The Things We Never Said (23 page)

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

Jonathan expected it to be weeks before he heard from Bob again, but he calls back within days. Margaret Kielty is willing to meet, he says. How about next Saturday?

On Friday night, he buys fish and chips but he can’t eat; his stomach feels hollowed out and he keeps going hot and cold, as if he has a fever. The kitchen is silent apart from the humming of the fridge. Next door’s cat, who’s been curled up on top of the tumble drier, now stretches luxuriously and, sensing fishy leftovers, jumps down and begins winding itself around his legs, its loud, rasping purr filling the room. Jonathan scrapes the remains of his skate into a dish and sets it down on the floor, then watches as the animal eats greedily, still purring, its metal name-tag clinking against the plate. With its yellow-green eyes and fat, bottle-brush tail, it reminds Jonathan of the cat he’d had as a child,
Johnny
. He’d chosen the name himself, and he smiles now at his six-year-old narcissism. A flimsy memory slides into his mind, of Gerald coming into his bedroom to tell him that Johnny had been run over. When Jonathan had started to cry, Gerald sat down on his bed and put his arms around him. He remembers the warm, bony feel of his father’s chest, the hard shirt buttons and the combined smells of starch and pipe tobacco. He’s forgotten so much about Gerald. And about Daphne, come to that. In fact, his entire history has tilted; he needs to go back, not just over the last few weeks, but over his whole life, crossing bits out and putting bits in; revising. But he can only revise the life he’s ended up with, not the one he started with; the one with which he is about to come face-to-face. A chill blows over him. What will she be like? What will she tell him about the man who provided the other 50 per cent of his DNA?

He lies in bed, watching the changing numbers on the digital clock, each luminous new hour mocking his attempts to sleep. She is ‘willing’ to meet him; does that suggest she’d be pleased to, or only that she’s prepared to? He even looked it up:
inclined or favourably disposed; done or given without reluctance
. Through the gap in the curtains, he can watch the night sky, but there’s not a star to be seen. Instead he focuses on a building in the distance, a high-rise block with a few windows still lit. He watches the lights go out, one by one.

*

It’s five past ten when he arrives in Hastings, almost an hour early. The sun is struggling to peek through the clouds, but the day is chilly. He’ll probably only be here for a few hours, but he dropped Fiona off at Lucy’s on the way because he didn’t want her getting out of bed to get drinks or snacks. Lucy made up the sofa for her in the living room and the two of them were going to spend the day watching DVDs. He finds a café and sits in the window with his coffee, watching the Saturday shoppers and trying to pretend it’s a normal day. He’s bought a
Guardian
but he doesn’t open it.

At twenty to eleven, he walks down to the seafront. For a moment, he’s tempted to run across the road and jump down the steps onto the beach so he can crunch along the shingle, pretending he’s here for a day out. He carries on along the front, glancing at the map as if he doesn’t know it off by heart. A few yards further and he turns the corner into her road, then counts along the house numbers. He calls Fiona. ‘I’m here. I’m outside.’

‘Good. Well, good luck, then.’ She sounds so quiet, so far away. ‘Call me as soon as . . . well, just call me, okay?’

‘Will do. Speak to you later then. And Fi . . .’

‘Yes?’

‘I love you.’ She’s the only one, the only thing in his whole life that is
right
.

‘I love you, too, Jonno.’

He turns towards the tall, white-painted house, part of a once-beautiful Regency terrace but now rather forlorn with its flaking paint and chipped windowsills. They all look weathered and tatty; he’s heard that seaside houses need painting more often because of the salt. He can see the concrete steps down to the basement flat behind a row of black iron railings. He runs his hand along them like a child, then starts to walk down the steps. There’s a plant pot outside the front door, a small tree of some sort. A gardening glove lies on the ground next to it. Heavy sage-green curtains are drawn to the sides of the large bay window, and he risks a quick look through the glass. An old-fashioned lamp with a fringed shade stands on a square dining table in the centre of the bay; beneath the lamp is a folded newspaper with a pair of steel-framed glasses resting on top. As he nears the door, a sensor light comes on, making him feel suddenly exposed. There’s a movement to his left; he glances at the window and catches a glimpse of her hand as the curtain falls back into place.

