sandra said. ‘It’s like lifting cement.’

  ‘Charming,’ Annie said. She stood a little unsteadily, adjusting to her upright position. ‘My head’s swimming,’ she said, to Sandra. ‘I’m not fit to drive.’

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ Sandra said.

  ‘It’s probably a touch of vertigo, after all that time sitting down,’ Josie said. ‘Come on, there’s a kiosk before the car park; we can have a cup of tea.’

  ‘Give me a minute,’ Annie said, so they stood there in the glade and waited, and the dogs assembled at their feet.

  ‘Look,’ Sandra said. ‘I think Fritz is having the same trouble.’

  He was up, but only just; his rear legs were semi-buckled and he swayed gently from side to side. They all looked down at him and Fritz looked at the floor. His coat was drab and sparse and the whiskers round his muzzle were grey. He looked as old as time.

  ‘Poor old boy,’ Annie said.

  ‘Sometimes I wish he wouldn’t wake up,’ Sandra said, and they both knew what she meant. She said, ‘I just don’t want to ring the vet.’

  ‘I could do it for you, if that helps,’ Josie said.

  Sandra shook her head fiercely. ‘No, I’ll do it, but I mean I don’t want to have to.’

  ‘Maybe it won’t come to that,’ Annie said. ‘Maybe he’ll slip away, in his sleep.’

  ‘Maybe maybe maybe,’ Sandra said. She sounded snippy, and at once Josie said, ‘Let’s go,’ so they did: a more melancholy bunch now, the pleasant effects of the mulled wine receding, and Fritz’s slow, painful gait setting their pace. They made it to the kiosk and had strong, fortifying tea from polystyrene cups, and small, dense squares of flapjack, and the dogs were offered a bowl of water, which Betty spurned, being too much of a lady to share with the slobbering boys. She turned her pretty face to the east and surveyed the view, the very image of gracious forbearance.

  11

  Vincent Doyle and Annie Platt were married on 2 November 1963; only three months after his proposal was confidently made and timidly accepted. Everyone who knew them was surprised at his choice, but no one more so than Annie. She wore her late mother’s 1930s wedding gown, which for all the passing years had been stored in the dark in a shroud of tissue paper to keep it from turning yellow. When Annie fetched it from the trunk in the attic and peeled away the wrapping, the white silk crêpe unfurled like a butterfly from its cocoon, and Annie cried sentimental tears for a mother she remembered only patchily, and not always with fondness.

  The gown was too small at the waist and across the back, so Annie let out the seams and gave up potatoes until after the wedding. It’d taken days and days of pressing and airing to eliminate the creases and the persistent smell of camphor from the delicate fabric. But all of this was worth it for the satisfaction of seeing her father blanch when she stepped from her bedroom in Lillian’s dress, with her hair curled and pinned just as Lillian’s had been twenty-five years earlier.

  She knew, though, that she didn’t really resemble her mother. And if she hadn’t known, there was certainly someone willing to tell her.

  ‘You look just like that Doreen woman,’ Mrs Binley said, when the young bride emerged. ‘Doesn’t she, Harold?’

  Annie’s father didn’t follow her meaning and looked at his second wife with his eyebrows knitted.

  ‘Doreen?’

  ‘The sister. The plain one in the wedding album.’

  ‘Oh, that Doreen.’

  ‘She has the same nose,’ Mrs Binley said. ‘And the same pudgy chops.’

  ‘Well now,’ Harold said, dimly conscious that a bride on the morning of her wedding should not, perhaps, be subjected to such unkind scrutiny. ‘I wouldn’t necessarily say so.’

  ‘Oh wouldn’t you?’ said Mrs Binley.

  ‘Lillian was a great beauty of course,’ Harold said, with misguided pride.

  ‘Yes, well, much good it did her,’ Mrs Binley said. ‘All fur coat and no knickers.’ And she stomped away, preparing to make her husband suffer for his folly. Harold and Annie regarded each other for a moment.

  ‘Agnes can be a little thoughtless,’ he said.

  Annie nodded. She had, after all, been forced to live with Agnes Binley’s particular brand of thoughtlessness for ten years now. From the day they heard of Lillian’s death, Mrs Binley – she was always that to Annie; never Mrs Platt, never Agnes and certainly never Mother – had presided over their Coventry home like the cat that got the cream. Annie’s mother had suffered a terrible, lonely fate, choking in the London smog, asphyxiated by the smoke and fumes that had rolled softly over London like a deadly eiderdown. A policeman had found her, stone cold and slumped in a heap on Regent Street. He’d lifted her from the pavement and carried her to a Red Cross van, where she was pronounced dead. For a day or two, nobody knew who she was: just a lady in fur, with red shoes. They held the funeral in Peckham, and Annie wasn’t allowed to go. Instead she stayed at home with the curtains drawn and watched Laurence Olivier in Rebecca while Mrs Binley shared a pound of grapes with her parrot, Mr Christian. He was a blue and gold macaw, and could say, among other things, ‘cowardly rascal’ and ‘pieces of eight’, but Annie hated him, almost as much as she hated Mrs Binley. When Harold was out of the house, Mr Christian was let out of his cage to hop around the furniture and preen his feathers on the ormolu mantel clock, and his beady black eyes followed Annie around the room. When the parrot fell sick, Mrs Binley cried on and off for a month, until he regained his glossy good health and swung from his perch again, keeping a malevolent eye on Annie.

