Walking into the living room we exchanged comments about the weather before she turned to look at me properly.
‘You’re tired, Rachel, I can see it in your eyes. They are sparkling just like they used to when you were little and needed to go to bed.’
I swear she never made such an observation when I was younger. It was as if she was trying to create some blissful, Enid Blyton childhood memories for me. All made up because it wasn’t ever like that.
I looked around me. The flowers on the patterned wallpaper had lost their colour, bleached by the sun over the years, and the green carpet, fashionable no doubt in the eighties, was dated and worn. She hesitated for a moment, as if there were words sitting on her lips waiting to be spoken. Then she must have decided against it. ‘I’ll get us some tea, shall I?’ she said too loudly.
Laura didn’t have children of her own, so there were no photographs of graduations or weddings or christenings to flaunt to her friends. Only images of John, my uncle, her husband who died when I was little. It struck me that hers might be a lonely, sad existence, and I wondered why I hadn’t made more of an effort to visit her more often. But when she came back into the room with a tray of tea and biscuits I was reminded why I kept my distance. In her face I could see my mother’s.
Taking a seat in the armchair opposite me, she poured the tea and handed me a cup and saucer. She had always seemed so big when I was younger, in the role of my protector. Now the armchair looked ready to swallow her up. Instead of sinking into it she perched on the edge, waiting to be interviewed.
‘I know about Clara,’ I said. She didn’t look up so I couldn’t see her expression. ‘I know, Laura, but I still have a lot of gaps. You have to tell me everything. I think you owe me that at least.’
Laura sighed and spooned the sugar into her tea and stirred.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘Niamh should have told you long ago.’
‘Niamh should have done a lot of things,’ I said. ‘When did Clara find out?’
‘Oh Rachel, what good is it going to do now, dragging all this up …’ I felt my cheeks heat with anger. After everything she still assumed she knew what was best for me. I gritted my teeth and spoke.
‘I asked you how long had Clara known? Did she know when we moved here, to Brighton?’
‘No darling, they wrote to each other, well your mother wrote to her, but they hadn’t seen each other in years. There was no way Simon, Clara’s dad, would have agreed to them meeting, not after everything that happened.’ She stopped, wondering no doubt about how much of the story I was actually familiar with, how much she could get away with glossing over. ‘Then of course he turned up one day to collect her from a friend’s house and found out it was actually Niamh’s house. That was a bit of a problem, I don’t mind telling you. Simon took a lot of convincing that it was just one of those inexplicable coincidences, which it was, Rachel, I hope you know that. No one was more surprised to find out you and Clara were friends than Niamh.’
‘Anyway there were lots of arguments after that. Simon had a job offer in the States and was all for taking it and moving Clara over there but Niamh begged him not to.’ She took a little sip of tea and placed her cup gently back on the saucer. ‘So they came to an arrangement. He insisted that as long as Clara was a child Niamh would never tell her she was her mother. But once she was an adult, old enough to make her own decisions … well, he knew he couldn’t keep it from her forever.’
‘And she agreed to it, just like that?’ It seemed so uncharacteristic of my mother to adhere to anyone’s rules.
‘What choice did she have? She’d walked out on them after all, no judge would have given her custody. Clara was only a baby at the time and Simon, well it was terribly hard for him, he was barely an adult himself when it happened. But he wouldn’t let Clara go. He would have done anything for that girl.’ Her gaze moved towards the window. The sun was streaming in, hitting my face and making me squint. I shifted in my seat to avoid it.
I thought of your dad who had always put you firmly at the centre of his universe. You used to tease him. When are you going to find a girlfriend, Dad? And he did have them, but the relationships were fleeting, never serious. You filled up so much of his world there wasn’t room for anyone else. It made sense now, the struggle to take care of you and carve out a career, to make a life for you both. Why would he have done anything to jeopardise it?
‘Poor Simon, it was such a difficult time for him and then the worry that he might lose Clara altogether.’ Laura sighed.
