Anne's Song (16 page)

Although Brian never missed one of my chemo sessions, I began to sense that something was wrong, either with our relationship or with him. He just didn't seem like the man I'd married any more. I felt he was distant and aloof. He'd be sitting in the room as I had the horrible chemicals pumped into me, he might be reading the paper, and I'd say something and either he didn't reply or he'd just nod. Something wasn't right.

One day, when I was resting in my bed, he sat on the floor and put his head in my lap. I started stroking his hair. 'It'll be all right, Brian,' I said, with rather more conviction than I felt. At that stage, half of me thought that Brian's strange, abstracted mood was triggered by my illness, that he was worried I might not make it. Or that, at least, is what I told myself.

I know now that my condition was only part of the problem. Brian was also single-handedly shouldering all the worry over our desperate financial situation. What would happen to me? And to his job? And to the house? And to the girls? It was all too much for one person to cope with. So much was bottled up inside him, I'm surprised now that he didn't go off pop. The look on his face that day, as he sat on the floor, was just pitiful. He was a soul in torment, a haunted man, but I couldn't quite understand why. Of course, I only knew half the story.

The chemo sessions were over by September; I began the radiotherapy in October and finished it in November, just before my fiftieth birthday. At one point, my ex-brother-in-law, Shane Richie, rang me up. He'd heard I was in the wars and wanted to offer some help. 'Look, if you want to go private, just tell me,' he said. 'Whatever you need, I'll pay for it.' He couldn't have been kinder and he didn't tell anyone else he was making this offer. It was such a shame that he and Coleen didn't go the distance. They seemed so suited to each other, like peas in a pod. They were born in the same year, just one day apart, and they had such similar personalities. Still, they're each happy now with their new partners.

I only found out very recently that Brian had been going to surprise me with a trip to Disneyland in Florida with Amy and Alex; and then I'd got ill. As it was, we had a birthday party at a local restaurant in Blackpool for family and friends. Brian was supposed to be arranging it, because I was still having radiotherapy sessions and I was a bit out of it – but so, in his different way, was he. As people started arriving, it became clear he hadn't organised it properly and hadn't booked enough places, so there weren't enough seats for everyone to sit down. That was so unlike Brian, up until that point such an orderly person. It was as though he was losing the plot.

The following March, in 2001, a plan emerged for the whole family to go to Florida. There was my brother Tommy, his wife and two kids; me, Brian, Amy and Alex; Maureen and Ritchie with their son Danny; my brother Brian with his current girlfriend; Denise and her partner Tom; Bernie and her husband Steve and daughter Erin; my mum and Aunt Teresa; Coleen and her two sons, Shane Junior and Jake – the three of them stayed in the house she owned in Florida; and a few friends, too. Only Linda and her husband Brian didn't come on the holiday because they'd very recently been to Florida. I'd also persuaded my friend Jacqui and her daughter to come along, too.

For some reason, I thought that inviting Jacqui had
put
Brian's nose a bit out of joint which I felt explained his slightly moody behaviour. It was as if he wasn't there. We'd go to one of the theme parks and I'd suddenly notice he'd gone wandering off. It wasn't just me, either. My sisters started commenting on Brian's absences when the rest of us were enjoying ourselves – he never seemed to be around – and then on his strange, dislocated mood when he was with us.

Amy celebrated her twentieth birthday while we were in Florida, so we arranged a party by the pool and an opportunity for her to swim with the dolphins. I was arranging all these treats, completely unaware of the true state of our finances. No wonder Brian was so preoccupied. I can see now that he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. It was also on this trip that my mother started behaving out of character. What we didn't spot was that this was the early onset of Alzheimer's; we thought she was just getting a bit eccentric.

One evening, Denise, Maureen, Bernie and I stayed up after the others had gone to bed. We'd had a few drinks and we started talking about Mum and Dad. We were laughing about some of our mother's recent behaviour and then we moved on to our father who'd been dead by this stage for three years. It was Maureen, I think, who said he'd also been pretty eccentric in his own way.

