Are You My Mother? (53 page)

‘
I called in to say goodbye to them both, on my way up to Scotland, and it all blew up into a colossal row. You were just a few months old, and were sitting wailing on Barbara’s lap, with so many harsh words flying back and forth above your head. I remember looking at you and feeling that this was it, there was no going back now. You were my child and I’d never see you again….’

Tony was crying. I squeezed his hand. ‘But you did see me again, eventually.’

He nodded and squeezed back. ‘Thank God. I did. I’m so glad, Emma. I’ve thought of you so often, wondered how you turned out. It’s so fantastic to know.’

So Mum had felt, at least indirectly, in some way responsible for Ann. That would account for the letters, I thought. I wondered what sort of things she’d written to her, how much she’d told Ann about me. Tony appeared to read my mind.

‘
I wish I’d kept her letters for you, but I threw them away. I was upset, I suppose, because Barbara wrote that she thought it better that no-one heard from me. At the time I felt that I’d just been written out of your life, but I understand now why she said it. She was only thinking of you. She also told Ann that she hoped Ann would understand, but she did not want you to know that her mother and her birthmother were in communication, not until you were an adult.’

‘
But they didn’t tell me anything about Ann, not even after I turned sixteen.’

‘
Did you ask?’

I thought back. ‘Well, no, I suppose I didn’t. I was desperate to know, but I was afraid it would upset Mum and Dad if I declared that I wanted to meet her. Besides, I believed that they didn’t even know who she was.’

Tony leaned towards me and took my other hand in his too. ‘Ann really did care about you, Emma. Whatever else she did or said, she loved you very much. But she got much iller again. You’d have been about nineteen, by then.’

‘
Which I was when Mum and Dad died.’

‘
They must have all died in the same year.’

We were silent, thinking about it.

‘
She obviously wrote to Ted and Barbara again, begging to see you. The last letter from them was explaining why they didn’t think it would be a good idea, not unless you were asking to meet her. The law then stated that a birthmother could not seek out her child; the impetus had to come from the child. I think this suited Barbara and Ted very well. Reading between the lines, they were probably afraid that Ann would put pressure on you to be a daughter to her; or worse, expect you to take care of her. I think they offered to visit her themselves, though, to check that she was OK and properly medicated. I don’t know whether they ever did that.’

I had a horrible, horrible thought.

What if, on the day of the accident, Mum and Dad hadn’t been going to a wedding in Wiltshire at all, but to see Ann? It was too awful to contemplate. But then I remembered Mum all dressed up with her sparkly clutch bag and good shoes on, and Dad brushing lint off the arm of his suit with a funny little sticky roller thing. They must have been going to a wedding. They wouldn’t have pretended otherwise, they weren’t duplicitous.

‘
What is it, Emma? You look pale again.’

I opened my mouth to voice my concerns. Then I closed it again, clamping my lips together. ‘Nothing. I’m fine.’

Some things were best left alone.

Ann’s suicide note had been found at the cottage, on top of a pile of all Mum’s letters to her over the years, and a faded, creased photograph of me, aged seven, gap-toothed and innocent of all the heartache I was causing.

Tony had let go of my hands just long enough to pull that same photograph out of his wallet and lay it in front of me, when we heard two sets of feet pounding up the stairs, making us both jump.

Robert burst through the door, stopping short when he saw me sitting in the kitchen, holding hands with a strange man and crying. Zub piled comically into the back of him, and then peered out over his shoulder.

‘
What’s going on? What’s the matter?’ demanded Robert in a panicked voice, giving Tony an extremely dirty look.

I wiped my eyes and smiled at him. ‘Hi darling. Zub, Stella’s gone to bed. She wants you to go and see her anyway, even if she’s asleep.’

Zubin turned and vanished into Stella’s room, kicking off his trainers on the way and leaving them sprawled in the hall. Even in the emotionally heightened circumstances, I felt a faint stab of annoyance.

‘
Well?’ said Robert.

