After the Lie: A gripping novel about love, loss and family secrets (3 page)

O
n days like today
, I wished we’d stayed in our little village in Norfolk and let everybody gossip their arses off until they’d found someone else to talk about. I fantasised about telling my mother that I wouldn’t go along with her charade any more. That I didn’t care that she arranged the flowers at St Joseph’s, that Dad had had his application accepted to join the golf club, that she loved telling everyone that her grandchildren went to Eastington House. I just wanted to be who I was, imperfect bloody me, who messed up.

But most of all, I wished I’d told Mark – some of it at least – the first day I met him after he rescued me when my stall collapsed at a wedding show. I wished I’d never allowed the secret to grow, rolling down the generations like a toffee under a sofa, collecting dust, hair and grit as it went.

‘I’ve led a very dull existence,’ I said when people asked me about my past. I’d been in Surrey long enough to lose my Norfolk accent, except for the occasional word. Mark knew we’d lived there but I blocked all suggestions about going back to show him where I grew up.

‘It’s so flat and boring.’

‘You’d hate all that seaside town nonsense, amusement arcades and silly souvenir shops.’

‘I’m a townie now. All those marshes depress me. It’s so bleak.’

In reality, I longed to be under those big open skies again. Yearned to walk for miles and miles on those sandy beaches, picking up razor shells or crabbing ankle- deep in freezing water. I craved the sea air, with its taint of dead seal and seaweed. I wanted to burst through the front door, cheeks whipped by blasts of sand and winter wind. I’d even run squealing into the Wash in April, just as we used to, disdainful of the out-of-towners who stood shivering on the shore, wrapped in their puffy anoraks and suburban attitudes.

Even my mother, who was a great one for snuffing out any source of fun, never batted an eyelid about me being gone for hours, as long as I didn’t commit the cardinal sins of getting home after dark and letting my dinner go cold. That freedom seemed laughable now when I thought of my own kids and their constant texting about where they were and what time they needed picking up.

And now I’d missed my moment to come clean. Perhaps if I hadn’t been so
grateful
that someone could see the good in me, I might have trusted Mark. I could have flopped against him, maybe heard him say, ‘Poor you. You were so young.’ Sometimes I struggled to remember how this Bazooka bubble gum of a lie had burst and engulfed us all.

I hardly ever cried. It was as though I didn’t have the same amount of moisture in my body as other people. When the whole room wept at wedding speeches, I stood dry-eyed at the back, wondering where people found the huge well of emotion to display. But today I was making up for it.

I needed to talk to Sean. Surely he had as much to lose as me? What if he just viewed it as a bit of fun, something that happened so long ago as to merit barely a mention? What if he couldn’t believe it was still governing my life, my family’s life, changing us all forever? Of course, he hadn’t lived it the way we had, but if his lips, those perfect lips, even suggested a smile, I’d have to be kept away from pitchforks.

I forced myself to take deep breaths until I stopped shaking. Nearly time to go and meet the bride who was taking the theme of ‘Until death do us part’ to extremes. I didn’t dare cancel in case I lost the ability to face anyone ever again once I’d stepped off the merry-go-round. Onwards and upwards with eye-whitening drops, foundation and a quick polish of my backbone.

I found the bride’s house easily. From the outside, it was a smart executive home, a square of lawn in front, garage to the side. When Clarissa answered the door, I did have to practise ‘eyes in’, as I instructed the children whenever we walked past a shouting match in the street, a car accident or anyone who was passé enough to be sporting a Mohican. Clarissa had enough nose and lip jewellery to quake in fear at magnetic forces. Beneath the long black hair streaked with pink, she had the sweetest elfin face. I did wonder what her fiancé looked like. How would he kiss her without getting an eye tooth hooked in a hoop? I wondered whether the neighbours shooed their children away in case they were invited in to eat barbecued bat.

She waved an arm tattooed with crossbows and gothic symbols and swept me across the threshold. ‘Come in, come in. I’m Clarissa.’

I held out my hand, noticing the inky skulls on her knuckles. She led me into a sitting room that looked like a skeleton might jiggle out from behind the velvet curtains. The walls were black. Two deep purple sofas were suspended from the ceiling by thick rope, dominating the room. Despite my misery, I was still trying to catalogue every little detail, storing it up to make the kids laugh. I didn’t want to think about what the bedroom looked like – chains and drapes and spiky things came to mind.

Clarissa indicated one of the swings. ‘Have a seat.’

I hesitated. ‘Is there anywhere I could sit with the laptop at a table?’

Clarissa smiled. ‘We don’t have a table.’

I moulded my face into a blank. ‘Okay, I’ll just balance on the swing.’ Nothing like trying to look professional while clinging onto playground equipment.

