The Sleeping Truth : A Romantic Thriller (Omnibus Edition containing both Book One and Book Two)

by Irvine, Ian C. P.

  The woman on the couch, the small, overweight old woman is shaking her head, tears streaming down her face, her hands quivering against her chin. There is such a look of shock in her eyes, such a look of hurt and disbelief at what I am saying, that I find myself speaking quieter and quieter, the power of her reaction driving me to silence. The pupils of her eyes have become pin-pricks and she appears to me now as an old and wounded animal, cowering in the face of a sudden and unjustified onslaught from a cruel, superior predator. Suddenly I am not speaking at all, my words having stopped in the middle of another, senseless sentence.

  She is sitting in her chair, shaking her head, her hands cupping her face.

  A clock ticks upon the wall, then slowly the woman begins to speak, and I am listening to her.

  “Stop, please stop, Andrew. Please…, stop. Why are you saying this? How can you come here and accuse me of all these things?”

  “Because of what you did! Because you destroyed our lives, and then just walked away from us. You abandoned us! How can any mother do that to any of her children? And how can any wife sleep with another man behind her husband’s back? You ruined our lives. YOU RUINED MY LIFE! And then you abandoned us!” I shout, standing up from my chair and towering over the small, tiny, wrinkled woman who looks up at me with so much sadness in her eyes.

  “I abandoned you? And I slept with another man behind your father’s back? …Oh no…” she says very quietly, and then again. “Oh no. Andrew, you’ve got it so wrong. So very wrong. Is that what you really think? Is that what you have always thought? Oh no, no…you don’t understand. I never abandoned you. Never. I never did…”

  She gets up from her chair and walks slowly out of the room, still shaking her head, her hands still cupping her cheeks on either side of her face. She leaves me to stand alone in the room with my anger, with no one to shout at or abuse.

  “Andrew,…” I hear her calling my name from another room. “Please, can you come through here. I need your help.”

  I walk through to where her voice is coming from and find myself in her bedroom.

  “There,” she says, pointing to a large brown leather box sitting on top of a white wardrobe against the wall. “Please, can you reach up and get that box down. I can’t reach it.”

  I reach up on my tiptoes and cup the edges of the box with my fingertips, pulling it gently towards me. Slowly I manoeuvre it over the edge, and eventually I am holding it in my arms.

  “Can you bring it next door, please?” she asks me, and she walks back out of the room. I start to follow her, but I can’t resist the opportunity to first look around.

  Her bedroom is neat and tidy, and even though she wasn’t expecting visitors and it is still early in the morning, I am impressed to see that she has made the bed and tidied everything away. A large double bed, bright yellow-and-white bedspreads and matching curtains, and a cream carpet.

  My eyes are drawn to her bedside cabinet, on which there are four photographs and a clock.

  I step further back into the room towards the photographs, putting the box down on the edge of the bed, walking around the mattress to stand in front of the cabinet.

  Four photographs. One of a woman who I now know as Aunt Claire, another which I immediately recognise as one which I have seen before, not long ago, sitting on top of the mantelpiece in the backroom of number 38 Beech Gardens: a photograph of Alice and her sister Claire with their parents, and a brother, an uncle whose name I do not yet know.

  There are two more photographs. One is off a small boy and a girl. I have never seen these photographs before but I know the children. The little girl is Hannah. The little boy is me.

  It is the fourth photograph that stops me dead in my tracks, the image etched upon the fading colour paper immediately casting me back in time, to a happy moment of my childhood, surrounded by rabbits, on a hill at sunrise. I stoop forward and pick the photograph up. It is a picture of myself and my mother and Hannah. The rabbits are everywhere. My mother is standing in the middle of a field of them. Hundreds, maybe thousands of rabbits are surrounding us. Hannah is clinging to one of my mother’s legs, and I am clinging to her other leg, and we are all laughing. We are all happy.

  “You were only four,” my mother’s voice says to me from the doorway to her bedroom. She has been standing watching me in silence.

  “Your father took us for a walk in the Queen’s Park at four o’clock in the morning, just as the sun was coming up. It was a crazy thing to do, and yet, of all the memories I have of you, it is probably the one where we were our happiest. A real family. Unfortunately it was our last memory together. It was only six months later that …” she says, stopping in mid sentence.

  “That what?” I ask.

  “Perhaps you should come next door. I think it’s time you got some answers, Andrew.”

  I follow her through back into the lounge and I sit down.

  She hands me the box and asks me to take off the lid.

  I look inside.

  The box is full of letters bundled up together into little parcels wrapped in red-ribbon, each parcel containing about twenty-five envelopes. There are about twenty bundles.

  I pick up one of the bundles and remove a few of the letters, sensing that this is what my mother wants me to do. I see now that each is clearly post-marked and stamped, the letters dog-eared and well-travelled, each with ‘return-to-sender’ scribbled on the front in handwriting that I immediately recognise as my father’s. The address on the front of each envelope says,

  “Master Andrew Jardine and Miss Hannah Jardine” along with an Edinburgh address that I do not recognise. I turn the letters over.

  On the back is a return address.

