A Book of Untruths Page 6

  Lie 22: All he needs is a firm hand

  Sean says ‘I love you’ a lot, because his many self-help books say it’s important. He feels we should speak about love more regularly. When he does I understand that I’m supposed to say the words back, but I struggle. The first thought that pops into my head is: ‘But we have no idea what that means.’

  At home ‘Love’ was the bread in the sandwich to ‘Dear’ in a letter, or it was used to admire Granny’s new dress. For many, many years the ‘I love you’ sentence was extinct. I, at least, feared that lying about love could ruin it for ever.

  Maybe then, in this regard, we were honest. Love had no currency. Survival was about as much as we could muster. Except when death crept in.

  Once he smelt the darkness Dad felt the need to speak. I don’t remember the specific occasion in those last months when he strung those dangerous three words together, but I know from some latent discomfort that he did. I have memories of the grey light glancing in through the ward window of the Southern General Hospital, and my father heaving himself onto his feet. I understood that he was saying the phrase because he felt he ought to, and I only managed to survive the uneasiness of watching him do it because I believed that in his own way he knew love and had loved me, and in the end that was enough.

  But for Sean to hear it, spoken in desperation, was painful. They were words that, as far as his relationship with Dad was concerned, he’d stopped believing in long ago. To him the phrase was empty, perhaps uttered only so as to hear an echo back.

  Afterwards Sean asked me over and over in a kind of fury:

  ‘Do you think he did?’

  ‘Love you? Of course,’ I would say. ‘Of course he did.’

  But only because that was the right answer. I didn’t really know.

  Until I came across, amongst Dad’s things, a copy of Sean’s adoption file. Without a photocopier Dad had written everything down by hand, on lined paper in blue biro. The time it must have taken to copy out these pages, and to contact the Sisters of St Anne for the file, reveals a motivation to record Sean’s story for him that feels to me like an act of love.

  Sean’s mother was twenty when he was born. Her father had received an MBE for his services in wartime France. She spoke fluent French. The person writing the report says she was a ‘dear, little girl – very timid’ and ‘had wanted to keep the baby at first, but is beginning to think it would be terribly hard to do and not in the best interests of the baby’.

  When she travelled up to Charing Cross in November 1962 on the 3.20 train she hoped someone would be able to meet her; she was scared to be in London alone and of having to make her way to the hospital by bus.

  A few weeks later Sean was born prematurely on Boxing Day in St Teresa’s Maternity Hospital, Wimbledon. He weighed only four pounds eleven ounces, and at four weeks old developed ‘severe streptococcal septicaemia’ from which he made only a ‘slow recovery’, remaining in hospital until May 1963.

  The Meningitis Research Foundation says that meningitis in babies is much more devastating than in older children. Their brains are vulnerable to injury. A newborn with septicaemia is very sick and those babies with a low birth weight statistically are likely to have a ‘poor outcome’, especially with regard to cognitive function. Sean’s adoption notes read: ‘it seems probable that the baby’s early failure to thrive was a consequence of his infection.’

  Sean, if he were a child today, would be diagnosed with something – dyslexia, aphasia – but then, in the late sixties and seventies, he was just lazy. A child who needed a firm hand.

  The final correspondence that Dad copied down in longhand from the adoption file is a letter from Sean’s mother to the Sisters of St Anne in May 1963. She expresses worry, hoping her baby will be adopted or fostered soon. She thanks the women who have helped her again for their kindnesses, saying that it will be a relief ‘to know the baby is in the hands of good, generous people who will love him and give him a better chance in life than I could’.

  Lie 23: Being good makes things better

  It is summer, though the day is overcast and threatens rain. We are in a Peugeot estate on the A1, crawling over the hills towards the border.

  It is just Mum, Ed, me and Sean making this filial trip to our aunt and uncle in the South. Mum’s brother has worked hard to consolidate his birthright, whilst the marriage she has made continues to be disheartening. Particularly on this grotty day driving the A1, for she will jettison what most represents the choice she has made.

