Loving Susie: The Heartlands series

by Harper, Jenny

  ‘I knew she’d got it wrong. I couldn’t understand how it could be true. I mean, even if they’d not told me when I was younger for some unfathomable reason, surely Mum would have said something after Dad died? Or before she died herself? And you’re right – even failing that, surely I would have found some papers, some letters, something among her belongings?’

  ‘Sure. You can’t keep something as big as that hidden. What does Archie say?’

  ‘Archie? I haven’t told him.’

  Karen stares at her. ‘O-kay,’ she says slowly, and only then does Susie realise how odd this fact is.

  ‘I couldn’t believe it was true,’ she says, with an edge of defensiveness, ‘So there didn’t seem any point in bothering him.’ The truth, she grasps now, is that somewhere in the dark corners of her mind she’s terrified that Archie might actually have known something that she didn’t, that for some bizarre reason he might have been told while she was kept in ignorance. The steak in her mouth suddenly tastes foul. She ejects it onto the back of her fork and puts it on the edge of her plate, gazing at it with distaste. She’s still clutching the fork because there’s something nagging her, something she should remember.

  Karen is saying, ‘Well, maybe you can put it all aside now. The old woman’s clearly barking—’

  Susie drops the fork onto her plate. The clatter startles Prince out of his dream and he looks up groggily.

  ‘What?’ Karen is startled too. ‘What is it?’

  Susie is back in 1981, back in her parents’ house in Helensburgh, still deeply familiar despite the fact that she hasn’t been living there for years. Archie is by her side, they’re in the old-fashioned front room. She’s sitting in the old sofa, the high-backed one with the floral covering, the roses big and blowsy against their dull gold background. Her mother sits comfortably in her favourite rocker, the chair moving gently back and forward, back and forward. Her father stands, patriarchal and proud, by the mantelpiece. He likes Archie. They both like Archie. They’re all drinking sherry from tiny, well-mannered crystal sherry glasses. She can taste its sweetness in her mouth now, even though it’s a taste that has passed her by for thirty years.

  ‘We’ll need to go and see the minister,’ Archie is saying. His hair is black, long at the back and cropped neat on top – a classic mullet – but other than a lack of wrinkles and the fact that black has become white and the length at the back has mercifully been shorn, he’s still the same Archie.

  ‘I’d like to do that little job with you, Archie.’ Her father, newly retired and already looking old, is insistent. ‘My pleasure. There’s not going to be much more I can do for my little girl now that she’s going to be an old married woman.’

  ‘I’d like to go,’ she says, a little surprised at the intervention.

  Her father lays his hand on hers, his grip firm and unusually assertive. ‘I insist.’

  The thirty years that separate Susie from the memory dissolve and the image of the scene comes into sharper focus than she could ever have thought possible.

  She is looking across at her mother, who says, ‘That’d be best, love.’ And – is she remembering right? – there’s a look on her mother’s face that’s more like relief than anything else.

  Now Susie’s mouth feels dry and unnatural.

  ‘Karen,’ she says, ‘I’ve just remembered something.’

  Shortly after Karen leaves the next morning, doubtless spraying more gravel onto the verges as she speeds down the drive, the telephone rings. ‘Susie? It’s Mo, glad I caught you.’

  Mo at this time of day is not good news. Conversely, it’s possible that it’s fantastic news, but she knows the hollow feeling in her stomach has nothing to do with the quantity of alcohol she and Karen downed last night. ‘Hi, Mo. What is it?’

  ‘Have you seen Scotland Daily yet?’

  ‘They don’t deliver here.’

  ‘Of course not, I forgot.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘This story with the Rivo Trust—’

  ‘What story?’

  ‘The rumours about mismanagement. I marked up an email for you yesterday, didn’t you see it?’

  ‘Uh? Oh, yes, yes I did.’ Susie’s heart is picking up pace. ‘But I don’t know what you mean by mismanagement. The charity is struggling a bit, well they all are—’

  ‘According to Justin, things have got so bad that the charity is teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. There’s a rumour that they’ll have to sell their properties to pay their bills.’

