After the Lie: A gripping novel about love, loss and family secrets (5 page)

M
ark opened
a bottle of Châteauneuf in celebration of the prospect of refurbishing three kitchens. ‘Cheers. Might be a bit premature, but I’m pretty sure we’ll get something out of the McAllisters. I hope she goes for the wine fridge. There’s a nice mark-up on that. Sounds like the husband is worth a bob or two.’

I couldn’t even hear the name McAllister without wanting to smash things. Mark was jovial, lighthearted, talking about how we might even be able to afford to take the kids skiing the following Easter.

‘Let’s see what happens. I got the impression that it’s the husband who has the final say on the finances. If they’re renting out the properties, they might decide to go to that new store and just do the cupboard fronts, rather than spend so much money on completely new kitchens.’

Mark stared at me. ‘Jesus, Lyddie, you’re a ray of sunshine. Thanks for your confidence in me. This is the biggest opportunity to come my way this year. I’m going to do everything I can to pull this off.’

I had so many emotions rushing to triumph – guilt, anger, frustration – that I didn’t know which one to latch onto. My head pounded from the effort of having a discussion with someone who only knew half the story. I was groping around for an impossible response: an apology that wouldn’t encourage him to pursue work with the McAllisters.

Jamie and Izzy chose that moment to start fighting over who needed the iPad most ‘for homework’.

Izzy blew a raspberry at Jamie. ‘You’re not even going to do homework on it. I need to find out what caused the French Revolution. You just want to go on Facebook. And message your girlfriend. Twit-twoooo.’

‘Shut up. I haven’t got a girlfriend. I’m working on a Biology project with one of the girls in my class and I need to discuss something with her. You just want to post a load of selfies of you pouting on Snapchat and talk about your spots with your friends.’

My brain was simultaneously processing the fact that Izzy had Snapchat – which I had expressly forbidden – and the fact that Jamie had mentioned Izzy’s spots, the one thing guaranteed to tap into her temper. Before I could react, Jamie tugged the iPad out of Izzy’s hand. She tried to snatch it back and it backflipped into the air, crashing down onto the kitchen tiles with an unmistakable smash.

Izzy screamed and burst into tears.

Without thinking, I swiped Jamie round the back of the head, a proper old-fashioned clout to make his eyes reverberate in their sockets, patented by my mum, circa 1980. He spun round. ‘Owww! For god’s sake, Mum.’

Mark frowned at me as though I’d suddenly appeared wearing a Ku Klux Klan suit. I’d taken ages to get pregnant with Jamie. For the first few years of his life, I’d been ridiculously overprotective. Mark would say I still was. So there’d been absolutely no question of us being parents who smacked. Apart from the occasional firm grasp of a wrist during a supermarket tantrum, I’d only ever smoothed hair away from the kids’ troubled faces and rubbed Deep Heat into aching muscles.

I wanted to take Jamie’s bewildered face between my hands and tell him that my sudden transformation into a parent who belts first and talks later was nothing to do with the iPad. Instead, a torrent of blame gushed out. ‘What do you bloody expect? I’m trying to have a conversation with Dad and you two are bickering over the flaming iPad so that I can’t hear myself think. And then you’re all surprised when I get to the end of my tether.’

I looked round the table at them. Both of the children were staring at me as though a T. rex had suddenly rattled to life in the corner of the kitchen. With the contrariness of teenagers, Izzy united with Jamie, a sullen sibling gang against the madness of the mother. The effort Mark was making not to undermine me had brought colour to his cheeks. He was standing rubbing the back of Jamie’s head. Somehow the soothing gesture of Mark’s hand ruffling Jamie’s hair up and down lit the dynamite under me.

I turned on Mark. ‘Stop fucking looking at me like I’m the bad guy. You’re the one who’s always banging on about how the kids take everything for granted and now you’re standing there going, “No matter, it’s only an iPad.” Right. Only an iPad that costs six hundred bloody pounds.’

I never said anything worse than ‘shit’ and now I felt as though I’d like to see how many swear words I knew. In multiple languages. I approached, then backed away from the C-word. That really would be the ultimate in hurling myself off the cliff.

