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

by Jane Sanderson

  Vince gave a foolish laugh. ‘It’s not,’ he said. ‘It’s Robert.’

  ‘It was Robert,’ Annie said, then she clamped her lips shut into a tight line, as if she’d already said too much, as if she regretted her weakness. The baby, in the high chair, smiled magnanimously at the adults, each in turn, and waved a rusk above his head before releasing his grip and letting it fall to the kitchen floor. Michael, at the table eating Weetabix, paused with his spoon in mid-air, and stared first at the baby and then at his mother.

  ‘Wobert,’ he said, and pointed at the beaming interloper, his rival, his amiable enemy.

  Annie turned her gaze on Michael. ‘No, pet, this is Andrew.’

  ‘No that’s Wobert,’ Michael said firmly.

  ‘Hear hear,’ Vince said. ‘Well said. You can’t just change his name; it’s not legal.’

  ‘I can do what I please – he’s mine,’ Annie said.

  ‘He’s yours? Since when?’

  ‘Since you gave him to me,’ Annie said. ‘Your fancy piece doesn’t want him, so she doesn’t get to name him. I suppose Robert was her idea? Yes, I thought as much,’ she said, without pausing to hear his answer – knowing, anyway, that she was right. ‘I’d always imagined two little boys, Michael and Andrew. Or Michael and Angela for a boy and a girl, or Angela and Julia if they turned out to both be girls. So he’s Andrew, always was in my mind. Andrew Doyle. Andrew, Andrew, Andrew. Michael and Andrew Doyle.’

  All the while she was wiping the baby tenderly with a damp flannel. He tilted his face and opened his hands obligingly, while she gently coaxed the sticky remnants of rusk from his darling face and the creases of his palms. She wiped in time with her words and Vince and Michael stared as if she were the last remaining member of an entirely different species.

  ‘Andwew,’ Michael murmured, trying out the difficult new word.

  ‘That’s it,’ Annie said.

  Vince snarled. He stalked out of the kitchen, then spun on his heel and jutted his head back into the room, poking a finger at her, stabbing the air. ‘There’ll be no girls, you mad cow,’ he said. ‘I’ll not be coming anywhere near you, and who else would bother?’

  And then he did leave, slamming the front door as he had so many times before.

  ‘Eat up, Michael,’ Annie said, nodding at the remains of his milk-sodden Weetabix.

  He scowled at her and pushed the bowl away, meaning to provoke, but she only shrugged and picked it up, then spooned what was left into the baby’s willing mouth.

  ‘Mine!’ Michael shouted, beating a cross little tattoo on the yellow Formica.

  ‘No, Andrew’s,’ Annie said. ‘So next time, think on.’

  She sent a regretful note to Barbara at the haberdashery, apologising for her sudden disappearance. She wanted to say that she’d had another baby, but that would be ridiculous, obviously, although she did consider inventing a surprise pregnancy, even wrote it out in draft to see how it looked. But Barbara was the only other living soul who knew just how rarely Vince came home, and how things stood between them when he did, so instead she wrote that ‘family matters’ were keeping her away from work and would continue to do so for the foreseeable future. She thanked Barbara for taking her on in the first place, and for allowing Michael to go with her. She wished Barbara well for the future. It was all very nicely put, but later when she read the letter through before slipping it into an envelope she worried it sounded bland and distant, as if the time she’d spent at Sew and Sew’s had been an insignificant thing, as if Barbara hadn’t thrown her a lifeline at one of the loneliest periods Annie had ever known. To put all that in writing, though … well, it might have seemed theatrical, thought Annie: melodramatic, overblown. The truth was, of course, that Barbara would have taken Robert-now-Andrew’s arrival entirely in her stride; she would’ve relished the details of Vince’s hair-raising cheek; she would’ve doted on the baby – well, who in the world wouldn’t love him, instantly? Barbara, unshockable and endlessly warm, would have helped mend the wrongness of Annie’s situation by ignoring … no, by accepting it. All this Annie knew. But pride, respectability, an inclination towards perfect privacy – all these characteristics rose to the fore and propelled her to the post box with her polite little resignation letter, which, in the end, irritated by her own ditherings, she quickly sealed, stamped, addressed and dispatched.

