Not My Father's Son (10 page)

In a way, perhaps, the woman did me a favor. Because she had so appalled me, I was jolted out of the agitation I had been feeling as my father appeared, next in the line of people passing by.

“Hello,” I nodded curtly and looked past him to the next mourner in line.

Later, as we raised a glass to Granny at a hotel in Inverness, I caught the woman’s eye across the room and could see she had not been shamed but fully intended to pursue her goal. She made to approach me. I gave her a look that I hoped made clear my utter lack of willingness. It was the visual equivalent of “Back off, bitch!” Hell no, I was not to be trifled with, not at my granny’s funeral, and not by this woman.

I talked to as many of Granny’s old friends as possible. In one corner were a few older men, all of whom had known her for decades. We got chatting about old times. They wondered if I remembered Sam, her second husband. I said I didn’t, though I loved the fact that she used to come and visit us when I was a little boy on the back of his motorbike. It was one of those memories that I had no true visual of, but a very vibrant manufactured one in my mind. It was
so
Granny.

“Did you know Tommy Darling?” I asked one of the men.

“Oh aye,” he replied. “I knew him fine.”

“He never came back after the war, did he?” I said.

The man really looked at me. Something cleared behind his rheumy eyes.

“No,” he said enigmatically.

“And he died in a shooting accident?” I fished.

“Well, they called it an accident,” came the reply.

“You don’t think it was?” I tried not to sound too shocked.

Suddenly a hand was on my shoulder and a departing cousin took my attention. It wasn’t till much later that night that I recalled the man’s remark at all.

Back in Covent Garden we
were wrapping up the interview.

“I sometimes feel that other parts of my life have been like an episode of
Dallas,
so I don’t know why this shouldn’t be too,” I joked for the camera, but it was also true.

Some of the details of my family’s dystopian past were much more in step with the plotlines of a histrionic television show than an everyday tale of country folk. For example, the husband of the woman who was chasing me around my grandmother’s wake for an autograph had taken his own life when she told him she was leaving him for my father. Oh yes. And his son was in my father’s employ at the time. And the doctor who was called to identify the body and sign the death certificate became, a few years later, my brother-in-law, when he married my ex-wife’s sister. Thank you, cut to commercial break.

“I’m forty-five, you know, time’s marching on. I just think you do become more curious about the past and . . . you want to know.” God! Yes you do, Alan! Yes you do!

Elizabeth, the director, then steered me towards the first port of call in my quest. The next day I would be in Mary Darling’s front room, asking my mother questions about who
her
father was.

I was told that we were leaving immediately for the train station. I thought we were staying that evening in London, but the early finish was in fact to facilitate travel. At 5
P.M
. that afternoon I would not be sitting comfortably in the privacy of my own flat dialing my father’s number, but on a train zooming north through the English countryside towards Scotland.

T
rain stations will forever mean Granny for me. When she came to visit us, my mum and I would go to Arbroath to collect her from the train station. I can still feel the excitement building in my tummy as we waited for her to appear amid the throngs. Finally I’d spot her, and as soon as she caught my eye her little face would burst into a grin, her suitcases would drop to her sides, and her arms would fling open to greet me as I sped down the platform towards her like a bolt of lightning.

I loved my granny. I think she was the first person to let me know it was okay to be different. The crafts I made at school that my father scoffed at and I was afraid to show him were not only praised by Granny but hung up on her wall. After she died my mum sent me a cross-stitch sampler I had made in primary school for her birthday.

I laughed when I saw it, all those years later, the wrong stitches, the size of my name dwarfing hers, but Granny had greeted it as though it were the most magical work of art.

When we went to stay with her in her little flat in Inverness she’d let Tom and me lie in bed with her, read comics, and eat sweets. Indeed, Granny not only encouraged us to bend the rules, she was usually the instigator.
She
was the one who’d first pulled us into the middle of the Grant Street pedestrian suspension bridge in Inverness and started jumping up and down to make the whole thing wobble, sending us into giggles and screams in equal measure. Of course after that, we did this every time we crossed.

When I was a little older, maybe eleven or so, and staying with her on my own for a weekend, she took me to the cinema. The only movies playing were X-rated, but that did not deter my granny. Somehow or other I was smuggled into the theatre for a David Essex double feature of
That’ll Be the Day
and
Stardust
. David Essex was a huge UK pop and movie star at this time and I felt so incredibly sophisticated getting to see him in action, in an X-rated film no less!! I remember vividly a scene in which he is being pressured by his manager to write more songs for his album and he says the immortal line “I’m an artist, not a machine!” Granny and I thought this was hilarious and repeated it all weekend long, and indeed I still use it today. Talking of hilarious, that was her favorite and most-used word. Except in her Highland accent she pronounced it “hil-AH-rious,” which somehow made it even more, well, hilarious.