‘It’s okay for all of you. There’s you, Jamie, with your nose in your phone barely looking up to speak and when you do, you manage to grunt at me as though I’m just here to facilitate clean pants and porridge. Then you, Izzy, thinking the world’s ground to a halt because your hair isn’t flicking the right way, and you, Mark, with your nose so far up Katya McAllister’s backside that I’ll be lucky if you pop out again before Christmas.’

Mark put his wine glass down, his face full of confusion that a celebration had ended up with me rampaging about the kitchen barking about random grievances. A great swell of fury rose in my chest. ‘So tonight I’m going on bloody strike. I’m going out. Get your own sodding dinner. Let’s see if anyone other than me is capable of picking up a bloody oven glove. You can all sit there on your screens. Go on, fill your boots having conversations with people you don’t even know rather than communicating with each other. Though you might find the iPad a bit slower than usual.’

No one said anything. I snatched up my handbag, longing for Mark to hold me tight until all the fright, the shock at my own behaviour, drained away. Izzy shrank down onto a chair, looking young and uncertain. Jamie was caught in that unhappy state between tears and anger. When the children behaved badly, I always left a door open so they could find their way back with minimum humiliation. For myself, however, I’d sealed it as tight as Tupperware.

I slammed out of the house and slid into my Mini. I drove to the address Katya had given on the kitchen sample forms. I knew what the house would be like. A modern executive home with zero character, LED downlighters, study with built-in computer desk, en suite to every bedroom.

I drove past the house. Blinds, not curtains. Very clinical. The opposite of my house, where toddler drawings were still stuck on the fridge a decade later. I pulled over at the end of the cul-de-sac and held my breath, trying to stop the tears. I couldn’t live like this. I wanted to storm up to the front door and hammer on it until the perfect paint cracked. Or bellow obscenities through the letterbox. I wanted to give Katya, that charming wife of his, the A-Z of everything he’d done. Watch her face shift from annoyance at being disturbed to disbelief. Most of all, I wanted to see him squirm, back away, hands up in defeat, deliberating over whether to come clean or to take the ‘that woman is deranged’ defence. His turn to be uncomfortable now.

All that deceit, hiding, humiliation was bursting out of the cage I’d trapped it in and roaring to be heard. I opened the car door. Izzy’s hairbrush fell out of the door pocket. I picked it up from the gutter, a knotty tangle of blonde hair stuck in its bristles. Could I really bear Izzy’s friends whispering to each other, the form teacher approaching me ‘to have a quick word, as she’d heard that there’d been a tricky situation with Eleanor’s dad’?

Especially as I’d been to a seminar they’d held at school on the dangers of social media a fortnight ago. I didn’t want to be the school example of ‘look what happened even without the internet – think how much worse it could be for you.’

I’d gone along out of a smug curiosity, given that my rules were quite strict – no TVs, computers, iPads or phones in bedrooms ever. I’d left a gibbering wreck after three different teachers gave examples of things that had happened at the school on Facebook, Snapchat and a hundred other sites that I’d never even heard of. The key message had been the importance of impressing on children the fact that any photo on the internet was there
forever.
I’d whirled home and started reading the riot act about privacy settings, acceptable photos and personal information. My kids adopted the face I used for my own mother whenever she tried to text on her mobile. No doubt they then hurried off to increase security on all things electronic but only so that
I
couldn’t see what they were up to.

I fastened my seatbelt again. The image that I’d been clinging onto of marching up to Sean and having my say faded away. I couldn’t be the mother that everyone talked about. I’d been that daughter.

My role as a mother was to have prim little conversations with other earnest parents about the benefits of learning the saxophone – improved confidence, increased connections between all the synapses – without once blurting out that Jamie’s sole motivation was that he thought it was the instrument most likely to get him a shag when he was older: ‘Who could resist me serenading them with
If You Leave Me Now
?’

I leaned back on the headrest. I needed to make Sean my friend. Or at least make him think he was. My stomach tightened into a hard marble of hate. If I wanted to get him on my side, I’d need to be patient. I’d waited three decades. It was surprising how ill-prepared I was now. I must have thought I’d never meet him, or anyone from my class or village again. Deluded.