  Susie sits down with a thump. ‘No! Surely not?’

  ‘Weren’t you at a Board meeting yesterday? Was nothing said?’

  Susie casts her mind back feverishly. ‘I did ask questions about the accounts. There were weaknesses. Ricky said he was changing the auditors again.’

  ‘You didn’t think that was odd?’

  ‘Yes, I—’ She did think that, but her head was full of other things and she didn’t challenge Ricky in the way she probably should. ‘How’s he got hold of this story?’

  ‘He must have a mole. Any idea who it could be?’

  June Mackintosh, Susie thinks. Out of character, perhaps, but she has a grudge, a justifiable one, and perhaps she thinks that by going to the Press she might be able to salvage something. ‘Maybe,’ she says slowly. ‘Listen, what’s in the story? Do any of the other papers have it?’

  ‘Not that I can see. It lists a whole load of so-called facts, castigates the Board, names you specifically—’

  Susie groans.

  ‘—insinuates that you’ve done nothing more than take credit when times have been good but failed in your duty of trust—’

  ‘Damn. What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Are you coming in this morning?’

  ‘I’m almost on my way.’

  ‘We’ll discuss it when you get here then.’ Mo softens her briskness, ‘Don’t worry, Susie. It’s not the end of the world,’ before spoiling that by adding, ‘though Coopie’s face is thunder this morning.’

  Her small snort might have been designed to show that this is a joke, but it does nothing to alleviate Susie’s mood. She toys for a moment with the idea of phoning Archie. On any other day in the past thirty years, that’s exactly what she would have done, but today it won’t help.

  She is stopped as she enters the Garden Lobby by a reporter from the BBC. ‘Susie? Have you got a moment?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘The Rivo Trust appears to be in some trouble, have you any comment?’

  Her lips tighten. ‘No,’ she says, ‘No comment.’ She sweeps past him, but he follows her. ‘As a Trustee, surely it’s your duty to—’

  She manages to say, ‘You know that, as a Trustee, it’s my duty not to comment about confidential matters,’ then – with relief – she is through the secure door and safely in the private office area. Out of sight, she leans against the wall because her knees are trembling. She should have coped better with that.

  Later, she works with Mo on her key words (‘Get these in, Susie, if you do nothing else.’). They think about the worst question she might get (an allegation of dereliction of duty at Rivo). Mo is, mercifully, unflappable. Calmness is her great strength, and a necessary one when all the heavy artillery of the media point in her direction.

  In the scale of Mo’s workload it’s a tiny story. Today the Press Director has a cluster of superbug infections in Lanarkshire that have resulted in the deaths of a handful of pensioners, a threatened strike by railway workers and a gathering storm about a change in the school curriculum that is catapulting the Education Minister into the headlines in the least welcome way possible. These all come considerably higher in the ranking of stories to be handled than a side issue about a minor charity.

  But this is Susie’s problem, her charity, her alleged incompetence and she doesn’t have her usual confidence to deal with it. For once, she is happy to consider Mo an ally.

  Chapter Five

  The clock governs h
er every action. Six thirty, wake up. Tick. Eight, in the office. Tock. Ten, Committee meeting. Tick. Twelve, constituent meeting. Tock. On and on, all through the day, every day. Sometimes Susie resents it – life before Parliament was so much freer. Time is capricious. She sees Time like a snotty-nosed child, sniggering at his ability to drag or fly at will – or to march on relentlessly, pulling aging generation after aging generation in its remorseless wake.

  Today, all Susie wants to do is turn back the clock, to the moment before Elsie says, ‘This lady’s like you, Indira. She’s adopted.’ Then she’ll move aside instead, speak to Jemma, hand out their name badges, anything rather than hear those words, in that moment. If only she’d never agreed to the visit. If only she’d asked Karen to do the tour instead. If only—

  ‘Bad day at the office?’ Archie asks sympathetically.