  So Annie excised her only friend from her life, but it was bearable because she had Andrew. His arrival had granted her another chance, a reprieve, a blessed last opportunity to love and be loved. He submitted to her at once and wholeheartedly, and returned her devotion fiercely and fully, with unconstrained delight. It was a meeting of hearts; also, it was as if the child – so utterly accepting of this new source of warmth and affection – was being mothered for the first time. Since Martha Hancock was only just out of girlhood herself, Annie assumed that this must be true. She had only a sketchy idea of who or what Martha was – she wanted no details from Vince on the subject, and in any case he was soon absenting himself again for long periods – so she filled in the considerable gaps with her imagination and soon had her cast as either a feckless hussy with an eye for the main chance, or a hapless, soft-headed victim of Vince’s predatory charm. Either of these incarnations allowed her to nurture a seam of contemptuous pity for poor runaway Martha, although, in the most private recesses of her mind, she acknowledged her personal debt to the girl, for leaving Andrew behind when she fled.

  Michael hated him. At first, when he could logically hope that the baby might be taken away as suddenly and mysteriously as he had arrived, the little boy’s hostility manifested itself harmlessly, in a kind of permanent passive scorn. He contemplated the baby from a safe distance, with the sort of withering disdain that a medieval monarch might have reserved for a scrofulous serf. But days, weeks and months passed and yet Michael still found that he was expected to share the world with Andrew. Worse, Michael discovered he was expected to sometimes play second fiddle: to wait for a story, to wait for his shoes and coat, to wait for his soft-boiled egg. His mother – his own mother! His! – spoke sharply to him often, and occasionally ignored him altogether. He didn’t have the words to express it, but Michael came to understand that somehow this noisy, clumsy, dribbling addition to the family had usurped him in his mother’s affections. He was no longer King Michael; the young pretender had seized the crown. What was worse, Andrew yearned to be friends, and he was unceasing in his efforts. As soon as he became properly mobile he followed Michael doggedly through the house, never fully grasping the depths of animosity of which the bigger boy was capable.

  ‘Get off !’ Michael would scream. ‘Get out! Get lost!’

  ‘Michael Doyle!’ Annie always said. ‘Be nice to your little brother!’

  ‘But I hate him!’ Michael yelled, with his face tipped up to the ceiling as if he was speaking to the gods, appealing for their intervention. Once – in a hot, blind temper, when his meticulous castle of Lego bricks had been scattered across the bedroom floor and two pages of his Rupert annual were ripped beyond repair – Michael screamed so hard and for so long that for a few moments he blacked out and Annie thought he’d died of rage. When he came to and opened his eyes she was hanging over him with a look on her face that he dimly remembered from earlier times, a look of desperate, fathomless devotion. For a fleeting second their eyes locked and he thought he had her back, but then Andrew staggered forth on uncertain legs and whimpered in confusion. Annie scooped him into her arms and shushed him and told Michael to be a big boy: to dry his eyes and sit up so she could read them both a story. This incident was seared on Michael’s memory like a brand on a bullock. It replayed in his mind over and over again; it never really left him, remaining in his memory long after the time that childhood injustices should have been forgotten.

  Annie fantasised about a cottage in a wood, in a part of the country where no one knew her. She’d live there with her boys and there’d be a brook and a vegetable patch and a swin
g in the garden. There were no prying neighbours in this imagined paradise, but in Sydney Road, of course, they suddenly seemed legion, and by their curious stares and bold enquiries they called Annie to account, wondering who this second little boy was, and why he’d come. Annie, when it simply couldn’t be avoided, spoke evasively of a distant sister in dire health, a likely death, a probable adoption, before ending the conversation and racing away, Andrew bouncing about cheerily in Michael’s old pushchair, Michael trailing behind, sucking his forefinger in that odd way he had, issuing dark, oblique looks from beneath his fringe. It was just as well she’d always kept these people, these inquisitors, at arm’s length, Annie thought; just as well she’d protected herself from the forensic intimacy of female friendship. Always, always, it paid to keep your own counsel, and the less she shared, the less she was obliged to explain.