  ‘But, you know,
your mother could be thoughtless too,’ Harold continued. ‘So don’t judge Agnes too harshly. At least she’s still here, with us.’

  ‘Has the car arrived, Father?’ Annie said. She simply couldn’t wait to be married. Afterwards, she planned never to see either of them again.

  Vincent Doyle was a great novelty, a great hit, at the National Provincial. He was a bit old – at twenty-eight – to still be a lowly clerk, but he didn’t seem to mind so no one else did. He’d come to Coventry all the way from Newcastle: a Geordie lad, cheeky with the women, pally with the men, and when the manager passed through the back office, Vincent made comical suffering faces to make everyone snigger behind their hands. Harold Platt didn’t bother much with the clerks, so he never noticed Vincent’s dark, rangy good looks or the insolent light in his eyes. Vincent, on the other hand, noticed everything. That was why he knew there was a boss’s daughter, an only child, apple of her daddy’s eye. Well, that was what Vincent assumed, and she certainly looked plumply pampered when he saw her at the bank, trotting self-consciously through the staff corridors on an errand for her father. When she trotted back out again, Vincent jumped up from his desk without bothering with his jacket, and followed her out into the spring sunshine on Broadgate. When he fell into step beside her Annie gave a little squeal of fright, but his laugh was so warm and kind that her alarm was instantly replaced by a deep, blushing, swooning sensation which made her wish she could sit down.

  ‘Miss Platt?’ he said with carefully hesitant charm, although he knew full well who she was. ‘May I introduce myself? Vincent Doyle.’

  He held out a hand, and although she wanted to flee, good manners compelled her to stop walking and take it. Once he had her in his grasp he didn’t let go, so they stood for a while, hands clasped, a still point in the busy street, him looking down, her looking up. Nothing in Annie’s life so far had equipped her for such a moment. Her heart pounded in her chest and that silly expression ‘weak at the knees’, which she’d read in romances and never believed, suddenly seemed an entirely accurate physical symptom.

  ‘I’m sorry to act so impetuously, Miss Platt,’ Vincent said, ‘but I need to speak to you most urgently.’

  ‘Oh!’ Annie said. She was raspberry pink under his gaze and he studied her with interest. Her cheeks looked softly pliable, as if with a prod and a squeeze of his long fingers he might rearrange her face, leave dimples in the dough. Her eyebrows and lashes were of the white-blonde variety, the type that at first glance seemed not to be there at all. Her nose was small but blunt, her eyes were as round as a china doll’s and underneath her chin were the beginnings of a second one. She was not, thought Vincent, a looker, but she had a sweet naivety about her that wasn’t unappealing.

  ‘My word, you’re lovely,’ he said. He was putting on a bit of a voice; his Noël Coward special, the one he used on girls he thought would fall for it. He wasn’t sure yet exactly where this little bird fitted in his mental catalogue of the species, but anyway Noël Coward seemed to be doing the trick. Spellbound, Annie blinked her blue eyes.

  ‘Far too pretty for the likes of me, but even so will you do me the honour of letting me take you dancing on Saturday night?’

  Annie stared. Vincent waited.

  ‘Cat got your tongue?’ he said, in his normal voice. She was an odd one and no mistake, he thought. She was behaving as if this was the first time she’d been asked out, and of course, it was, but Vincent didn’t know that. In his world, the precious only daughters of bank managers were there to be preyed upon, and the streets were full of hunters.

  ‘I’ll pick you up at seven. Cocktails at the Leofric then on to the Locarno.’

  The question mark was missing, Annie noted; the deal seemed to be done. She nodded her head, and he reached out and took an experimental pinch of her cheek between finger and thumb, before smiling a swift farewell and jogging back to the bank. Annie had to stay put and catch her breath before she could continue on down the street. Her cheek, where he had squeezed it, felt a little hot, a little sore, but she took this as proof she wasn’t dreaming.

  Annie sat quietly, waiting for her date, but her outward calm belied an interior that was all a-flutter with anxiety. She had conquered a number of self-inflicted obstacles – doubt, indecision, mortification – to reach this point of relative stillness on the arm of the sofa in the drawing room; but the greatest hurdle had been the practical necessity of asking her father’s permission. This, by rights, should have been Vincent’s job, but it was only later that she learned he always took what he wanted without asking.

  She’d tried very hard to get Harold on his own, choosing a moment when she knew he’d be in his study, the only room in which he was allowed to smoke his pipe. But Mrs Binley had a sixth sense for intrigue.

  ‘What’s that?’ she’d said, bursting through the door of Harold’s den like the Gestapo.

  Harold took the pipe from his mouth. ‘The girl has been asked out.’

  Mrs Binley laughed in disbelief and Annie’s spirits sank further still.

