The questioning of Mum’s legitimacy was precipitated by her father’s will. He had left her little, confirming feelings she had long known.
Physically there is no question that Dorothy and Ian Paterson’s first child, Mum’s brother, is his father’s spit. A big-lipped, ponderous man with black hair. My mother, however, was a redhead.
Only 1 to 2 per cent of the human population have red hair, because in order to have a red-haired child, both parents need to carry a mutated MC1R gene. The MC1R gene plays an important role in pigmentation. Statistics quoted in Nature Genetics reveal that carriers of the mutated gene make up fewer than 20 per cent of people with black or brown hair and less than 4 per cent of those with a good tanning response. Granddad was amongst the 4 per cent.
Though he pre-dated the genetic generation Granddad had resolved that red hair was wrong. He wrote in one letter to my grandmother, in the period before my mother was born, that he would be sorry if his child turned out to ‘have red hair’, though he bravely stated: ‘I don’t think it will matter very much.’
He knew, though, that he was being betrayed. Amongst the detritus of Granny’s life there is a massive correspondence that dates back to the war.
Reading it, it is possible to see that there can only have been a brief post-wedding honeymoon period of fidelity before Dorothy fell into bad habits. Soon she was comforting lonely officers, who were billeted in their house near Stirling. Or more often she was AWOL for weeks and weeks at a time. My mother remembered her disappearances, regular trips to London, that were marked by how irritable all the adults concerned were on Granny’s return.
Letters from Granddad during this period read: ‘I am feeling very sad this morning as there is no letter from you …’ or ‘I have had no letter from you, only an account rendered from Graham & Martin for over £460!’ (which in today’s money would be a blistering £19,300). Ian also writes that he has forwarded her engagement ring: ‘It was very bad of you to have left it behind and another time I won’t bother to send it on.’
Other than her chaperon and her husband, the third correspondent in the letter collection is the fantastically named Captain Ronnie Rushe. His name is familiar. My mother had rolled it over her tongue in my hearing, and after only two letters I want to roll it over my tongue too – Ronnie Rushe, I keep repeating to myself. Ronnie Rushe sending stockings from Beirut and Elizabeth Arden lipstick from Amalfi. A chest surgeon, who published in the Lancet in 1946. This is the kind of aspirational grandparent I want in my life – the kind of genetic heritage a person dreams of. I ring up Ed. It’s the first time in years he’s agreed with me about anything. He suggests we celebrate with champagne.
Ronnie Rushe is loving: ‘I have thought about you very many times my dear, and have regretted nothing’; ‘I never told [my wife] all – I let her know that we sailed very near the wind, but always denied anything else.’
Did Ronnie Rushe have red hair, though? I read on, hopeful that something may come up about freckles or burning beneath an African sun (however there is only mention of Rommel). Instead there are hints that Dorothy’s marriage is a mess. He writes saying he has sympathy with her domestic situation: ‘it can’t, I fear be a very cheerful one.’ Or asking whether the new nurse is ‘safe against Ian’s charms’. (Granny often railed against the nannies.)
However, with each letter the mirage of Ronnie Rushe as grandfather begins to dissolve. He mourns the time that has passed since they last met, and perhaps because he is married himself, Dorothy feels comfortable writing to him about her new lovers: ‘the American boyfriend sounds rather fun,’ Ronnie writes, or ‘that escapade with the Naval Officer in Glasgow – you really are the limit. How gratifying not to have lost your cunning.’ The name, though, that comes up most frequently is Phil. She wishes to leave her husband and child for him.
In the lead-up to Phil’s furlough from the war in Africa, in late July 1943 Dorothy raises with Ronnie (and probably every other person she is speaking to) the question of another baby. She claims that her in-laws are ‘pestering’ her to expand the family. Then she reinstates Ian’s ‘fortnightly visitations’ and tells everyone in her circle of this decision too. The resulting gossip makes sexual intercourse with Phil possible.
