After the Lie: A gripping novel about love, loss and family secrets (21 page)

H
earing
my dad explain ‘the unfortunate incident with Sean McAllister’ all those years ago, not making any attempt to gloss over his part in it, unleashed a sadness in me that I didn’t know I was still capable of. The tears kept coming. Not the great wrenching sobs of the emotionally incontinent, but the quiet tears of the defeated.

Reliving the cataclysmic events put into action by a silly teenage girl who wanted to fit in nearly sheared me in two. I kept looking at Mark but his face was impassive. Would he want to stay with me now that we’d laid out not only our family history, but also our family lies in all their sordid glory?

In between glancing at Dad to see whether he was becoming too distraught, I kept putting myself in Mark’s position. However we tried to adorn the facts, they were ugly and not easily smoothed over. The woman he married hadn’t bothered to enlighten him that she’d bared her breasts – and her bum – for his best customer, who hadn’t held back on getting his tackle out either. The nice respectable family he’d married into had a criminal record. Plus the little matter of my mother masterminding a fresh start with a new name for me, like something out of
Gone Girl
. And most tellingly of all, despite the fact that he’d seen a baby, twice, pop out of her body, his wife had never trusted him enough to tell the truth.

So now, all the truths we had shared, the truths that were real, appeared bent out of shape by the omissions.

I tried to catch Mark’s eye but he was looking away from me in a manner that I couldn’t describe as casual. It was as though he was sitting in the optician’s chair having various lenses slotted in front of him until what he thought was an F revealed itself to be a P. Similar, but completely different.

Dad finally ground to a halt. He spread his hands out on the table in front of him. ‘I don’t come out of this well. In the end, he was a young lad who’d made a mistake, but I took it so much further and ruined everyone’s life. Dorothy’s, Lydia’s, even my own, though that matters the least.’

And as though something was wrenching and twisting inside me, the memory of going away with my dad, three months before his trial, barged in. We’d rented a cottage in Somerset, just the two of us. It was the last time we’d talked openly, when I still saw him as someone to rely on, not someone to protect. In between games of Yahtzee, we discussed what had happened, how we’d cope. He spent the week instilling in me that I was strong, that I could survive, that this was just a bump in the road. That we’d go on to lead good lives after all of this was over.

For years I thought he’d been right.

I put my hand out to cover his. ‘Dad.
You
didn’t ruin anyone’s life. I did that myself. If anything, it was the other way round.’

He gripped my fingers. ‘No, darling. I picked you up five minutes after you were born and promised I’d never let bad things happen to you. What happened that day was the result of my fury at myself that I hadn’t protected you. But it’s not an excuse. I was the grown-up with a duty of care, even to Sean McAllister. You were just a teenager trying to find her way in life. That’s a huge difference.’

My mother had remained quiet. Every time she shifted in her seat as though she was about to have an opinion – which was approximately every thirty seconds – my father put his hand up to silence her. Scenes I’d long deleted from my memory stirred within me, a bit like a dog drying out after heavy rain and taking on a different shape all together.

Despite considering my mother a dictator for the last thirty years, Dad hadn’t always capitulated when my mother strode through the family, delivering her rules and regulations in a no-prisoners-here way. They’d clashed swords, my mother in a shrill, coming-through-now bulldozer fashion, my father in a far lighter but determined manner. I did recall, seeing him now, that he’d often diverted her with a joke or a compliment. All her hackles would settle down again until the next time she had a diktat she wanted us to follow. In the middle of all my panic about whether Mark would demand a divorce and what would happen to Izzy and Jamie, I kept feeling slivers of joy at the glimpses of my dad, as he was, years ago, confident and capable.

My mother was the first one to ask Mark a direct question. ‘Are you terribly shocked by all of this?’

When he replied, ‘Yes,’ it still surprised me. I was so used to Mark having a liberal view of everything – of Jamie’s vodka-swigging at parties, his fumbling in the bedroom with Eleanor, Izzy’s predilection for watching wall-to-wall
TOWIE
on TV. My brain struggled to comprehend that this man, the one who indulged my need to have a particular mug for my tea, who accepted that I couldn’t sleep unless the curtains were completely closed, did have a tipping point of shock. He’d always been the one to take everything in his stride, allowing me the luxury of going off the deep end.