  “Mummy. c/o. Mrs Alice Jardine, Ward 5, St.Katherines Hospital, Mitcham.”

  “I don’t understand,” I start to say, my voice quivering.

  “These are your letters. Yours and Hannah’s. I want you to keep them. At last they have been delivered…”

  “Please explain…what are you saying?” I ask, taking out another bundle of the letters and holding one bundle in each hand, then looking back at my mother.

  “These are the letters I wrote to each of you, one letter every week for five years, until I couldn’t bear it anymore and the doctors said I had to give up. To accept the truth. That you had abandoned me...”

  “That we had abandoned you?” I blurt out in disbelief of what I just heard. “I don’t understand this…what is going on? What are these letters? And why are they addressed to some house I don’t recognise, and what …”, I say, glancing at the back of the envelope again, “What were you doing in hospital in Mitcham?”

  “You don’t know any of this, do you? Your father never told you?” she asks, her eyes wide, willing me to answer. Wanting to understand. Seeking the truth. From me?

  “No,” I reply. “What is he meant to have told us? What is this about?” I ask.

  My mother is nodding now. The expression on her face changes, and she goes slowly white, the blood draining away. I watch her, suddenly concerned for her.

  Steadying herself on the side of the chair, she pushes herself up and walks to the window of the lounge and looks out onto a view beyond that I cannot see. For a few moments she stands in silence, then she turns and comes back and sits down again. She looks different now, and I see that there has been a change in her, a subtle change that I cannot immediately place, but one which has changed the invisible aura that exists around her, the way she holds herself, the way she sits, the way she ‘is’ within herself.

  “I understand now…” she says. “I see it now. You never abandoned me. All those years that I have wondered about you and cried over you…it wasn’t you who abandoned your mother…and it wasn’t your mother who abandoned you. You just never knew. You never knew the truth…We were all victims of the same person. All our lives were ruined by the action of the same person. One person who caused so much misery. The source of a life-time of distrust and tears…”
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  “Who?” I ask, demanding to know. “Who are you talking about?”

  She looks at me, directly into my face, and when she speaks, her words change my world forever.

  “Your father.”

  .

  Chapter Fifty Six

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  .

  “My father?” I exclaim, automatically jumping to my feet in defence of the pillar upon which I have built my life. “How dare you accuse my father of anything! You…you who knows nothing about decency or morality! You’re the person that committed adultery and slept with my father’s best friend! How can you even dare to blame him for ruining your life, or mine. My father was the one person who stuck by me and supported me all my life. Not like you. You’re the one that ran away and left us to grow up as semi-orphans, without a mother’s love…You’re the one…”

  I am standing above her now, ranting and raving, enflamed by her outburst, but confused and scared by what she has said and rallying to the defence of my father and my own existence.

  My mother looks up at me, her hands no longer trembling with fear, the look in her eyes so much different than before. Gone is the look of the lost and lonely individual who greeted me at the door. Instead there is warmth and inner-strength, that even as I speak, I see slowly growing in strength and intensity. She reaches up her hand and touches me gently on my wrist.

  “Andrew, none of this, none of it, is as you think. please….sit down. I think it is time that you learnt the truth.”

  “The truth?” I ask, “I know what the truth is! That’s why I came to see you today. To end this cycle of lies and distrust. To reclaim my life and to make you pay for what you did to me…”

  “Please. My Andrew…please. Sit down…”

  The way she says ‘my Andrew’ reaches deep inside me and twists and turns and stops me in my tracks, and ultimately renders me speechless. Suddenly I see the face of Slávka appearing in my mind's eye, her lips mouthing the same words: ‘My Andrew…’”

  I look at my mother again, and once more the power of her silence and what I can only describe as the kindness that I can see within her eyes, stuns me into submission.

  I sit down slowly opposite her and wait. I wait for her to speak.

  “Andrew, what I am about to tell you is the truth. The very truth. I don’t know why you came here today, -today of all days-, except that you say you want the cycle of lies to end. Perhaps you may hate me even more for what I am about to say, but before I do, I want to thank you for coming today. Because today you have helped answer a question I have been asking, sometimes screaming, for the past twenty years. Why did you, or Hannah, never try to contact me? Why did you never miss me? I know the answer now, and …and now I know, perhaps I can start to live my life again, without the guilt that has shackled me and destroyed me day after day for God knows how long….”

  “You’re scaring me…What are you talking about?”

  “The first time I saw you Andrew, I fell in love with you. You were so tiny. So helpless. So beautiful,” she reaches out across the space between us and touches me on my hand. I look down at her hand, then back at her, and she withdraws it.

