Coming Home (29 page)

Mum sighed. ‘One afternoon I’d gone shopping,’ she said. ‘Or out somewhere. I forget where. Probably the High Street. We didn’t have the big supermarket in those days; I had to get everything from the High Street. Anyway, I’d nipped out and you were home from school. You were full of excitement, practically flying with it. I hadn’t seen you look so happy for a long time. “Are you going upstairs?” you kept asking until I realised that you wanted me to go up; that there was something waiting for me. I imagined it was some artwork or a little gift you’d made for me in crafts at school—do you remember how you used to like making me those little brooches?

‘Anyway, so I went upstairs and there, on the bed, you’d laid out my best dress—a black cocktail dress—high heels, your favourite of my necklaces and the cream, patent leather handbag you thought looked like the Queen’s. You were practically jumping up and down with excitement so I asked you what was going on. You were never the best at keeping secrets and you couldn’t keep this one in: “You’re going out for dinner! I’m not supposed to tell you but I heard Daddy on the phone. He booked a table for two at The Blue Orchid! He’s going to meet you there straight from work. And I want you to look nice!”’

I remembered the afternoon, remembered The Blue
Orchid—at the time, it’d not only been the only Thai restaurant for miles, but the most romantic restaurant around. I think it’s a takeaway now.

‘I’d no idea about this dinner plan,’ Mum continued. ‘Your father hadn’t mentioned it to me—he’d actually told me he’d be away lecturing—and I imagined you’d got the story wrong; that your father was taking a work colleague there. Still, I was a little suspicious—if it was work, why not go somewhere closer to the university?’ Mum looked at me, her face clouded with the memory. ‘You must have noticed, Evie, as you got older, that your father wasn’t always the easiest man to be with? I saw the same thing in James, by the way. They were peas in a pod.’

She shook her head then picked up the thread again. ‘Your father had been acting odd for some time and I’d been wondering if something was up. He’d bought some new clothes and got a spring in his step. Yet, when he was home, it was like a light had gone off. His attention was no longer on me. It was quite obvious; like being left out in the cold. I don’t think he could deal with my … my … well. You know what happened after “the accident”?’ She was referring to her suicide attempt. ‘Your dad was a man who liked to be adored; he liked to be the centre of attention. And, when I was sick, that wasn’t the case. It was the beginning of the end, Evie, but I tried to keep it together for you: I was scared.

‘Anyway, that night, I decided to play along. I got dressed; we made a game of it. You helped me put on the necklace, spray my perfume and choose a lipstick to put in the bag.’
I nodded, the memory coming back to me. Mum had let me put some lipstick on, too. ‘Then I called a cab and went to the restaurant. Lily was only too happy to babysit.

‘I sat in a café across the street and I watched until your father arrived. And I saw them, Evie. I saw your father with his arm around that woman and I knew the moment I saw them. It was something in the way he moved with her, a lightness; an intimacy. I knew at once that this was no fling; that he thought he loved her.’

‘But what did you do? Why didn’t you go in and confront them? I would have.’

Mum’s eyes misted. ‘I know you would—you always were impulsive. And maybe I should have confronted him then, Evie. Maybe I should have had it out with him then and there and let him run away with her. It’s easy to say now. Maybe that would have been the better thing to do. If I knew now how it would all turn out, how that decision was going to affect so many people, maybe I would have let him go. But back then all I could think was that I didn’t want to make a scene. I wanted to go home and think about what to do, not barge in and risk ruining my life—and yours. You’d already lost your brother—all I could think was that if Robert chose that woman—’ she curled her lip around the word, as if the feel of it repulsed her ‘—our family would have been ripped apart. I couldn’t bear for you to lose anyone else. Your father may not always have been the best, but he was your dad and you loved him.’

I pressed my hands to my chest. ‘Oh, Mum … So what did you do?’

‘Well, I did all that I could: I paid my bill, I got up and called a cab home. You were in bed so you didn’t see me come in without your father. In the morning, you assumed he’d already left. I told you that, far from being the romantic date you’d imagined, the dinner hadn’t gone very well—that Dad had got a bit upset about Graham—and that it’d be better not to mention it. You obliged. Always were a good girl.’

I remembered that. I remembered that morning. Graham was the one topic that could be relied upon never to be brought up in our house. His death was the subject we swept collectively under the family carpet. How sneaky Mum had been to cash in on that.