My mother did her usual delicate beating about the bush. ‘So, Mark, where does this leave you with Lydia?’

‘With all due respect, Dorothy, it’s none of your business. It’s something Lydia and I will discuss without you sitting there ready to tell her what to think. What I will say, is quite a lot is falling into place for me. I’m a bit stunned that Lydia’s had to live a lie for so long.’

My dad stretched out his other hand and took my mother’s. She didn’t bat him away like she normally did. She clutched it, her knuckles white against his craggy old fingers. I waited for my mother to launch into Mark but she said, with the sort of gentleness that I’d associated with other people’s mums, ‘I only wanted the best for her, you know.’

She sounded so desolate. I tried to smother my resentment. How could putting down Tripod be the best for me? Incubating my shame at the perfect temperature all my life? Making sure there was never a chance to forget?

My dad squeezed her hand. ‘I know you did, love, I know you did.’ She leaned against him.

My dad got up. ‘Come on, Dorothy. We need to leave them to it. That’s enough for one night.’

My mother made no move to get up. ‘You won’t do anything silly, Mark, will you? Don’t make any decisions, you know, well…’

She walked stiffly round the table. Briefly, she stroked my hair. Her touch was lighter than I remembered. ‘I did what I thought was right, Sally. I did it all for you. So you wouldn’t be, you know, so you wouldn’t, for the rest of your life, be
that
girl.’

My dad put his arm around her shoulders. I wanted to see them out but I was afraid to go to the front door in case Mark followed me and pushed past us, out into the night. I couldn’t let him leave without trying to explain, though the only real explanation was that we’d all lied to him.

And in my case, laid new lies like frosted icing on top.

M
ark was always
the one who came in search of cuddles. I accepted them rather than sought them out. That night, once Jamie had returned, ten minutes past his curfew with his shirt hanging out, and Izzy had danced in, singing a couple of lines of
If I Were a Rich Man
, I’d yearned to be held. Longed for the solid feel of Mark’s body, the way he tucked his pillow down so our faces could be close together. Mark settled Izzy into bed, who even at thirteen still liked to be officially snuggled in. I went through the motions of responding to where Jamie might find a shirt for the morning or whether I’d bought any biscuits for break. It was as though the elements of my life had fragmented, like a windscreen that shatters but remains in place, without anyone knowing for how long.

We got ready for bed, not speaking at all, just orbiting around each other in an unnatural way. I kept looking at the things that usually grated on my need for order: Mark’s whiskers round the sink, the dirty socks balled up rather than shaken out, the light left on in the hallway. Suddenly, if not endearing, they seemed representative of certainty, of a life shared.

In bed, I stretched my hand out towards his. For a moment, his fingers didn’t flicker, then they gripped mine.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. It wasn’t a sorry dashed out to keep the peace, dominated by resentment, a sense of apologising to move forward, without really acknowledging being at fault. This sorry came deep from the core of me. A recognition that I’d let this man down by not confiding in him.

Mark shifted next to me. ‘I can’t process it all.’

‘I know. Will you tell the children?’

He took his hand away. I felt him rub his face.

‘I don’t know. It’s not just our family, is it? Jamie will tell Eleanor. But if we don’t say anything, we’re infecting another generation with secrets and lies. Jesus. You could have got it all out on the table right at the start, then they’d have grown up knowing and it wouldn’t have been a big deal.’

‘I couldn’t tell you. My mother was adamant I was never to speak about it again.’

‘But you’re forty-three now. There must have been some point over the last decade when we could have had the conversation.’

Normally I’d have got angry. But I could feel the hurt blistering out of him. His voice was hoarse, as though the words were scraping past the pain in his throat.

‘When would there have been a good time to sit down and say, “By the way, darling…”? A few weeks ago, you were going on about that head teacher who used to run a brothel, all shocked about how she’d covered up her past. Never mind you telling everyone at Katya’s dinner party that you wouldn’t want anyone you knew seeing me naked. Every time I was on the cusp of blurting out the truth, I felt this dreadful terror that you would walk out on me. A bit like I do tonight, actually.’

