Heartbreaker (61 page)

She hears the magic word “girlfriend” but she can’t make sense of it despite my hetero write-ups in the tabloids. (Serena sold her story to the
News of the World
and was last seen heading for Heathrow in a very long limo.) The problem is Mum’s convinced no man could be a prostitute unless he himself was gay. One doesn’t normally encounter such people, of course. One doesn’t have any homosexuals where one lives. One doesn’t mix with that sort of person at all.

I show her into the living-room and offer her coffee. She nods, looking at the cheap furniture as if she’s deep in some Third World country which isn’t coloured pink in the atlas any more.

I make the coffee while she sits on the sofa, and when I return I find she’s crying quietly into a very classy lace handkerchief.

“It’s okay,” I say. “I’m on a new course now. No need to dwell on anything the papers said. That’s all over.”

She can’t even take a sip of coffee. All she can do is weep but eventually she manages to whisper one word. It’s: “Darling.”

She’s gone nuts. The trial’s unhinged her. She sees this despised second son, the one she wanted to abort, the one she said was useless, the one she wanted dead instead of Hugo, the one who’s just shocked her and shamed her for life, and yet all she can say is: “Darling.”

“There, there,” I say awkwardly, knowing I mustn’t display any emotion by touching her. “Don’t cry, not when you’re looking so terrific!”

But she’s not listening. She’s checked the tears and she’s dredged up all her strength and the next moment she’s blurting out: “Forgive me. Please. Forgive me.” And when she reaches out to me as she’s never reached out to me before, I do touch her after all—I take her in my arms, and as we cling to each other, the two survivors of that terrible earthquake, The Bloke draws silently back to give us the space we need.

It turns out she was stricken with remorse after I disappeared. Dad was too, she says. They did try to trace me. They registered me as a missing person and private detectives were hired, but as I was floating around doing casual labour I wasn’t plugged in to any system which would have made me traceable. I also used aliases for a while and only returned to my real name when I took the escort job with Norah who, running a legal business, wanted my national insurance number for her records. But by that time my parents had abandoned the search.

“I always felt you were alive,” says Mum, “but losing you was like a second death. First Hugo, then you.”

I explain how I felt I was doing them a favour by disappearing. I explain how I hated myself for failing to be a Hugo-clone. I explain—

But she can’t bear it. With tears streaming down her face she whispers: “The further we travelled from your disappearance, the more clearly we saw how you’d been harmed. Then
we
were the ones eaten up by self-hatred.” And the next moment she was saying it was all her fault, everything was her fault, she wished she’d been the one to die of a heart attack instead of Dad.

I’m reminded of how I used to say to myself: “Everything’s my fault, I wish I’d been the one to die instead of Hugo.” But I’m wiser now. I’ve been able to see this attitude is destructive and wrong. So I say to Mum: “You made big mistakes, sure, but we all did. What matters now is that you’re sorry and I’m sorry and Dad and Hugo would be sorry too if they were here, and if only I can now find out why you and Dad made your mistakes, maybe you and I can draw a line under the past and make a fresh start.”

But she’s still locked away with her guilt and grief and she can’t grasp this at all so in the end I just plunge right to the heart of the pain to try to lance it. I ask: “Why did you want to abort me?”

She’s stunned. “What makes you think I did?”

“You let the information slip once when you lost your temper.”

“I couldn’t have done! I couldn’t possibly have told you such a terrible thing! I couldn’t have been so cruel!”

“You mean you don’t remember?” I forget about forgiveness. She dropped this information on me all those years ago, information that slaughtered me, and now the silly bitch doesn’t even—

“It wasn’t true!” she cries desperately. “I lied!”

“No you fucking didn’t! It was the fucking truth!”

She blanches at my language, shrinks back from my anger. We’re into reality big-time here, and this reality isn’t going to be swept back under the Surrey rug.

“I
couldn’t
have told you!” she insists, still crying. “Only a bad mother would say such a terrible thing!”

I spot the problem. She’s always consoled herself with the belief that she’s a good mother, and if I take that belief away from her she’ll have nothing.

I get my anger under control and make a new effort to reach her. “You weren’t a bad mother,” I say carefully, “but as I just said, you made mistakes and I need to know how you came to make them. Why didn’t you want me when you got pregnant?”

