‘Did he mention us?’
‘He said he loved you three more than anything in the world and he hoped one day you would understand why he had done what he had done and find some way to love him. He hoped your lives would work out better than his. That was it.’
Poor man. Mother’s lie meant he had never been granted his last wish to be understood. There had been no acceptance for his restless soul. I looked across the table at her hunched figure, rocking gently on her chair. What right did she have to play God, to reshape our lives, pulling them away from the truth?
Poor poor man.
What he had been through. In the police station when they pulled him in and said they were going to charge him and ruin his life. Homophobic coppers smirking, knowing they’d hooked a press-worthy fish. Lying in bed thinking about the shame he had brought on everyone. Wondering how he could tell Grandpa T and his wife. It was hard to think of two people one would be less inclined to confess to.
‘How did he do it?’
‘Jumped.’
Her voice was so quiet I could hardly hear. I didn’t want to know but I had to. After all these years. It was my life too.
‘Beachy Head?’
She nodded. She was staring bleakly at the mould on the side of the cheddar.
‘He drove all the way to the south coast from London? What’s that, maybe a couple of hours grinding through South London and so on, knowing he was going to commit suicide?’
She shrugged. She’d had to deal with this every day for thirty years. I pictured Father in his brown Peugeot, stationary in South London traffic, sucking in sounds and colours, the radio silent. There was no news he wanted to hear. In one way the fact he drove made it better. It wasn’t a mistake. It wasn’t a rash decision made after a bad day at the office. Every day was a bad day at the office. A big tear formed in my right eye. They always started there. I tried to blink it back.
What must it have been like standing alone on the edge, wind ruffling his hair, winter trees as bare as coat-stands, feeling he had let everyone down so badly there was no way back, believing there was no love left for him anywhere in the world? I wiped my face with my handkerchief. It was stained by tears and make-up. He had no one to share his pain. He obviously thought that with this one act he could atone for everything, for all the things that were his fault and all the things that weren’t, that with this one gesture, this self-sacrifice, he could make life whole again for everybody else. He was so proud. He must have realized if he was out of the way the storm would be stilled and his wife and children spared. There was honour in his ending.
I imagined him standing in his dark coat with its smart velvet collar, a striped City shirt and a narrow tie, crested cufflinks. I could see him raising pale eyes to the horizon, clearing his mind of everything and everyone, hearing nothing but the sound of the waves crashing against the rocks below. He wouldn’t have glanced down before he stepped off into the sound of the wind and the empty future.
‘Why did you lie to us?’
We had moved back into the library. The air was still. Mother seemed diminished, slumped in the corner of the sofa. I knew I should go easy but I remembered all the times she seemed so tall. She looked around the room as if safety might be found in those dreary British landscapes or bulbous china figurines, the Toby jugs depicting tricorn-hatted Dickensian men. God knows where we got them or why we got them. Eventually, with an effort that required almost more than she seemed to have strength for, she said,
‘You were too young.’
‘Too young to know the truth?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you ever too young to know the truth?’
She glanced at the bookshelves, as if wondering which leather-bound volume held the answer to one of life’s biggest questions.
‘Yes.’
‘Was Matt too young?’
‘Yes. Especially Matthew.’
There was iron in the voice. She wouldn’t go down without a fight. I should have known. She’d had time to rationalize the decision she made and she had an instinctive understanding of weakness.
‘And when we were old enough?’
There was another long silence, the cadence of another time.
‘It was too late. There was never a right time.’
‘Too late to tell your children the truth about their father? We wouldn’t have loved him any less. We would simply have understood him, and maybe each other, a little more.’
‘I took a decision not to tell you straight away because what happened raised so many questions I felt you were too young to comprehend.’
I picked up the near-empty bottle of Chablis from the drinks trolley and poured myself a splash of wine. There was only a dribble left. I canted the bottle neck rhetorically towards Mother but she shook her head. I emptied the dregs into my glass. I felt the same, tipped up and emptied out, my life’s narrative drained of its true meaning.