I’d never let Mark know how vulnerable I felt before.

Mark turned on his side and took my face in his hands. ‘That’s completely different. She was abusing young people. You just did something stupid as a teenager. I don’t know what more I could have done to convince you that you could trust me. I wouldn’t have gone anywhere then and I’m not going anywhere now. In some ways, a lot of things have fallen into place: your funny little way of withdrawing, of creating this self-contained aura.’ He rolled over onto his side. ‘I’m not sure how I feel about knowing Sean went out with you. Though I suppose it would have been worse if you’d actually slept with him,’ he said, gently moving on top of me. ‘You didn’t, did you?’

I closed my eyes. It was an obvious question. And the time had come to stop lying about the answer.

T
he next couple
of days passed in a backwards and forwards of: ‘But you were only thirteen!’; ‘The same age as Izzy!’; ‘Weren’t you worried about getting pregnant?’; interspersed with ‘I feel a right bloody idiot, working away in Sean’s house all this time, not knowing he’s had sex with my wife.’

I wanted to argue that it wasn’t as sordid as it sounded. That when Sean and I were in bed together, everything that was wrong with my teenage life receded into a haze of closeness and connection. We couldn’t wait to steam out of lessons and race back to his, our feet echoing down the lanes, the smell of the spring hedgerows in the air. When he was making love to me, the world changed into a landscape of intensity and colour that I wanted to trap in a jar and inhale when I was away from him.

But reminiscing about how good another man made me feel didn’t seem like a solid situation-rescue strategy. I didn’t know what to say to absorb the hurt. And really, what had I been thinking? When I looked at Izzy, with her rainbow array of nail varnishes, her collection of snow globes and posters of puppies on her wall, I couldn’t imagine her kissing a boy, let alone having sex. She was just so young. And although I’d thought I was so grown-up, going out with the mighty Sean McAllister, I’d been no more than a child myself.

Thankfully, my mother kept out of our way, letting Mark and I relax back down into some semblance of normality. The heat of accusation gradually faded away, moving towards a genuine desire on his part to process and accept. His questions were considered but not overwhelming. I felt more understood in those few days than in thirty years. Living life without a filter, however, took some adjusting to. I had to concentrate to make myself speak freely, to allow memories and thoughts to make their way out into the world, unchecked and unsanitised, at least when the children weren’t around.

With typical generosity of spirit, Mark insisted we should take our time to work out how to tell the kids because of the domino effect on Sean’s family. His view was there was no rush, given that ‘all that business’ hadn’t been spoken about for so long, that letting little bits of information slowly trickle out would reduce the shock value when the whole truth came to light. ‘Anyway, Jamie can’t see beyond Eleanor’s tight T-shirts and Izzy’s too busy being in love with that bloke off the
X Factor
to give much of a hoot about what their mother got up to in the ’80s – too last century, darling!’

I loved him for his measured approach, for having a plan to keep us on an even keel when terra firma was shifting. I deliberately didn’t answer calls from my mother. From now on, I was going to make my own judgments without the drip-feed of my mother’s warnings: ‘I shouldn’t…’; ‘I wouldn’t…’; ‘It’s probably best if you don’t…’

My mother, however, wasn’t the sort to be defeated by caller I.D. When I suspected my dad had been unable to restrain her any longer, she turned up when she knew Mark was at work. I’d only just filled the kettle when she skewered straight in. ‘Mark’s not going to leave you, is he?’

I shook my head, pathetically grateful that I didn’t have to face her reaction to a ‘yes’ answer.

I saw the tramline wrinkles down her forehead ease and fade with the relief that the family wasn’t going to suffer a second humiliation: the saviour son-in-law leaving the prodigal daughter.

With a crunch of a chocolate digestive, she banged down the lid on that particular Pandora’s box and turned her attention to the state of my flowerbeds at the front of the house. From divorce to dandelions in five seconds flat. A hidden camera, the Rushford/Southport family and a reality TV show could bring new meaning to the word ‘surreal’. Yet the idea of confronting my mother, digging back in time to excavate a huge mountain of rubble to expose real feelings was just too exhausting to contemplate.