‘And you never said anything? To Dad? Or Zoe?’

‘No.’

‘But then? As I got older? Why didn’t you confront Dad then? You had a job, you were independent. You could easily have left.’

Mum sighed, and refilled her teacup. ‘Evie. Things are never as clear-cut as they seem. For a while I thought he’d stopped seeing her; that whatever little thing they’d had had burnt itself out. Although I should have known better. I’d done my research, found out her name. I spied on them every now and then, too—once I followed your father down to Maidstone on a Friday night and I saw her open the door, the child at her feet shouting “Daddy!”’

‘Oh my God!’

‘Yes, that was a shock. Actually, “shock” is an understatement. When I first found out, I’d no idea there was a baby.’

I was shaking my head, over and over. I tried to remember what Mum had been like a couple of years after the accident. I’d thought she was getting better. ‘Did you talk to anyone about it? Does “she” know that you know?’

‘No, she doesn’t. And I couldn’t tell anyone else. We were busy during the day, you and me; I had to keep going for you; try to keep your life normal. Do you remember the little outings we used to go on? Greenwich Park? Swimming? People were sympathetic because of what happened with Graham. If I looked a bit morose, they assumed I was grieving—which I was, but for far more than they ever knew. The doctor was more than happy to keep me in sedatives. I got through.’

I thought of the bathroom cabinet still full of sleep remedies.

‘And then, as time went by, I realised it suited me to stay married to your father. I didn’t want to let her “win”; neither did I want to be a single mother, a forty-something divorcée with a child. It’s not how I saw my life panning out. And I liked being married—I didn’t want to have to find someone else and start again. Who wants a middle-aged woman with a child? And then your father became successful—I can’t lie, Evie, I enjoyed his success. I enjoyed the money, the prestige, the social standing. I enjoyed being Mrs Robert Stevens.’

‘So you turned a blind eye? It was that easy?’

‘I’ve told you. It wasn’t easy to block it out, but I got used to it.

‘Is that what the sleeping pills are for?’

She laughed. ‘In the end, it became like a game for me. A challenge. He could easily have gone to her but, despite her youth, whatever it was that she had, I kept him here. Ultimately, he loved me enough to stay.’

‘Did Dad know that you knew?’

‘No. I was always one step ahead of him. I had him under my thumb.’ She laughed again. ‘Men aren’t that complicated.’ A pause. ‘I just wish he’d been a bit more careful.’

‘In what way? In making sure you didn’t find out?’

‘No. In leaving a trail of destruction—the children. Child, I mean.’

I caught my breath. ‘You know?’

Mum sighed heavily, looked out of the window. ‘Know what?’

‘You said children. You know? That Zoe …?’

Mum turned around and, in the instant that she did, I saw something I’d never before seen in her face: hatred. ‘Yes. I know. She’s expecting.’ She spat the word out.

‘How?’

‘Oh, Evie.’ Mum shook her head sadly. ‘I work at a hospital. The biggest one in the south-east.’

‘What do you mean? You saw her there? She can’t even be showing.’

Mum shook her head, her lips a thin line. She looked hard at me, as if she were assessing me; she opened her mouth to say something then closed it again with a tiny shake of her head.

‘What’s the point of working in a hospital, Evie, if you can’t use it to your advantage now and again?’ She rolled
her eyes at me as if I were stupid. ‘Medical records. Long ago I pulled up her records. Wouldn’t you if you could? And I checked them every now and then, just to see what was going on with her. That’s how I found out about the baby. Thanks to NHS cuts, we have the only maternity unit in the area.’ Mum counted on her fingers. ‘She must be, what, fourteen weeks now.’

I shook my head in disbelief. But Mum was so calm.

‘How can you stand it? Doesn’t it kill you to know?’

Mum lifted her chin. ‘You don’t need to worry about me, darling. I’m stronger than you give me credit for.’ She laughed to herself, a small chuckle, and shook her head again. ‘Oh, Evie. You’ve no idea.’

I wasn’t convinced of that. Given the ‘episodes’ I’d witnessed her having, I thought Dad’s death had knocked her far harder than she thought. Another thought crossed my mind. ‘Did you know Zoe and Tom came to Dad’s funeral? Was it you who invited them?’

