A Stranger in the Family (14 page)

‘Thank you. But the fact remains: because I wanted to find a family, I assumed I would be welcomed by people pleased to have been found. But why should I be? All you three children of Isla and Frank grew up as a family. You all knew there was one brother who had been taken from you. You knew that Isla grieved for him and always would do. But you could not grieve for someone you barely remembered, if at all. The family unit did not include me, and though
relationships and interest would always be polite, they would never be close or passionate.’

‘Where exactly is this heading?’ asked Pat.

‘Fair point. The point I think is that I’m saying I was a fool to think I could fit into a family unit that had been complete for so long without me. I hope we see each other when I come down to see Isla, but I doubt I will ever be more than a “friend of the family”.’

‘If that,’ said Dan.

‘If that,’ Kit agreed. ‘Now, the other thing I want to say follows from that. If we are not going to be close in the future, I need to know from you now anything that may have a bearing on what happened in Sicily all those years ago. There may be things so trivial you haven’t thought to mention them, or it may be they didn’t seem to reflect well on us as a family. Either way, please tell me now, or in the next day or two while I’m still in Leeds. Let me add whatever information you have to my little store of clues and indications – things that may eventually lead somewhere or may not.’ They all looked at him, some with calculation in their eyes. ‘Agreed?’

They nodded.

‘When shall we talk about this?’ asked Micky.

‘At the end of the meal – ah, here’s the main course.’

It was much later, after spoons were being laid
aside from the inevitable
dolce
, and while Dan was licking his with an enthusiasm that suggested dieting was never going to be part of his regimen, that Kit once again looked around the table and said: ‘Well?’

From her position at the other end of the table Maria raised a finger.

‘Just one thing – one tiny little thing. I was having a good old confab the other day with Pat’s Auntie Flora—’

‘You know her well?’

‘Ah … you probably don’t realise: Micky and Pat have been going together since primary school. Pat used to come round and help him with his homework. All our family do’s included members of her family and vice versa – so yes, I do know her well, and she’s the best gossip of all of us.’

‘Just what we need,’ said Kit.

‘And Auntie Flora said that Mother – Isla – was always desperately in love with Dad. It’s not the impression she likes to give now. She suggests – even if it’s only by tone of voice – that the marriage went very flat and was destroyed by the kidnapping, and that she’s now totally disillusioned with Dad, which may well be true. But she was always, when Flora came to know her, besotted with him, completely under his thumb, and not in any way discontented with
her lot. The sun shone out of his … you know. We children probably just accepted it as the natural order of things, but in fact that sort of subservience in marriage had been out of fashion for decades.’

‘I think I caught some of that,’ said Micky. ‘Being the eldest, I was a bit bewildered. Other kids’ parents were not like that – Pat’s weren’t for a start. In our household Frank was the big panjandrum whose every wish had to be obeyed and whose comfort was everybody’s first priority. I didn’t notice any major change at the time of the kidnap, but of course, the disappearance of one of us children was what was on our minds for months afterwards.’

‘Interesting,’ said Kit.

‘One additional piece of info,’ said Ivor Battersby, stretching his long legs under the dining table. ‘I was dining with the Rotary Club the other night, and I was placed next to a solicitor. The talk came round to my father in-law … Well, the fact is, I brought it round. This solicitor had known him well. Said that in his time Frank was a first-rate legal brain: cautious, reliable even when he was dealing with hot potatoes like the Glasgow gang wars, which he got into because of his Italian background. He agreed that there was no great change in him at the time of the abduction and divorce. He set
himself up in a posh flat near St Paul’s Square, had a succession of girlfriends – not usually live-in ones, had a good life to all intents and purposes. The change came later.’

‘Micky could add something to that,’ said Pat.

If Micky could have thrown his wife glances that could kill, he would have done so. Instead he just swallowed.

‘Yes, well … I don’t know. I normally make a fool of myself when I have to speak in public. Remember when I was your best man, Ivor?’

‘You did very well,’ his brother-in-law said. ‘You are the only one who doesn’t think so.’

‘Try and talk as if we were speaking to each other alone after dinner,’ said Kit.