  He has seen her car on the drive and already poured her a glass of wine. It’s winking invitingly, the deep straw-coloured liquid so chilled that a blanket of condensation has wrapped itself sympathetically round the bulb of the glass. Prince, ecstatic to have them both at home again, nudges her hand insistently, asking for attention. For a few seconds the scenario brings comfort. She takes the wine, closes her eyes and sips. It’s rich and buttery.

  ‘Oh – you know,’ she says noncommittally.

  ‘What’s up, Suse?’

  He knows her too well. She can’t hide the fact that something is troubling her, but he can’t suspect that she’s begun to wonder if she knows him at all – and even here, in her own home, where everything is so familiar, she feels she can no longer trust the obvious. The blithe watercolour of glorious scarlet dahlias in its battered frame was her father’s. Her father’s? But he wasn’t, was he, if the story is true?

  She looks at the Lladró figurine that has pride of place on the bookshelves to the right of the fireplace, a small shepherd boy, idealised and untroubled. Not her taste at all, but it was her mother’s knickknack and her mother’s taste, and the shepherd boy was one of the few items she kept after her mother died. It has always seemed to Susie that the small porcelain ornament was the embodiment of her mother – sweet-natured, unsophisticated, honest.

  Honest?

  She has to ask him. There’s no other way. An old cliché springs to mind: ‘what you don’t know can’t hurt you’. But she does know now, or at least she knows partly, and the hurt is there already. She puts her glass of wine down so that he won’t see her shaking hands.

  ‘I know, Archie,’ she says, the words as simple as she can make them.

  But Archie’s attention is no longer focused on her. He has picked up the tv remote and is flicking through the channels. Her life is imploding and all her husband can do is hunt through a sea of banality of someone else’s making.

  She waits. Silence can be as effective as speech.

  In the end, he looks up. ‘Hmm? Sorry Suse, did you say something?’

  ‘Yes.’ She has to say it again. ‘I know.’ She invests the words with deep significance.

  ‘Sorry? He asks, confusion on his face. ‘You’ve lost me.’

  Is there hope? There’s still a tiny window left to her. She can close the conversation now and that will be the end of it. Life will return to normal and the truth – whatever it is – will remain buried, in the graves of her parents, where it should be. But Susie, eyeing the dahlias, her gaze flickering over the china figurine, knows that the time for simple truths has passed.

  She meets Archie’s puzzled gaze. ‘I had to show someone round the Parliament yesterday, a friend of my mother’s around the time I was born. She said – I couldn’t believe what she said, Archie, but I heard it very clearly—’ Susie lets the words hang in the air, then finishes, her voice breaking, ‘She said I was adopted.’

  If she has the slightest doubt about the truth of the matter, it’s dispelled now. Understanding floods into Archie’s eyes like dye dropped into water, curling and spreading until it has changed colour completely.

  Until now, there has been one element above all others that Susie can’t believe: that Archie knew. But looking at him confirms the story. Like snow triggered into movement by some minor shock, her feelings pick up speed and slither down a bottomless slope. She knows that her life, like the landscape after an avalanche, has changed for ever.

  I can’t ask him to explain. I don’t want to hear.

  She stands abruptly. ‘I’m going to walk Prince.’

  ‘I’ll come with you.’ He tosses away the television remote and begins to rise.

  ‘No, Archie. I want to be alone. I’ll be fine. It’s still light.’

  He’s going to argue and she knows she’s being unfair on him, that in not allowing him to explain she’s putting him into the worst of all positions. She knows, too, that he’ll be concerned about her feelings and about how this revelation might affect their relationship. She turns away abruptly, angry at these new layers of complication in a world that has already become uncertain.

  ‘Prince! Here boy!’ As the dog scuttles eagerly towards her, she reaches for his lead. ‘Go to bed, Archie.’

  But she knows he won’t. She knows that when she gets back, he’ll be in his studio, losing himself in his music.

  She sleeps fitfully until Archie slips in beside her, when the sheer familiarity of his presence brings enough respite from her thoughts to lull her into a deeper slumber.

