After the Lie: A gripping novel about love, loss and family secrets (26 page)

I
stood by my car
. Mark moved to touch my face, then stopped mid-air and put his hand in his pocket. He nodded at my cheek instead. ‘That’s nasty. Let me fetch the first-aid kit out of the car.’

If I hadn’t been trying to redirect the adrenaline of my unused speech, I would have smiled at Mark’s capacity for having the right thing at the right time.

He handed me a wipe. ‘Just under your eye.’

Eventually he took it from me and did it himself, dabbing gently.

I shook him off. ‘What the hell happened in there?’

‘Let’s go and get a coffee and I’ll fill you in.’

‘Why don’t we just go home?’ I paused. ‘Or do I take it you’re not coming back?’ A big sob was sitting at the bottom of my throat, stretching my vocal chords until my voice sounded as though it was trying to squeeze out of a space too small for all the huge emotions contained within it.

Mark scratched at the stubble on his chin. I’d never seen him unshaven before. His voice was soft but determined. ‘Every time I think I’ve come to terms with a new discovery about you, something else pops up. I’ve loved you for such a long time, Lydia, and what hurts so much is that you’ve never been honest with me. Truths offered up freely feel so bloody different to truths that come out because you’re cornered in a lie.’

‘There aren’t any more truths.’

‘You’ve just proved my point.’

‘You know everything there is to know now.’

But Mark carried on shaking his head. He couldn’t have discovered the last thing I hadn’t told him. There were only two other people who knew and I was positive they wouldn’t have revealed it. I glanced at the windows of Sean’s house. I didn’t want them to be watching this conversation. They wouldn’t have to hear the words to see that this was a marriage struggling to stay upright in a full-scale storm.

‘Let’s sit in your car,’ Mark said, as I shivered in the December drizzle.

The concentrated space gave our conversation a ‘do or die’ feel.

‘Do I take it that you’ve somehow found a way to stop Katya calling the police on Jamie?’ I asked.

‘You could have done the same,’ he said.

‘How?’

He looked out of the window. ‘You know how.’

Of course, I knew how. I’d come here with the express purpose of wielding that particular weapon. But how the hell did Mark know?

‘Is this to do with Sean?’ It was a tricky business trying to keep a secret
and
find out whether someone else knows the truth, without discovering you’ve dug yourself a turd moat to drown in.

Mark turned to me. ‘You could say that.’

I felt something in me throw itself onto the funeral pyre. Mark had already left me. What happened thirty years ago didn’t matter now except in terms of how it could save Jamie.

‘What did you tell them?’

‘That you’d had an abortion. That, if necessary, we’d contact the clinic to get the records. Wouldn’t actually prove it was Sean you’d had sex with, but I thought it might be enough of a bargaining tool to make them think twice.’

Even though I’d been prepared to shout it at them myself, hearing it come out of Mark’s mouth made my whole body go weak with regret. I knew he’d be thinking about the excruciating two years it had taken for me to fall pregnant with Jamie. The times we’d sat discussing intimate details of our lives with doctors who could find nothing wrong. And all the time I’d cradled my guilt, wondering whether my abortion was responsible, shame oozing through me like a weeping sore until I thought I would suffocate beneath it.

And still I said nothing.

I stared at the floor, forcing some volume into my voice.

‘How did you find out?’

Mark leaned back in the seat. ‘I went to Norfolk.’

‘Norfolk?’

‘Yes. I wanted to understand, to go back to the beginning. I thought it might help me if I saw where you lived, where you’d come from, the school where your dad worked.’

A visceral sense of longing for those open skies flooded through me. ‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’

‘Gorgeous. I went to Thornham. Stayed at The Lifeboat Inn. Walked the coastal path to the nature reserve at Holme-next-the-Sea.’

Memories of drinking dandelion and burdock in the pub garden and throwing sticks into the sea for Tripod wriggled in next to the cold reality of today’s conversation.

I made myself look at Mark, still waiting to discover how he knew.

‘I went to see Sean’s mother,’ he said, as though he had clarified everything.

But I was still in the dark. Margie couldn’t have told him, though she was probably one of the few people who would have understood. I’d loved Margie. She’d made me feel that it was okay to be me. She teased me all the time but not in the way the girls at school did. She teased me
because
I belonged.

‘How did you find her?’

‘Come on, Lyddie. It’s a tiny village. God knows what it was like for you after your dad got the sack. I asked at the shop.’

‘Why did you want to see her?’

‘I wanted another view of what happened back then. I didn’t have to press her too hard.’

‘Is she okay? She was very kind to me. It was Sean’s dad who pressed the charges. I don’t think she wanted to.’

‘She didn’t. In fact, she begged her husband not to get your dad prosecuted. She was delighted that you’d married and had children. She burst into tears when I showed her a picture of you and the kids, really sobbing.’