  “…I loved you. I really did,” she continues, “…and I tried to look after you the best I could,…but after a few days of breastfeeding you my milk dried up… I felt terrible. I felt like a terrible mother. I blamed myself. You lost some weight, and then I had to start feeding you on a bottle. I got really upset about it…Very upset … So upset that I ended up slipping into what people now call “Post-Natal Depression.” At least, that’s what the doctors called it. I used to sit with you crying all day long. I was useless,” she says, some tears welling up in the corners of her eyes. She looks up and away from me. “Oh dear….” she says, pulling a handkerchief out from underneath her wrist at the end of the arm of her jumper. “Oh dear…” she says, again, shaking her head. She breathes in deeply. “Anyway,…” she continues. “It lasted for years. It went on day after day, month after month, for years. A black cloud that just hung over me and wouldn’t go away...Your father didn’t know what to do with me, and I think that he ended up losing patience. He thought I was pathetic. He would come home from work and I would have been sitting in my bed all day long, or I wouldn’t have moved from the kitchen at all. I couldn’t cope with the washing or the cooking,…I couldn’t do anything. The neighbours where we lived were really good. They took you and Hannah in and looked after you during the day, and in the evening when Robert came home, ..when your father came home, sometimes one of my friends called Cathy, a neighbour from number fifty-four up the street, …”

  “Aunt Cathy?” I ask, a distant memory of her popping into my mind.

  “You remember her? Aunt Cathy? …Aunt?…Well, she would come in and help cook an evening meal for everyone. I thought she was so kind to me… Anyway, …I never got any better. In a way, Cathy maybe made it worse, because now I could see that another woman was beginning to replace me in my own home. But she was my friend, and I needed her. But then I got worse. Really bad. And in the end, I ended up being taken into hospital for a while..” She pauses, her eyes searching the distant past. She nods her head as if she has remembered something, then carries on. “Anyway, I hated being in the hospital. Thankfully Cathy was coming to visit me when she could, and she was telling me how you were, and how Hannah was…Robert hardly ever came to see me. He was working too hard, or so my friend Cathy used to tell me. I think the truth is that he was ashamed of me. I wasn’t the person he had married any more. I was useless…”

  More tears, and another dab of the handkerchief.

  “Cathy was lovely to me. And the doctors started to give me more powerful tablets, and one day I felt that it was time to go home to try to be a mother again. I didn’t tell Robert I was coming. I wanted it to be a surprise….I remember stopping at some shops in Princess Street on the way home and buying a new dress and going to the make-up counter in Jenners and asking one of the nice young ladies there to help me put some make-up on. I wanted to look my best for you all. And for Robert.”

  “I got the number 26 bus home from Princess Street,…it’s funny how you remember silly details like that…and it was about seven o’clock in the evening when I put the key in the door and walked in to the house. You were already both in bed by then, and I never saw you…And then…” she breathes in deeply, and slowly lets her breath out. “And then, I walked into the dining room and I found your father and Cathy, ...together. They were half naked, lying on the dining room floor. Her skirt was up around her waist, and your father, …my husband….was…He was...he was screwing her.”

  She looks up at me then, and stares right into my eyes.

  “Your father, Andrew, was screwing another woman. Behind my back. In fact, it wasn’t just another woman. He was screwing the only friend I thought I had left in the world!”

  “No…” I hear myself saying. “That can’t be true. You’re just making it up. You’re just saying all of this to try …”

  “To try and what, Andrew? What can I really gain by telling you this? Do you think that I’m capable of making up stories like this? Me? Huh! I don’t have an ounce of creativity left in me. Or at least, if I ever did, the drugs and the pills I spent the next fifteen years of my life taking certainly suppressed it completely. Along with the will to live. To exist. To be able to face myself in the mirror in the mornings…Look at me now? I used to be fit and slim and men, including your father, used to look at me as I walked past. Look what the tablets did to me Andrew! I’ve grown fat and old before my time…Andrew, I promise you. I’m not making this up. Any of it. What I’m telling you is the truth. Read the letters…”

  “You’re not! You’re lying to me. This is all a pack of lies!” I shout at her, protesting, trying to stabilise my world, …but there is something about the way she says all of this, something about her posture as she says it, the way she says it, that makes a part of my mind begin to listen. To start to re-arrange the pieces of
the jigsaw puzzle of my memory and to begin to find lost pieces of the puzzle, …and then to begin to rip apart the picture I always thought that it made up and start rebuilding it from scratch so that I can see that the picture of my life has always been very, very different indeed from the way I thought it appeared before.

  I am staring at her now, my jaw wide open, struck dumb with fear and a need to know. A need to know the truth.

  “Go on…” I almost whisper.

  “Are you sure?” she asks, touching me gently on my hand again.

  “No,…I mean, yes. Please. Please,…go on!”.

  “At first I just stared at them, - I don’t think they saw me -. They weren’t expecting me and they just carried on screwing each other in front of me. Then I started to scream. You father looked up at me then, still on top of Cathy, - and then I just stopped. Suddenly I just shut up. I never said another thing. I just turned around and walked out. I left. I went back to the hospital, got into bed, and I stayed there for another fifteen years.”

  “Fifteen years?”

  “Yes.”

  “But why?”

  “Because your father was the most important person in the world to me. I trusted him with my life…oh I know, he thought I was pathetic…but I loved him. And when he broke that trust, ..there wasn’t anything else to live for.”

  “There was us? Did we not meaning anything to you?”

  “Of course you did! You two were the only reason I never killed myself straight away. Then, and every day and evening since.”

  “So why didn’t you come back to get us?”

  “The doctors wouldn’t let me. They sectioned me. I think it was your father’s idea, and they supported it.”