After she’d tottered off down the drive, throwing in a warning about threadworm after Mabel had chosen the moment of her departure to drag her backside from one side of the hall to the other, I wished I’d taken her to task.

I was still sifting through the various home truths I’d like to have shared with her when I picked up the kids. It took me a while to realise they were talking to each other in the back of the car. Usually they preferred to bicker over whose rucksack was taking up the most room or who was bagsying the TV – for rugby in Jamie’s case or
Strictly
in Izzy’s. But today they were whispering. Izzy was casting anxious glances in my direction. Jamie had his finger on his lips. My maternal antennae were waving about like treetops in the wind. I smiled into the rear-view mirror. ‘Everything all right?’

The over-bright ‘Yeah, yeah, all fine, Mum’ from Jamie alerted me to imminent disaster. The last time they behaved like this, Jamie had received a detention for imitating the Geography teacher when a wasp flew up her skirt.

As soon as we got through the door, they both scattered upstairs bypassing the biscuit tin in the kitchen. In my experience, Izzy would crack first. Sure enough, light little footsteps pattered down the stairs.

‘Mum?’

I stopped chopping carrots and turned round. ‘Darling?’

‘It’s Jamie, Mum. He’s in real trouble.’

Izzy’s idea of real trouble and Jamie’s were diametrically opposed. Izzy’s dramas tended to revolve around microscopic rebellions such as writing in black ink instead of blue, but latterly, Jamie didn’t class anything as trouble unless it escalated as far as Head of Year and even then, he saw it as a chance to enhance his standing as a cool dude. I blamed bloody Eleanor. I couldn’t remember him even being told off until he met
her
, with her sassy madam ways.

‘He hasn’t been imitating Mrs Randle again, has he?’ I laughed.

‘Mum, it’s not funny.’

I put the vegetable peeler down. Izzy was pulling her jumper over her hands. ‘You’ll stretch your sleeves doing that.’

She rubbed her hands over her face. ‘Promise me you won’t start shouting.’

‘I’ll do my best. Do you need a cuddle?’

She raced to me and hugged me tightly. Most of the time, she shook me off if I went anywhere near her, flouncing out of the room if I so much as stroked her hair. She had my attention now.

‘Don’t be cross. Jamie said I can’t tell on him.’

‘Sweetheart, if he’s in trouble, I have to know what’s going on.’

I could feel the tension in her bony shoulders.

‘Eleanor sent a photo to Jamie on her phone,’ Izzy mumbled into my chest.

I lifted her face up. ‘What sort of photo?’ Fronds of fear were beginning to quiver.

‘You know, one of her, um, fanny. Her vagina.’

Given the actual message, it surprised me that I still managed to recoil from Izzy’s casual use of ‘fanny’. And in other circumstances, I would have suppressed a smile that she felt the need to translate for her closeted mother.

‘How do you know?’

‘She sent it while he was at rugby practice. He’d left his phone on the bench in the changing rooms and one of the boys picked it up and started looking at his messages.’

‘Just a minute, love. I need to get Jamie down. He needs to delete that photo, right now.’

‘But Mum, it’s too late. They sent it to everyone. Even Freya’s sister saw it and she’s in the first year.’

I shot upstairs, shouting for Jamie. Dread was compressing my voice. All the horrible stories I’d ever read about teenagers hanging themselves after stupid arguments with their parents, B grades instead of A*s, cyber-bullying, raced through my mind. I could barely look as I rounded the corner on the landing. I barged into his bedroom, not bothering to knock. He was face down on the bed, head in his pillow.

I put my hand on his back. ‘Jamie, love. I gather there’s been a bit of trouble at school.’

He raised himself onto one elbow. ‘I’ve really let you down, Mum.’

I sat on his bed and pulled him into my arms. ‘Darling, we all make mistakes. But you’re going to have to tell me everything so I can help you. I know about the photo.’

His shoulders slumped. ‘Do you know what sort of photo it was, though?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘I thought you’d go mad.’