While we discussed her desire to come down the aisle to
Bat Out of Hell
and the logistics of having her Doberman, Satan, as a bridesmaid, my mind was chasing all sorts of solutions to stop Sean messing up my life for a second time. I needed to warn my parents. I couldn’t allow them to bump into him at school over coffee and croissants on French Day. Disappearing abroad was beginning to look very attractive.

‘Could you organise a wedding cake with a big skull on top?’ Clarissa asked, breaking into my miserable thoughts. ‘Would it be hugely expensive? My fiancé is concerned about the finances. He thinks we should just have cupcakes, but I’ve got my heart set on it. It would be so cool with a little bride and groom sitting in the eye sockets.’

‘I do know a clever cake maker but she doesn’t come cheap. Of course, if it really matters to you, I can spread the cost about among some other things on the invoice, so your fiancé wouldn’t necessarily have to know that it went on the cake.’

Clarissa looked aghast.

‘No. That wouldn’t be right. I love Mungo so much, we tell each other everything. You can’t go into a marriage without total honesty, can you?’

She looked at me with those huge eyes, thick black eyeliner distorting their beauty. Who was I to criticise the stuffed bat spread-eagled on the wall? Who cared if they donned dog collars and ate their supper from bowls on the floor? She was streets ahead of me. Fifteen years younger and generations smarter.

Total honesty was the way to go. But would my own marriage be able to withstand it after eighteen years of half-truths?

M
ost of the time
, my mother steered through choppy waters with the air of someone who didn’t even break a sweat until the mainsail ripped in half. In the six months leading up to Dad’s trial, when he’d been too broken to steady the family ship, my mother had written herself a list and set about ticking it off.

• Sell the house.
  
• Rent a house far away, somewhere that attracts lots of outsiders. London? Surrey? Brighton?
  
• Find a school for Sally, now to be known as Lydia.
  
• Find a job.
  
• Find a solution for Tripod.
  

There was no discussion about our dog. My mother wasn’t taking any chances. Tripod had lost one leg to a tumour, hence her name, and had one white ear in an otherwise black coat. My father’s photograph walking her on the beach had appeared in the papers. Too distinctive. ‘Sorry, Sally.’

I’d hardly ever seen my mother cry. She disdained tears. Even when I said goodbye to Tripod, the effort my mother was making not to tell me off for crying penetrated the moment so deeply that afterwards I felt guilty that I hadn’t focused on Tripod completely, transmitting how much I loved her. Worrying about whether Tripod knew how much I didn’t want to let her go kept me awake for months afterwards. In the event, I needn’t have fretted. I learnt much later that my mother had her put down.

‘Surely you must have realised no one would have wanted a three-legged mongrel?’

Dad had no problem with me crying. When my mother wasn’t there to cotter about ‘girls needing to toughen up, to stop expecting to be rescued by a handsome prince’, he would hug me and tell me to have a good cry, get it out of my system. He smelt of Extra Strong Mints, which I found comforting. The day after ‘all that business’, I understood why. I stumbled across him sitting on the dunes, staring across the Wash, smoking. If I’d been able to feel anything other than gut-wrenching fear, I would have been delighted to know that he had his own rebellion going on.

I tried to tell him how sorry I was. I struggled to look at him, pretending instead to watch the seagulls swooping over the inlet.

‘We all make mistakes, pet. Unfortunately, sometimes we have to pay a high price to put them right,’ he said, taking a deep drag on his cigarette.

Then we sat, the dune grasses whispering around us, while the questions I wanted to ask and the ones I hoped I wouldn’t have to answer drifted away on the autumn breeze.

In that moment, I thought the high price would be an apology, maybe a fidgety meeting with Sean’s parents with my dad in the unusual position of accepting admonishment rather than dispensing discipline. My understanding of the magnitude of what I’d done, what he’d done, came the following day, after Dad had met with the headmaster. I listened, spying from the stairs, as he spoke to my mother in a voice I struggled to match to my dad’s booming, jolly demeanour.

‘It’s out of their hands now. The police have stepped in. The father wants to prosecute. It’s not looking good, Dorothy.’

My mother muttered something sharp that I didn’t catch, something that seared a fraction more pain across my dad’s face.

Then he said, ‘No, absolutely no chance of the headship now when Bill retires. He told me that the governors have already written a joint letter instructing him to advertise for a replacement to start next year.’

My mother rested her hand briefly on his shoulder. She put a lamb chop and potatoes in front of him. ‘Well. That’s that, then. Always said we shouldn’t have been so lax with her. Then none of this would have happened. I expect they’ll ask her to leave the church choir now. I didn’t have a daughter so that she could become the local legend. We’re not going to be able to stay here, you know.’

Even back then, our priorities were polar opposites.