'Eccentric?' I said. 'I wouldn't exactly describe him as that.' And then I found myself blurting out the whole story of my sexual abuse. It was the drink talking. The three of them just sat open-mouthed as it all spilled out. They simply couldn't believe what they were hearing. Shock and incomprehension gradually gave way to anger although it wasn't directed at me. They saw me, quite properly, as a victim.

'What did he do?' asked Denise.

'How long did it carry on?' asked Maureen.

'Did he ever say sorry?' asked Bernie.

I tried to answer all their questions as best I could. But, in the end, I told them there was nothing to be done about it. He was beyond reach now. I'd lived with this secret for so long that I must admit it was a tremendous relief and release to unburden myself. We were all in tears by the end of that long night.

Denise, Maureen or Bernie must have subsequently told Tommy and Brian, perhaps it was on that same holiday, because in time I came to realise that they knew. I then tried to talk to each of them about it, but neither wanted to know. Brian found it difficult to hear a bad word about him. Tommy, however, was clearly discomfited by my revelation. Any time I brought it up, he'd mumble a few words and wander away. I think he felt a kind of guilt that he should have known something was happening and done something about it, but I would hate him ever to feel he'd let me down. When I was being abused by my father, Tommy was the last person I wanted to find out, with the exception of my mother. In my confused state, I thought he'd think less of me if he discovered what had been happening and I was pretty sure he'd all but kill our dad. So the one person who might have been my saviour was the very person from whom I was most anxious to keep my secret.

One of my sisters must also have told Coleen because she referred to it a little later. She cried when she was told what had happened but, because she was the youngest and because she'd stayed in Blackpool when most of the rest of the family, including Mum and Dad, had moved south to pursue our career, the influence of our parents on her was much less pronounced. By the time she was in her mid-teens, she was part of a successful group and living away from home with her boyfriend. My father had always had less influence on her, not least because she left home at sixteen.

Linda and Brian hadn't been on holiday with the rest of us in Florida. Shortly after we got back home, they came to dinner with me and my Brian. After the meal, we were sitting around chatting about work and family and our childhood. Then we moved to the subject of my father, recalling how he'd been very much the one who ruled the roost. 'He always liked to be in control,' I said.

My Brian suddenly piped up, 'Why not tell them what else he got up to?' I'm sure this wasn't much more than the effects of a bit too much alcohol but I was shocked. Brian was putting me on the spot and without in any way having warned me first that this was what he was about to do.

Everyone stopped talking and I could see the blood draining from Linda's face. 'What do you mean?' she said. 'What else
did
he get up to?'

So I told her. As soon as I'd finished, she ran out of the room upstairs to the bathroom. She was there for ages. Eventually, her Brian said to me, 'I think you'd better go and check on her.'

I went up and found her sitting on the edge of the bath, crying her eyes out. I held her and hugged her, but she seemed inconsolable. 'I'm just so shocked and hurt,' she said.

I felt a bit relieved that I'd told her but also a bit sorry, too, because it had clearly upset her so much.

I tried to comfort her. 'Well, it was a long time ago. It's over now.' She was struggling, though. She said later that she felt an overwhelming sense of betrayal by our father.

In June, Coleen gave birth to a daughter, Ciara, by Ray Fensome who's now become her second husband. Maureen, Amy, Julia and I did a summer season in Torquay with Joe Pasquale – such a very nice man – topping the bill, and then we came home to Blackpool. Brian still seemed a little as though he was on automatic pilot, just going through the paces, but I hoped it was a phase he'd pass through.

Then I was at a friend's party one night. Brian came straight from work and arrived after me, so I went and sat beside him to say hello – and he immediately muttered something and moved away. The same thing happened when I approached him again. I was getting fed up with all his moods. I wanted an explanation as to why he was behaving in this strange, remote way. I followed him into the kitchen.

I said, 'You're not being very friendly.'

He grunted. I wanted to provoke him into saying what was on his mind. So I said something I'll always regret: 'You don't love me any more, do you?'