‘And having not told you originally it became harder to do so, even if I’d only told a white lie for the right reasons.’ She turned away, in order not to catch my eye. ‘I suppose I thought that in the end time would bury it.’
‘But why did we never get a hint? If the trial was going to be in the papers, surely the suicide was? How come no one picked up on it?’
‘After he died it was different. Grandpa T was a powerful man. The establishment looks after its own.’
I remembered standing beside the open grave in Highgate Cemetery as his coffin was lowered into the ground. Four burly undertakers, black top hats against a brilliantly blue January sky, the green stacked turf as bright and unreal as a greengrocer’s, every sod in sharp relief. I had hardly dared to breathe in case I fell in.
‘Believe me, Alice, there hasn’t been a day, not one single day, since it happened when I haven’t thought about how to tell you or what to say. Now I wish I’d told you everything straight away. And if I had my time again I would have, of course I would, but I didn’t, and I – we – have to live with that. Life’s not perfect. It’s a mess. We all make mistakes. There never seemed to be a right time and then suddenly you were older, Matthew was an adult, Bridget was away at school and you were all in different places and had different lives and different problems and it just seemed to be from a different age, an unhappy time, and what was the point of raking over the past when it wasn’t going to make anyone happier? And then Matthew had all his problems and after that it was always too late …’
‘Telling the truth is not “raking over the past”. Maybe that secret was part of Matt’s problem? Have you ever thought of that? Maybe even it was the root of it? Maybe Matt overheard someone talking, or sensed he hadn’t been told everything, but had to bottle it up because he had no one to talk to? Maybe that’s why he’s had all the issues he has?’
She shook her head. Thin white hair.
‘Matthew’s problems were evident before your father died. Children are resilient. They take the world as they find it. They grow up as they are. Whatever happens to them feels normal – it is normal for them. You lost a parent and you lived.’ She shifted on the sofa. ‘Matthew lost a parent and he lived.’
‘In a manner of speaking.’
My tone was harsh, too critical. I knew immediately I had gone too far. Mother wasn’t going to take any more. She stood up, using the arm of the chair for leverage. I watched her walk across the room. She paused at the door, almost seeming to bare her teeth, and said in the clipped tones I knew so well,
‘Matthew has lived the way he was always going to.’
Ed was waiting in the sitting room. It’s the smartest room in the house, the only grand room in the old sense. There’s a high ceiling, a cornice with intricate plasterwork, three tall windows giving on to a wisteria-entangled wrought-iron balcony with a lead awning and a wide view over the rooftops to Ashton Court. Two long sofas face each other across a low-slung oak coffee table we were given as a wedding present. A smoky mirror in a carved gilt frame from Highlands ha
ngs above the fireplace. There are three portraits – Ed, Matt, me – on the opposite wall. They are three of my best.
From everything I’ve said, you might expect me to fight shy of self-portraits, the ultimate self-exposure, but I don’t. Although a self-portrait has the capacity to get closer to the truth than any other work of art, it is only for public consumption if the artist wishes and doesn’t require the painter/sitter to open themselves up to anyone else. Self-portraits have a storied history revolving around the impoverished artist unable to afford a model but desperate to descend into the silent depths of humanity. Some of the greatest paintings in the history of art are self-portraits – think Dürer, Velázquez, late Rembrandt, especially late Rembrandt, even Samuel Palmer. It’s not surprising. The painter knows the sitter better than he or she will ever know anyone else. Some critics argue that every painting, like every novel or film, no matter the subject, is a self-portrait of the artist or writer or auteur. I don’t buy it. Art is about objectivity. It is essential to separate the life from the work. The self-portrait in the sitting room was painted soon after Nell was born and although I seem ecstatic about my new-babe joy that is the surface working. Look deeper and you’ll see a sort of sadness in the shallow curve of my mouth and an elusiveness in my eyes. It seems to hint at connections not made, as if I already knew a mother must give up everything for the happiness of her child.
