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

by Jane Sanderson

  ‘Sick? Are you sick?’

  He lowered the paper. ‘I’m certainly sick of you,’ he said and laughed, so Annie left the room, which was always her only recourse. Sometimes this was how he was: sharp and hurtful, just as he’d been for years. Other times, he stared at her through a fog of incomprehension, and only answered her questions with others of his own. Annie had no idea what was wrong with him, although she knew there was something. He slipped between nastiness and befuddlement, and sometimes he was nasty and befuddled.

  This had all happened since Annie had left Martha Hancock for dead in the river then come home with fish and chips, although there couldn’t be a connection between those events and Vince’s state of mind, Annie knew that. Still, since that night – when Vince didn’t recognise Annie or the haddock he’d asked for – he’d been strange and unpredictable. He hadn’t returned to work and instead he either lay on his bed or lay on the sitting-room sofa, waiting, waiting, waiting. They all crept about the little house like the three Billy Goats Gruff trying not to goad the troll, but none of them knew what the next trigger might be and each day held new disasters: tea the wrong shade of brown, a missing newspaper, a smell of fried onions when there were none cooking, sunlight slanting through the nets and into his eyes, an imaginary swarm of wasps in the outside lavatory. Annie took the worst of his wrath, but none of them were safe from his irrational fury, and the boys learned to hide from him, retreating under their beds and breathing very, very quietly until he forgot his purpose and gave up the rampage. His forgetfulness was his saving grace.

  But Martha Hancock’s days were done and this was Annie’s sustaining strength. She had returned to the river only once, in the early hours of the next day, and although she’d found one of Martha’s shoes snagged on a tangle of ivy, there was no trace of the body, even when she craned her head into the tunnel. Annie had uttered a small, fervent prayer of thanks to the river for hiding the evidence beneath the city and then had walked home in the dawn light, holding Martha’s shoe under her coat. And while she knew she must live, now, in a permanent state of guilt and with full knowledge of her own wickedness, she found these burdens more bearable than the constant fear during those dark days when Martha had roamed the streets of Coventry.

  Annie had burned the shoe, the purse, the brush and the birth certificate, just as she’d burned Martha’s letters, but for some reason that she couldn’t have articulated even to herself, she’d kept the book for a while, and tried to read it, surreptitiously, when Vince was asleep or out or absorbed by the television. But she soon found that Tess Durbeyfield rose from the early pages with startling clarity, a beautiful, potent mix of womanliness and childishness, and it was as if Martha Hancock herself were in the story, as if she were Hardy’s tragic heroine, catching the eye of the wrong kind of man. Annie had thrown the book across the bedroom with shaking hands and then at once retrieved it to send it the way of everything else: into the range, to be burned down to a collapsing heap of pale grey ash.

  So Annie felt no regret, only a kind of guilty release. Her world, already small and under-populated, shrank still more, and she never ventured further than she absolutely had to. The school, the butcher, the grocer, the post office: these four essential points formed the outer reaches of her daily universe. Certainly she never again trod the streets with the children in that blind and careless way of the evening she found Martha stepping off the bus. Perhaps, she reasoned, someone would see them who’d seen them before, on that terrible night; perhaps the old lady who’d fussed over Andrew would see her again and recall the bloodied neck, the brutal rent to her coat, the wet footprints leading from the river to the lane. No, thought Annie: stay in, stay close. Keep the boys close too, away from strangers, away from the water. She wished to be as quiet, as good, as self-sufficient as it was possible to be. She wished to be invisibly ordinary; which, after all, wasn’t too much to ask and was really the only thing she’d ever wanted.

  There was a heady atmosphere on the day, six months later, that Vince eventually stopped waiting for Martha and got back outside into the world of work and women. He picked up where he’d left off in Tamworth, leaving behind him a basketful of dirty laundry and a lingering smell of fags, so Annie baked a cake to dispel him entirely. It was a two-tiered sponge filled with lemon curd and she let Andrew slap thick white icing all over the top, any old how. They had finger rolls filled with egg and salad cream and Michael was allowed to have his hard-boiled egg unsliced, and his sauce and his bread roll served independently of each other and on separate plates. When he’d finished he asked to get down from the table instead of just sliding off his chair and sloping away. Annie and Andrew stayed where they were, playing I-spy and singing nursery rhymes. The boy’s face shone and now, when he smiled, the livid scar left by the snow globe puckered at its edges like a pulled seam. Annie called it his war wound. She felt battle-hardened herself, too: a survivor.