‘I don’t think it’s a time for that. How did they get into your phone? Didn’t you have a password on it?’

‘I kept doing those stupid passwords where you draw a pattern with your finger and getting locked out because I’d forgotten what I’d done, so I just left it off in the end.’ The distress in his voice was fanning my own fright.

This was not a moment for a lecture about the perils of disorganisation but honestly, I would have to pencil in a day to wring his neck at a later date. For god’s sake.

‘Right, so who picked up your phone?’

‘Just some bloke in the lower sixth.’

‘Who?’

‘You don’t even know him. What does it matter? The photo’s gone out and they’ll all think it was me.’

‘No, they won’t, darling, because I’m going to get down to the school and sort this out.’

‘No! You can’t do that. Everyone will think I’ve told on them. They’ll think I’m a right sneak.’

‘What about Eleanor, though? Does she know?’

Jamie’s face crumpled. ‘I tried to talk to her after school but she told me she hated me and ran away in tears.’

‘It was her fault for sending such a stupid photo in the first place. What was she thinking of?’ Out it came: ‘Little trollop.’

Jamie pulled himself away from me. ‘She’s not a trollop. I knew you wouldn’t understand. I wanted that photo. I asked her for it. It was supposed to be private. You’ve no idea what it feels like to be young. I don’t suppose you and dad even have sex any more!’

He swiped at the tears that were leaking down his face.

The temptation to say, ‘Last night, actually,’ was buried under the realisation that this was my occasion to be a grown-up. I gritted my teeth against the memory of my mother’s slow articulation of exactly ‘how disappointed’ she was in me. She’d hard-wired my brain to believe I could never make a success of anything ever again. I was about to set the template for Jamie’s ability to handle his mistakes for the rest of his life.

I pulled him to me again, feeling the damp heat of his face through my shirt. ‘Jamie, I remember exactly what it felt like to be a teenager and to mess up. Now you’ll think it’s the end of the world, but I promise you it’s not. One day, I’ll tell you some of the mistakes I made. I think you should go and see Eleanor’s parents.’

Jamie pushed me away again. ‘I can’t do that.’

‘I’ll come with you.’

‘Will I get into trouble at school?’

‘We’ll probably have to have a word with the headmaster.’ I wasn’t sure what was worse, being the pupil who’d cocked up or the mother who’d let it happen.

‘Do you think Sean will find out? He’ll be really angry. He was always joking about me being the son he never had.’

‘Of course, he’ll have to know but he might understand more than you think, darling. Though dads can get a bit protective over their daughters. I need to phone Daddy.’

Jamie sagged against me. ‘Do you have to tell him?’

I marvelled at the naïvety of teenagers. In some ways, my kids knew so much more about life than me. I was quite positive that Jamie could name a variety of dodgy sexual practices with household items I would never view in the same way again – but he still showed a remarkable lack of understanding about what was in the ‘serious shit’ category.

I was beginning see the advantage of packing kids off to a single-sex boarding school aged seven. ‘Is Eleanor sixteen yet?’

‘No.’

‘You don’t have to answer the question I’m about to ask you, lovey, but I think it’s going to come up.’

Jamie looked at the floor. ‘Mum! This is just embarrassing.’ He slumped back down and curled up in a ball, facing the wall.

I touched his shoulder and felt him tense away from me. I screwed up my eyes and scrabbled about for my ‘this is a perfectly normal conversation to be having with my sixteen-year-old son’ voice. ‘Have you slept with Eleanor?’

‘For god’s sake. We haven’t actually had “intercourse”, just, you know...’

‘So technically Eleanor is still a virgin?’ I was glad he couldn’t see my face.

‘Ye-es.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Yes. Go away.’

I hoped, more than I’d ever hoped for anything in my life, that he was telling the truth. The trouble with kids was that it wasn’t that they grew out of lying, they just got better at it so you didn’t realise how often they did it. I picked up an array of water glasses from his chest of drawers, the sheer quantity going some way to explaining why we were down to three glasses between the rest of us.

Though water glass scarcity wasn’t the most pressing problem to tackle right now.