“Oh, but I did, I did—”

She’s still not getting it. “Mum, the neighbours aren’t listening, the family aren’t here, the Mothers’ Union hasn’t bugged the room and there’s no need to keep up appearances any more! Talk to me, for God’s sake! Tell me what happened or I’ll wash my hands of you!”

She sobs and sobs but finally whispers in despair: “I couldn’t cope. I shouldn’t have married so young. I shouldn’t have married a man who was so much older and so wrapped up in his dead wife . . .”

It all comes out. Apparently Dad was a far more complex character than I ever imagined. Everyone felt so sorry for him, chained for years to his invalid first wife who had been unable to give him children, but this mass-sympathy was totally misplaced. Dad secretly loved having a frail wife, the last word in adoring dependence, and he secretly thrived on the quiet, orderly home life with no kids. After his wife died he was so traumatised that he slid straight away into a mid-life crisis and fell violently in love with a twenty-year-old babe (Mum). After they were married he fell violently in love again, this time with the idea of chucking up his job and sailing off into the golden sunset, but of course this escape-fantasy had to be abandoned when Mum got pregnant with Hugo. However Dad did get a new boat and soon sailing played a bigger part in his life than ever. All his spare income was poured into the boat. Mum was given a stingy allowance and only the minimum of hired help. He wouldn’t even employ an au pair girl, a fact which just about sums up his interest in women once his boat-obsession took over. You’d think a chic French girl might have perked up his domestic life, but no, all he wanted was to worship the boat, his idol.

“He was never around,” says poor Mum desolately. “He worked all hours attending to those ghastly patients and then on his time off he was always heading for the coast. I did try to get interested in sailing, but once I’d had a baby—”

“Did he really want children?”

“God knows what he wanted. He told me once he was bored with being a doctor, but when I asked him what he wanted to do instead he didn’t know. He just said he’d never considered doing anything else because he’d wanted to please his father, and now he was too old to change professions.”

“He sounds seriously unhappy!”

“Oh, but he covered it up beautifully and no one ever guessed! The patients worshipped him and he liked that—I think he was a good doctor in spite of everything, and he loved you and Hugo even though he never gave me any help when you were young. Well, men didn’t in those days, it was a different world, and I was too young myself to cope single-handed with all that responsibility—I didn’t understand adult life, I was so overwhelmed by the hard reality of marriage and so disillusioned when he turned out not to be the romantic husband I thought he would be—”

“No wonder you got depressed!”

“The depressions were terrible. The pills I had to take were terrible. Everything was terrible. It was like living all the time in a black fog.”

“But surely Dad was sympathetic?”

“Yes, but he was so busy with his patients, the ones who were really ill.”

“
You
were really ill! Listen, if you were struggling to cope, why did Dad let you get pregnant again before Hugo was old enough to start nursery school?”

“I don’t know. We never talked about contraception. I didn’t know anything about it. Then after you were born he had a vasectomy— without consulting me, of course—and that was that, but I felt so sad later. I’d have loved another baby when you and Hugo were both at boarding school.”

“But Mum, this was the 1960s! Surely you must have known something about birth control?”

“The early sixties were just like the fifties, and people stayed ignorant and innocent for longer then . . . Oh, how I wished I was one of that small London minority who created ‘Swinging London’! I loved parties, I loved to dance—”

“I like to dance too. Mum, why on earth did you stay with this bloke?”

“Oh, I couldn’t have left, not possibly! What would everyone have thought? Divorce was so different in those days—deserting wives lost custody of their children and I couldn’t have borne that.”

“You could have gone later after Hugo died!”

“How could I? I had no money of my own and I’d never had a job. Where would I have gone? What would I have done? Besides, I still had you—until you vanished. Oh God, that was terrible,
terrible
—”

“Well, you’ve got me back now,” I say briskly, hoping to avert another tear-storm. “I know I’m not Hugo but at least I’m not dead.”