I was trying to take it all in slowly, memorise what she was telling me, so I could leave her with the facts clear and ordered in my mind.
‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘Why would he have lost her?’
‘You never knew your grandfather did you?’ Laura asked. I thought of the blurry image I had of an older man with white hair and a beard that always held a crumb or two of what he had eaten for his last meal. The smell of pipe smoke. That was all I remembered.
I shook my head.
‘Hmmm,’ she said as if the story of her father held the key to everything. ‘Well, your mother was always his favourite, she could do no wrong even when we were children. He gave her everything. And I mean everything she wanted. He ruined her, we could all see it. And then she went and got pregnant and we thought he would hit the roof because he was strict but no, he told her not to worry, that she always had her family for support. And then Clara came along, his first grandchild, and he doted on her; he’d take her out for hours in her pram at the weekend, sit her on his knee and sing her lullabies, he’d tell her stories, tickle her and make her chuckle. He was smitten with his little Clarabel,’ she said, the resentment towards her dead father still sharp in her voice.
‘When Niamh walked out he was devastated. He couldn’t understand how anyone could do that, let alone his own daughter, his favourite daughter. He insisted on giving Simon all the help he needed, looking after Clara at weekends, organising childcare so Simon could study. But that wasn’t quite enough for my father and he decided it would be best for everyone if Clara came to live with him and my mother. The man had taken leave of his senses.’
‘I assume Simon wasn’t exactly receptive to the idea?’ I said.
‘Good God no, he was enraged and who could blame him? He thought my father was trying to be kind by offering him support, not angling to steal his baby daughter from him. My father threatened to fight for custody, lawyers’ letters were sent backwards and forwards, but then suddenly he dropped it. I think he was taken aback by how protective Simon was of Clara. I don’t think he expected a man who was barely twenty to put up such a fight. Besides, he’d never have got custody anyway. Simon was a model dad. But he did make sure your grandfather never saw Clara again. First he lost Niamh and then Clara too. It killed him in the end.’
She took a breath and sighed. ‘So you see, Rachel, your mother didn’t doubt Simon when he threatened to take Clara away. And if it wasn’t that job in the States he could easily get another one; he was a successful consultant, in demand. At least if she played by his rules she still got to see Clara through you.’ Laura saw the look on my face and lowered her eyes, shamed by her own words. ‘Oh, I didn’t mean it like that, I meant—’
‘Don’t.’ I held my hand up. Niamh had exploited the thing most precious to me and then kept me in the dark when everyone else knew. I wanted to pick up Laura’s china tea set and hurl it across the room.
She must have read my mind.
‘She was going to tell you, Rachel, how could she have kept it from you? Simon agreed that she could tell Clara a few months before her eighteenth birthday and she was supposed to tell you afterwards.’
‘Supposed to …’ I laughed. ‘When did Niamh ever do what she was supposed to do?’
‘Well now, Rachel, I don’t want to makes excuses for your mother but she was in a difficult position. It was a shock for Clara, an enormous shock for a young girl to be told her frien
d’s mother is actually her mother too. And she begged Niamh just to give her a few weeks to get her head round the idea, to let it sink in, before she told you.’
The room was spinning, the tea tasted like tar in my mouth. I closed my eyes but I could see colours jumping about beneath my eyelids. You knew, Clara, you knew and you kept it from me, begged her not to tell me and all the time you acted as if nothing had changed. I thought of the day of your birthday barbecue, the way you both ignored me. You wanted her all to yourself, to erase me from the picture.
Best friends who tell each other everything but the truth.
‘Ten years,’ I cried, ‘ten years she’s been dead, Laura, and you haven’t told me. Everyone else knew and still you chose to keep me in the fucking dark.’
‘Oh darling, you just seemed to be doing so well for yourself, it was like you didn’t want to be reminded of the past. You were so focused on the future. I always admired that in you.’