My dad looked as though he was incapable of absorbing another piece of information, but my mother still launched into the plan she had in mind. Through my spy gap, I saw that she was drying her little china teacups and putting them into the glass cabinet, handles turned outwards. At thirteen, I was old enough to wonder how anyone as loving as my father could have chosen someone as cold as my mother. She could have rented herself out as a backup refrigerator for emergencies.

What I didn’t realise was that was just the beginning of the recriminations. For the next six months, my mother alternated between buoying up my dad with comforting but terrifying phrases such as ‘previous good character’ and ‘mitigating circumstances’ and berating him with questions he couldn’t answer: ‘Who’s going to employ you if you get a criminal record?’

What she never wavered on was that, whatever the outcome of the court case, the Southport family was moving, far away, where Dad wouldn’t be
that man
and I wouldn’t be
that girl
. Some days she could barely stand to be in the same room as me. Spilling a drink, leaving my shoes in the hall, forgetting to hang up my coat – everything was a trigger for a rant about the disgrace I’d brought on the family, followed by her flouncing out to church.

Then, after all that waiting, dreading and hoping, on a freezing November day, we finally found out our fate.

My mother walked through the door with the news that Dad had gone to prison. ‘Three months will pass soon enough. It’s what comes next that’s the real challenge.’

That evening, we ate fish fingers and chocolate mini-rolls in silence, sitting on the sofa among half-packed boxes. The departure from the rigid routine of eating at the table frightened me. That and my mother telling me that we were never to speak of ‘it’ again. That no one ever needed to know.

Late that night, when I finally ran out of my own tears, my mother’s muffled sobs filled the darkness.

A week later, we locked the door for the last time and walked out of our lives, away from the village where we’d lived in our upside-down house with the kitchen and sitting room upstairs, views stretching over the sands and the quiet punctuated with the fluctuating sound of the tide – close, then far, then close again. Away from Sean. Away from the embarrassed throat-clearing when we walked into the newsagent’s, averting our gaze from the headlines in the
Eastern Daily Press
.

Away from Sally and towards Lydia.

I didn’t realise I would have to become someone else entirely. Not for the first time, I envied my brother, Michael, who’d thrown himself into university life up in Edinburgh. The suggestion of a scandal appeared to be all that was needed for the Perfect First Born to remain north of the border until Dad came out of prison and the furore at my old school in Norfolk faded into relative oblivion. My mother greeted any enquiries about my brother with the wrinkled brow of someone who feels their children’s pain. ‘Honestly, what with studying for his degree – he’s specialising in neurology, you know – there’s no time to be wasted on visits to us. Utterly dedicated, he is, that boy. Dedicated.’

For me, it was the ultimate proof that you wouldn’t want to be the fat girl marooned on a boat with Michael when the food was running out. He was going to be a ‘Doc-Tor’ and no family crisis was going to interfere with that. Maybe it was the selfishness of youth, maybe he had simply sucked up too many of my mother’s mean-spirited chromosomes, but while Dad was in prison and Mum was conducting a cross-country relocation, he proved himself so self-centred, it was surprising that he didn’t turn in circles when he walked. He visited not once, not twice, but never.

And now, after a thirty-year interval, I had another crisis to bring to the family door. My mother was never the source of comfort, but she was often the font of solutions.

Unpalatable ones.

I phoned to explain that Sean McAllister had turned up as a parent at her grandchildren’s school. Within fifteen minutes, she’d barged into my kitchen. ‘Are you sure, Lydia?’

‘Yes.’

‘How did that scoundrel end up here?’

I wished she could articulate the words ‘fucking bastard’. The whole ‘Sherlock Holmes chasing down a bounder’ language made me feel as though we were in a 1970s sitcom, though god knows, I’d never felt less like laughing. I told her what I knew.

‘It’ll break your father. He can’t know. He’s never been quite right since, you know…’ For a fraction of a second, my mother sagged. Then straightened.

A rush of weariness washed over me. ‘How can we keep it a secret? What about Mark?’

My mother frowned. ‘Sean’s not likely to tell anyone, is he? I think I’ll have a word with him.’

It was safe to say that all the peace envoys to the Middle East had no redundancy worries on my mother’s account. Even as a teenager, Sean McAllister had a lively disregard for authority. Backed into a corner by my mother’s rules and rants, he might just blurt it out to spite us all. With bells on.

I put up my hand to stop her. ‘Let me deal with it. Hopefully he’ll see that it’s not in anybody’s interest for it all to come to light now, after so many years. He’s a professional man. He won’t want people to know about it either. Especially while he’s so busy arse-licking at the school.’

‘Lydia! Could you kindly not…?’