  We have crossed the River Tweed, and watched the hills of Northumberland recede through the back window. When Sean isn’t winding us up, Ed and I wave at lorry drivers and count how many wave back. We seek solidarity beyond the car. The boot is spread with cotton sleeping bags emitting a smell of loft and feet and rained-out camping. We move freely between here and the back seat.

  Ed and I try to be good. We believe in it, as others might believe in God. Goodness will have its own salvation. We are so good that when we are back in Edinburgh we can be left alone for ages at the fish pond on the ground floor of the National Museum of Scotland. We wait motionless, watching orange colours flit through the water while our mother spends her hour in the gallery upstairs.

  Sean hates the way we deceive ourselves. Goodness has never got him anywhere. He is our jester, our tormentor, our confidant, our fool. He is also not quite one of us.

  But that doesn’t matter. We are equal. Our parents tell us over and over. We are all loved just the same. We know that even though Sean is adopted it makes no difference. The only reason he is beaten so often is because he is bad.

  And on this journey, without Dad to scare him into submission, bad is what he is. There are arguments over who gets the window, and games of rock/paper/scissors where he cheats and licks his fingers to flick the inside of our wrists. He has seen the soft underbelly of us both and knows where to poke.

  I think that what happens happens at Scotch Corner, but it could have been anywhere north of Peterborough. We are at an elevated service stop, the slip road rising up to meet the petrol station, at an indeterminate time of day. The rain flecks the windscreen, Ed and I still loose in the boot.

  When I ask Sean about that afternoon, and I have tried to twice, he slides away into recollections of how he was often beaten till he wet himself. Sean is frustratingly uninterested in sticking to the point. I ask him because I want to work out how old he was, because however many times I do the calculations, I cannot make him any older. Sean was still a child.

  ‘Did she give you a piece of paper to write on?’ I ask, because that is the only thing I remember – the hitch-hiker’s sign.

  ‘She gave me nothing. No money, no nothing. And I’d done nothing neither. She just told me to get out of the car.’

  My parents never deliver empty threats. If they say they will put us out, they do. And that wet afternoon at Scotch Corner is proof.

  Screaming into the rearview mirror, Mum pulls up in the car park and gets out, hauling Sean with her. By now the rain is hammering down. It rolls in fat drips over the windows, making the silhouette of her gesticulations wobble and contort. Sean droops beside her, his hands in his pockets, his shaggy dark hair wet against his face.

  My tummy hurts.

  When she storms back towards us she wrenches open the rear door, and a chill sweeps through the car. Now it’s raining over the edges of the sleeping bags and the family suitcase open at our feet. Soon Mum is tearing into that too, stuffing what is Sean’s into a plastic bag. It’s only when I clutch my things around me that she seems to notice that we’re there. We are ordered to pass her a felt-tip pen. It’s a green one, and once she has torn a sheet out from my colouring-in book she begins to write.

  The soggy piece of paper is for Sean, for she pushes it into his chest, throwing all the doors closed against him. Back in the driver’s seat she fights with the gear stick and the indicator, the windscreen wipers scraping aside a blur of rain.

&nb
sp; Her escape from the car park is not as quick as she would have liked, and we accelerate noisily in the wrong gear down the slip road, back onto the A1. As we wave at Sean’s shrinking silhouette, his sign still limp at his side, I think he is like Paddington, except the message doesn’t say ‘please’ or ‘bear’ or ‘Darkest Peru’. It says ‘EDINBURGH’, and instead of a marmalade-filled suitcase Sean is gripping a plastic bag.

  Lie 24: One day you’ll move into the Big House

  My parents’ marriage was in special measures by 1977. In an attempt to pretend it wasn’t, my mother insisted that we continue our fractious Sunday visits to Perthshire and the Paterson estate. A visit to Granny focused the mind. It reminded my father what it was she had forsaken.