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

She’s not how he’d pictured her, this woman who bore him. She looks younger, for a start, and taller – he’s used to looking at the top of Fiona’s head, so it’s quite a shock to find that his birth mother is almost as tall as he is. Her face is softer than he imagined. What
had
he imagined? Her hair must be quite long because she’s pinned it up in a bun, although bits have escaped and are hanging down all over the place. Fiona will want to know what she looks like, so he takes note of these details. For a woman in her sixties, he’ll say, she’s quite attractive but not very well groomed. Unlike Daphne, she wears neither make-up nor jewellery, apart from a plain wedding ring, and her clothes seem slightly old-fashioned and mismatched.

When he first arrived, almost two hours ago, she could barely meet his eye. He’d taken it for guilt, but now he’s heard her story, it is he who has lowered his eyes. He feels slightly sick; it’s all buffeting around in his head now, all clashing and clanging together, making sounds he can’t bear to hear and pictures he can’t bear to see. Part of him wants to run, to fling open the door of this stuffy flat, to bound up the steps into the sharp seaside air and then sprint down towards the sea, where the tide comes in and goes out and does what it’s supposed to do, according to nature, on and on, for ever.

He takes a breath and looks at her. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he says.

She presses her hand to her forehead. ‘Excuse me for a moment,’ she says. ‘I’ve such a headache . . . I must take something . . .’ She gets to her feet and walks to the door. She carries herself well, he thinks, almost elegantly, but at odds with her clothes.

While she’s gone, he casts his gaze around the room. It’s shabby but comfortable, with patchwork cushions on the sofa and rag rugs on the floor. A radiator under the window blasts out heat. On the mantelpiece are several cacti and a dusty spider plant with its babies hanging over the side like little umbrellas. There’s an empty pill bottle, a key with a paper tag and a name scrawled in pencil, and an old mantel clock with a couple of postcards and a thank-you card tucked behind it. The shelving in one alcove is filled with books: hardbacks on gardening and cookery, and paperbacks including the Brontës, several Kahlil Gibrans and a fair collection of what Fiona calls Sunday afternoon books – Catherine Cookson, Maeve Binchy, Rosamunde Pilcher. He’s about to look at what might be a photograph album when he hears her coming back.

*

Maggie pauses with her hand on the doorknob before she goes back in. Her head is pounding, and the paracetamol she’s just taken feels like it’s stuck in her throat. She can actually see her fingers trembling. She pushes the door open and there he is: Jonathan, her son. She’s so glad they kept his name. She can hardly believe he’s here in the same room, breathing the same air. But there is one more thing she needs to tell him, and then he will leave, she is certain. She settles in her chair and takes a sip of orange squash to moisten her lips before she continues: ‘By the time it all came back to me in the hospital, I’d been remembering little snippets for quite a while,’ she says, ‘but none of it made sense until the night of the social.’ She pauses, looks down at her hands. ‘It didn’t all come back at once – some of it never did, in fact. But when I sat up in bed that night, I’d remembered about Elizabeth, and I’d remembered attacking that poor health visitor. But that was it. It was only later that I . . .’ How can she put this into words? She takes another sip of the sweet, artificial drink ‘. . . that I remembered what had happened . . . what I’d tried . . .’ She can hear her own breaths coming too fast. Oh, why won’t her head stop hurting? She’s really struggling now, but she must tell him the truth; she owes him that much. ‘It was a while before it came back to me what, God forgive me, what I almost did to you.’

She glances at him; he’s waiting for her to carry on. He has kind eyes, but she can see the anxiety in them, even without her glasses on. She’s grateful for this brief time with him, for the way he has sat here listening with barely an interruption. How proud his . . . his other mother must be of him. She hesitates, desperate to prolong this moment. Why hadn’t she asked more when he first arrived? She wants to know all about him, all about his wife and his life and the future he hopes for. But she has no right. She draws a deep breath and prepares herself. When she tells him the rest, he will go and she will not blame him.

