Don’t Tell Mummy (5 page)

M
y eyes blinked as I forced my brain back into the present and into the hospice. I unscrewed the flask once more, poured myself the last of the vodka and lit another cigarette.

‘Now do you remember?’ Antoinette whispered. ‘Do you really believe your mother loved you?’

‘She did,’ I protested weakly.

‘But she loved him more,’ came the reply.

Trying to dam the floodgates as the memories struggled to get through, I took a deep swallow of vodka and inhaled my nicotine sedative.

Through the haze Antoinette held up an unwanted picture; the focus was too sharp for me to be able to force it away with pure willpower.

As though it were yesterday, I saw the room inside the thatched house with two people in it. A woman was sitting on a chintz-covered settee with a small child standing, facing her. With clenched fists and imploring eyes the child drew on all her reserves for the confrontation and searched for the words to describe an adult act.

It was the week after that kiss. Antoinette had waited until her father had returned to work and she and her mother were alone. I saw her still trusting in that mother’s
love but fumbling for the right words to explain an act that was foreign to her. Her nerviness showed in the way she stood and the mother’s anger grew more visible with each word that passed her lips. Faithful little Judy, sensing something wrong, was standing by the child’s side with her face looking upwards, her eyes full of canine concern.

Again I felt that blaze of anger flashing from the mother’s dark green eyes. This time, through my own adult’s eyes, I could sense another emotion lurking behind it. Looking back in time I searched the picture for a clue as to what it might be, and then I saw it. It was fear. She was frightened of what she was about to hear.

Antoinette, at six and a half, only saw the anger. Her slight shoulders sagged, expressions of bewilderment and hurt flitted across her face as her last hope of safety left her. Her mother did not intend to protect her from this.

I heard again the mother’s voice commanding her to, ‘Never, never speak of it again, will you?’

I heard her reply, ‘No, Mummy.’

Her training had started; her silence was assured and the road forward for what was to follow had been successfully cleared.

‘You see, you did tell her, you did,’ my tormenter whispered.

For years I’d blocked out the picture of my mother being told. I’d forced it to fade from my mind. I had forced Antoinette, the frightened child, to disappear and with her she took my memories. I realized, with a sad acceptance, that my mother had always known what my father felt towards me. How else could the child have described that kiss, if she hadn’t actually experienced it? She couldn’t possibly have invented it. Out in the country in those days
there was no exposure to television, she had no books or magazines that could have allowed her to learn about such things. My mother had heard only the truth from her child.

‘Remember our last year, Toni,’ Antoinette asked, ‘the year before you left me? Look at this picture.’

She slid another memory into the receptacle of my mind. It showed my father coming home from prison eleven years later. How my mother had sat looking out of the window waiting for him. Seeing him in the distance, only then had her face come to life as she rushed to meet him.

‘You were forgotten then. She never forgave you, but she forgave him.’

Still I did not want to accept the memories that were being set free in my head. I had realized a long time ago that my mother’s recollection had stayed for ever locked onto the picture of the handsome, charming man of her youth. She, five years older than him and cursed with a beautiful mother, remained in her own mind the plain woman, lucky to have such a man.

‘And nothing or nobody would take him away,’ Antoinette retorted. ‘Think of the last months at the thatched house, and think about what she finally did.’

Could she, I wondered that night, have loved him so much that she committed the ultimate betrayal to keep him?

Another cigarette was lit as I wondered if any of my questions would ever be answered, any explanation given, or had she lived in the state of denial for so long that her truth had also been firmly buried?

Feeling tiredness almost swamp me, I closed my eyes briefly and, half asleep, I returned to the thatched house.

A steady stream of almost imperceptible changes over the passage of two years had gradually unwoven the fabric of my life. For comfort I would try and conjure up the face of my English grandmother and the memories of feeling secure and loved when I was around her. I would remember when just my mother and I had lived together, days when she had played with me, days when she had read my favourite stories at bedtime and days of just feeling happy.

In bed at night, feeling knots of despair growing in my stomach, I tried to cling onto those elusive memories, to hold onto the feeling of warmth that they gave, but each day they slipped further and further out of reach.

A distance had sprung up between my mother and me, a cold space that I could not breach. Gone were the days when for a surprise she would arrange for a neighbour to drive her into town so that she could meet me from school. Gone were the days when she would listen to my chatter with a smile on her face, and gone were the days when she spent hours making me pretty clothes. In the place of my loving, laughing mother a stranger had appeared, gradually invading her body until the mother I’d known was no longer there, a stranger who had little time for me. Not understanding what I’d done wrong, I felt increasingly bewildered, unhappy and alone.

At the start of the summer holidays I realized that my visits to my grandparents were to come to an end when my mother informed me I was not going back to my junior school in the town. She had enrolled me in the local village school, which was four miles away.

I couldn’t stop the tears coming to my eyes, but I furiously blinked them away, having already learnt not to show any weakness. Instead of crying in front of her, I took Judy
for a walk and once out of sight let the tears fall. Not to see my best friend again, not to be part of the school I thought I would stay at for years, and never to see my grandparents alone and have the teasing conversations with my relatives that I had been enjoying so much. The prospect was too bleak to be bearable.

I learnt the meaning of isolation that summer and a feeling I was too young to put a name to entered my head: it was the feeling of betrayal.

September came and another first day at a new school began, a few days before my seventh birthday. This time there was no excitement in me as I dressed in my old school uniform and prepared myself for the first of many long walks. Not only was there very little public transport in those days, there was no school bus either. I could remember other first days and my mother taking me when it was only a short distance. Now I was to do the daily four-mile walk to school and the walk back alone.