  ‘Has she now? Who by?’ By whom, thought Annie.

  Harold nodded at Annie, inviting her to speak. She cleared her throat.

  ‘Vincent Doyle,’ she said.

  Mrs Binley screwed up her face. ‘Vincent Doyle, Vincent Doyle, no – not the first idea who he is.’

  ‘He works at Father’s bank,’ Annie said.

  ‘The blazes he does!’ said Harold.

  ‘A clerk,’ Annie added.

  ‘Ah,’ said Harold. ‘Well then, I can’t be expected to know every minion in the back office.’

  ‘No,’ Annie said. ‘But anyway, I’d like to go to the dance with him.’ And I shall, she added privately.

  ‘I’m sure you would,’ said Mrs Binley. ‘But your father doesn’t know him so that’s that. You can’t be seen walking out with any old jack-the-lad, y’know.’ She’d long ago forgotten how far she herself had risen, although Annie hadn’t.

  ‘Father didn’t mind that you were a char lady,’ she said. ‘So I don’t see why he should mind that Vincent is a bank clerk.’

  Mrs Binley set her mouth into a tight line of fury. Swift as a cobra she slapped Annie across the cheek.

  ‘Take that back,’ she shouted. ‘Harold, make her take that back.’

  But it was only the truth, and while Harold very often chose the path of least resistance, he was also a pedant, irredeemably literal, and therefore was simply unable to demand a retraction from his daughter. However, he stood up, the better to assert his scant authority.

  ‘Annabelle, go to your room,’ he said.

  ‘I will, but may I go out on Saturday with Vincent?’ she said. Mrs Binley’s fingerprints were burning red on her face, but Annie hadn’t allowed a single tear to form, or raised her own hand to the wounded cheek. She was buoyed up by hatred; it was her solace and her support.

  ‘You may,’ said Harold. ‘Now go to your room.’

  And Annie left, sending a shallow, sardonic smile to Mrs Binley as she passed.

  Now, here she was, waiting, in a pale yellow brocade dress, sleeveless, with a wide cowl neck and a tulip-shaped skirt that narrowed just below the knees, and therefore hid them, which was her intention. There were plenty of clothes in her wardrobe, because Harold gave her a small allowance and she had little else to spend it on, but still she had been in agonies of indecision over what to wear. Hopeless, unhappy hours were spent considering her reflection in the cheval mirror, weeping tears of frustration that her soft, ample belly refused to be subjugated, or that her pale blonde hair curled in a haphazard way that was not, and could never be, chic.

  She wondered how it would feel to confide her insecurities to a girlfriend: to seek advice, to share beauty tips, to swap dresses. But Annie’s lonely childhood had continued on into lonely adolescence, and now here she was, twenty-two and still quite solitary. She believed she had no talent for friendship – she didn’t know why – and anyway where were friends to be found, now that
she was an adult, cloistered in her father’s house and seeing no one but him and Mrs Binley?

  But now there was Vincent Doyle. She listened to the clock, and her own steady breathing, and she waited for the doorbell to ring. She would answer it swiftly and leave the house before Mrs Binley could swoop down upon them.

  Vincent Doyle. She said his name aloud, very softly, and she wondered; was he her first real hope? Her best hope? Her last?

  At the Leofric Hotel, she perched on a bar stool and looked for somebody famous. Everybody knew this was where the stars stayed when they were in Coventry and for a moment she thought she’d spotted Pearl Carr at a corner table, until the woman in question waved right across the room at Vincent, who winked and waved back. ‘Call me Vince,’ he’d said to Annie on the walk here, but she hadn’t called him anything yet, because there hadn’t been any reason to use his name. He’d parked her at the bar then gone to talk to the woman who wasn’t Pearl Carr, while Annie sat alone and tried not to see her own reflection in the glass behind a dizzying wall of liqueurs.

  ‘You choose,’ she’d said, when he came back and asked her what she wanted, and he ordered a Blue Hawaiian, which came in a tall glass with a slice of pineapple, a maraschino cherry and a palm-fringed straw.

  ‘It’s mostly pineapple juice,’ Vince said, when she widened her eyes in alarm.

  ‘Then why is it blue?’

  ‘Curacao,’ he said. ‘Just for the effect.’

  ‘It’s exactly the same colour as Mrs Binley’s parrot,’ Annie said.

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘Her parrot, Mr Christian. He was a blue macaw. He’s horrible,’ she said.

  Vince laughed, but he was distracted again, this time by a man, who called out, ‘Vincey boy!’ and pointed at the door before exiting the hotel.

  ‘Okay, sup up,’ Vince said then. He hadn’t taken a stool, preferring to stand with his back to the bar, looking out across the busy room. He had a patently restless air, and was drinking his pint of bitter with efficient speed. She was fascinated by his Adam’s apple, which bobbed vigorously as he swallowed, although she tried not to stare. She couldn’t think of a single thing to say now, and she deeply regretted mentioning the parrot. Vince’s eyes scoped the room, sweeping left and right across the flushed and chattering faces. Annie, trying to follow the direction of his gaze, found it barely settled before moving on.