I wanted to hurry Mark along, but I could see that in the telling, he was still processing his own feelings about what he’d heard.

‘Then she just came out with it. “Thank god she’s gone on to be happy. I felt guilty for years after that abortion, thinking about how frightened she must have been. I often wondered if she’d managed to have kids later on.”’

‘Oh my god. I didn’t know she knew. Did she realise I hadn’t told you?’

‘She didn’t when she said it. She was shocked when she saw my reaction, but she didn’t try and take it back.’

I shifted in my seat. ‘How did she find out, anyway? I never even told Sean.’

‘She came round to talk to your mother, to apologise for her husband refusing to drop the charges. Unfortunately, it was the day you’d gone to Somerset for the abortion.’

Mark kept pausing on that word, as though he wasn’t quite sure how to pronounce it, as though it couldn’t belong in the same context as me. The shame I felt, the strength of it in the face of Mark’s bewilderment, made me want to curl up into the smallest, tightest ball.

It almost matched the intensity of that awful day, three months after Dad was first arrested. We were just beginning to adjust to our new reality, coming to terms with the fact that Dad might go to prison. As soon as I heard my mother leave for church, I’d stood at the door of the sitting room, waiting until Dad looked up from his paper. Then I’d thrown myself onto his lap, burying my face in his shoulder, sobbing out that I was pregnant with Sean’s baby.

After weeks of repeating that we’d just been messing about in those photos, that ‘of course we didn’t have sex’.

I forced my attention back to Mark. As he was speaking, his face carried an expression of disbelief, as though he was expecting me to contradict him, to say, ‘No, no, of course not, that never happened.’

‘Apparently your mother completely lost it with Margie, started screaming at her, told Margie she should feel responsible for killing a baby for the rest of her life,’ he said.

‘I think she might have been projecting her own guilt there. You know what a staunch Catholic she is. But my dad was absolutely adamant. There was no way he was going to let me have a baby at thirteen. And I think Mum saw the sense in that too. But she really struggled with it.’ I forced myself not to cry. ‘Margie would probably have come with me to the clinic. My mother couldn’t bring herself to. Dad and I pretended to everyone we’d gone away for a little break, just the two of us. When I came back, my mother would never let us talk about it again.’

I tried not to think about Dad steadying himself on the banister at the bottom of the clinic steps, before grabbing my arm and pulling me up them.

‘I wish Margie had taken me. Dad found it so traumatic. He kept saying, “You’re just a child yourself.” Margie wasn’t shocked by anything. She made everything I felt, all the big emotions I couldn’t tame, seem normal. She always told me that when I grew up, I’d understand them. I’m not convinced she was completely right about that.’

I shivered. I turned the key in the ignition and switched on the heating. ‘Why didn’t she tell Sean though?’ I asked.

Mark shrugged. ‘She was protecting him, I suppose. She didn’t want to risk her husband finding out. According to her, “He’d have killed Sean himself.”’

Mark rubbed his hands together. ‘I don’t understand why you didn’t come straight round here though. You could have shut Katya up yourself.’

‘That’s why I’m here now. I wanted to discuss it with you first but in the end, I was so terrified that Katya would report Jamie I couldn’t wait any longer. I did leave you about nine hundred messages.’

‘No signal in that part of Norfolk. The handset nearly blew up when I got to King’s Lynn. I was already on my way back when I got your message about Katya wanting to go to the police, so I just drove straight here.’

‘Why didn’t you ring me when you got in range?’

Mark leaned away from me, huddled up to the door. ‘You’d been protecting Sean all this time. I wasn’t sure you’d agree to threatening them with that. For me, the priority was Jamie.’

I felt the breath leave my lungs. I stared at Mark as though some random stranger had been walking along the street and decided to hop in and rest his legs in my car. ‘You honestly thought I would protect Sean over Jamie?’ The unfairness of the accusation had shredded my voice into a tinny thread.

‘Forgive me if my trust was a bit shaky. I couldn’t allow some bizarre sense of loyalty to Sean to stop me getting them off our backs.’

I thumped the steering wheel. ‘How could you ever think that I would let anything happen to Jamie that was in my power to prevent? I’ve spent the weekend Googling the bloody clinic, trying to find out if it’s still there and how long they keep the records for.’

‘How could I ever think that you would change your name? That you’d keep it from me that your poor old dad had been in prison? That you’d had underage sex with someone I’ve grown to consider a friend and top it off with a little Italian affair that I was never supposed to know about? Let alone not breathing a word about the abortion the whole time we were struggling to conceive?’

He threw open the car door. ‘I’ll be in touch about Christmas. Tell the kids I’m still working away.’