I reached for my phone.

He answered immediately.

‘Is that Sean?’

‘Speaking.’

‘Hello, it’s Lydia Rushford, the new chair of the fundraising committee. Melanie asked me to call you. Have I called at a convenient time? Not too late?’ Just a delay of thirty years and I was nit-picking about the sacred and self-imposed rule of not calling anyone after eight-thirty.

He greeted me as though I was the person he was most looking forward to speaking to. It made me want to lean on the horn and bellow, ‘You do know you put my dad in prison, don’t you?’

‘I wondered if you had any time to meet to discuss the photography you had in mind?’ I rasped out the word photography, my throat constricting, as though I’d swallowed a lump of dry bread.

‘Sure.’ Very American. ‘When were you thinking, Lydia?’

Again. Had I imagined the small hesitation, the slight drawing-out of Lydia?

I stuck to my script. ‘As soon as possible, really. I know Melanie wanted the permission letters sent out no later than next week.’

‘Is tomorrow any good? I’m free first thing. We could meet for coffee at the Art Café?’

‘Sure.’ I had never said ‘sure’ in my life. I had no idea why I was starting now. ‘Nine-thirty?’

‘Yes, looking forward to it.’ A little pause. ‘Lydia.’

‘Me too.’ A hiccup of bile rose in my throat.

We said goodbye. I drove home with the odd feeling that I’d jumped without knowing whether my parachute would open.

S
ean had chosen
the squidgy armchairs in the corner, under an oil painting of bright purple lips. As soon as I walked in, he jumped up. ‘Lydia, hello. What can I get you?’

‘I’ll get it, thank you.’

‘No, let me, honestly, my pleasure.’

Social niceties would have worked better several decades ago but a coffee shop with the slogan ‘Peace, love and great coffee’ didn’t seem the correct location to start a manners revolution.

‘Americano with soya milk, please.’

I still wasn’t sure whether he knew it was me. I tried to sit nonchalantly but was having difficulty encouraging my body into anything other than a straight-backed schoolmistress sort of pose.

How was I going to broach the subject if he didn’t? Was I really going to sit there and talk fundraising? I did a quick scan of the café to see if there were any other mothers I knew, sitting there ready to record and repeat the conversation if it all turned nasty.

Sean returned with a tray of coffee, looking as though he’d slept on scented lavender pillows with nothing more concerning than
The Times
crossword to solve. I, on the other hand, was carrying the rawness of an argument that had see-sawed until the early hours as Mark struggled to understand why I’d suddenly lashed out after sixteen years of strict adherence to rational, hands-to-yourself-whatever-the-provocation parenting. Unable to find a small explanation that didn’t drag in a huge one, I’d gone on the attack.

Mark had stayed calm as I’d become more hysterical. ‘I’m worried about you. You’ve been so bad-tempered and snappy lately. Do you think you need to go and see someone?’

I’d considered telling him the truth. But the truth was so unwieldy now, a great avalanche of omissions ready to thunder through so many people’s lives, sweeping away everything we took for granted. How could I explain now that the slapping scene over the broken iPad was just the tip of an ancient iceberg blundering through the family sea? I couldn’t find the words to start that discussion.

I took my coffee from Sean.

He sat. I sipped. A toddler running away from his mother stuck his tongue out at me. I pulled a face back, delaying the moment, now it was here. Sean was still good-looking. Still assumed he was top of the tree and everyone else was blessed to bask in his shade. He bent over to bring out a folder from his briefcase. I liked folders. Papers. Plans. Organising. Certainty.

When he looked up again, I spoke, my voice coming out in a funny squeak. ‘Do you know who I am?’

He stirred his coffee and laughed. ‘Off with his head! Of course I know who you are. I knew as soon as I saw you. Like the blonde. Wasn’t convinced you’d want me greeting you like a long-lost friend the other day, though.’