‘I don’t think that that would make any difference. You’re an educated man – I’m just a man with a roller and a tin of paint. Oh well, here goes.’

He swallowed, looking at Kit, then started.

‘You all know I’ve seen Dad on and off since the divorce. For a time – not long – he saw us kids: not often, but still, regularly, maybe every three or four months. I didn’t notice much difference in him then, and not for long afterwards. I knew in my heart that these were duty occasions and no pleasure to him at all, but still … When they ceased Maria and Dan were pleased, but I wanted them to go on.’

‘Why?’ asked Kit.

‘Because I thought they ought to go on, I suppose. It’s what happens when parents divorce. I always like to do the done thing, the ordinary thing. So I rang him and said could I come and see him. He must have thought word would get around if he said “no”. So generally we met up, though it was never a pleasure for either of us. Then things started to change.’

‘In what way?’

‘In the past he’d always been the correct, buttoned-up solicitor, running to type, I suppose. We generally went to sporting events, though I’d have liked a bit more variety. And he started saying things that seemed … well, wrong for him, as I’d always known him. One day at a rugby league match, he introduced me to one of his clients, and he said: “This is my boy, Micky. He’s a good lad. Never wanted to go to university. Saved me a mint of money that has.” Do you see why I was surprised?’

‘I think so,’ said Kit. ‘It was thoughtless, cynical, slightly “off”. It showed he didn’t care how he hurt you, didn’t care about your feelings at all.’

‘That’s it. And I’d always wanted to be important to him. I was hurt, very hurt.’

‘Were the remarks always aimed at you?’

‘Oh, not at all. Sometimes the family
perhaps, sometimes just general remarks. They were always things that a solicitor, a good one, wouldn’t say. And he said them, and enjoyed saying them.’

‘And this has gone on, has it?’

‘Oh yes. I went to see him the other day, and he asked me if I’d seen Isla’s by-blow recently. It’s as if he’s losing all his inhibitions and natural cautions and now flaunts what he once would have shrunk from saying.’

‘What precipitated his going into a nursing home?’

‘A broken leg. And he found he preferred being looked after, and decided to stay there.’

‘Ah. No reason there for a change of mood and character. I wondered because what happens to a lot of people with Alzheimer’s and other diseases of the elderly is that they seem to change their whole nature, whereas in fact it is
long-hidden
things emerging and making them seem transformed. I’m sure you know the sort of thing: elderly spinsters with a command of four-letter words that family and friends find astonishing.’

‘Ah yes, I‘ve heard of that sort of case,’ said Micky. ‘There was another odd occasion recently – not like that, but interesting. Often he’s quite quiet when we get together – whether it’s in his bedroom at the nursing home or at a home game at Elland Road – and he sometimes makes
odd remarks that come from what he has been thinking in the long periods of silence. Ten days ago we were at the football game, and a goal had just been scored by Leeds, and suddenly he said: “They said it could be slow, but I never thought it would be as slow as this.”’

They all looked at each other. Dan’s eyes revealed a mind that was struggling with new information.

‘That sounds like a death sentence,’ he said finally. ‘And we’re the only family he’s got …’ he looked around the room, ‘we three.’

‘I don’t think that’s how Micky reads the remark,’ said Kit, in a low voice. ‘And he’s the one who was there.’

Micky nodded.

‘That’s right. I read it that he’d been told a while ago that he was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, or maybe senility. I believe those are pretty unpredictable illnesses to get, so far as the rate of their progress and so on are concerned. I read it that he was expressing surprise that he – and his brain – had been so long in developing the illness.’

‘I think that’s how I read it,’ said Kit.

Suddenly Maria changed the tack of the meeting.

‘To go back to what Micky quoted earlier,’ she said, ‘that about Isla’s by-blow. Wouldn’t it
make more sense, if Isla did produce a child that wasn’t her husband’s, that that child would be Dan rather than Peter – sorry – Kit?’

‘How do you work that out?’ asked Pat, though it was through gargled outrage and ‘what the hells?’ from Dan.

‘I’m just thinking of the usual pattern of a disintegrating marriage: it makes sense if Kit was unwanted by his father at least, and if Isla responded with a protest – the opposite of her earlier worship of him. If Frank went elsewhere – and he clearly had a line-up of girlfriends after the divorce, which suggests a straying eye all through the marriage – then maybe Isla felt: if he can, why shouldn’t I?’