He looked at me, such a cold, searching look. 'No,' he said, 'not the way I should.'

It was the beginning of the end.

When we got home, Brian went into the front room and started to make up a bed on the sofa. I stood in the doorway, desperately trying to make sense of it all.

'What do you mean you don't love me any more?' I asked.

He wouldn't meet my eye. 'I don't know if I've ever loved you,' he said.

I started shouting and screaming. 'So our whole life together has been a lie, has it? All the fabulous things you used to do and say . . . You never meant any of them?'

He was angry now. 'Oh, I meant them at the time.'

He had always loved me, and we both knew it, but that didn't mean everything was going to be fine. I knew, deep down, that something fundamental had changed and it made me sick with worry. This was the only man I'd ever loved and it was as if he'd built a brick wall around himself. It didn't matter whether I coaxed or cried: I couldn't reach him.

The girls were still at the party, so they heard none of this. Nor did we refer to it again in the coming weeks. I felt as if my life had been put on hold as Brian and I got on with our work as though nothing had happened. However he began coming home later and later each evening. Some nights, I'd leave his dinner waiting on the kitchen table for him after I'd gone to bed. I'd hear him when he finally got back, sometimes in the middle of the night, so drunk he could barely stand up.

He'd always been quite a heavy drinker, but this was different. I didn't know where he'd been and he wouldn't tell me; and I didn't know if he'd been getting drunk on his own or with someone else. Either way, this wasn't innocent, social drinking with mates. This was the action of a man drinking to obliterate whatever was going on in his head. As it turned out, I was only half right. I could have confronted him again about his behaviour but, however foolish this may now sound, and although I took the situation seriously, I still believed it was only a phase, that he'd wake up one day and come to his senses.

By now, Brian had a part-time job looking after the books for Bloomfield, the local working men's club where we'd first met all those years ago. He'd often stay behind after work and have a few drinks with people he knew. Then a group of them would go on to a hotel called the Dutchman where all the show people went and where they'd be served with drinks until three or four in the morning. Part of this group included a woman and her husband, who I also knew but not as well as Brian did. I'd met them both socially and liked them. She was particularly easy to talk to, always very chatty, even a bit flirtatious, I'd say, if there was a man around. Her husband was similarly friendly but perhaps a bit more reserved than his wife. Then, out of the blue one day, Brian announced that he was off to Newcastle at the weekend and that he was giving a lift to this couple. I assumed he'd drop them off and then go and visit his dad. Two or three days later, Brian said that the husband couldn't make it, but the wife still wanted to go. I was fine about that; there was no reason not to be. Brian and I were still communicating. Although, things were a bit strained but I thought he was having no more than a mid-life wobble. I had no reason to believe that this long and happy marriage was seriously under threat.

So off he went. After a day, I hadn't heard from him, so I tried ringing him on his mobile. There was no reply but I left a message. Another day passed and still no word from Brian. Finally, I managed to track him down. I was feeling really anxious by this stage. Whenever one of us had been away from home in the past, we'd talked three or four times every day on the phone. I was beginning to wonder whether something had happened to him.

I said, 'Are you all right? I haven't been able to get through to you.'

'No,' he said, 'we've been on Holy Island. The reception's not great there.' He couldn't have sounded more matter-of-fact.

We? Holy Island? The place Brian and I had spent our magical honeymoon? A sliver of ice entered my heart. 'What do you mean "we"?' I said. 'Who are you with?'

He told me he was with this woman. I didn't know what to say. 'We stayed at Shirley's house' – that's his sister's – 'and then we went across to Holy Island, for a couple of days.'

I said,
'What?
You and her on your own?' This was beyond my comprehension. I went berserk. 'Well, you needn't think you're coming back here.'

Brian sounded genuinely surprised. 'Nothing happened between us,' he said. He's stuck to that story to this day – but he must have known what a betrayal that represented, whether or not they shared the same bed. Sex would be the least of it. Without my knowledge, he'd taken another woman to a place that could not have been more intimate, more special to him and me, to us.

