All I could say was “Well. That’s a lot to think about.”
“The boys, well I just think they came along because he wanted a dynasty. I did everything I could to stop them coming one after the other. It’s as though I didn’t really have a say in it. I don’t even like them very much. I’m just trapped with them, feeding them, cleaning up after them. God knows what I’d do without Monika. He gets out every day, he’s not often home in the evenings – he gets back late, usually after having spent a few hours in the pub – I don’t know why he comes back sometimes. Sometimes he doesn’t – Oh I don’t know Uncle Ted. I don’t want them. I wish they had never been born. Oh shit! How did I get into this mess?”
She was working herself up into a state.
I sat her down at the kitchen table and got her a glass of wine. I had to let her calm down for a few moments.
“I won’t say that you don’t mean all those things. I’m sure you do. You’re so like your mother sometimes, you’ve got so much I common with her.”
“You mean she resented me? She didn’t want me? I was a complete mistake, a disaster and her life would have been so much better if she had never had me?”
“I’m saying that you wouldn’t be the intelligent 23 year old young lady you are if you didn’t, at times, resent the fact that you have a husband and four children to look after. I’m saying that you wouldn’t be normal if you didn’t sometimes think ‘what might have been’. It’s just that both you and your mother both ask what ‘might have been’ if you hadn’t married the man you did and had the children you’ve had. That’s what you have in common. You both keep thinking that ‘what might have been’ would have been infinitely better.”
“You seem to know a lot about my mother.”
“I’ve known her a long time.” was all I could say. She didn’t need to know any more today.
“She only had the two of you. You’ve got four, four children are a lot to deal with.”
She drank her wine, staring into the glass. “Five”
“Oh no!” The words were spoken before I could stop them. “I mean...”
“Yes another!” she smiled ruefully at my confusion.
“Why Susannah? I’m sure there’re ways and means these days. It’s easier....”
“You mean the pill? He won’t let me. You mean it’s easier to get rid of them now? He wouldn’t hear of it. It’s no easier for me to get rid of this...” she hit her stomach hard with a fist “...than it would have been for mother to get rid of me!”
To that there was no answer.
She looked at me as she had done when she was a small girl. Before she had had Carl’s friendship and love, when she had been alone.
“Don’t you have anyone who can help you? Anyone you can turn to?”
She and Charles had never been close and although she depended on Monika, she knew she could not help her with this sort of thing. She looked so young as she shook her head.
“Is there anything I can do, Susannah? I know I’m probably not the best person but I’ll do anything to help. If I can.” I finished lamely.
“Would you? He doesn’t know I’m .... you know .... ‘up the spout’ again. If you could let me have some money – anything, help me find a clinic or whatever, help me sort it out – before he knows – would you? Could you?” She was beginning to cry now .... so, of course, I went to put my arm around her to comfort her.
I was thinking how I could ask my secretary to help – what would she think, would she know what to do? How was I going to sort out this mess? Susannah was sobbing more and more deeply on my shoulder when Joe came into the kitchen.
“I think she is tired Joe, I think she needs a rest.”
“No she’s just being feeble as usual. Sue, the children are asking for you. You have neglected them too long. It is time to blow out the candle on the cake. You will not want to miss that, will you.” It was not a question and I knew she hated being called Sue.
As she left the kitchen and I carefully folded the tea cloth that had been in my hands throughout, Joe took the cloth from me and placed it on the hook by the boiler.
I had no idea how much, if anything, he had overheard. He had overhead my conversation with Alicia in the garden of Sandhey on the afternoon of his wedding – that had been information to his advantage – had he overheard this?
He certainly didn’t seem surprised that his wife was crying and that I was trying to comfort her.
“Leave it. Don’t interfere. She’s fine.” He didn’t sound like a man talking to his boss.
Susannah did her duty by the children, laughing and playing with them until they were as tired as she was.
As Monika put the children to bed Max and I sat with Charles, Susannah and Joe out on the patio with a bottle of wine. The sun was still warm. I was thinking of a July 4th some years earlier when I had met Alicia off the boat in Liverpool and she had got very drunk with the Americans at the Adelphi. How many years ago? 17 years. It seemed a lifetime.
It was Charles who broke the silence which should have been companionable but wasn’t.
“Look I’m giving a lecture next week, there’s a series of talks by people with local connections. Would you like to come with me? It would get you out of the house, Monika can look after the kids and I know you’d enjoy it. If you don’t want to come to my lecturing on about birds you could always listen to one of the others.”
“No I don’t think so.”
Joe had answered for her. I would have sworn she was going to say “yes”.
“And she doesn’t need to ‘get out of the house’ as you put it. She is perfectly happy.”
He was talking about her as if she wasn’t there.
“I work day and night to get the money to keep her and the children well provided for. I can do no more than I do. All she’s got to do is stay at home and keep the house.”
There was just the hint of menace in the voice – just the hint that he was annoyed, thinking that we were finding fault with him.