  Granny had been sold short herself. She had always believed that once her mother-in-law died, she would finally move into the Big House. That was the plan (and perhaps the only reason my grandmother had agreed to marry). Instead, as soon as her eldest son came of age, he claimed his inheritance, some angry Shetland ponies that strewed the drive thrown in. Granny found herself housed with Granddad in a small modern building in the grounds.

  Each window had metal venetian blinds, which must have been extremely ‘in’ in the early seventies, because every morning and evening there was a great pantomime of hauling the blinds up or down, so the whole house seemed to shriek and clatter at dawn and dusk. Both grandparents slept in separate single beds at either end of the upstairs corridor, a guest room slung in the middle. It too had high single beds that seemed to swallow you whole as soon as you clambered in. Ed and I stayed over often, but Mum only stayed once. It was in the refugee weeks of September and October 1977.

  When I blew out the candles on my birthday cake in August I’d made a wish: I wanted to fly. The cake was a chocolate sponge with nine candles and Smarties and I had to stand on a stool to be able to reach. With the cheap pine wobbling beneath me, I plunged the knife in, my eyes tight shut. Perhaps I wanted to fly like a bird, by simply flapping my arms, but I imagine I wasn’t capable of that level of ambition. So in retrospect my wish was a waste. Dad had already accepted a job in Saudi Arabia. We would fly.

  When Dad took the assistant professorship position he didn’t feel under any pressure to tell Mum his plan to leave her. He did, though, feel compelled to deal with what had always held him back. A boarding school was found for Sean and a flat in Edinburgh for Adrian, who had only one more year of school. And once both inconveniences were seen to, he applied for a bachelor visa and bachelor accommodation. Then he bought a one-way ticket to Dhahran.

  It was, like all those Irish lies his mother had told him, a lie of omission which left the victim to incorrectly fill in the gaps. My mother, believing that she would emigrate too, was allowed to begin packing, to throw in her job at Edinburgh Dairies, and to worry over whether to cut the Marks & Spencer’s labels (a brand then banned in Saudi Arabia) from our clothes. By late August she had rented out the house to a pastor from Hawaii and was fretting over how, on the back of only three suitcases, she would be able to build a new life. Still Dad said nothing. When his own visa arrived in the post the first week of September, he indulged her with a story about Saudi incompetence, and a fortnight later headed for the airport, a single suitcase in his grip.

  To have spoken the truth would have freed him. Instead the lie took over. It was a reversal he would perhaps always regret. On the back of some student notes for an Engineering Graphics course he taught, which are headed ‘Read carefully, it may affect your grade’, Dad has written an ‘Epilogue’ in pencil, a two-sided postscript to a story that is long lost.

  When we find the protagonist, J—, he is browsing through a Sunday supplement and stumbles over an article with the headline ‘Family Man Still Missing After One Year’. The wife, M—, when interviewed, tells the reporter she has only been able to imagine that her husband’s disappearance is down to a ‘loss of memory’. J— reflects: ‘If trying to forget [Dad’s emphasis] equates with loss of memory then she’s right.’

  It is unclear when Dad gave up on his fib. Apart from ticking the ‘Single’ box in the employment questionnaire, this lie of his was never explicit. More honestly it was an undeclared wish. But to have hoped that Mum would get the hint was never going to be a good plan. It was not until after he died that she realised Saudi Arabia had been primarily about escaping her.

  Maybe he chickened out when the Hawaiian pastor arrived to rent the house, allowing us to hang on in our rooms a few more days. Or what broke his courage was seeing how we three, without visas, our lives packed into three tan, synthetic buckled suitcases, had to be rehoused at Granny and Granddad’s in Perthshire.

  My grandparents were a couple with a routine and a lifestyle that the house struggled to accommodate. There was a hatch between the dining room and the kitchen through which help could be administered. But help had dwindled from a small platoon in the 1930s to a couple of hours of Mrs McGregor on weekdays between the hours of ten and twelve. Abandoned to themselves for breakfast each morning the two of them would scuffle about, pushing and pulling plates and boiled eggs in and out, then retrieve the two types of marmalade (the Golden Shred was hers) and the two tins of oatcakes (he preferred thick) from the sideboard, and they would eat at either end of the table in silence. Apart, that is, from those long weeks in September and October 1977, when, as Granddad smeared his marmalade, he would ask after the visa and the plane tickets, my father’s name never passing his lips.