  When Michael started school – outraged yet again at what was being asked of him, hanging limpet-like to the frame of the pushchair until his mother peeled him off and handed him over – life altered once more. Annie and Andrew spent uninterrupted hours pleasing themselves, pottering together in the house, or finding treasure along the canal path: pebbles, feathers, twigs. At two years old, little Andrew had a collector’s eye; his choices, while perfectly ordinary in themselves, somehow revealed a certain everyday loveliness when they got them home – a whorl of blue-grey on a brown stone, unexpected speckles on a wing feather. At home they resided in a shoebox treasure chest and on wet days or wash days Andrew could while away an entire morning laying out the specimens, talking to them, changing their places then changing them back, then returning them carefully to their tissue-paper bed. They pressed wild flowers too, but this was more for Annie’s benefit, since Andrew had no interest in a bluebell or a cowslip that must be left alone between the pages of a dictionary for long, uninterrupted weeks on end. Annie told him they’d keep for ever once they were properly pressed, but he didn’t understand, and his expression, when she tucked the flowers out of sight and out of reach, was of puzzled pain.

  Vince was working in Tamworth by this time, for a company that sold guttering and downpipes. He was in sales, at which he excelled. The money still came like clockwork, in envelopes that were a little fatter than before, and Annie was surprised by this, and mutely grateful. If this had remained her only contact with him she would have been perfectly content, but sometimes Vince came back too, so that his boys didn’t forget their old man. They didn’t much like his visits – or anyway Michael didn’t – because everything changed when he walked into the house. The atmosphere shifted, became brittle with ill-feeling, and even though Vince sometimes brought little paper bags of bulls’ eyes or slender bars of creamy Caramac, his hearty joviality hung badly on him, like a cheap suit. Domesticity made him irascible. His high spirits were not to be trusted; they could be replaced in a heartbeat by harsh words or, worse, the back of his hand. Andrew, being amenable and lovable, had nothing much to fear from his father, who swung him about to make him scream with laughter or hoicked him on his shoulders instead of using the pushchair. But Michael provoked Vince with his sullen looks and odd habits, and the small concessions his mother made at mealtimes in pursuit of a quiet life were all either mocked or banned altogether when his father came home. Any old plate must be used, not Michael’s special one; a dropped spoon must be picked up and used at once, without washing the germs off it; milk must be poured onto cornflakes, not served in a glass on the side; beans must be on top of the toast; gravy must be allowed to run where it wished, not corralled in one corner of the plate by a mashed potato dam. In fact Vince’s rules rendered a Sunday roast practically inedible to Michael.

  But if the boy bucked and squirmed under the terrible scrutiny of his father, Annie dreaded the visits for exactly the opposite reason. Vince simply behaved as if she wasn’t there. In his presence she was anonymous, hollowed out, insubstantial. He looked straight through her while keeping up a stream of ostentatious, one-sided banter with the children. He proposed boys-only outings, and although Michael would never go with him, Annie took no comfort from this. Andrew always went, sunny and chatty, taking his father’s hand with a trustfulness that Annie feared was unfounded, because for her, the spectre of the mysterious, unmentionable Martha Hancock haunted these outings. A secret rendezvous, an assignation, an agreement. Until she heard the key in the lock again, Annie couldn’t function. She sat on a hard kitchen chair, drawn and silent, listening to her own dark thoughts, and waited for him to bring Andrew back. Then in they would come, bundling through the house, bringing with them the smells of outside, the fresh wind, the cold rain, the cloying sweetness of candy floss, and Annie always rose from her seat and resumed her run-of-the-mill domestic tasks, as if she’d only just that minute sat down. If Vince had only known her fears and understood his power, he’d doubtless have kept Andrew out longer.

  20

  Annie took her time untying the laces of her walking shoes, stepping into her slippers, unzipping her fleece, hanging it on the coat-stand, but Andrew simply waited for her, standing in the hallway in silence, holding the little photograph, his ticket to the past. When it was simply no longer avoidable, she allowed him to lead her through to the kitchen, where the small table bore an old wooden box, a small chest scarred with age. It sat in the midst of its curled and yellowing contents, which were laid out carefully in an ordered display: a letter or two; a postcard; more photographs.

  ‘I found all this,’ Andrew said. ‘In the loft.’