What a weak, lame excuse.
‘Hang on,’ she said and got up and left the room too quickly, eager to escape. I heard her footsteps climbing the stairs, then overhead. Five minutes later she returned carrying the ankle-boot shoebox I recognised immediately.
‘I shouldn’t have taken this from you after the funeral, but at the time I thought it was for the best.’ I heard the strain in her voice. ‘You deserved better. You always deserved better.’
Her eyes were wet with tears as I took the box from her. I wondered if she expected me to comfort her. I didn’t have it in me. All those years I thought she was protecting me. I thought she was better than Niamh. I believed she loved me where my own mother didn’t. Now I realised it was just pity disguised as love. Poor little know-nothing Rachel. All those memories: the flower names, the baking, they were all so false and empty now.
Opening the box I let the photographs spill out on to the floor. I saw the one of Niamh with the gumsy, smiling baby. I turned it over to read the name. Five faded letters.
CLARA.
They met when she was seventeen and your dad was nineteen. Niamh was still in the sixth form taking her A levels at the local private school. Childhood sweethearts, everyone said. And then she fell pregnant. It was 1978 and they thought they should do the right thing and get married. ‘They were in love,’ Laura said, staring out of the window, anywhere to spare her from looking at me. There was no part of her that wanted to tell me this story. The red blotches creeping up her neck, the sound of a dry mouth talking. She did it though. I think she must have known I would have beaten it out of her if I had to.
‘Clara was born at the beginning of September. I think Niamh had loved the attention of being pregnant, you know she always wanted to be different from everyone else and no one else she knew was having a baby. But the reality of being a mother soon hit her.’
‘Did she live at home with your parents?’ I asked. Laura allowed herself a dry laugh.
‘Your grandfather told her she would always be welcome in his house; she could have brought the baby up there if she’d wanted. But that wasn’t Niamh’s style – she craved independence, so he paid for a wedding and set her and Simon up in a flat. Not that she ever thanked him for it.’ I let her words hang in the air for a while, before I breathed them in. My mother, the woman with no redeeming qualities. ‘She was given everything and then she went and messed it up again.’
‘You mean she messed it up by getting pregnant with me?’
‘No, I … that’s not what I meant. Niamh threw everything my father did for her back in his face. We’d all been telling him for years that she could twist him round her little finger. We warned him to let her make her own mistakes. I think he thought we were jealous. And then she started leaving Clara in the flat on her own and going out. God knows where she got to. She couldn’t handle the responsibility, she’d never had to. And when she left, abandoned her baby and husband without so much as a goodbye, he shrank right before our eyes. My mother tried to contact her, to get her to come back, or speak to him at the very least. But she wouldn’t. She thought he would try to persuade her to come back to Brighton and back to Simon and her old life. So in the end she stopped taking the calls. I think that’s why your grandfather was so fixed on keeping Clara, that way he wouldn’t have lost Niamh entirely.’ Laura’s words were laced with anger and reproach. I allowed myself a wry laugh. All those years I had mistaken a sense of duty for sisterly love. I had believed their relationship was harmonious, if frustrating. But now I saw Laura had been jealous of Niamh, jealous of the undisguised, undeserving favouritism their father showed her. And now she was angry, that ten years after her sister died she was still dealing with the consequences of her sister’s behaviour.
‘Tell me about Clara,’ I said, ‘as a baby,’ I added, before she told me I knew you better than she did.
I heard her huff, and realised she thought she’d already told me more than enough to satisfy me. She had no idea what it was like to find out your whole life story has been fabricated and built on layers of lies. She didn’t understand the insatiable hunger to consume every single detail that has been kept from you.
‘She was difficult. Any mother would have found her hard work, let alone a teenage one. She didn’t sleep, she cried all the time.’ It sounded like Niamh’s description of me as a baby. I wondered whether she had deliberately swapped our stories.