“We’re not questioning how you provide for your family Joe, how could we? You have a lovely house here, a lovely garden – Josie goes to a good school – No we cannot, nor would we, question how you are looking after your family.”
“Then what are you criticising me for?”
“We aren’t.”
“Yes you are. You are always checking up on me, keeping tabs on me. Well everything is fine. Absolutely fine.”
Without saying a word Susannah got up and went into the house.
“Joe, we just think Susannah looks a little ...”
“downtrodden?” he asked mockingly.
“No. Don’t put words in my mouth, a little tired. You have, after all, had your last three children in very quick succession – young children are tiring. Susannah’s a very intelligent young woman, she could, perhaps, want to do more with her life than look after babies.”
“That, with the greatest respect, is not for you to worry about. It is not your business. Have another drink.”
Why do people always say “with the greatest respect” when they mean the exact opposite? Joe was showing how little respect he had for us.
I realised that evening what Susannah must have seen some time ago, Joe was using us all, the firm, the family, all of us.
But we all had another glass of wine and the awkwardness was pushed to the background by gentle conversation about nothing at all.
Susannah phoned me at the office early on the following Tuesday morning, the 7th July.
“Uncle Ted, Can we have a word?”
“Susannah, of course.”
“About the party. What I said. It was a mistake.”
“What was the mistake Susannah? Your thinking you are pregnant again or your telling me that you are?”
The silence at the end of the line was painful.
“Susannah, are you still there?”
“Yes I’m still here, and I’m still pregnant.”
“Do you still
want a termination?” I thought I had better bite the bullet. “Because if you do, you know I’m here and will help in any way I can. No one should have to have children they don’t want in this day and age.”
“Unlike 24 years ago you mean?”
“Susannah for God’s sake don’t be so hard on yourself! You are you. Take no notice of the past and whatever your parents did or didn’t do. You are you. You have your life. Do what you have to do and do it with your chin up.”
“I must talk to someone.”
“Come in to town for lunch – leave the children with Monika, she’ll pick up Josie from school tell her you’re going shopping – she will understand. We’ll meet at the Adelphi..”
I looked across at Susannah as she held the menu in her hand, I don’t think she was reading it. It was the same dining room in which I had eaten with her mother. Susannah was so very like Alicia had been, before the illness that was now eating her away. I felt desperately moved by the thought of the opportunities these two women had missed in their lives, how everything had gone so wrong for both of them.
It was now too late for Alicia, but surely I must be able to do something to help her daughter?
As we sat with menus in hand but taking no interest in choosing our meal, all I could do was listen as she talked.
She told me, in more detail than I wanted about her relationship with Joe. How he had said so often that they liked it at the office when she was pregnant, he said it showed what a family man he was, how respectable he’d become. He’d said that it stopped her straying like her mother had, how ‘everyone’ knew that her mother was a tart who’d gone with all and sundry, and who left her when she was a baby. She told me how he had explained to her, very clearly, how he was going to make sure she didn’t do what her mother had.
“Mother would have got rid of me like a shot. I think that she really really didn’t want me and I really really don’t want this one.”
Her voice was breaking but she carried on, not letting me interrupt.
“He knows that I have always loved Carl, and that he was always second best. He knows I only went with him because I’d lost Carl and he knows that I could never love anyone else. He knows he couldn’t hold a candle to Carl, he knows that if Carl turned up I would go away with him just like that,” clicking her fingers over her shoulder, dramatically, just like her mother, “even though Carl..” She had great difficulty finishing the sentence, “even though Carl is my brother.”
She continued with hardly a break “He knows I can’t leave the children, though he seems to think that if I had only one or two I would – and the more there are the more I’m tied to him – and so he wants child after child after child – and I just can’t do it.” Her voice was rising hysterically as she found herself putting barely thought out worries into words.
This was not what I wanted to hear. She had said so much last Saturday but I really hoped that had been the result of the odd wine or two too many. It evidently wasn’t. What was I to say? I just sat there and wordlessly handed over a handkerchief for her to blow her nose.
We sat in silence for a few minutes, she looking down at the menu in her hand and the crisp white linen napkin on her lap.
“Do you still want to eat lunch or would you rather go for a walk?”
“Let’s go.”
I slipped the waiter a note, apologising, saying my friend was not well and we left.
If only we’d stayed just a few minutes longer.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing and we left when it was right for Susannah that lunchtime. But I have wondered over the intervening years what might have happened had we stayed just a little bit longer. It would have saved so much pain. But maybe it wasn’t the right thing. Maybe what happened because we didn’t stay and meet Charles and Carl that lunchtime was actually better for them all in the end. What was that in Julius Caesar? You can take one route in life and know the consequences but you never know what would have happened if you had taken another? Who knows what would have happened in their lives if Susannah and I had stayed just a little longer in that restaurant.
It would have been only a few minutes after we left that Carl and Charles came through the crowded foyer on their way to the bar.