‘Sorry. But it is true.’ I wondered if a Guinness World Record existed for the ability to split hairs at times of crisis.

She rested her chin on her hands, unconsciously pulling at her wrinkled skin with her thumbs, then smoothing it back into place. ‘We should tell your brother. He might have a good idea.’

‘No. Michael is well out of it, now he’s up in Oxford.’ I couldn’t bear a second-hand interpretation of my brother’s supercilious comments. Especially if he came up with the same suggestions as me, which my mother would suddenly see as glitteringly original rather than ridiculous.

I tried to divert her. ‘Realistically, except for the local gossip factor of “Did you know Lydia Rushford’s dad was in prison? And them so respectable…”, who is going to be the slightest bit interested in what a seventy-five-year-old man did years ago?’

It was futile. Respectability was the pinnacle of petticoats as far as my mother was concerned. Then, of course, there was the small matter of Mark, who could be forgiven for being ever so slightly pissed off that no one had thought to slip the words ‘your future father-in-law has been in prison’, into any prenuptial conversation, never mind the rest.

My mother smoothed her cardigan. ‘I moved heaven and earth so we could start again. I wanted people to remember that you played the piano beautifully. That you had the most school merits for Latin. That you sang like an angel.’

I wasn’t sure if I was imagining the tremor in my mother’s voice. I could feel my own body go weak, powerless to force back the memories that were breaking free, dragging me back to 1982, to an afternoon I had blanked out in the intervening years.

I
t was
my first day back from holiday after a tedious week caravanning in Cromer with my parents. The last Sunday of the May half-term, the roadside fluttering with red admirals and cabbage whites, the sunshine carrying the promise of a summer heatwave.

But instead of disappearing to the beach like I’d told my mother, I’d pedalled over to Sean’s.

His parents were just on their way out to a beach barbecue. His mother, Margie, was holding a bottle of Cinzano, vivacious and vibrant in a tiered broderie anglaise skirt, her long curly hair held back in a bright pink scarf.

‘Come on in, lovely to see you. You’ve caught the sun this week.’

Sean’s dad, Stuart, grunted a hello, his gut hanging over a pair of shorts too tight for his stocky legs. As the door closed behind us, Sean and I stood opposite each other, slightly awkward now the whole of his house was our unfettered domain. But it wasn’t long before he held out his hand to me.

‘Let’s go upstairs and listen to some music.’

With Yazoo blasting out of the cassette player, we tumbled onto his unmade bed, with no pretence at conversation, just snogging, urgent and intense, Sean’s hands everywhere, unbuttoning and unhooking. The heat of the day mingled with the heat of our bodies pressing through our thin shorts and T-shirts. As our clothes gradually fell to the floor, Sean lifted his head. His hands were still working their way down to a place that left me shocked and ashamed of my own desire.

‘It’s my birthday tomorrow. I know what I’d like as a present.’ He kissed my breasts, before hauling himself off the bed. ‘Back in a mo.’

I lay there for a few minutes, with the sunlight bouncing off the pillar-box red wall opposite the bed, giving everything a pinkish tint. My mother would never have agreed to me painting my room that colour. I took in the posters of the Athena tennis girl, the World Cup football squad, the England flag. The rag rug on the floor, now littered with my bra and my rose-patterned pants.

Sean reappeared, clutching a Polaroid camera. ‘Give me a birthday present to remember. Then you’ll always be with me, even when you’re not here. When I’m missing you.’

He loved me. This was the proof. I wanted him to have something special from me, something that would seal our relationship, underline the fact that this wasn’t some silly crush on someone who lived in a poster on my wall like Simon Le Bon. This was a proper full-blown love affair with a real person.

Who’d chosen me.

He lay down on the bed again, the camera next to his pillow, his lips on mine, his hand between my legs. I squirmed against him, knowing that I shouldn’t be doing this but not wanting to stop.

He put his mouth close to my ear. ‘Go on, you’re beautiful.’ He reached for the camera.

‘You won’t show anyone, will you?’

‘Don’t be silly. I’m keeping you all to myself.’

I nodded, smug in the knowledge that this secret act would bind him to me, stop him moving onto one of the blonde girls in the cool crowd, prevent me from plunging out of the sunshine that Sean shone onto me.

A
week later
, we spent our lunch hour in the far corner of the playing fields, shielded from view by a cluster of oak trees. I lay on my back in the cool grass. Sean’s face kept appearing above me, his eyes trapping me there, his lips searching out mine. The bell in the distance signalled the end of break, dragging us out of our world and into the real one. As we got up, brushing the grass from our uniforms, he pulled out the Polaroids we’d taken. ‘You look gorgeous. Sexy. Keep them right here. Next to my heart,’ he said, tapping his chest. ‘Best birthday present ever.’