I really thought I might slap him. He looked delighted to see me as though I was some classmate he hadn’t seen for an age and we were about to embark on a ‘Do you remember?’ session about rosy times past. I swallowed.

‘So, Sal, how did it all pan out for you in the end? Rumour has it you’ve done pretty well for yourself, with the event business and all that. Melanie was filling me in.’

‘Don’t call me Sally. Sally doesn’t exist anymore.’ I hoped he hadn’t been filling in Melanie, in return.

‘Bit extreme, wasn’t it? Changing your name and moving away? I mean, I know it all got a bit out of hand but I didn’t realise you were going to do a Lord Lucan.’

‘Sean. It didn’t get “out of hand”. My dad went to prison. He was never able to teach again. You know, the job that was his whole life? He ended up working as a gardener while my mother got a job as a bookkeeper to keep us afloat.’

I shook my head to dislodge the image of my dad sitting blankfaced in his armchair in the weeks after he came out of prison. My mother urging him to change out of his pyjamas, go for a walk, play golf. Cajoling, coaxing and then shouting. Shouting so loud that I’d hide in my room, my ear pressed against the radio on full volume, trying to drown out her voice.

I could have sworn one of Sean’s shoulders raised a couple of centimetres in a shrug.

‘It was a bit of a mess, wasn’t it? To be fair though, a bloke with an unpredictable temper like that shouldn’t really be teaching kids, should he?’

His words acted as a screwdriver jabbed into an already seeping, weeping wound. I breathed out slowly. ‘My dad wouldn’t hurt a fly and you know it. He had never behaved like that before or since.’

Some of the bravado slipped. ‘Yeah. I know. I liked your dad. I did feel bad about what happened.’

‘Bad’ didn’t even begin to cover it. ‘Nice of you to press charges.’ I never knew bitterness had a taste before. I could feel it, souring my saliva, scorching down my oesophagus.

‘Come on. You know my dad. He was a tough old boy, brought up to protect his own. He didn’t care much for school, anyway. He always liked a pop at authority. I was just a kid. I didn’t know which way was up, back then. Thought the old man had all the answers. And your dad did crack one of my ribs and break my nose.’ He fingered the slight bump.

I couldn’t shake off the feeling that Sean was still viewing it as a prank that went wrong. I tried to follow the advice that Mark often gave to Jamie: ‘Focus on the outcome you want. You can’t change the past, only the future.’

Before I could speak again, Sean twirled his coffee cup. ‘Dad died ten years ago. I never did connect with him properly. We started to get a bit closer when Eleanor was born.’

I wondered what his daughter looked like. Like him? A hint of rebellion and a smile everyone remembered? Or like Katya, elfin and petite?

Sean carried on. ‘Dad was much softer with her, light of his life really, like he’d got all the hardness out of him in my childhood. He mellowed as he got older.’

I noticed the Norfolk in his speech. Those soft vowels and country burr.

Social convention demanded that I utter the word, ‘Sorry’. But I wasn’t sorry. I hoped Sean’s grief had ripped him apart. That he’d experienced some of what my father lived every day, the loss of the future that he – we – should have had, that searing, tearing feeling of life changed forever, our permanent low-level fear of him spiralling downwards, unable to get out of bed. I wondered if my mother even told me the half of it.

I put down my mug and plunged in. ‘I don’t want to discuss what happened with anyone from round here. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t either.’ There. The request for my future, undisturbed, unchanged, was out there.

The electronic plink-plonk of a baby’s toy filled the silence.

This time, an unmistakable shrug. ‘No one’s really going to be interested in some ancient story of a misspent youth, are they? Everyone’s got naked with someone they shouldn’t have at one time or another with unpredictable consequences.’ He gave me a cheeky grin.

An unbidden image of Sean peeling off my school shirt bounced into my mind. I hoped to god that he wasn’t recalling my Playtex bra and my Woolworths knickers. He did look amused, which, if he wasn’t careful, might result in him needing a plot in the cemetery sooner than he’d anticipated. Flutters of emotion were vibrating all the way from my stomach to the base of my throat, as though I was standing on a bridge with heavy lorries thundering underneath.