I stood up, my legs so shaky that I wondered where my kneecaps had got to, and walked over to him, sliding my arms around his waist and burying my face in his chest. When I looked around, I saw that Tony had got up too, and was holding out his hand towards Robert.

‘
Robert,’ I said, my voice as wobbly as my legs. ‘I’d like you to meet my - father.’

Chapter 40

Tony and I saw each other every day over the next fortnight. He stayed in a local B&B for a couple of nights, and then in the spare room at Robert’s flat, spending every possible minute with me and Stella. Other people drifted in and out; extras to our talking heads, filling in details, providing colour: Stella, Robert, Ruth, Mack, and then Tony’s wife Melissa, who came down from Scotland to join him after a few days. She was gorgeous; calm, and beautiful, a mass of curly brown hair and appealingly crooked Dracula teeth, like David Bowie’s before he got them capped. She showed us how she could leave two puncture marks in an apple, and taught me and Stella some Qi Gong. She laughed an impulsive, delighted laugh whenever Stella insisted on calling her Auntie Melissa. She was my stepmother, kind of.

Mostly, however, Tony and I just talked. Talked and cried and talked. After a few days, we tentatively hugged. And then we cried again. He’d been terrified, he said, that I would hate him for what he’d done.

But how could I hate him? After everything that had happened over the past year, the one thing I’d learned was that we had to make the choices which felt right to us, and to live with the consequences, whatever they were. It was our responsibility, and no-one else’s. Poor Ann, I thought, young and ill and easily swayed. But it wasn’t Tony’s fault that she hadn’t been strong enough to do what she really wanted to do – keep me. And this, for me, made all the difference.

He and I were out on our own for a walk one day, along the river just past Hammersmith Bridge, when Tony pointed at a nearby bench. He looked anxious and edgy, as if he’d been wrestling with some kind of knotty internal problem and then come to a decision.

‘
Sit down for a minute, I want to show you something.’

I sat, noticing the dull brass plaque screwed to the back of the bench:
In memory of Elizabeth Hannon.
She loved this place
. Underneath, in green aerosol, someone had sprayed
Shaz is a slut.
I turned my back on it and watched the thick swirling water flow past.

Tony reached for something in his trouser pocket, and pulled out a crumpled envelope. Sitting down next to me, he extracted an old photograph and handed it to me, and I felt a physical swooping in my belly.

‘
Ann.’ We both said it at the same time.

She was a small woman, except for her nose, which sat awkwardly on her face as if dropped on there from a great height. She looked dislocated, uncomfortable in her skin and whey-pale, with a large mole near her left eye. Her hair was the same colour as mine, but dull, with a stubborn sort of curl. She was leaning against a mantelpiece, raising a glass of red wine in a toast, but with an expression of abject misery on her face. She looked nothing like me.

‘
She wasn’t very well then,’ said Tony. ‘She was so beautiful when I first met her; but it wasn’t because she had a stunning face or anything – she just had so much – energy. Vitality, I suppose. It’s so sad….’

His voice trailed off once more, and he rubbed his beard. The small scratchy sound it made sent a funny electric sort of shock down my legs; not sexual, just the realisation that these two people, one real, one on photographic paper, had given birth to me. Their absence in my lives had made me into who I was.

The next afternoon I had a couple of massages to do, so Tony and Melissa took Stella out for lunch. They discovered a mutual love of explosive curries, and were gone for hours, returning with scalded tongues and garlic breath, tipsy with Cobra beer; and Tony announced himself fully up to speed on everything in Stella’s life.

They had also had a long chat about Charlie, in which Stella had finally made peace with her decision to drop the original charges, and not pursue this latest attack despite the obvious, and understandable, disapproval of the police. In her mind, Charlie had got what he deserved, without anybody else - ie. herself, me, Zub, Charlie’s family - having to suffer further.

‘
Karma,’ Tony said, and Melissa agreed solemnly.