With the time for Phil’s leave fast approaching, Ronnie, admitting jealousy, counsels her to stay in her marriage till the end of the war, ‘so you will not risk being thrown out or being penniless’. Then after my mother is conceived, Ronnie, aghast, writes: ‘And this time, I don’t suppose you have consulted Dr Maclachlan?’ Which suggests there have been previous illegitimate pregnancies and other decisions made.
Once my mother is born Ronnie writes: ‘Ian is behaving well I am glad to hear,’ and ‘the fact that none of your in-laws know of the Phil episode – I do hope you have heard from him now, after all this time. And that he will see the force of your decision.’ Which was to have the baby, to pretend that it was her husband’s and to stay.
It is hard to imagine what my mother took from these letters, because we all draw from a text only what we need from it. However, after that brief hiatus in the months following her father’s death, Mum dropped the whole illegitimacy project and turned resolutely to God.
Lie 26: I am your father
Illegitimacy. Infidelity. There is much of both in my genes. Illegitimacy is a catch-all for any person born out of wedlock. It is an outdated definition, reflecting outdated views, and doesn’t acknowledge the silent group of illegitimates. The ones who are born within wedlock, but not of the father they think. Here the nature/nurture question is at its most interesting.
I work for a professor who researches at the interstices between the genetic inheritance from our parents and the environment in which we live. He and his fellow scientists are preoccupied with that grey area between. How a stressed-out animal and his stressed-out sperm can imprint biological change in the next generation. For example, mice who were not exposed to stress themselves but were fathered by the stressed-out are found to be more likely to underestimate risk, have an upset metabolism and be depressed. (A depressed mouse, in case you’re interested, is one that gives up.) A human study has also been conducted by researchers at Mount Sinai University, looking at the children of Holocaust victims. Not only have these offspring inherited their parents’ eye colour, musical talent and metabolism, they have, it seems, inherited their stress. Rachel Yehuda and her team analysed the genes of the survivors’ offspring and found that there were epigenetic tags on the same part of the stress-related gene in both parent and child. Epigenetic tags choreograph the activity of our genes, and Yehuda and her colleagues assert that these tags can be inherited.
Once a baby is out in the world, the family she finds herself being parented by and the environment she lives in may change the way her genes are expressed, which has an impact on how she grows, and on the children she comes to produce.
So although the sperm that created my mother will have had its own genetic message (a man on furlough from a war) and her lawful father’s genes will not, the environment of mistrust and betrayal that she grew up in will also have had its biological impact. On her, and ultimately on me.
Up until the end of the twentieth century sexual infidelity was seen to have a more significant impact on men than on women, because men financially had a lot more to lose. Like my grandfather, when a partner was unfaithful, the cuckold was forced to live not only with the betrayal, but with the financial burden of another man’s child. The research term for this kind of lie is ‘misattributed paternity’.
Data on misattributed paternity is most often drawn from men with ‘low paternity confidence’, who themselves make the decision to take a paternity test. This is a category into which my grandfather may have put himself. Had science been a bit further on in the forties and fifties, we might have found him at the front of the queue.
Genetic origin is important for a person’s sense of identity, psychological well-being and personal autonomy. A chi
ld’s right to know his or her own biological parentage is recognised under Article 7 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, 1989. Lady Warnock, the philosopher who had established anonymity for gamete donors when she chaired a UK parliamentary inquiry on the subject in 1984, later reversed her opinion. On seeing the figures of how many parents of donor children choose to lie, she argued that to keep a child’s biological origins a secret is ‘evil’. The deception, she said, is of a ‘very long-term kind’, in which the interests of the parents are given precedence over the interests of the child.
In the case of misattributed paternity the mother finds herself in a toxic bind from which she cannot escape. Even though the proof of her lies has grown inexorably inside her, evidence of her deceit written all over her child’s face, it is a secret that must stay secret. A skeleton that needs burying in the darkest places of the psyche, if this is a fib she will be able to pull off. And ‘pulling it off’ in cases like this is a lifelong endeavour.