But Susannah and I did leave.
Maybe we wouldn’t have bumped into them anyway.
We walked down to the river. Pier Head was, as always, a good place to clear the head. We stood by the railings overlooking the frighteningly grey river as the tide surged in. The ferries were shuttling backwards and forwards, the seagulls wheeling above, the sounds of the buses and cars all about us, but we were as good as alone.
“I can’t have this baby.”
“No. I realise that. Do you want to leave it to me? I’m sure something could be arranged. It would be done as soon as possible – probably this week – will you be able to explain it? Why you aren’t well I mean? It’s probably not going to be easy.”
“Monika will help. I don’t know what I’d do without Monika.”
“Are you absolutely sure about this?”
“Yes.”
“The other bits you told me, about Carl, are they true too?”
“Yes. I will always love him – I don’t care if he is my brother. You know I tried to get him to go away with me don’t you? Go somewhere where we weren’t known and we could have lived together – no one would have known or minded and we could have been happy. I really believe we would have been happy. He wouldn’t do it, you know, he wouldn’t go away with me because it was ‘wrong’. He loved me but not enough. He couldn’t have loved me enough.”
Tears were streaming down her face.
“Perhaps he just didn’t want to hurt you.”
She wasn’t crying, there was no sobbing, no gulped intakes of breath that I associated with someone who is heartbroken crying their eyes out. It was just as if her eyes were leaking independently of herself. She kept talking, not bothering to wipe the salt water from her cheeks.
“I’ve thought of that. I just think he was frightened, scared, and he didn’t love me enough to overcome that. He never got in touch with me. He’s never tried to get in touch with me.”
What was I to say? I knew it wasn’t that he didn’t love her enough, he left because he loved her too much.
I couldn’t tell her what I knew. I couldn’t tell her the true nature of her relationship with Carl, that I had known for some years that they were not brother and sister.
Nor could I begin to tell her the real reason Carl had not contacted her since that Sunday afternoon seven years before. I didn’t think she could cope with the knowledge that he loved her that much. How could I upset her so much at this time when she had so much to deal with?
How could I tell her that I knew all her pain had been unnecessary and that one woman’s selfishness and pride was the cause of it all.
She was so upset, so close to a breakdown, that I felt I had to keep that information from her until she was more able to deal with it.
At least that was the excuse I made to myself at the time, and so often in the years that passed before I eventually did tell her everything. I couldn’t undo what had been done. Neither could Alicia. Neither would Joe. The only way I could help her was to make practical arrangements and hope to ease some of her burden over the next few days.
“Do you want me to talk to Joe?” I couldn’t imagine what I would say to him if she had asked me to, but I had to ask anyway.
“What? Tell him to leave me alone? I don’t think that would work.”
“No tell him that you need some care and attention yourself, that you are a young woman, he must make you feel important and loved – you don’t feel loved do you?”
“No. Whenever he – you know – well he’s always saying was I imagining he was Carl. Did I want him to be Carl. Was I imagining it was Carl... you know..... He taunts me with him, all the time. He will never let me forget that I have loved someone else. I thought I did love Joe in the begi
nning, he made me feel so good. But it’s all too late now. He’s always saying things like ‘if only you knew what I know ...’ and ‘would you marry me again, if things were the same?’ He is always acting as if he knows something that I don’t. He’s changed. Now I know he’s just cruel and manipulating.”
She stopped for a moment, looking out across the river. A ferry passed by and it was possible to hear the strains of Ferry ‘cross the Mersey playing on its loud speaker as it turned against the running tide towards Birkenhead.
As she talked she seemed to be trying to understand what had been going on in her life for the past seven years. It was almost as if she was growing up all at once, realising that she was no longer the 16 year old with everything in front of her, she was now in that future she had thought would never come. The bitterness eventually left her voice leaving her subdued, resigned.
“You know he goes to have tea with his mother every Sunday. He walks down to the old house and spends all afternoon with her. I’m never invited. He doesn’t want any of us with him. She never comes to the house and I never go there. It is as if when Joe married me he created a new life that wouldn’t change his old one, the new one just superimposed on top of the old. He’s changed himself into a different person, one who does all the right things, has his boss to dinner, plays golf. He’s absolutely nothing like the fisherman he was at first. He’s not him. Can you see what I mean?”
I had to see if there was another side to the story, though after all Susannah had said I hardly sounded convincing – even to myself. “Could it be that his responsibilities, a wife and young family, make him feel he has to work so hard, he has to do all these things to keep you all in the comfort he believes you expect?”
“No.”
She sounded very definite about it.
“So you want me to go ahead with contacting the clinic – making an appointment?
“Yes.”
I nearly added “or would you like me to talk to your Mother “ but managed not to.
That would be one complication too many.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Carl didn’t know where he was going to go when he left the house in Dunedin Avenue – he just had to get out.
The Last Dance Page 22