T
he days leading
up to my niece’s wedding were agony. If there had been a medical emergency requiring the opening up of my chest cavity, they would have discovered a congealed lump of tangled matter, haemorrhaging wildly with veins and arteries waving about like wisteria on a windy day, desperate for something to cling onto.

Which made a visit from my mother, whom I had resolutely refused to see since the shoe shop debacle, the least welcome experience I could have imagined beyond the aftermath of Mabel eating a maggoty hedgehog. Dad had popped by to take the kids golfing. I was so delighted to see him full of motivation again, that I was slow to register that as the kids leapt into the car with him, my mother tottered out.

She looked old in the sunlight, despite her make-up. ‘Could I come in?’ she asked, as Dad’s car reversed off the drive. I nodded and stood aside. Mabel came galloping out to greet my mother, who, for once, stroked her – albeit with a flat, rigid hand rather than the proper ruffling and squidging of a dog-lover. But as an olive branch, it was a good start.

‘I’ve got a lot going on at the moment,’ I said, as a preamble to telling her she couldn’t stay.

My mother frightened me by patting my arm – the closest we ever got to hugging – and saying, ‘I know, dear. I do know. I’ll make coffee.’

She put a cup down in front of me, with a couple of slices of toast, as if she knew I hadn’t had any breakfast. Then she sat down, pursed her lips and said, ‘Daddy tells me Mark hasn’t been around much.’

Her pale eyes watched me carefully.

I surprised myself. ‘He’s left me.’

My mother didn’t miss a beat. ‘Of course he hasn’t,’ she said, as though I’d told her he’d taken up macramé or hang-gliding. She’d now become the walk-on-water wonder of marriage guidance. She’d always struggled to accept things that didn’t concord with her world view.

I looked at her. For once, I didn’t care about her disapproval. ‘Please do save me from any lectures. I have as much on my plate as one human being can reasonably be expected to deal with.’

‘I knew that McAllister boy would end up bringing trouble.’

I felt oddly defensive of Sean. ‘It was such a long time ago. I want it to stop now. I’m not going to let ‘all that business’ affect the next generation too. We were both as bad as each other. I’m just sorry Dad got caught in the middle of it.’

As the words left my mouth, I realised that I didn’t want to pursue Sean, even if Katya did go to the police. I hoped that the threat was enough but if not, I’d save my energies for helping Jamie, not for exacting revenge on the McAllisters. I wasn’t going to turn on the boy – man – I’d loved so long ago, even if I’d trained myself to hate him over the years. I’d been a willing participant. I couldn’t lie about it now.

My mother reached for my hand. My instinct was to withdraw it but I kept it there. ‘All men are very proud. It will have hurt Mark to find out our secrets after all this time. He’ll just be needing some time away. He’s a good man. He wouldn’t leave the children.’

My mother sounded as though she was convincing herself.

‘It’s not about that anymore.’

My mother’s eyes narrowed. ‘What is it about, then?’

All the years of weighing up whether my thoughts were acceptable enough to be allowed to sully the air my mother breathed ground to a halt. The truth flowed out of me like slurry from a gravel pit.

Jamie, Eleanor, Katya. And god help me, sex with Tomaso as well.

As the multiple horrors came to light, her eyes grew rounder and rounder until she looked like a bush baby. The rest of her was inert, slumped into her seat. She withdrew her hand from mine. I saw the weariness in her bones as she instructed herself to sit up straight and mount a fight back. She pursed her lips. ‘I wondered about that Tomosi. Far too charming for his own good. Good job I kept an eye out in Florence. And to think I’d encouraged you to take him…’

I didn’t disabuse her of the idea that it had been a Surrey-based one-off. I knew she’d be racing through her mental list of patron saints to call upon in these extreme circumstances. But even St Gregory the Wonderworker wouldn’t be able to make this one right.

I held up my hand. ‘Don’t say anything.’

She didn’t. Just leant forward, covered her face with her hands and sobbed.

I watched her tears drop onto her silk blouse. I sat there, immobile as shock spread through me. ‘Don’t cry!’ I could hear the panic in my voice. I wanted to put my arm round her but ended up sitting next to her, afraid to touch her in case she brushed me off. My skin prickled with the desire to comfort her. A long-buried image of my mother refusing to look back at our house as we drove away from Norfolk for the last time came to me so vividly that I could smell the sea air. Little flashes of my mother wrapping up her best china and gently laying the photo of her and Dad on top followed. And later, when he came home from prison: her begging him to eat a spoonful of soup, leading him by the hand to the shower, putting his chair outside in the sunshine ‘to get a bit of air’.

She interrupted the parade of memories by grabbing my wrist. Her fingers were strong and cold. It took me a while to understand what she was saying.

‘I’m so sorry. I wanted to protect you but I got it wrong. So wrong.’

But unlike me, she’d done her best.