Secrets are a burden. We talk of them weighing us down. Psychologists from Columbia and Stanford have found a correlation between the language we use and the way secrets make people physically feel. To be carrying the wrong child must be like having your pockets filled with stones.
Which, with my grandmother, led to an infuriating evasiveness. By the time Mum had found and read the Rushe letters my grandmother teetered on the edges of dementia. Mum and I would sit in her ludicrously expensive room at the nursing home, watching her eyes shift and her words skate as she attempted to manage her deceit. Mum, her bag clasped hard in her lap, would stare straight ahead, like a person at a bus stop. Waiting.
All she would ever know of her biological father was that perhaps his name was Phil. Phil, as a grandparent within me, has been genetically randomised. There will be bits of him, Dorothy Jane, Rose Haran and the mentally frail Michael Doyle littered through me in a mosaic of chromosomes. I am mildly curious about which bits might be Phil’s, but to my mother this poverty of knowing became a struggle to know and to understand herself.
Lie 27: The Saudis are all bloody incompetent
In the end, Mum completed the visa application for Saudi Arabia herself.
Ed and I wore matching T-shirts and trousers, outfits she had bought specially for the trip. As she had once dressed for dinner, now she dressed us for the flight.
Flying, to my intense disappointment, was sitting still, with nothing to look at through the window. British Airways wouldn’t be privatised until 1987 and was considered by everyone across the eastern Gulf coast to be the poor man’s choice. However the drinks were free, and on the milk run between Heathrow and Dhahran in the late seventies, that was the only important consideration.
In October 1977 everyone on that plane was a worker heading east to the driest country on earth. Getting completely hammered was mandatory, and every adult did. On one return flight into Terminal 3 a few years later, Dad was so drunk the flight crew weren’t able to manhandle him into his seat for landing. He flailed about in economy until the plane hit the tarmac, levelling him in the aisle.
But that first evening, as we disembarked, we found the wind blew hot like a hairdryer, and the slow burn of the sun from the sky was replaced by a sudden plunge into night. Far into the distance, beyond the runway, a few orange streetlights marked out a path through the waste of desert, and in the distance huge flames tore into a black sky.
Only in 2006 did Saudi Arabia begin issuing tourist visas, and with huge restrictions – no single women under the age of thirty, no unmarried couples and no Jews. It is not a country that wants to invite the world in. Back then we were mere workers, submitted to a frisk and search, like janitors heading into a jail.
Getting through customs at Dhahran took hours. The long line of westerners were scrutinised bag by bag, shirt by shirt, a mess of belongings accumulating beneath the tables. The queues were chaotic and the inspection team, wearing white gloves, unpredictable. They were looking for ham, alcohol and indecent material. There was talk of women strapping bacon to their stomachs, or smuggling porn in a concealed compartment of their suitcases, but the things we lost beneath the table were more innocent: a children’s book, or a jar of olives, making a bottle of gin feel as dangerous as an IED. The Saudi justice system lacked any logic, and once tangled up in it there was a sense that anything could happen. Anything at all.
So, rightly, the Marks & Spencer’s clothing was of huge concern as we waited. However, without labels it was impossible to prove our clothes had been stitched by infidels, and so, duly disembowelled, we trailed out from behind the temporary partitions, struggling to carry what we hadn’t been able to repack.
The arrivals hall teemed with men wearing identical uniforms of white dresses, their heads bound in red checked scarves, sandals flacking across the marble floor. Occasionally there was a figure swathed in yards of black polyester, hennaed hands holding the material tight over her face.
Of seeing Dad I remember nothing until we were careering through the darkness in a dusty cab, Arabic music belting out the open windows. Looking over into the back seat he told us that there had been a problem with our accommodation.
‘We’ve been allocated a flat in Dammam.’
‘Dammam?’ Mum leant forward to be heard better. ‘You said we’d be given a house.’
I watched the prayer beads swing from the rearview mirror and clutched the back of the passenger seat.