  She wondered if Vince could hold his job down, now that he sometimes forgot names, faces, places. She wondered, too, if he’d be able to curb his anger and frustration when it welled up in the face of a customer or a colleague rather than herself or one of the boys. But days passed, and then weeks, and still he didn’t come home, which was no bad thing except that neither did he send money. This made her feel abandoned, not liberated; the brown envelopes had been proof to the world that she was a wife. Now she had to eke out the contents of her housekeeping tin, shopping frugally, as if they were on rations. She thought about Sew and Sew’s, and wondered if Barbara might have her back when little Andrew started school. She wondered if she was brave enough to ask.

  Then one day a letter fell on to the doormat. It was in a stiff brown envelope, larger than average, and her name was typed on the front, not handwritten. Her heart seemed to stop when she first picked it up, although it wasn’t a letter from beyond the grave or a summons from the police, but a very formal communication from a solicitor; her father’s solicitor, acting on behalf of Harold. She read the words many times over in order to fathom their meaning, though she wasn’t completely certain she grasped it. It was definitely to do with her father though, and his wife, Mrs Binley. Unless Annie was entirely mistaken, it seemed they might both be dead.

  She read the words aloud, the better to understand.

  We are writing to you in accordance with Mr Harold E.G. Platt’s last will and testament, which states that if his wife pre-deceases him or if his gift to her should fail for any other reason, then, following payment of funeral expenses and administration costs, all his estate, both real and personal, should go to you, his only child, Annabelle Doyle, nee Platt.

  ‘I’ll be blowed,’ Annie said. It sounded very much as though she’d been left something by her father, now deceased. Or was he? Perhaps this letter was simply to notify her of her father’s intentions should he die. She lowered the document and tried to conjure her father in her mind’s eye but all she could see was a bowler hat and a waxed moustache. Mrs Binley loomed large though: that shelf of a bosom, those calculating eyes, that self-satisfied smile. What the devil could have become of her? Annie felt quite certain that Mrs Binley was too determinedly fleshy and substantial to have done anything so feeble as die. But the next morning, in the unexpectedly dowdy office of Harper, Madely and Prince, she sat on a grey plastic chair, Andrew on the floor at her feet with crayons and a colouring book, and heard that Agnes Platt had in fact died alongside her husband in a fatal car accident in Norfolk.

  ‘A motoring holiday, last month,’ Mr Prince said, darting a glance at Annie over the top of his tortoiseshell spectacles. He was elderly, small and trim, with the keen, beady appearance of a clever little mouse, but there was dust on his desk and the diary, open in front of him, looked lamentably blank; Annie could see her own name in there, but no other. Business was hardly brisk here. She wondered what had happened to Harper and Madely: there was certainly no room for them in this drab little office if they happened to turn up.

  �
�Collision with a stationary tractor on a lane outside Burnham Market,’ Mr Prince continued. ‘They must have been driving at quite a lick.’

  He seemed cheerfully unfazed that she was receiving this news for the first time. Annie thought it was just as well that she didn’t happen to mind very much. Still, though: last month! She attempted indignation.

  ‘Shouldn’t I have been informed earlier?’

  ‘This is why you’re here now, Mrs Doyle.’

  ‘At the time, I mean. What about the police? Don’t they tell next of kin?’

  ‘Ordinarily, I suppose they do, yes, although sometimes people can slip through the net, as it were.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I believe your relationship with your father was rather distant?’

  Annie thought this impertinent so she ignored it. ‘And the funeral?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mr Prince. ‘Ten days ago, a double ceremony, followed by a double cremation. It was all organised, I gather, by the sons of Mrs Platt.’