  It doesn’t last long. Susie sees the dawn probe its way through the fabric of the curtains, the fingers of light poking into her sore eyes with an insistence that won’t be denied. Ironically, maybe because she isn’t trying to be quiet, she manages to get out of bed without disturbing Archie. In the morning light, the whole thing seems unreal once more, its reality grounded only in side-effects, in exhaustion and a mild headache lurking behind her eyes. She pads down the stairs, avoiding the creaky boards so as not to wake Archie. She needs time alone.

  Her desk is in the corner of the living room, underneath a window that faces the trees at the back of the cottage. The opening is a deep one and the window itself small, the dimensions evidence of the age of the cottage. A few days ago – before Elsie – she found the time to pick a bunch of snowdrops, but now she notices that she has allowed their water to stagnate and become cloudy and they’re already brown. Irritated by her neglect, she grabs the vase and marches through to the kitchen, drops the flowers into the compost bin and returns, without the reminder of her sloppiness, to her work.

  She hears a faint creak above her head as she opens her briefcase and tries to settle to her papers. Archie is stirring. She knows she must talk to him because she needs to know his side of the story, but she shies away from the conversation, reluctant to start along the road of discovery.

  I don’t want to know.

  You have to know.

  It’s too difficult.

  You can’t hide from the truth, now that it has found you.

  Archie knows how to take care of you. You can trust your husband.

  But he lied to you. Her resentment is fuelled by sleeplessness. He’s been living a lie.

  She bins four brochures and two annual reports, their crisp, colorful, expensive covers gazing reproachfully out of the wicker basket at her. Listen, she fires back at them irritably, I didn’t ask for you to be posted to me. I’m too busy for you. A sheaf of briefing papers from a large charity are more matched to her mood and she glances through them quickly, highlighting a sentence here, a paragraph there with a fluorescent orange marker.

  Archie appears. ‘You want tea, love?’

  ‘Had some.’

  ‘Ready for toast?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Do you want it at your desk?’

  Susie sighs and pushes away her papers. He’s trying to be normal – but can anything be normal again? She stands and stretches. ‘I’ll come through.’

  ‘Last night—’ Archie starts when the toast is on the table. He’s leaning forward.

  She sees his hand start to
move towards her arm, the movement conciliatory, and she jerks it back tetchily. I don’t want comfort. I want facts. Archie’s face is weary and she feels compassion but ironically this makes her react more angrily than she might have done.

  ‘Don’t—’ Don’t touch me. Don’t comfort me. Don’t ... lie to me any more. ‘I need to know this, Archie. I need you to tell me your part in this story, so that I can begin to understand. I can see that it’s true. What I want to know is, why was I never told? Why did my parents—’ she breaks off, confused. She can’t use that word. It isn’t right. ‘Why did Robert and Mary—’ But that sounds unnatural too, she never called them by their first names, only ever called them – thought of them – as Mum and Dad.

  Who were they?

  Who am I?

  Her gaze drops, the effort of keeping it steady too much. Bizarrely, what she notices is the suit she is wearing – tailored business wear. It’s a costume, designed to fit the part she plays every day because she’s accustomed to using props. Until now, she’s had every confidence in her ability to play her role. This morning, the grey wool looks out of place and unfamiliar. Did she really put it on just an hour ago? The fracturing of her reality has been so great that time itself has warped.

  ‘Just tell me Archie,’ she says wearily. ‘I can’t fumble around any more trying to make sense of this.’

  He retracts his hand and crosses his arms as if he doesn’t know what to do with them. ‘What happened, Suse?’

  He’s always rational. Archie has only ever done one impulsive thing in his life, and that was to fall in love with her. If he conspired to hide this from me, Susie tells herself, clutching at the thought like a life raft, there will have been a good reason. Discuss this. Be calm. Archie will sort everything out.

  ‘I had a tour booked,’ she says, ‘My paren— Their old neighbour, Elsie Proudfoot brought her grandchildren on a special treat. The little one, it seems, was adopted. Mrs Proudfoot told her we had something in common. She obviously thought I knew.’