‘You wouldn’t believe’, he said, ‘the incompetence of these people.’
Through the windscreen the flames shrank away to the north, the skyline of a town looming ahead.
‘Where the hell’s Dammam?’ Mum asked.
Dammam was where the buildings and roads were unfinished, sand driven up onto the patchy pavements by a chaos of cars. Dammam was where weevils overran our cornflakes and rats the size of Dad’s shoe overran the front step. All of it became proof to my mother that he had pretended in his application he was single. The reason there had been no house ‘on compound’, she said after his death, was because he simply had not applied for one. Dammam, she told me, was where his lies caught him up.
Lie 28: I’m leaving you
Mum leaves us in Saudi Arabia with Dad. There is a threat that this time it’s for good.
We are ten and eight. It’s a shock. Everything was going so well. Dad had ditched his anger for parties and sailing. Mum had got stuck into the Women’s Group. She would make Afternoon Tea each Wednesday afternoon, where scones and tea quickly gave way, on the dot of five, to homemade booze.
There had been time to breathe.
We have a new house too, with grass around it, a stunted palm, air conditioning and a view of the six-foot-high Aramco fence. Beyond stands the baseball pitch and the Rolling Hills Golf Club, its ‘greens’ held together by tar. Through the wire we watch women in shorts, with squares of carpet, pitch and putt, digging dirt from the holes as they go. They drive huge Chevrolets, living a life that we can only dream of and from which we are roundly excluded. Security at their gates is tight.
The Aramco compound has its own television channel, which we’re able to pick up with our aerial, if a wadge of aluminium foil is scrunched around each of its ends. Our world has expanded in magical ways. There is the recreation centre, where we hurl ourselves off the diving board, and the wasted desert, through which we explore, tinkering in the dirt. Dancing between the sprinklers we roam free for hours.
After Mum goes there are dens built with discarded builders’ waste, the scorpion is fed, the camel stroked. Dad is at work most of the time, and in a better mood. We eat a good deal of Tuna Helper, beans, toast in the evening. For lunch we take ourselves to the rec centre for burgers, fries, a slush. The new puppie machine has arrived and the blue ones are best. Perhaps we play a couple of games of pool, go swimming. The weeks are ours and there is lots to do.
One afternoon we come back to find Dad has rearranged the furniture, and the guest toilet has a sign on the door in blue bir
o which reads ‘Men Only’. We are told when we get in that it is absolutely out of bounds. But as the freezer is emptied for ice production, outdoor seating looted from the neighbours, and the bachelor contingent begin to traipse over with plastic cool boxes, we await our opportunity. Dad’s mood is buoyant. We take a risk.
The toilet is no bigger than a cubicle, with maroon tiles on the floor and white walls. On the inside of the door, at head height for Ed and anyone seated on the lavatory, there is a picture. A brunette stands in a black basque and panties, one stilettoed foot balanced on a plain wooden chair. Blu-tacked beneath her is another picture. The same woman. Closer. She is now seated, one breast exposed. And beneath is another, and another, a comic-strip undress, the woman’s face falling from view as the camera pans down to where it matters; the spread labia, the purply inside of her, raw as a wound.
Hustler’s first publication of a woman jacked open was only four years earlier, in 1974. This is on the boundary of unacceptability in the West. And in Saudi it is going too far. The religious police, had they raided, would have lashed my father in the public square.
Later I would remember the ‘Men Only’ toilet merely as an aberration. A father going crazy in the straightest country on earth. But that night I am too relieved to care. We are on holiday from his rage and his impatience. We live a lie with him, that he is free, and that when the party deteriorates in the small hours to a bedraggled chain of adults staggering off into the desert he won’t have to wake up to the truth.
In bed we listen to their shouts fall away in the warm night, disappearing down into the dark corners of the compound, away towards the perimeter fence. They hunt for ages, the women’s giggles punctuating each call, and the person we hear them yelling for is George.
A Book of Untruths Page 7