I tried to remain icily calm when he finally got home, but I couldn't contain my feelings. The row erupted almost immediately. I didn't mince my words. 'I don't want you living under the same roof as me,' I shouted. 'I want you to pack your bags this instant and leave and never come back.'

Brian started to defend himself. 'Look,' he said. 'I needed a break. She just came along for the ride on the spur of the moment.' He must have seen the look on my face. 'Honestly. Nothing happened.'

I said, 'Brian, you've taken another woman to the very place that you chose for our honeymoon. You couldn't have done anything more hurtful if you'd tried. And you expect me to believe that all you did was show her the sights. Get out!' I was screaming now, I was so hurt. Then I realised we had to talk to Amy and Alex. 'We have to tell the girls,' I said.

So I called them down from their bedrooms. As soon as they appeared, I told them their father was moving out. 'Your father's leaving,' I said, 'because he says he doesn't love me any more.' I felt they were owed the truth. They looked so crestfallen, I decided not to tell them that he had just spent the weekend on Holy Island with another woman – and, unsurprisingly, he didn't mention it, either. Alex started crying and Brian put out his arms to her. She crossed the room and sat on his knee as he cuddled her. I was crying, too, and Amy came to comfort me.

Then Brian put some of his things into an overnight bag, left the house and went to stay with the Bloomfield steward who had a house next door to the club.

Brian's behaviour was so unlike the husband I thought I knew, I had to find out more. I started asking around. It turned out that he and this other woman used to sit in a corner at the Dutchman or at the club and Brian would pour out his heart to her. Then he'd walk her home, holding her hand. They'd also been seen sitting in a park at three in the morning. I don't know where Kevin was when all this was going on. I think he worked shifts, so maybe he wasn't in the club or hotel most of the time.

A couple of days later, Brian came back to the house. He'd obviously been turning things over in his mind. 'Why should I have to move out?' he asked. 'This is as much my house as it is yours. If you don't like the situation,
you
can move out.'

I exploded. 'But I haven't done anything wrong,' I cried. 'You've just spent two days with another woman – in our honeymoon cottage, for all I know. I'm not going anywhere.'

'And nor am I,' he said.

It was stalemate for the next two or three days as I tried to ignore the man I'd been married to all these years. Finally, I couldn't take it any more. 'Look, Brian,' I said, 'you're acting as though you have nothing to apologise for. How on earth do you expect me to tolerate this?'

He simply replied by saying, 'But I told you I didn't love you any more.' He seemed to think that, having said that, he was now a free agent. But he wasn't. He was still married to me – and, if I'm truthful, I thought he'd continue to be. Maybe he was having some sort of crisis that would pass. I made up my mind that, when the situation was a bit calmer, I'd suggest we go to marriage counselling and get to the root of the problem. More than twenty-five years couldn't be thrown away so lightly.

He had one more ace up his sleeve. 'You ought to tell the girls the
real
reason why I'm going,' he said.

'And what would that be?' I asked.

'Because of what your father did to you.' The sexual, abuse I'd suffered had festered in Brian's mind, apparently, and he could never overcome the guilt he felt about the possible risk to which we had exposed first Amy and then Alex. It had all become more than he could bear and that's why, he said, he wanted to end the marriage. This sounded to me like something Brian was hiding behind, even though I accepted that it had cast a shadow over our lives, so I decided that I should talk to Amy and then Alex and tell them what had happened when I was a girl.

The next day I made up my mind to tell Amy, and her then boyfriend Mark, as well as Alex about what my father had done to me. I was a bag of nerves because I knew I was about to deliver a bombshell, a shocking piece of news that would shatter my girls' illusions about their beloved grandfather, but I felt it had to be done and planned to do it when we were calmly eating dinner.

'I haven't told you the full story,' I said, 'about why your father says he can't live with me any more.' Then I told them what had happened when I was twelve. They sat there open-mouthed. Both Amy and Alex obviously found it incredibly hard to reconcile what I was saying with their fond memories of the grandfather who, up until this minute, they'd uncomplicatedly adored.