‘Yes, I see that,’ said Ivor Battersby. ‘The alternative is that this marriage disintegrated earlier than most people realised; ignoring Auntie Flora – though in my experience she is usually right – and Kit was the result of an affair, what does that imply about Dan? You might ask: why did he come into the world at all?’

‘A lot of us have often wondered,’ said Maria.

‘Here, I’m not sitting through garbage like that,’ yelled Dan as if he was being accused of a blatant foul. ‘If I was conceived when the marriage was on the rocks it was because Dad was careless like we all are at times. I’m going.’

And he threw his chair back against the wall
and marched out of the function room, followed reluctantly, with wistful glances at Kit, by Wendy.

‘Not so much careless as brainless,’ she muttered to whoever was in earshot.

‘Well, that’s given us plenty to think about,’ said Kit, realising that, whether he wanted it to or not, the meeting was drawing to a close.

Kit was conscious of a chill in the air from the moment he awoke next morning.

‘Tea,’ said his mother, putting it down with a clang beside his bed and going straight out.

She had already gone to bed by the time he had arrived back in Seldon Road the night before. Kit went straight up to bed himself, with more than enough to think about. But ‘tea’, without a comment on the weather or cheery chaffing on his sleeping late, did give him a clue to her mood. He washed and showered in a hurry and went downstairs. Mail was lying in a bundle on the hall table, secured by the inevitable red elastic band. He quickly sorted through it and left his in a separate pile. Then he went into the dining room.

‘Lovely day,’ he said to Isla.

‘Is it? I haven’t had time to notice. I presume you want cereal?’ she said in a sour tone. She didn’t say anything about the eggs and bacon
and sausages which he did not want but which she slapped down in front of him before going out. He felt obliged to eat as much as he could, and then a bit more.

‘Toast and marmalade,’ Isla said, coming in the moment he put his knife and fork together on the plate.

‘Best part of the meal,’ said Kit. ‘Now, are you going to tell me what this is all about?’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said, going out. Kit buttered and marmaladed a slice of toast, then went in a casual fashion, plate in hand, and stood in the doorway to the kitchen.

‘What “this is about”,’ he said, ‘is the ice in your manner. You’re about as welcoming as a winter congregation of Wee Frees. I’ve done something that has annoyed or offended you – right?’

She turned round, her hands on her hips.

‘There’s no “or” – I’m both … Ada Micklejohn drove me home last night after the opera. We went along Bennett Street, just as practically my whole family came rolling out of La Cena Italiana. If you’d asked me, I could have told you of a much better restaurant than that. But of course, you didn’t ask me, did you?’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘So I was humiliated in front of Ada, who’d asked where you were eating and I’d said you
were having a pub meal with your brother Micky.’

‘I don’t see anything very humiliating in a change of plan.’

‘It was not a change of plan. I know all of Ada’s little Mills & Boon affectations. You persuaded her to ask me out to give you a clear field with the rest of the family.’

Kit sighed.

‘OK. But it wasn’t so much a clear field I wanted. I didn’t want to bully or manipulate them in any way. I just wanted to test them, to see if there were any memories they’d suppressed, or hadn’t spoken of because they thought they might offend or upset you, so that they would have kept quiet about anything that reflected badly on the family.’

‘You wanted to drag up anything that reflected badly on the family,’ said Isla, her voice overflowing with bitterness. ‘I’ve always tried to show the best possible face to the world, and I tried to make Micky and Maria do the same.’

‘Not Dan, I notice,’ said Kit, going into the hall. ‘You love him, but you recognise he’s a lost cause.’ He riffled through his mail and then looked at Isla. ‘There was a letter from Vienna when I sorted through my mail. What have you done with it?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

Kit shook his head.

‘Oh dear, Mother. You’ve ruled the roost too long. You haven’t got together a little collection of denials and excuses or counter-accusations. Of course you’ve taken it. Who else could have done it? We’re alone in the house. In fact, I think I can see the outline of an envelope in the pocket of your apron. Let me have it.’