The first time the road seemed to stretch endlessly into the distance, with only a few scattered cottages breaking up the scenery, which that day gave me no pleasure. As I trudged along for over an hour, I was quite surprised I was able to find the school at all. Other pupils were arriving on bicycles and on foot and for the first time I realized that the school was mixed. Up till then I’d been used to a girls-only school. Squaring my shoulders for the challenges that lay ahead, I walked in and went in search of a teacher.

The school building was completely unlike the mellow red-bricked one I was used to. It was a low, grey, utilitarian building, divided into two classrooms, one for the under eights and the other for children between eight and eleven. Here, when we had our breaks there was no grass to play
on; instead a concrete playground was deemed sufficient for the needs of the hundred or so children who attended.

At this school, when the breaks came, there was no Jenny to introduce me around, no companionable laughter that drew me in to feel part of their group; instead clusters of children dressed in a different uniform stared at me with open suspicion.

The pupils, mainly local farm-labourers’ children, sniggered at my English accent and my old private school uniform which, since it was not worn out, my parents had insisted I wore, while the teachers ignored me.

Lunchtime came and groups or pairs of noisy children ran to the small canteen, everyone busy saving places for their friends. Confused, I looked around for a seat. Spotting one at the end of the table I placed my satchel on the chair before joining the queue for food. Mashed potatoes with corned beef and stewed cabbage was served and as I forced it down in silence I knew I had entered a different world, one where I was no longer ‘Annie-net’ but an alien to those around me. Pride kept me quiet as the children mocked me with an undercurrent of aggression, which over the years I would become familiar with but which was then still an unknown quantity

That year, as the seasons changed from summer to autumn and the evenings drew in, bringing with them an eerie twilight dusk, my four-mile walk home seemed to take longer every day. The hedgerows and trees cast sinister shadows, turning what had been a pretty walk into a frightening journey.

Gradually my fear of the dark grew and twilight with its shadows became an enemy. I would try and walk faster but
my school satchel, crammed with sharpened pencils, reading and arithmetic books, seemed to get heavier with each step I took. The middle of October, when the clocks turned afternoons into evenings, brought winds that took the leaves from the trees. In November I encountered another enemy, the rain. With my head down I would struggle through every downpour, knowing that in the morning my coat would still be damp. The water would soak through to my gym tunic and over the weeks the creases gradually disappeared until the smart confident girl I had been only a few months before had disappeared. When I looked in the mirror I saw in her place an unkempt child, whose puppy fat had melted from her bones. A child dressed in crumpled clothes with lank shoulder-length hair, a child who looked uncared for, a child whose face showed a stoic acceptance of the changes in her life.

Half-way between the school and the thatched house was a shop, which like many of the buildings scattered nearby was designed to withstand the bleak Irish weather, not to enhance the countryside. It was a squat stone building with a concrete floor and a simple wooden counter, behind which were numerous shelves. It stocked an extensive array of goods that the local farmers and their labourers needed; everything from oil for the lamps to delicious-smelling home-baked soda breads and locally cured hams.

Here women would come not just for the necessities of life, but for a brief respite from their men folk, and to enjoy a few minutes of female company. With no public transport, limited electricity and in many cases such as ours not even running water, the days were long and hard for the women. They seldom seemed to leave their homes except on Sundays, where the community of staunch Protestants rarely missed a church service.

The owner of the shop, a kindly woman, would always welcome me with a warm smile. The moment I saw the shop I would quicken my pace, because there I could escape from the cold and find some friendly company. They would sit me down, give me diluted orange squash and sometimes even present me with a scone fresh from the stove, dripping with melting butter. The friendliness of the owner after the bleakness of the school day would warm me and the second half of my journey home would pass more comfortably.

On one of those rare days when the winter sun banishes the shadows of twilight, a small black and white dog, which looked like a miniature Collie, was tied up near the counter. With her matted coat and a piece of rope around her neck she looked as unkempt and in need of love as I did. When I bent down to stroke her she cowered away with a whimper.

‘My son rescued her from her previous owner,’ the shopkeeper told me. ‘She’d been kicked, beaten and even stuffed down a lavatory, poor thing. I’d like to kick them some, being cruel to a wee dog. What sort of people would do that? I need to find a good home for her. I’m sure she just needs some love.’

She gave me a hopeful look.

I felt a warm lick on my hand and, kneeling, I laid my head against the silky black and white one. I knew what it was to need love, and a wave of protectiveness rose in me as I gently stroked her. Five minutes later, after scones and squash, I was walking up the country road holding a rope with the newly named Sally on the other end. That day the rest of my journey home seemed a great deal brighter. Warm licks rewarded me on the frequent stops to reassure Sally that nobody would ever hurt her again, that I would love her and that Judy would be her friend from now on.
With that instinctive trust that dogs have, she seemed to know she’d found her protector because her tail came up and her walk quickened.

By the time I turned into our lane the orange light from the Tilly lamp was already glowing and I pushed open the gate and walked to our front door.

‘What have we here?’ my mother exclaimed as she bent down to pat my new friend. I told her what the shopkeeper had said.

‘I can keep her, can’t I?’ I implored.

‘Well, we can’t send her back now can we?’ was her answer.

I knew that nothing else needed to be said for she was already petting her.

‘The poor little thing,’ my mother cooed.

To my surprise I saw a film of moisture form in her eyes. ‘How can people be so cruel?’

Too young to see the irony in what she said, I just knew Sally had found a new home.

Judy came up, her tail wagging, and curiously sniffed the new arrival with what looked like a friendly greeting to me. It was as though she, a naturally territorial animal, sensed that Sally was no threat to her. She immediately decided to accept her as a four-legged playmate and a new member of the family.

The following morning, to my relief, the jovial father appeared and to my surprise he seemed quite taken with the little dog who, desperate for affection, unlike Judy, gazed at him adoringly.