Not My Father's Son (8 page)

“Yes,” I said in the neutral, flat way I had learned was best when asked a question by him. This was manlier and offered less chance of being disappointed by showing emotion.

“Fine. We’ll leave here at half past twelve on Saturday.”

My mother was through in the kitchen doing the dishes and I knew she would have heard this exchange. Later, when my father was upstairs changing for his night out, she came through and sat down in the chair opposite me.

“Your father’s going to take you to the Angus Show?” she said, picking up her knitting.

“Yes,” I replied, avoiding her eyes. “But I don’t have to go.”

I felt torn. I really wanted to go, but I also wanted to show my mother that my loyalty lay with her, for we both knew what my going with my father would entail.

In the past, the only times my father had ever taken me anywhere of his own volition were bittersweet experiences. For even though I enjoyed these rare glimpses into a life that might have been—a seemingly loving dad taking his son swimming, or out to a café for a strawberry tart and a glass of pop—I knew that in so doing he had made me an unwilling accomplice in his affair of the moment. The time at the pool, years before, had been traumatizing. She was waiting for us at the entrance. Neither my father nor she made any attempt to explain her appearance, and I knew better than to question it. It was a woman I knew. I even knew her husband. As I splashed around on my own in the shallow end I could glimpse them farther up, smiling and nuzzling, she with her back against the pool wall, my father facing her, his arms outstretched, gripping the ledge on either side of her, right under a sign with a big “
NO
” at the top, followed by a list of the sorts of behavior not tolerated in this establishment, including, to my horror, “
HEAVY PETTING”
—exactly what my father and this woman were engaging in right at that very moment.

Even then, as a young boy, I was amazed at my father’s brazenness. There would surely have been people they knew in this pool who would have seen them. They seemed to have absolutely no care that they might be compromising or embarrassing those people with their actions. I realized that my father had total disregard for anyone’s feelings, let alone his wife’s, or indeed his small son’s, who at this very moment felt he was being dragged down into a cesspool of deceit and crime just by being near them. Afterwards my father informed me that the woman would be joining us for a cup of tea and that I could have a strawberry tart, a seasonal delicacy so delicious and so rarely experienced that my brother and I would speak of them in hushed tones. Even as I savored it, I knew I was being bought.

But why did my father take me on these meetings, I have often wondered? He must have known my mum would ask me and I would tell her that we had not been alone, and while my mother seemed to tolerate my father’s pandemic infidelity, she drew the line at her children being accessories. A huge row between them ensued as soon as we got home that day.

I was obviously being used by my father in some way, but how? Was I brought along to remind this woman that despite their obvious and public entanglement, he was still a family man with responsibilities, and that their affair would always have to remain just that? Or worse, was I there as a sort of decoy, to somehow show a softer, kinder side of my father to balance the more brutish front he presented to the world? Maybe he felt my being there made him and the woman seem more like a family and therefore less illicit to others around us?

Back home, giddy with both the rare attentions of my father and the sugar high of the soda and the strawberry tart, I came crashing down to earth when I saw my mother so angry. Soon after that, my Saturday mornings were no longer my own, as I was put to work on the estate, peeling posts in the sawmill or weeding the seedbeds in the nursery. It was backbreaking work, but I was glad to avoid such compromising situations. Even strawberry tarts had lost their luster.

Now, several years later, I could sense a mile off that my father’s willingness to take me to the Angus Show had conditions.

My mother looked up from her knitting and smiled kindly at me.

“No, you go to the show, pet. I know how much you want to.”

Saturday came, and at the appointed hour we set off in silence. I had my wages from the brashing burning a hole in my pocket. I hoped my father would let me have some time on my own to go and spend it.

We had to park far away from the showground, but I loved the walk, the sounds and smells wafting ever nearer us as we approached. My father walked with determination to the agricultural machinery section. There were stands with tractors and combine harvesters, and you could climb into their cabs and pretend to drive them. I didn’t, of course. I was too old for that now, but I had done so as a little boy, and seeing other kids do it now made me happy and nostalgic for that time. Then, standing nonchalantly by a stall where you could collect leaflets and key chains with the tractor company logos on them, I saw her. It was not the woman I expected, yet she was not a stranger to me. We said our polite hellos, and they pretended it was a total coincidence we had bumped into each other in this seething mass. Then my father strode off and she followed. I knew better than to linger and dutifully scampered after them.

Thus began a weird dance. She and my father would be ahead of me, and suddenly they were gone. Fearing the wrath that would ensue if I became lost, I began to panic and scanned the area, leaping up and down to see over the heads for a sight of them. I wove my way through the crowds to rejoin them, marveling at how quickly we had become separated and vowing to myself to be extra diligent from then on. Stalls that would normally have caught my eye I ignored. At one point we stopped at an army recruitment trailer, and as I glanced at the photos of burly men driving helicopters and tanks I waited for my father to start in on a story about his days in the forces. His National Service in the Royal Air Force was a source of great pride for him, even though, as I grew older and began to ask more questions, I realized he had only worked in his barracks’ kitchens and had never seen any actual combat. Still, the order, the discipline, the unquestioning acquiescence to rule had obviously made a great impression on him. Of course it also crossed my mind that Tom and I were now his soldiers.

But the usual story of some fellow squaddie’s ineptness never came that day. I looked up and my father was gone. She was gone. They had both disappeared into the crowds, and I knew in an instant that they had intended to do so, that they had in fact been trying to lose me for the last quarter of an hour. I had doggedly pursued them, fearful of my father’s wrath, little knowing that he was trying to engineer their flight all along. My father had purposely abandoned me.