*

With the aid of the cut-glass fruit bowl, Maggie has managed to knock the infection woman to the floor, but those little creatures are swarming all over the place, scuttling, multiplying into a huge mass which surges along the hallway in a red tide towards Jonathan’s room. She leaps over the groaning woman and reaches the bedroom in two bounds. Hoisting her crying child onto her hip, she heads for the front door. The shock and suddenness of it all seems to stun Jonathan into silence, and Maggie is aware of his startled expression as she begins to run through the cold streets. As they near the beach, he starts to whimper again. He is shivering; so is she. She hugs him tighter and tells him to shush, shush, Mummy’s going to keep you safe. She strokes his damp hair, notices the salty smell from his scalp and the heat from his soft cheek as he lays it against her own. Despite the coolness of the day, his forehead is burning. Fear rips through her. He has a fever; she has failed to protect him. She starts to unzip his little sleepsuit, but then she has a better idea. Wrapping her arms around him again, she hurries down the stone steps onto the shingle. She is still wearing the thin leather pumps she keeps for indoors and she can feel the hard stones through the soles as she crunches down to the water’s edge. She pauses only for a second, then takes a step forward. The lacy surf froths over her foot, sending a chill through her whole body. Another step and the cold water floods right up over her shoes, slicing at her ankles. A noise makes her look round; a figure is coming down the beach towards her, that woman, a red mass, boiling with infection. Maggie wades further out, the water chopping at her thighs. Then a dark wave swells in front of her and she feels the icy water rise up in a shock over her shoulders. Her whole body rocks sideways and the seabed disappears from beneath her, leaving her flailing in the water, one arm desperately clutching her child as the current tries to tug him away. Briefly, she sees the sky before the water closes over her face, sending an acid pain zinging up her nose. The shouts from the beach become distant and muffled; she twists round to try and gain her footing and her elbow touches the ocean floor as she stumbles, gripping Jonathan more tightly. But then she feels him start to slip and the next minute, he is gone. Half-choking on the briny water, she flings her arms around, frantically searching for his solid little body. But all she finds are fronds of seaweed that brush against her face and hands. She kicks and twists in panic, and her knees scrape against the shingle. Just as she thinks her lungs will burst, her head breaks the surface and she is coughing and gulping the dry air.

*

Sitting there in her living room over forty years later, Maggie is unable to subdue the strange half-gasp that bursts from her throat, as though she is fighting for air once more. Now she is starting to shiver. ‘They took you to hospital, but apart from being cold and shocked, you weren’t hurt.’ She glances at him, but he’s looking down so she can’t see his eyes. ‘After that, I could hardly argue I was a fit parent, could I? I was committed – sectioned, they call it now – that night. They thought at first that I’d deliberately tried to kill you.’ He lifts his head now and looks right at her, but this time she can’t bear to face him and she looks away. ‘Whatever they thought, it didn’t really make any difference, because I wasn’t in my right mind, not by any means. And if that poor young woman hadn’t followed me to the beach, well . . .’ A familiar wave of horror sweeps over her at the thought of what could have happened. ‘They said it was a miracle she managed to pull you out safely, especially with her head still bleeding from where I’d hit her. So you see . . .’ She glances at him but looks away again immediately; she can’t get the words out while he’s looking at her. ‘The thing is, I
could
have killed you.’ She leans back with a sigh. There. She has told him. She can hear the clock mechanism, which means it needs a new battery. It’s slow, but she doesn’t know how slow, because time doesn’t seem relevant just now. Her son is hunched forward in his chair, hands resting on his knees, staring at a patch of carpet between his feet. His hands are nice; smooth, long fingers but not too thin. The sort of hands you’d feel safe holding if you were a child walking along a wall. A floorboard creaks in the next room as Sam moves across the floor. She pictures him hesitating as he wonders whether to come in and offer some tea or a sandwich. Not now, Sam, she says silently, hoping he’ll hear. Jonathan is nodding slowly. He leans back, blows air through puffed cheeks and looks at her again. ‘I think I need some fresh air,’ he says.

Maggie nods dumbly. Is he disgusted with her? Does he hate her?

‘A walk round the block or something; just for ten or fifteen minutes. Then I’ll be back. If that’s all right?’