Apparently your first home, Clara, was a one-bedroom flat on Lewes Road, where the noise of the buses thundering past would keep you awake. Laura said Simon gave Niamh lots of last chances, even when he found out she had gone out and left you alone in the flat. He must have really loved her to put up with that.
When Laura reached the point in the timeline of my conception, she began to squirm. I let her stew for a while, watching her struggle to come up with a palatable form of words to deliver the blow, before my impatience got the better of me.
‘For God’s sake, Laura, just say it: it was a drunken fuck against a pub wall.’ She blinked, startled by the language, and then nodded slowly.
‘Well I wouldn’t have quite put it in those terms, Rachel, but sadly that is roughly what happened.’
It was the one detail of my life Niamh had never tried to hide from me.
I wanted to know about the letters, when and how Niamh had begun sending you little missives of her love. Laura rubbed her head as if to staunch off a headache.
‘She’d always sent them, ever since Clara was at the age she could read. Before that she sent cuddly toys and cards, on her birthdays and at Christmas, but Simon wouldn’t give them to Clara. He said she was too young to be disappointed by her mother again.’ I wondered when Niamh wrote these tender messages of motherly love, cards that said all my love, Mum xxx. Would she pour her heart out to you and then turn to me, the daughter she lived with, and tell me I disgusted her? It was all so clear now, the absence of love: she was starving me of her affection to store it all up for you. I felt like I was sinking again, back into the past I had tried so hard to bury. My mother loomed so big in that room I felt her ghost was ready to consume me.
‘So how did they finally make contact?’ I asked and watched with horror Laura’s face colour. She couldn’t look me in the eye.
‘Oh God, it was you. You were her fixer.’ The pain ripped through me. So many betrayals.
‘Rachel, you’re making it sound so sordid. She promised me she was sorry, genuinely sorry for what she had done; she told me she regretted walking out on Clara every day of her life. She said she had changed, she wanted another chance. Your mother was so persuasive, she could make you believe anything. That was her power. She had it over my father. And she could turn it on whoever she wanted to. She begged and begged me.’ Laura stopped and took a tissue from her pocket to blow her nose. ‘So yes, in the end I …’
‘You agreed to do her bidding,’ I said, finishing her sentence.
‘I’d always kept in touch with Simon and seen Clara the odd time as she was growing up. So when she was a b
it older I asked if we could spend some time together. She’d come here one Sunday a month and I would give her Niamh’s letters. She never once told Simon, she knew it was to be our secret. All the poor girl wanted to know was that her mother still cared for her. You should have seen her face when she read them, Rachel, she devoured them. Her eyes would light up. Every girl wants a relationship with their mother.’ Laura carried on, the irony of her words lost on her.
Every girl wants a relationship with their mother.
‘She was fourteen when I gave her the first letter.’
‘A real coming of age,’ I said, doing the calculations in my head. ‘And your little introductions must have gone well because we moved down to Brighton the following year.’
‘Niamh didn’t expect you to become friends. Clara was older after all, we had no idea you’d end up in the same class. I didn’t want to be involved after that. I didn’t want Clara to find out that I was your aunt and make the connection. It was all so tangled.’
Tangled. The word didn’t even come close to encapsulating the twisted mess Niamh had created.
‘Do you know what it was like for me?’ I spat. ‘While you were passing fucking letters to Clara, have you any idea? Niamh didn’t give a fuck about me; Jesus Christ, you must have seen that. Every day she’d tell me how I was fat, or ugly, or stupid, how she wished she’d never had me. She was inventive, I’ll give her that, she always found a different way of telling me I was a piece of shit. You must have known, and yet you believed her when she said she’d changed? How could you have been sucked in by her promises, how could you have believed she was truly sorry when you saw how she treated me?’
Laura was sobbing, polite little stifled sobs that sounded like hiccups.
‘Rachel, please, please don’t do this, I never wanted you to find out like this.’ I watched her get up from the armchair and come over to me, her tanned, leathery arms outstretched.
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