My instincts were that I should try to find them, but knowing that they had purposely tried to lose me quieted the panic that was rising from my stomach. I told myself that I had done everything I could. Surely my father would not have the audacity to punish me for this? I also started to make a plan. I looked at my options. It was light, there were many people around, and I had money. But I knew that telling anyone about what had happened, even the public “I’ve lost my dad” version, would not be tolerated by him. And taking a bus to Muirdrum and then walking the remaining several miles to the estate would be too much of a transgression also, so that was out of the question too. My only option—and I thought for certain the option my father both wanted and knew I would take—was to stay in the park, wander around until they returned, and take my chances. There was nothing else for me to do.

There’s a thing in Scotland called “smirr” and it’s miserable. It comes off the sea and it’s not quite a rain but it’s thicker than a mist. Well, right then, it started smirring.

Being alone in that showground turned out to be one of the most exciting times of my thirteen-year-old life. In the midst of one of my father’s terrorizing, psychotic mind games I was suddenly given freedom. I realized that whatever I did in the time it took for him and the woman to do whatever they had snuck off to do was up to me. They hadn’t just accidentally lost me in the crowd; they had run off, they had
abandoned
me. I then remembered his van being parked so far away, and wondered if the seclusion had also been part of his plan. I felt flushed with the feeling that for the first time ever, I held all the cards.

But soon that glow evaporated and I began to worry that they might not return, or worse, he would return alone and she would not be there to supply the buffer to my father’s wrath that I was counting on. I felt lonely and yet liberated. Euphoric, and afraid.

At that time my brother Tom and his fiancée were busy creating their “bottom drawer,” a collection of household items for their life together that would be accrued throughout their engagement. Each time they bought or were given something to add to it filled me with panic, for it meant that the day Tom would leave me alone in our house was coming closer. And also I felt jealous, for each pot or bedspread was a sign of a future, other life, and a symbol of hope that I, as yet, could not imagine.

But now, alone in a showground with people positively bursting to sell me things, and with my wages just waiting to be spent, I did something that filled my heart with joy, and surely held a deeper symbolic meaning. I bought myself a dinner service!

I didn’t mean to. I was thirteen, after all, and not likely to be throwing any dinner parties for quite a while hence. But I needed to feel comfort, I needed to know there was a future for me that did not involve my father and a woman who was not my mother running around like schoolchildren trying to hide from me, dashing off to the back of a van carefully parked in a quiet side street. I needed to imagine a home where I would not be tormented, where I would be in control, where I would be the one inviting others into my space, and I would be providing for them. I needed to jump-start the process that my brother was embarking on, for myself.

It took me ages to gin up the courage to bid. The stallholder said he had a half dozen of the sets to sell off at this never-to-be-repeated price, but I waited till the very end of his rant, when he’d said it was his absolute lowest offer at least ten times, and then I gingerly raised my hand. A box was almost thrown towards me. I felt people looking at me sideways, wondering why an unaccompanied child was bidding for tableware in the rain. I walked away from the crowds towards the animals’ section where I sat on a bale of hay and peered into the cardboard box of treasure, of future, that I had just acquired. Beige and bland with seventies-style flowers printed on every plate, bowl, and cup, I thought they were the most sophisticated things I had ever seen. They were my ticket out. I would be eating off them in a place where there were buses and taxis and where I would never have to wait in a public place for hours, cold and damp, wondering if my father had concluded his liaison, and if or when he would come for me.

He did, of course. Both of them did. It was dark and the field was nearly empty and they actually had the audacity to pretend they had genuinely lost me. But I knew they were lying. The very fact that he did not explode when he saw me was immediate and total proof. And though it doesn’t give me much pleasure to say it, he wasn’t a very good actor.

U
p until very recently I still had one of the saucers from that dinner service. The rest of the set had gradually been broken or given away to charity shops during my many moves through student flats in Glasgow and marital homes there and in London. But I always hung on to that one saucer because it was a talisman of my escape to adulthood from my dark years as a child, and reminded me of the actual day when I had the first inkling that I might actually get away.

Sadly the saucer did not survive my move to America, but I can still see it in my mind. It still glows in my heart.

I
woke up in the white attic and Tom was gone. I lay awake for some time, too exhausted to move.

The day was a blur. I had lunch with Elizabeth, the director of
Who Do You Think You Are?,
and the only moment I acknowledged anything was wrong came at the same time as the bill.

“I just wanted to say that I understand there’s going to be surprises during the shoot, but can I just put it out there that . . .” I hesitated, not quite knowing how to convey what I meant. I just needed to give myself an out, somehow.

“I’m feeling a little delicate right now. You know, I’ve been traveling and I’m tired and a bit overwhelmed. If there is anything really big and completely from left field, you’ll give me some sort of hint to prepare myself, won’t you?”

Elizabeth looked me in the eye, a little taken aback.

“Well, of course, I can’t tell you anything in advance, but I will be as respectful to you and your family’s feelings as I possibly can.”

I thought that was really tender and comforting, and exactly what I needed to hear. Of course the reality was a little less tender and comfortable.

Saturday night was spent with my London friends, people I have known and loved long, but see less and less frequently. I was in a daze throughout dinner, but acted like the person I wanted to be in that scenario: happy, secure, open. I pulled it off, mostly. Months later a very perceptive friend told me she had suspected that night that I was really ill. I was certainly not in my right mind.

All day my mind had been a constant rotation of memories of what had been inconsequential moments that now seemed full of portent. I mentally scanned all the childhood pictures of myself and Tom and remembered how I’d always joked about our different body types—Tom the skinny boy athlete with his washboard stomach and me the rosy-cheeked little brother with his wee belly. Now it made sense.