I dabbed at my lips with my napkin. ‘I don’t think you have any idea what we went through.’ I concentrated on looking Sean straight in the eye. ‘So I’d be really grateful if you kept quiet about it. We’ve made a new start here. I’d like to draw a line under it and not contaminate my children’s lives with it. They don’t need to know their granddad was in prison. And I definitely don’t want a discussion about the photograph.’

Sean laughed. Actually burst out with chuckle of proper merriment. ‘Come on. They’re watching all sorts on the computer. I bet teenagers today think a threesome is old hat. I doubt that they’re going to be too scandalised at us oldies getting a bit frisky.’

‘Frisky’ was for lambs gambolling about in spring. It went nowhere near describing the mayhem that had ensued from a few bloody Polaroids. Sean was grinning, as though if he waited for a minute or two, I might develop a sense of humour.

‘Sean. Let’s be really clear. No one is to know anything about this. Ever. Especially my kids. Or my husband.’

‘Mark doesn’t know?’ He flopped back in his seat. ‘Does he think your real name is Lydia?’

‘No. He knows that my first name is Sally. He just doesn’t know why I don’t use it.’

Sean sat shaking his head. ‘Jesus. Are we going to pretend we don’t know each other at all?’

‘Yes please.’

‘Better not blurt out that you’ve got a Mickey Mouse-shaped mole on your left buttock then.’

I blushed until I could feel my eyebrows sweating. At thirteen, my fledgling sexuality had been hammered into a box with a boulder rolled on top. I’d never managed to shake off the idea that I shouldn’t actually be doing ‘it’, even after I was married. So Sean thinking about my left buttock – any buttock – was the quickest way to get me zipping up my handbag. Then I paused.

‘Does Katya know about the Polaroid saga?’

‘I haven’t told her.’ Sean looked off into a corner. Despite myself, I felt a little wrinkling of curiosity.

‘Why not?’

‘Katya has, shall we say, an ability to get rather possessive. I’ve learnt not to tell her anything about past girlfriends.’

‘What, not even teenage-years-before-I-met-you girlfriends?’

‘Nope. Leads to grief. As far as she’s concerned I was all but a virgin when we got together.’

I bet there was a bit more of a story to that, which, I was ashamed to admit, I wouldn’t have minded hearing.

Sean leaned forward, smiling up at me under his lashes. ‘Plus, of course, you have blossomed into rather a gorgeous swan, so that wouldn’t help matters.’

I was just pondering the fact that the English language lacked a word for the reluctant pleasure experienced when someone you hate admits to finding you attractive, when Sean said, ‘Of course, I didn’t expect to live in the same town as you.’

‘Join the club.’

Sean cracked his knuckles. ‘We could just bite the bullet, come clean and have done with it. Might be easier in the long term. At least tell them we knew each other at school years ago. If not the rest.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘Katya might take a bit of time to get used to the idea of a woman from my past popping up. You might not get the starring role as her new best friend.’

Fright made me slop my coffee. ‘No! No. We can’t do that. You can’t say anything. This involves my whole family, my mum and dad as well. It will just lead to more questions about my childhood, more discussions about why we left Norfolk. It will all come out. Mark wouldn’t ever trust me again.’

Sean put his hand up. ‘Give it some thought. I’m very happy to talk to Mark with you if that would help, though I suggest you leave Katya to me.’

‘Sean. Listen to me. You’re not going to be having any cosy little chats with my husband. You can’t say anything to anyone.’

And there it was. That flare of rebellion, of defiance, across his face. A memory of my dad telling him to get his hair cut for school, to get it off his collar, flashed into my mind. The next day he’d turned up with a ponytail.

‘Sal. You can’t dictate what I choose to tell my wife.’

I hissed at him. ‘Stop calling me Sally.’

He shrugged. ‘Come on, I don’t think it has to be such a drama.’

‘Which just goes to show you have no bloody clue what you did.’

He really didn’t.

Frustration made me want to snatch the purple lips off the wall and smash them over his head. I grabbed my bag and scooted out of the door before the whole café was left in no doubt about how much of a drama it was.