Stella also told Tony that she and Zubin were going to get a flat together – which was news to me. I felt a momentary panic, until I remembered that I spent most days at Robert’s anyway, and really it was as if she and I had stopped living together months ago. I wouldn’t miss Zubin’s trainers in the hall, either.

‘
I think we should sell the flat, then, and split the money,’ I said recklessly. Robert had been badgering me for weeks to move in with him permanently, but I’d been reluctant to abandon Stella, in case things didn’t work out between her and Zub. Old habits died hard….

But, in the long term, Robert wanted to be closer to his daughter Grace. Every time we came back from Nottingham he marvelled about what she’d learned in his absence: colouring inside the lines; understanding and following the ‘dee-structions’ for a new board game; singing ‘Trinkle trinkle little star’ in a round. I could have listened to him talk about her all day, just for the expression on his face. And Grace was such a lovely, funny little girl, with a fearsome comedy frown and a brilliant smile.

When we were with her, I surreptitiously studied the way she interacted with her mother and step-father and realised that she ebbed and flowed between all the adults in her life, effortlessly adapting to the different personalities around her. It made me think that perhaps the circumstances of my childhood, or even Stella’s, hadn’t been all that remarkable after all. Families came in all shapes and sizes.

Mack begged me to let him make a follow-up documentary, a sort of ‘what happened next’, but I stood my ground and refused. I’d had enough of baring my soul on television. I wanted to put it all behind me and move on. Besides, the first documentary had been so well received that Mack had a constant stream of work offers.

But I did think about how different a programme it would have made this time. I could see why Mack wanted to do it. I could see it when I looked in the mirror, when I opened my mouth to speak, when I lay down to sleep curled up close with Robert at night. Everything was different. I felt that instead of my cells renewing themselves gradually over a seven year period, it had all happened at once and I’d sloughed off my old body and suddenly become a new person. For the first time in my adult life, I felt the feathery wings of freedom take hold of me under my arms and lift me up, as if throwing me into the sky, confident in the knowledge that I’d fly. It was the most amazing feeling.

Chapter 41

Towards the end of summer, when the late sun was getting weaker and the shadows on the pavement skinnier, Tony came down to London again, alone this time, announcing that Melissa had just found out that she was six weeks pregnant.

‘
My
second
child’s due in early June,’ he said when he arrived at the flat, a broad smile elongating the word ‘early’ even further than his acquired Scottish accent already had. He looked fantastic, I thought, much brighter-eyed, without the hovering anxiety of his last visit. Even his beard had been cropped into angular topiary on his chin – not quite George Michael, thankfully, but much smarter and far less hippyish. When he rubbed it, it no longer made such a rustling sound; more of an brisk zipping.

I had some news of my own, which I’d been saving for when I saw Tony face to face. When I waggled my finger to show off the small sparkly diamond engagement ring Robert had given me just the week before, Tony smiled an even wider beam of delight. And, unless I was very much mistaken, pride.

‘
That’s fantastic news,’ he said joyfully. ‘I want to hear all about it over lunch. Are we meeting Stella there?’

I hesitated. ‘Yes. But, um, before we go….I wanted to ask you something.’

‘
Anything.’

‘
Would you….um, I mean, would it be OK if….do you think…’ I was beginning to hyperventilate, and I could feel my face getting damp and hot with fluster. I felt even more vulnerable than when I’d visited the Ann Paramors; and really began to understand why Robert had been so nervous when he’d proposed to me.

We had gone for what I thought was a normal day out to London Zoo, and I couldn’t figure out why Robert was so jumpy and distracted, until we got to the orang-utan enclosure. There, with an audience more than likely comprised of Betsey’s nieces and nephews, clustered on the bank on their side of the fence, all collapsed down into seated positions like a display of fold-up pushchairs in a baby shop, Robert got down on one knee and handed me the tiny ring box. The orang-utans looked solemnly across at us, as if appreciating the momentous occasion - apart from one baby one, who was loping cautiously around on the grass, showing off his smooth hairless inner arms as he swung tentatively around a tree-trunk, like Gene Kelly in ‘Singing in the Rain’.