  Granddad had a nose for a deserter. Dorothy Jane, Granny, I would later learn, had attempted a similar escape herself.

  Granddad wore his suffering about him like clothes. His left side dragging from polio, he hauled one leg along like a dead weight, his lame hand clutched cautiously by his side.

  Granny was a woman who felt herself much grander than her life had allowed. Hating to do anything that someone else might do for her, she was the first person I ever knew to buy a then obscenely overpriced Marks & Spencer’s sandwich, which she cut down to four quarters and attempted to pass off as her own. She had her hair ‘done’ twice a week, imprisoned beneath a hooded hairdryer, Vogue open in her lap.

  Though she struggled to like anyone else, she did like me, with the kind of straightforwardness you can only expect from a grandparent. One letter she sent to me at school reads: ‘Please come and spend a couple of nights with me. I find it very lonely.’

  That autumn I did my best not to intrude on my grandparents’ routines, but our presence was difficult to ignore. It was not a big house, the telephone at the heart of things, ringing roundly beneath the staircase. The stairwell had a chimney effect, which meant that each conversation could be overheard wherever you were in the house. We all heard the desperation in Mum’s voice each time she called the Saudi embassy, and the angry whispers she used the few times she managed to speak to Dad.

  One morning after breakfast Ed and I gratefully retreated. Another day yawned ahead of us. Soon Granny would drive into town for her hour at the hairdresser and Mum, minus half her audience, would make that embassy call.

  Ed, anticipating the discomfort of having to listen, took off towards the Shetland ponies, or a tree. I tiptoed upstairs, wanting to curl up in bed with The O’Sullivan Twins at St Clare’s – Erica, the nasty one, had just told on everyone else for having a midnight feast.

  On the landing at the top of the stairs I heard the grumble of Granddad on the telephone extension in his bedroom, speaking to his bookmaker.

  Through the door of the spare bedroom I could see out the window the low sun, thin and pale against the trees, the days darkening into autumn. The light through the glass had a dismal quality, the field beyond the garden ploughed and black. It was only then that I noticed Mum’s silhouette hunched on the bed.

  Despair had stripped my mother from me, revealing a woman strange and alone. I backed quietly into the corridor, keeping my eyes to the window.

  Today only the feeling of anxious sadness, and that black
field, stick.

  Lie 25: They’re pestering me to have another baby

  The worst lies are those that are planned and well executed. If there was a jail term for the most devious family member, my maternal grandmother would be the one to get life.

  I always knew Granddad wasn’t who she would have married if she had had any choice in the matter. He was what you ended up with if you managed to fuck up your London season.

  From all accounts Granny had had a relationship with her chaperon, who, rather than being old and female as one would expect, was a youthful widower. The other ladies that year made the assumption that she was more interested in him than in any of the young men on offer. She remained on in his Wimbledon home long after the season was over. The more time that passed the more the talk solidified and the more difficult it became to marry.

  Only when she had reached her late twenties was a husband found. Mr Paterson, a factory owner from Fife, was new to his money, polio-ridden, and desperate. His last letter in the days before they married, dated 18 July 1938, is fearful of her expectations, positively dreading his wedding night: ‘I am perhaps a little nervous now…. I don’t know what will happen on Saturday night, as I think we will both be rather tired.’ He signs off: ‘Darling I do love you and I wish it was all over now.’

  The questions about the chaperon (seen here giving Dorothy away at the wedding) were raised at about the same time as Mum began to query her legitimacy. These questions I heard, but did not listen to. I was sixteen and had some extremely trying issues of my own to deal with: could I afford, get into, or even get hold of a pair of Fiorucci jeans before term started?