East of Innocence (14 page)

I toss the last photo on to the table, lean back on the sofa as if to give myself physical distance from them. I rub my face, feel the stubble. Rather than give me some grounding, some sense of provenance, these pictures serve only to mock my existence further. A woman with a face as warm, as loving as this; even she was not interested in me.

But these thoughts are not going to help so I rouse myself, get up and pick up my father’s telephone directory. I know the name I am looking for, though I fear she might have changed it; she has been divorced from her husband for years and I do not know her maiden name. In all the shots of my mother, there were only two that also showed other people; and, from them, there was only one other face I recognised. My blunt finger works down a list of names and stops; this must be her. She is, as far as I know, the only person in Essex whose name begins with X. Xynthia Halliday. Looks like she never got around to changing it.

I do not call ahead; Xynthia lives close by and, if there is any murkiness about my mother’s disappearance, I would rather not give her time to get her story straight. I am in my car, the envelope of photographs on the passenger seat next to me, a drab packet almost humming with significance such that I am tempted to pull over and look through
the photographs again, examine them, search them for meaning.

The traffic is slow and when I turn a corner into the main shopping street I can see why; the town has stopped to witness a procession of people, young and old, and their passage is being treated with a reverence which, to begin with, I cannot fathom. The group at the front are all wearing white T-shirts. When one of them turns I see that there is a photograph of a face printed on the T-shirt, and then I recognise with a jolt that the face is Rosie O’Shaughnessy’s. Some of the group are holding flowers and some are holding candles, shielding the flame with their hands although it is so bright the flames are barely visible; each line of the group has their arms interlocked as if they are marching in protest at some invisible oppressor. The silence of the onlookers is profound, an almost shamed quiet; collective guilt at what was done to Rosie, at what was allowed to happen, here, in their town. The group passes by slowly and I guess that they are on their way to the park gates, to the last place Rosie was seen alive.

To be confronted so suddenly with the fact of a murdered young woman gives me pause. The photos next to me seem no longer to be proof of my mother’s existence but rather grisly artefacts of a life cut brutally short. My father will not speak of her, will not acknowledge her; everything about her has been sucked into the black hole of his silence. I realise with sudden finality that, whatever I discover about my mother, it will not be good news. Why would she leave me voluntarily when, as my father claimed, she refused to have me aborted? Whichever way I look at it, her
disappearance now strikes me as sinister, a malignant secret at the heart of my life. Yet I cannot turn away from it; I must know the truth.

Xynthia Halliday lives in a third-storey flat in a geometric seventies block, which must have been built around the time of my mother’s disappearance, a concrete box wearing a Mondrian grid of windows and coloured squares of cladding. I climb the outside stairwell and pass along the walkway, stop outside number eleven with the envelope of photographs in my hand. I am nervous and sweating from the climb and the heat and I pause before ringing the bell as if something dangerous and evil lurks behind the door.

I know Xynthia Halliday from years before when she would help out at my school, teaching dance and theatre to children whose parents were pushy and rich enough to afford the extra expense; of course I never attended. But her presence around the school was hard to ignore whether or not you were lucky enough to be taught by her, a bird of paradise amongst starlings. In the past, she had been an actress, never successful but well enough known in local repertory theatre to have caught the eye of Vincent Halliday. It did not take long for her to turn her back on her career and assume the responsibilities of full-time villain’s wife, hanging off his arm wherever he needed to be seen. After he traded her in for a younger beauty, she found herself without a career or a future, which was when she started touring schools, offering her meagre acting experience in return for meagre money. But I never thought of her as down on her luck; she always seemed to carry with her
an irrepressible air of glamour and excitement, her flamboyant clothes and astounding hairstyles lighting up my school’s monochromatic corridors.

So I am shocked when she opens the door to me. It has taken a long time for her to answer and I am just about to ring the bell again when I hear soft footsteps approach.

‘Who is it?’

‘Daniel. Daniel Connell.’

‘Who?’

‘Frankie’s son.’

After some fumbling with the chain, she opens the door and I wonder whether I have got the wrong place. But looking at her carefully I can see that, underneath the tired grey skin and sparse hair, this is the same Xynthia Halliday from a quarter of a century ago. It is as if some ancient succubus has taken over her body, causing it to decay and atrophy but leaving her essence somehow still present, there in her eyes and the turn of her lips. The reason she has taken so long to get to the door is that she is dragging an oxygen cylinder on a trolley, a clear tube snaking up from it to her face, two smaller tubes invading her nostrils as the tube bridges her top lip.

‘You’re Frankie’s boy?’ Her voice belies her appearance, as clear as a bell.

‘Daniel. I remember you from school.’

‘How is Frankie?’ She asks it offhandedly and I get the feeling she is enquiring more out of politeness than interest. ‘He well, is he?’

‘In hospital. He had a heart attack yesterday.’

‘Frankie’s had a heart attack,’ she says to herself. I lose
her for a few seconds, wait for her to come back to the present. ‘So what can I do for you?’

‘I want to ask you about my mother.’

Xynthia sighs sadly, as if this visit is something she’s been expecting for decades. She looks me in the eye and I can see a level of sympathy, pity even, which takes me aback.

‘Come in, son,’ she says quietly and steps aside. ‘Into the living room, sit yourself down. I won’t be a minute. We’ll want a cup of tea.’