As I got older I had to work every school holiday, and so my visits to see her in Inverness became fewer and far between. When Granny came to visit us, the atmosphere in the house changed. Her spirit infected everyone. My father was in better spirits and we felt safer when she was near. Even if she was there when I had to work all day, it still felt like a holiday knowing she would be at home when I returned from the forest, or as I sped down the sawmill yard for lunch. But gradually, my father’s behavior became more obvious to Granny, especially when he would disappear out every night even when she was staying. I could see the concern on her face as she glanced at her daughter when my dad popped into the living room for his “That’s me away.” I never heard Granny say a bad word about my father, but I know she was incredibly supportive of my mum leaving him. She always wished the best for everyone. I think I have inherited some of her mischief and joie de vivre, and I hope her compassion.

The last time I saw her was just after she’d had a heart attack and wasn’t well enough to make her eldest son, Tommy’s, sixtieth birthday celebrations. So we all gathered at her little assisted-living house before the party. She was very frail and looked a little overwhelmed at having so many people in her home, but she was still the same old Granny.

I had cropped blond hair at the time (maybe for a film role but maybe just because it took my fancy) and it was the cause of much scoffing by some family members.

“What’s this, another weird haircut, Alan?” said one.

“Well, I like it!” Granny’s frail little voice piped up from deep in the chair she was sunk into.

“And if I was young again I’d have my hair a different color every week. I’d be a freak like Alan too!”

The day after her funeral, I had a sudden desire to go to the Grant Street suspension bridge and say my own good-bye to her. Funerals sometimes are to be endured, and as I’ve said, my main concern that day was looking after Mum. As Grant and I walked across, my heart sank. I was jumping up and down but it didn’t feel nearly as bouncy and magical as it had all those years ago. But when we got to the middle it was completely as scary and fun as I’d remembered and we both leapt up and down like five-year-olds.

“Good-bye, Granny!” I shouted out to the sky. “I love you! Thank you!”

Grant was taking pictures and laughing with me. We stopped bouncing and had a hug. I felt really close to Granny in that moment and was so happy Grant was there to experience it. They had never met but I knew they would have loved each other. Still giddy we began to race back to the car like schoolboys in the playground. As Grant tried to pass me I put out my arm to stop him and suddenly his camera flew out of his hand, up, up into the sky. It banged against one suspension wire with a huge metallic clang, then another, before plunging into the freezing waters of the River Ness below.

We both stopped in our tracks, utterly shocked.

“That was weird,” said Grant.

“That was Granny,” I replied, quite certain.

I’m not religious in the slightest, but I do truly believe that people’s energies can be present or invoked after they’re gone. It was as if she wanted to be part of the fun on that bridge too. And losing the camera was her way of telling us to use our imaginations more, enjoy our memories but live in the moment. At least, that’s what I have chosen to think. And whatever happened, I certainly had the moment of connection I’d craved with Granny.

O
utside the window, England slid by in a bucolic blur. I took deep breaths. I cleared my throat, laid out my pad and pen. This wasn’t going to be easy. I needed to be strong. I had nothing to be ashamed of. I remembered the wise words of an American president that so connected with me I had them written in neon on the kitchen wall of my London flat: The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. I knew an awful lot about fear. I waited till five o’clock and pressed “call.” He answered after a few rings. “Hullo?” His voice. Fainter than I remembered, but with the same Highland upward inflection as always.

“Hi, it’s Alan.”

“Uh-huh. How are you doing?” he asked.

“Well, obviously, I’m not doing so great.”

Don’t. Don’t get riled.

“I have a lot of questions I’d like to ask you, and so I’d just like to get started.”

I was being blunt on purpose, keeping him at bay, not allowing him to derail or entangle me.

“All right. I’ve had that reporter fellow down here again,” he said, doing exactly that.

“Okay, I’ll talk about that later. But do you think we could stick to the issue of me not being your son, for now?”

Don’t mess with me, old man.

“Aye aye. I know you must have a lot of questions.”

I looked down at my notes. I had made a list, with careful spaces for me to scribble down his answers. I needed to remember every second of this conversation.

“Are you certain? Are you absolutely certain?” I tried to sound flat and scientific.

“I’d never have brought it up if I wasn’t certain, Alan,” said my father. “I wrote you a letter about it, years ago. It’s in my will. But when I heard you were doing this TV program I didn’t want you to find out that way, so that’s why I called Tom.”

The next question was difficult to ask. I was born on January 27, 1965, and I needed the math to make sense. I needed it all to make sense, and so I said it.

“So you’re certain you didn’t have sex with Mum at any time during the months of April or May of 1964?”

“No, Alan, no. Sex had been sporadic with your mother for some time before that.” Okay, that was definitely more than I wanted to know. A simple “no” would have sufficed, but I chose to be encouraged by his openness instead.

“It’s why we had to move away from Dunkeld, Alan,” my father proffered.

“Why?”

“The shame,” he said. There it was. I knew it would rear its ugly head before too long.

“The shame of Mum having sex with someone else?” I asked, wondering if, like me, he’d imagined how this conversation would pan out, and if he thought we’d go this deep so soon.

“The shame of people knowing,” he sidestepped slightly.

“I was compromised in my work because I had dealings with him.”

That made sense. We moved away from Dunkeld to the west coast of Scotland, near Fort William, when I was just under a year old, and stayed there till I was four, when we moved to Panmure Estate. And I remembered enough from growing up to understand how a small rural community like Dunkeld could be unbearable when everyone knew your dirty laundry.