Ed was fiddling on his smartphone when I arrived. He was wearing the black dressing gown with Chinese-style patterning I bought for him in Torque on Westbourne Grove a couple of years ago. Ed doesn’t like staying up late and told me pointedly when I called from the car and woke him to tell him I was on my way home and wanted to talk that he had a hard day the following day. He said going to Highlands had been a bad idea from the off and whatever it was, surely it could wait until the morning. He must have detected the strength in my reply because he didn’t say it again. Ed thought I should have been tucked up in a Tuscan hotel taking the sun. He was wrong. Highlands was exactly the right place to go, even if I didn’t manage to stay a whole night. But he didn’t know that because he didn’t know about the decision I had taken there. He didn’t know how that decision had freed me from the weight that was dragging me down.
He shifted on the sofa when I came in and glanced at his watch. Twelve forty-five.
‘Good trip?’ His voice was thick with irony.
‘Yes, thanks.’
After Mother had left the library I hovered in the kitchen tidying up before I went to bed. I couldn’t face running into her again. I knew her contempt for weakness, how she could home in on it from fifty yards, and I was too angry and upset to trust myself with her. If I saw her I would scream or cry, for my father first of all, but also for all of us, for what she had done, for a family that didn’t exist any more, if it ever had done. For a family built on a lie. I remembered Marianne’s comment, ‘I’ve never come across a family that sounded so disconnected.’ Was that the inheritance I was bequeathing to Nell and Arthur? It was so different to the simple laughing love Ed had experienced as a child and offered as a father.
So, just to be certain she had gone to bed and wasn’t padding around in the corridor, I spent a few minutes looking at the generic prints of wild Dartmoor flowers – foxglove, flax, sedge, orchids – hanging in the passage beyond the hall. They were perfectly done, perfectly rendered, but they lacked individuality. Sometimes I thought it was extraordinary I ever became an artist having grown up at Highlands. Mother had no interest in art. She would have hung a Kandinsky beside the Tiverton Parkway train timetables. My artistic streak must have come from Dad, not that he lived long enough to know.
I went up the back stairs and, for no reason other than I was at that end of the house and I hadn’t been there for years, I looked in on Matt’s old bedroom, the ‘graveyard slot’. To my surprise, it was exactly as he’d left it twenty years before, with its London Calling and Clockwork Orange posters, old school desk, vinyl record collection, his sunken armchair, overflowing bookcases and stack stereo with its large black wooden speakers, headphones still plugged in. The only thing that had changed was the curtains were open. I thought of mine and Bridgey’s bedrooms at the far end of the house, guest bedrooms from the day we left university, no trace of our personalities remaining, and I realized that in her frozen way Mother had always loved her son and heir.
It was while I was lying awake in the spare room thinking about Matt and Dad, the desperate loneliness of his end – his silk handkerchief and delicate wrists, the wounded sky – and the way my mother had stolen his truth from us, how we had never been able to forgive or grieve properly, that I understood I didn’t have a choice any more. We had reached the place we were always going to reach. Highlands had done its job. I didn’t need to spend any more time with my mother and she didn’t need to spend any more with me. So I got out of bed and sat on the window-seat taking in the cool, moorland-scented air, rolling my decision around in my mind, and when I was certain, I dressed, repacked, crept downstairs and left a note on the kitchen table saying I had to go home. She would understand.
‘Ed, we have to talk.’
He raised a laconic eyebrow. Why else had I asked him to wait up? He seemed admirably cool given I was unlikely to be doing anything at this hour except creating trouble. Ed put his mobile on the arm of the sofa and, leisurely as Drake, reached down to pick up a glass of water I hadn’t noticed by his feet. He took a sip, leant back on the sofa and crossed his legs, cool as you like. I perched on the arm of the sofa opposite, leaning forward, my feet barely touching the floor.