  ‘Mrs Binley,’ Annie said.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Never mind. Do they get anything?’

  ‘They?’

  ‘Her sons.’

  ‘Erm, I don’t believe they—’

  ‘Do you happen to know if there’s a parrot?’

  Mr Prince’s eyes flicked nervously towards the door. Annie said, ‘She used to have a parrot called Mr Christian.’

  ‘I see.’ He studied the paperwork on his desk. ‘No,’ he said, looking up. ‘No mention of a parrot.’

  ‘So what exactly has he left me then?’

  ‘Everything, Mrs Doyle, except, it would appear, Mr Christian, although there’s every chance he may have pre-deceased them.’

  ‘When you say everything …?’

  Mr Prince nodded. ‘I do mean everything. A substantial property and all its contents, monies accumulated in savings, bonds and investments, plus a valuable life insurance policy which, according to the terms of the arrangement, now pays out to you.’

  ‘Why?’ Annie asked, suspicious that at the heart of this sudden good fortune might lie a cruel joke. ‘I mean, I haven’t seen or spoken to my father for years.’

  ‘The fact remains you’re his only issue,’ Mr Prince said.

  ‘Mrs Binley thought her sons would inherit.’

  ‘If you mean Mrs Platt, then I do believe she exerted some pressure on your father to alter his will. I believe she may have believed it was, in fact, altered, although your father never had any intention of benefitting his second wife’s extended family.’

  ‘Really?’ Annie said. She felt a little sad, now, for the first time. She wished she could have said thank you to her father, but then, he did seem to have intended her to discover his generosity only after his death. After all, he knew where she lived. He could have called in any time.

  ‘Did you know my father well?’ she asked.

  He took off his spectacles, as if he couldn’t answer a personal question while he was wearing them.

  ‘I handled all his business,’ he said. ‘Did so for many years. But I can’t in all honesty say we became friends.’

  ‘No,’ Annie said. ‘I can imagine.’

  ‘But our professional relationship was always cordial.’

  ‘He didn’t much like me,’ Annie said. ‘That’s why I’m surprised at this will.’

  Mr Prince cleaned the lenses of his glasses with a soft brown cloth. ‘I’ve been administering people’s dying wishes for many years, Mrs Doyle,’ he said, and he popped the spectacles back on, although he still regarded her not through them but over the upper rim. ‘And if the experience has taught me anything, it’s the truth of that old adage: blood is thicker than water.’

  ‘Speaking of that …’ Annie said, and then faltered. It had slowly been dawning on her that here, in the moral limbo of a solicitor’s office, she might resolve a nagging loose end that, alone, she felt powerless to address. Mr Prince waited, and kept his bright dark eyes upon her, inviting her to speak.

  ‘Well, that is, I wonder, as I’m here,’ she went on, ‘whether you can help me with another matter?’

  ‘Certainly,’ he said. ‘If we can.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Annie. ‘We?’

  Mr Prince blushed an endearing pink, for he knew for a fact what Annie had surmised: that Harper, Madely and Prince was in fact a one-man band, and a rather under-employed one at that. He coughed, and continued.

  ‘Figure of speech, Mrs Doyle: the royal we. It goes without saying that what passes between us here is entirely between you and me.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, with ingratiating meekness. ‘It’s just …’ She glanced down at Andrew, good as gold on the floor, his tongue poking out in concentration as he coloured in all the animals of a zoo in outrageous technicolour. ‘I need a birth certificate for this little chap.’

  ‘I see, and have you spoken to the city registrar?’

  ‘No!’ Annie said, and then again, ‘No,’ in a more reasonable tone of voice. She considered for a moment then said, ‘I hoped perhaps you could see to it for me?’

  ‘I believe it’s perfectly straightforward, Mrs Doyle. Perhaps Mr Doyle—?’

  ‘He’s never at home,’ Annie said quickly. ‘And he’s not a nice person.’

  Mr Prince was silent.

  ‘I worry,’ Annie said in a stage whisper, ‘that I have no proof he’s mine.’ She was aware of the danger of exposure, of the potential risk to her carefully constructed story, but here she was with a brand-new fortune and the willing ear of a distinctly shabby solicitor, and after all, every man had his price. ‘It’s complicated,’ she said. ‘I’d like some documentation, without … without necessarily going through the usual channels.’