The magic name diverts her and she does a classic slide into Hugomania as she says with a passion worthy of Jocasta how handsome and clever and charming he was. I somehow keep my mouth shut. Hugo, of course, was all those things, but he could also be arrogant, pig-headed and snobbish. He wasn’t a saint. In fact he was sex-mad enough to shag a local waitress when he was only fifteen. (Mum and Dad never found out.) But it’s no good trying to argue with Mum here. If she needs to cling to a fantasy of St. Hugo, maybe I should respect the fact that she’s still unhappy enough to need a fantasy to cling to, but my God, I can see how all this gooey sentimental drivel drove poor old Dad straight to the boat.

I decide to interrupt her. “Mum, is Granny still alive?” I ask, but I learn that Granny the Gossip, the last of my grandparents, died in 1991. I feel sad. Her favourite daughter, rich-bitch Aunt Marigold, used to keep her in a plush granny-flat over the multiple garage of the mansion at St. George’s Hill, so snotty cousins Arabella, Charlotte and Jeremy saw far more of her than Hugo and I did, but Granny doted on all her grandchildren, even cousins Rick, Mary-Elizabeth and Ham, weird offspring of arch-bitch Aunt Pansy in Los Angeles. How could I have been so warped that I dismissed Nigel’s talk of unconditional love as rubbish? How could I have been so fixated on my parents that I told Carta the people I loved never loved me in return? Welcome back to my life as a cherished memory, Granny—sorry for all the pain I must have caused you by disappearing, but I know you’ve forgiven me. Unconditional love was your speciality.

As I sigh I realise Mum’s returned to earth after her trip to fantasy-heaven where she keeps her best airbrushed memories. “But it’s no good getting emotional about Hugo,” she says hastily. “The only thing that matters now is that you’re alive—oh, I’m so happy to have found you! And how happy your father would be too if he were here!”

“What’s your present husband like?”

But she’s cagey. She doesn’t want to talk about him. “He doesn’t know I’ve come to see you,” she says, not looking at me. “After the trial he said it was just as well you and I weren’t in touch. Of course I wanted to get in touch, but I was so afraid you’d reject me, just as you did when you went away, and I was still trying to summon up the courage to write to that clergyman, the one the papers said sheltered you, when—”

“—when you went to Hugo’s grave and found my card.”

“Exactly! Oh darling, I cried and cried, I was so . . .”

I tune out. I’m busy thinking that I’m not going to like Step-Dad. But poor old Mum’s not so bad when you get to know her. I’ll take her dancing somewhere when I’m well and I’ll give her a little fun—I’ll send her flowers on Mother’s Day and give her a nice present at Christmas and maybe I might even take her to the theatre around the time she has her birthday. Do I still bear her a grudge? No, what’s the point? She was just a victim of her class, her times, her marriage to that peculiar bloke, my father. Lethal old Dad, playing Dr. Heartbreaker and effortlessly creating havoc! I can almost hear the sighs of his lovelorn patients (both sexes) mingling with Mum’s sobs as he buckets around in the wrong walk of life and never manages to get himself sorted.

I can’t wait to discuss him again with Lewis.

“It’s so wonderful to see you, darling!” Mum’s saying dewy-eyed. “How handsome you’ve become, even more handsome than Hugo!”

Watch it, Jocasta! I’m not auditioning for Oedipus.

Fortunately Susanne chooses that moment to return home from the supermarket.

Of course Mum’s appalled by Susanne. And Susanne’s appalled by Mum. They stare at each other in the manner of two animals from different species prepared to fight over a choice piece of meat, but within seconds I’m realising that this situation could work to my advantage. Susanne won’t let Mum convert me into Oedipus, and Mum won’t let Susanne into her home too often—which means I’ll only have to face Step-Dad on a very occasional basis.

Mum soon takes herself off. We’ve exchanged phone numbers and we’ve agreed to have lunch at Fortnum’s when I’m feeling less agoraphobic. Another tear’s shed as she lingers on the doorstep out of sight of Susanne. She whispers that she can’t find the words to express all her feelings. Have I truly forgiven her? She loves me so much and if I can somehow manage to love her a little in spite of everything—

“Of course I can—don’t be soppy, Mum!” I say, instantly converted into a shining example of repressed middle-class behaviour complete with antique vocabulary, but I give her a big hug so I think she does drive away happy in the end.