‘Fire away.’
‘We have to deal with this. We have to tell the children.’
He closed his eyes and made as if he was counting to ten. When he opened them he said,
‘Haven’t we been through this?’
‘Not so as we’ve reached a conclusion.’
He gritted his teeth, simultaneously expressing frustration that the subject hadn’t gone away and his determination to remain patient.
‘Darling, it would be completely unfair on them. You know that. They’d be forced to keep a secret they need never have known. There’s no upside for them at all.’
‘Other than our relationship with them would be honest. That’s some upside.’
‘Our relationship with them is based on the fact that we are their parents and we will always love them and do the best for them. That’s the parent–child contract. It doesn’t change. There’s nothing in it that says they need to know everything about our lives, just as we don’t need to know everything about theirs.’
‘That was certainly the view my parents took. And look where it got us.’
He examined his fingernails for a moment.
‘Darling, I really don’t think going round in circles is going to get us anywhere.’
My stomach churned. I felt unexpectedly nervous. There was a dead fly at the foot of the curtain.
‘That’s the problem, though, can’t you see? We have to get somewhere, because I can’t go on like this, not forever. I can’t work. I can’t breathe.’
‘O-kaay.’ His tone was slow and thoughtful. It was the voice he used when one of the children couldn’t grasp a basic concept in their homework and he was going to have to think of another way of explaining it. He uncrossed his legs and leant forward, tapping the tips of his fingers thoughtfully against each other. ‘So what’s the alternative? We ruin our children’s lives by telling them a secret that brings them no benefit but demands an incredible amount in terms of keeping it?’
I shook my head. He pursed his lips and frowned as if preparing to explain a simple principle for the umpteenth time to someone who was very stupid indeed.
‘I thought we were sitting here because you say you are finding it impossible to live with the secret and need to tell them. You’re saying you can’t cope and you can’t work and you have to have a valve. Why should it be any easier for them?’
I shook my head ag
ain. He’d missed my point.
‘What then?’
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t bring myself to say it. I couldn’t articulate the ending. He was my husband and a good man and in spite of everything I still loved him. But it was a different kind of love. Life had intervened. Death had intervened. Betrayal had intervened. I waited for him to understand. His mind was in circular motion, until finally, slowly, his eyes narrowed Clint-style, and he shook his head slowly.
I nodded, equally slowly.
‘Oh no.’ The emphasis was on the first, drawn-out syllable. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to break the chain. He leant back on the sofa, shaking his head slowly like a poker player passing a hand. ‘I don’t think so.’ I didn’t reply but never took my eyes off his. ‘No. No way, darling, it’s not going to happen. I promised. Day one in Arthur’s bedroom.’
I nodded. His voice gained a harder edge.
‘I’m not going to fuck up their lives when I don’t have to.’
‘There’s no alternative. Not if we’re going to stay together, as a family.’
My voice was cracking. I was trying to sound controlled but underneath I was bubbling like microwaved soup. I knew I had to stay calm. Otherwise he would dismantle my arguments, pull me apart bit by bit. He tried to keep the irritation out of his voice, not entirely successfully.
‘Why isn’t there? There’s every alternative. The police have done their stuff. The game’s over. All we have to do is never mention it again. Never even think about it again.’
He reached down and picked up the glass of water. Although he seemed in control I could see he was dry-lipped. The vein that stood out on his forehead when he was under pressure had sprung a tributary. I didn’t want to go through this any more than he did, but I knew if I was ever going to work again, if I was ever going to breathe again, if we were ever going to be a proper family again, I had to hold firm. Leaving him, running away, couldn’t be the solution. It never is. We had to deal with it tonight. I said,
‘ “All we have to do …” I can’t believe you can be so cold about it. And anyway, whatever the police do, that has nothing to do with us, as a family.’
What Alice Knew Page 24