  Together they stared at it.

  ‘It’s Dad’s stuff.’

  ‘Well then,’ Annie said. ‘We shouldn’t pry.’ Her heart pounded; she wondered that its beating wasn’t audible in the desperate silence. She hadn’t ever laid eyes on this box or its innards before, but she knew that they could only do harm.

  ‘Mum, this is Martha.’

  Andrew placed the photograph flat on the table, and tapped at the young woman with one finger. He turned the picture, showed her the faded scrawl: Martha and Robert, July 1967. Annie was silent and pale.

  ‘And this one.’ He picked up another photograph – the same young woman, no baby. She wore a girlish printed cotton dress and sandals. Her hands were on her hips, her head tilted coquettishly. She was laughing in the picture, and so palpable was her happiness that Annie had to look away. Again Andrew flipped the picture over. Martha Hancock, Whitley Bay. There was no date. Annie wondered where she herself was, when Vince and Martha were together at the seaside.

  ‘So who exactly is she, Mum?’ Andrew hung over the table, taking it all in. He was entranced by his find, fascinated by his father’s secrets. ‘And who’s that baby? Who’s Robert?’

  ‘Ask your father,’ Annie said sharply. Her mouth was dry but some reflex in her throat forced her to swallow hard, gulping at nothing.

  ‘Well I can’t, can I?’ He looked at her, surprised.

  ‘They’re not my things,’ she said. ‘I’ve never seen them before.’

  ‘Sit down, Mum.’ He held out a chair for her but she hesitated and remained standing, looking anywhere but at him.

  ‘See here,’ Andrew said, trying to draw her along with him. ‘This postcard was from her, to Dad.’ He picked it up and started to read. ‘Dear Vincent, you made me promise to send you a card so here—’

  ‘Stop!’ Annie said. She held the edge of the table so he couldn’t see her hands shaking.

  ‘Mum, I’m sorry, but this stuff matters.’

  She looked about her. ‘Where is everybody?’ she said, hoping to create a distraction, find some room to breathe. Riley and Finn, she knew, had slipped into the sitting room and were watching cartoons but she hadn’t seen Blake or Bailey since they’d come in. Andrew stared at her for a moment.

  ‘They went out to the park,’ he said, irritation now creeping into his voice.

  ‘Park?’ Annie said. ‘There is no park!’ She threw out her hands in startled confusion, as though whatever drama may have been about to unf
old in the kitchen, it was utterly eclipsed by this new crisis.

  ‘Jeez, Mum, down the road there, the grassy area.’

  ‘That’s a rec, not a park.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Mum, can we talk about this lot? Whatever Dad was up to, it was donkey’s years ago, and it’s not as if any of us thought he was a saint.’

  Then Finn appeared, and he leaned against Annie’s legs so she could feel the heat he’d absorbed by loafing about too close to the fire. ‘Oh!’ Annie said, realising all of a sudden that a most wonderful opportunity had presented itself. ‘Oh Andrew!’ She wailed the words and covered her face with her hands for fear that the cunning relief she suddenly felt might be visible in her features.

  ‘It’s awful, Andrew,’ she said, through her fingers.

  ‘Just tell me,’ he said. Gently he prised her hands away with his own. ‘It can’t be that bad. We all knew what a rogue he was.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Well Dad, obviously.’

  ‘Him! I’m not talking about him! It’s Finn. He killed a sheep, Andrew, and another one had to be shot, and now I have to give him away.’

  She looked at him cautiously, not yet certain that the other danger was past. It wasn’t.

  ‘Mum, why’re you talking to me about the dog?’ Andrew folded his arms now, and regarded her appraisingly. ‘Finn’s fine, it’s me you should be worrying about. I’m struggling here. I might have discovered a half-brother we didn’t know existed, and you want me to worry about the dog?’

  Annie’s vision swam and jumbled thoughts clamoured inside her head, though one pushed itself powerfully forwards. Martha Hancock was back. Martha Hancock had come to take her revenge. She turned from Andrew, who only watched in utter confusion as Annie bolted upstairs to the bathroom, locked the door, sat on the lavatory lid, and wept as quietly as her consuming grief would permit.