'Your father,' I continued, 'says he can no longer live with the knowledge that your granddad sexually abused me when I was young. I told your dad all about it before we got married, but I always said that, if he ever told anyone, I'd deny it. For most of our marriage, Dad has lived with the guilt that we sometimes left you with your granddad, each of us knowing what he'd done when he and I were alone together all those years ago. Now it's come to a head and he wants to leave me for good.'

There seemed very little left to say. Brian was ending the marriage, I explained, because of the burden of guilt he felt about the consequences of my father's actions. I still didn't tell Amy and Alex at that stage about their father's trip to Holy Island; they'd had quite enough to digest as it was.

Amy particularly took the revelations about her grandfather very hard; she was extremely distressed. She'd loved and respected him. Now, in an instant, he'd been blackened in her eyes. She wasn't only angry with her grandfather; she was angry with me, too.

Initially Alex was very quiet. She was only fifteen so I think it took her a while for the full implications to sink in. But, gradually, I could see that she felt the same as her elder sister. Neither of them could understand, given the way I'd suffered, how I could have left either of them in my father's care. And they're right. It's indefensible.

'I could have been abused,' said Amy, 'and it would have been your fault.'

I replied that I had no excuses for what I did, and that I have to live with that for the rest of my life. I can't change the past. I can only apologise time and again for taking that risk, for putting both girls in the way of possible abuse. I never thought that Alex and Amy would cut me out of their lives as a result of it all, but I seriously worried that their anger could destroy their relationship with me. And it did for a bit. I think Amy felt that I might as well have left her in the middle of the motorway, a different kind of danger but just as reckless as the way I behaved. She crystallised my worst fears, and made me realise that my attitude had been that, although I'd acted irresponsibly, nothing bad had happened, that I'd got away with it. And that's not good enough.

Not long ago, I told her that I should have kept what happened to myself, then she'd still love her granddad the way she did before he died, but she insisted it was better that she knew the truth. Anyway, I realised, I had little choice because Brian was using it as a reason to turn his back on our marriage, so I'm certain he'd have told her the secret sooner or later. It was better, more appropriate, for the girls to hear it from me. He did discuss it with them later, apparently, and talked about his share of the guilt, but neither of them believes that it was the main reason for our marriage failing.

Now, Amy says she hates my father. If ever I say something about his good side, she scolds me. 'Mum,' she says, 'he was an incestuous paedophile.' She's very straightforward about that. It gets on her nerves, she tells me, if one of my sisters says anything complimentary or recalls a fond memory of our dad.

With hindsight, she does wonder whether she'd sometimes felt uncomfortable alone in his company, but she can't be sure whether that's an accurate memory or a general feeling of unease knowing what she now knows. She recalls one occasion when she was ill and he was babysitting her. She must have been eleven or twelve. She was lying on the couch in Waterloo Road and he was sitting in an armchair opposite her. He'd bought her lots of sweets and magazines and they were watching a film on television. Then he went to the toilet. When he walked back into the room, he came and sat on the couch and put her legs on his lap. He started rubbing her ankles. She was hot and restless and she didn't like him crowding her like that, so she kept trying to push him off with her feet. Eventually, he moved back to the armchair. Now, she wonders if something might have happened if she hadn't pushed him away. We'll never know.

Against the backdrop of all this distress and soul-searching, Brian found somewhere to live just a few doors down from the working men's club. On one occasion, I went round to the back of the house that contained the converted flat where Brian was living to deliver some of his mail. He wasn't there but I looked in the window. It was tiny and pretty depressing. It backed on to a supermarket car park. If I couldn't sleep at night, I'd drive to the empty car park at three in the morning and then get out and stand on a small brick wall to see if I could tell what Brian was up to. I was behaving like a madwoman.

He was in a very bad way at this point and I suspect he was having some sort of breakdown. Friends had reported that they'd seen him drinking alone in pubs always supping on a pint or a vodka and Coke. He'd see the girls but not regularly. They'd ask him if he was going to come back home or if we were going to divorce. He'd do little more than answer in riddles.