‘I didn’t see either of them at the funeral. Well, I was hardly looking—there were so many people there. I’m glad they didn’t come back to the house afterwards. Some decency, I suppose. But I suspect it was you who invited them. Her name’s in your father’s address book. He’d put it in way back before anything happened and he kept it updated, I suppose not to look suspicious. When you went through it, you probably called her.’

I racked my brains; I wanted so badly to remember that call, but the more I thought about it, the more I think I imagined it.

‘I sometimes wondered if it was all my fault.’

‘What do you mean?’

Mum shrugged. ‘Well. It’s too late now.’ She stood up, collected the teacups, put them back on the tray with a little laugh. ‘Anyway, I’m glad you know. I can stop pretending. Perhaps you’ll understand now why I’m not really knocked sideways about your father’s death.’ She picked up the tray. ‘Do you fancy helping me go through the books now?’

Confession hour, it would seem, was over.

L
ying upstairs on my bed, a pillow hugged to my chest, I could hear the muffled sound of the radio coming up through the floor. I don’t know what Mum was listening to and I couldn’t catch any specific words but a man’s voice was reverberating up through the floorboards, the sound as irritating to me as that of a bluebottle stuck in the net curtains. Bzz. Bzz-bzz. Bzzzzz. Bzz.

I was rerunning in my head the conversation we’d had. As far as Mum was concerned, the topic of Zoe and Tom was closed—she’d taken the tea things back to the kitchen, washed them up and gone back to sorting out the books. I think she genuinely felt the issue was resolved. She’d been relieved that the lies were over; that she could stop pretending—the word made me wince—to be sad about Dad’s death. She’d said she hadn’t been ‘knocked sideways’ but I didn’t think that was true. Maybe she didn’t see it, but she’d been acting odd the whole time I’d been in England.

For my own part, I was struggling. To some extent I was relieved, but the rest of me felt as if I’d been disembowelled, my insides scraped out. Admittedly, the weight I’d carried around with me since finding out about Tom had gone—the
problem of how to tell Mum and how she’d take it simply ceased to exist. But what did all this tell me about Mum? How could my mother have kept this to herself for so long? I knew what James’s infidelity had done to me: when I’d found out, I’d wanted to kill him slowly and painfully with my bare hands. I’d even fantasised about how best to do it. How had Mum lived with the knowledge of Dad’s infidelity, constantly and continually? She’d have been reminded of it every weekend when he packed his bags and disappeared off ‘on lecture tours’. How had she lived with that knowledge and not exploded? Was her strange behaviour since I’d been here a symptom of that?

‘Maybe,’ I said to the room. ‘Maybe …’

Miss Dawson had suggested that Mum had been unable to move on from Graham’s death while Dad was alive; that she had suppressed her grief about it; and that Dad’s death had finally enabled her to ‘bury’ Graham. That made a lot of sense to me and it largely fitted what I’d seen: Mum’s reaction to the sirens, for example. Her ‘memory’ of Graham’s funeral; the screaming fit over Dad’s bike. It was only since Dad had died that she’d started to have these ‘episodes’. But was that all that was going on?

How did the night of the black bags fit into it? Certainly, Mum had blamed Dad for Graham’s death, but was there something more going on? After being so emotionally controlled for two decades, had Dad’s death also given Mum some sort of emotional release? Had her fury that night been directed at him, rather than at me? I sighed and propped myself up on my bed, pulling over my bag
of knitting. Something was out of kilter and I couldn’t put my finger on it.

I was startled from my thoughts by the sound of my phone ringing. I saw it was Tom and scrambled to pick it up.

‘Hey, Evie.’ His voice was questioning, as if he wasn’t sure whether or not I’d hang up on him.

‘Hey. How are you?’

‘I’m great. I was just calling to see … um, how you were? After the other day?’

‘Bruised,’ I said. ‘But getting better.’ I smiled into the phone, surprised at how happy I was to hear from him. The fact that Mum had known all along about Dad’s double life changed everything. I didn’t need to worry about her finding out any more; she even knew Zoe was pregnant.

‘Look, Evie, I don’t want to leave things like that. I know it was a shock for you. But I just want to say that when you’re ready, I’d love the chance to talk to you properly.’

‘You know what? I’d like that, too.’

‘Great! I can come down to London over the weekend, if you like? Meet you in the West End?’