She lets her breath out in a rush. ‘Yes, yes of course.’ She is weak with relief.

*

Jonathan’s first instinct is to phone Fiona, but then he changes his mind and puts his phone back in his pocket. He needs to think about this on his own. He walks briskly down to the seafront, craving the salty air on his face. As he walks, he becomes conscious of the movement of his limbs beneath his clothes; he can feel the denim of his jeans moving against his legs rather than with them, as though his body is out of sync with what’s around it. The wind coming off the sea isn’t strong today, and yet he wants to cower from it. The pebbles are cold and damp, but he drops down onto them anyway, drawing up his legs and trying to make himself small while he allows himself to cry at last; for himself, for his mother – for both his mothers – and for his poor dead sister. Again, he’s been given a sibling, and again she’s been torn away. After a moment, he lifts his head and dries his eyes. Elizabeth; Mimbet. They’d played together, shared a cot until she died. His sister, the one person who’d have been like him, whose blood was the same as his blood. He can see her clearly in his mind . . . but no, he couldn’t possibly remember her. And yet . . . he struggles to marshal his thoughts . . . and yet she did live; she did know him. Somehow, he feels her as a real and present connection. But then his thoughts darken as that other connection rolls in like a storm cloud.

He gets to his feet and walks down the beach until he reaches the water’s edge. The tide is coming in, and he stands there for a moment, watching the rhythmic push and pull of the waves, just as he had when he was a boy. He and Alan Harper used to spend ages building dams, trying to hold back the tide, but all they could do was divert its course for a few seconds before the next powerful wave swept away their carefully constructed barrier.

Hands in pockets, he walks along the newly washed shingle and forces himself to think about his actual father: a rapist. He breaks his step, almost as if the word has knocked him off balance. He’s often wondered about people’s capability for violence:
a man has broken into your house and is holding a knife to your wife’s throat – you have a gun; what do you do?
Or,
your child is dying and the medicine that will save him costs £200 – you have no money but your neighbour does. What do you do?

But rape? A few feet ahead, two gulls are squawking over the bloody remains of a fish. They fly off as he approaches and he kicks the fish head hard into the water. He hopes the man is dead.

It is only when he sees the pier looming ahead that he realises how far he’s walked. He pauses to text Fiona:
All OK. Might be a while. U OK?
The reply comes back almost immediately:
Fine. Watching Sleepless in Seattle. Creamy pasta for lunch. Don’t worry. XX

He looks at the words. Normality.

As he heads back along the beach, a quote pops into his mind from some seventies feminist:
all men are rapists
. Do most women think that? What must his mother have felt when she first looked at him, her male child? Did she see a small replica of the man who had done that to her? He quickens his step, wondering what might have been in her subconscious when she’d walked into the sea with him.

She opens the door when he is halfway down the steps to her flat. She must have been looking out for him, he thinks as he follows her into the sitting room, and she’s attempted to tidy her hair. He hangs his jacket on the back of the chair and sits down. The door opens and her husband comes in with a large tray, which he sets down on the table.

Maggie looks flustered. ‘Sam . . . this is my . . . er, Jonathan, this is . . .’ She doesn’t quite manage to introduce them, but Sam extends his hand and smiles.

He looks nervous, Jonathan thinks as he shakes Sam’s hand; the poor man has obviously been hiding in the kitchen, probably instructed to keep out of the way until now. On the tray are two mugs, milk, buttered toast, blackcurrant jam, a slab of cheese on a board surrounded by oatcakes and another plate bearing slices of date and walnut cake. ‘This looks great,’ Jonathan says.

‘Och, I forgot the tea.’ Sam turns and heads back to the kitchen, returning seconds later with the teapot, which he carefully sets down on the table before disappearing again.

Jonathan has little appetite, but their hospitality wraps around him like a warm blanket on a cold day. A vision of tea with his parents passes through his mind. A sterile, silent affair, weak tea, cheese sandwiches, plain biscuits, never cake.

‘Thank you,’ he says, taking a slice of cake and noticing that it’s home-made. It’ll give him time to think about how to ask her; he has to know what she sees when she looks at him.