Xynthia’s living room is a museum to her past, her pre-Halliday past when she still believed that her life would become something extraordinary. Framed photographs of her in various roles, all black-and-white, are ranged on every available surface like an entrenched army facing one last battle. I sit down on her sofa, another relic from the past, and wait for her, listening to the soft tick of a carriage clock on the mantelpiece over her gas fire. She takes so long I worry that something may have happened but eventually she reappears. Her manner has changed and her eyes seem brighter and I can now recognise the Xynthia I remember from way back. She has put on make-up and, though she is still attached to the oxygen cylinder, she seems to have miraculously shed a decade. It occurs to me that perhaps she could have been a very fine actress, if she had managed to escape Halliday’s clutches.

‘Tea’s ready, doll,’ she says. ‘In the kitchen. Be a good boy and fetch it, could you?’ I put down the envelope of photos I have been holding and go into the kitchen, where there are two cups on the counter. When I get back to the living
room, Xynthia is looking through the photographs, rotating each to the back of the set in a way that I can only describe as loving. She looks up when I come back with no hint of apology for having taken them without permission; instead, she smiles up at me kindly.

‘Lovely-looking girl, weren’t she?’

‘She’s my mother?’

‘Yes, my darling, yes she’s your mother.’

‘You knew her.’

‘Not well but, yes, I suppose I knew her. As well as anyone.’

‘Is she dead?’

Xynthia puts down the photos. I am still standing and she pats the sofa beside her, a strangely coquettish gesture that could only have been made by somebody who was used to getting her way with men. I sit down next to her and she takes one of my hands.

‘You know, you look like your father but there’s something of Marcela in you too. You’re darker than Frankie. You like him in other ways?’

‘I hope not,’ I say. She likes this; her eyes crinkle.

‘I used to see you, in school,’ Xynthia says. ‘I used to watch you, see how you were getting on.’ She squeezes my hand harder. ‘Was he terrible to you?’

I do not reply immediately, look down at my hands, try to think of the right reply. ‘Not terrible, no,’ I say. ‘But he never wanted me. I always wished that he would. It’s hard for a kid, knowing that.’

‘Daniel.’ She lets go of my hand, leans forward with difficulty and picks up the photos again. She breathes heavily.
‘Emphysema,’ she says. ‘Smoking. It’s an absolute fucker, I don’t mind saying.’

I smile at her casual profanity. ‘I only know her name,’ I say. ‘What was she like? Where was she from? What can you tell me about her?’

‘Whatever you want to know,’ Xynthia says. ‘The question is, do you really want to know? Because it’s a story as bad as any I ever heard.’

My mother’s full name was Marcela Cosma and she came from a small village in Romania. One day an advertisement appeared on her school’s noticeboard, advertising university courses in England, offering them free as part of a British-Romanian exchange programme. My mother was a promising student but came from a poor family, which could never have afforded to send her to college; her future was mapped out, dedicated to helping her mother and father. It was the reason she’d been conceived in the first place, a purely expedient decision on her parents’ part to ensure there would be somebody to look after them when they grew old. So she didn’t tell her parents about the programme, applied for it in secret. To her very great delight, she was accepted and she left, again in secret, for her new life studying English Literature at a university in London.

That there was no university place, and that there had never been a university place, was something that, Xynthia tells me, my mother never truly believed. She clung to the belief that she had been driven across Europe in the back of a van by men entirely unconnected to the original advertisement and that, on a campus somewhere in London, a
room was still patiently waiting for her. Regardless, the reality was that she’d been sold into the sex trade and that was where she was trapped. But my mother had an unshakable belief in the ultimate goodness of humanity, something she held on to throughout her terrible ordeal. She always expected that something would happen to make it stop, this awful nightmare she’d found herself in. So, when my father fell for her, that was it. The fairytale ending she had been waiting for had arrived.

‘I never had my father pegged for a knight on a white charger,’ I say.

‘That’s because he fucking wasn’t,’ Xynthia says, her sudden vehemence causing her to cough. I wait for her to finish, listen to her sucking in breaths. ‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘But it’s true. Oh, listen, he liked her enough. Maybe even loved her, I don’t know. But a knight? Fucking joking, aren’t you?’

‘So how did you know her?’

‘Vincent.’ She almost spits the word, like it tastes bad and she doesn’t want it in her mouth. ‘Your mum, she was one of his girls.’

Halliday had stood in my office and threatened me, forced me into a humiliating position in which I have to do his dirty work, and all the time he knew that he had been the master of my mother, had forced her into infinitely more depraved and humiliating situations. My hand holding my cup of tea begins to shake; Xynthia notices and calmly takes it from me.

‘I’m sorry, my darling,’ she says. ‘It isn’t what you came to hear. But you do have a right to know.’

‘So…’ I grasp for words. ‘How did it happen? What did Halliday think, about one of his girls, and my father?’

‘He was inside at the time. Six months for aggravated assault, somebody owed him money and Vincent broke his arm. Your father and Marcela got together while he was inside. By the time he got out, it was too late for you to be…’ Here Xynthia’s composure falters, the brutal realities of the situation too much for her to comfortably articulate. ‘Got rid of,’ she manages. ‘Thank sweet heaven. But Vincent weren’t happy. See, your father was working for him at the time, doing fuck knows what, but what he definitely shouldn’t have been doing was knocking up one of Vincent’s girls. Vincent was not best pleased.’

‘So I was born. Then what? What happened to my mother?’

‘Oh, Daniel. I am so sorry.’

‘Did he kill her? Did he have her killed?’

‘Killed? No, no, Vincent didn’t kill girls. Did a lot of other things, but not that. No, he didn’t kill her. He sold her. While your father stood by and did nothing.’

‘Sold her?’ For a moment, Xynthia’s words do not make sense. How can you sell a person? I look at her in shock; she is rubbing her forehead, pinching her eyes, shaking her head in sadness. But it is not grief I feel. Halliday sold my mother, and I feel nothing but rage.

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