  She was practically holding her breath, waiting to see if she’d misjudged the situation, but Mr Prince only made a steeple with his fingers, to rest his chin. He looked thoughtful, amenable. He didn’t look scandalised.

  ‘Well,’ Annie said. ‘And if such a thing might be possible, then I’m able to pay for it, aren’t I?’

  ‘Well yes,’ he said, ‘after probate, naturally. These matters must run their course, but yes, yes.’

  ‘Whatever the cost,’ she said, and she raised her eyebrows at him.

  ‘Ah, I see,’ Mr Prince said. ‘Yes, yes.’

  ‘So, I wondered, then, if you’d handle this for me,’ she said, appealing now to his professionalism as well as his greed.

  ‘I believe I may be able to, yes,’ he said. He glanced at the closed door, as if it might be listening and couldn’t be trusted. ‘Expensive business, mind you.’

  ‘Well, and do my father’s investments run to it?’

  She honestly didn’t know what a skilled forger might charge for a fake birth certificate: hundreds, thousands? Anyway, she’d pay it, if she had it.

  ‘Oh yes, yes, you’re most definitely a woman of means, Mrs Doyle.’

  Andrew looked up from his labours and said, ‘Mummy, what did he say?’

  Annie reached down and ruffled the hair on top of his head. ‘I think he said we’re rich.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Andrew, and turned his attention back to the purple monkey, the blue bear, the orange crocodile.

  So Mr Prince promised to be in touch, then handed over the keys, along with the paperwork pertaining to all Harold Platt’s prudent investments, bonds and savings, and Annie returned to visit the house she had once shared with Harold and Lillian, the house she had thought she would never see again, the house that now belonged to her. Michael and Andrew were with her on the day she opened the solid oak front door and stepped back in time. The three of them stood on the large chequered tiles of the front hall and stared up and all around at the high ceiling, the heavy glass chandelier, the ornate plaster cornicing and the wide wooden staircase, which started in the middle of the floor and curved round to the first-floor landing.

  ‘Big,’ Andrew said.

  ‘Mmm,’ said Annie, ‘and very empt
y.’

  Somebody had plundered the place, stripped the walls of paintings and mirrors and carted away the furniture. The Binley sons, no doubt, thwarted in the end by Harold and determined to gain some small advantage for themselves. Daylight robbery, but Annie didn’t really care. They could have it all; she’d buy new, and anyway the emptier the house, the fewer the memories. She’d have the locks changed, though, by nightfall.

  Andrew started to tear about, excited by the space and the echoing, empty rooms. Michael, always wary in new places, stayed close to Annie and accompanied her on a methodical tour, room by room. This took some time; you could fit their entire Sydney Road home into half of the ground floor, thought Annie. She was reminded of her father’s grandiosity, his preening ambition. But then, what could he have meant by marrying Agnes Binley, with her rough hands and her brassy, knowing laughter? What wiles had she used to raise herself in his eyes from char to mistress to wife? Annie could think only of the bedroom, and she shuddered.

  ‘What?’ Michael asked.

  ‘Oh, nothing.’

  They wandered around and Michael was silent, though she could almost see his mind whirring and working, taking everything in, missing nothing. There was dust on the dado rails, old bills and newspapers on the floor, but other than that the house was a shell. Those Binleys, thought Annie. She could understand them taking the big-bellied mahogany chests, the solid walnut bedsteads, the gleaming rosewood nests of tables with their thin, bandy legs; but why would they want the socks and pants, the toothpaste and the lavatory brush, the salt, pepper, Bisto and beans? They must have been driven by the belief that this was their very last chance to get something for nothing.

  ‘This was mine,’ she said to Michael, when they were upstairs. It was a small, square room, with a window overlooking the street. At some stage in its history, Mrs Binley had had it redecorated, so the rose-sprigged paper that Annie remembered was gone and instead there was heavy flock in thick stripes of burgundy and gold.