Not My Father's Son (9 page)

I swam that afternoon, the water the perfect place to soak up the whirring of my mind. As I was walking home I suddenly stopped outside Foyles bookshop just off Charing Cross Road. I was quiet for a few moments and then said aloud, “
That’s
why I don’t have a hairy chest!”

R
ecently I attended an interactive theatre piece in the Brooklyn Museum. Towards the end of the evening I was taken into a corner by a soft-spoken Japanese lady. She sat me down, took my hands in hers, and asked me, if the world were to end and I could choose one person to save, did I know who that person would be? I told her I did. Then she asked me if I thought that in the same circumstances, the person I had chosen would choose to save me. I said I knew that they would. She looked up at me with tears in her eyes.

“You are so lucky,” she said. “Some people don’t even know who they would save.”

One of the good things about having had more than a few relationships before I met Grant is that when we did meet I knew quite a lot about myself. And so did he. We should have done, I suppose, we were both thirty-nine, after all. And so along with the euphoria and passion of our coming together was a conversation that was adult, honest, and frank. We’re all so conditioned to entering relationships hiding our baggage. Now he and I were laying ours out unashamedly and embracing it. It felt very good. It still does.

Grant is the kindest, funniest person I’ve ever met, and I’ve known some kind, funny people. I feel so lucky to have met him because I think we
should
be together. We just work. And we have the same color eyes. When I look into his I feel I am looking into myself.

G
rant woke me up on Sunday morning. He had arrived home in New York, listened to the messages I’d left him, and got straight back on a plane. I suddenly felt buoyed. I had so many things I needed to do. With Grant coming, I felt I could finally take a step.

I was more and more worried about the possibility of my father giving an interview to the
Sunday Mail
. I had no idea how many times reporters had come to his home over the years, but I had seen the few printed articles he had supplied quotes for, and there was no way anyone could interpret those as positive experiences, so why was he threatening to do this now? Now, of all times, when he had just announced his lack of connection to me, or
re
nounced his connection, more like. And then the panic began to set in. Was
that
what he was going to talk about? Was he going to spill the beans to the press before he had even spoken to me, or before I had a chance to talk to my mum? I wouldn’t put it past him.

But that just didn’t make sense. My father would never allow the last thing the world knew of him before he died to be that he had been cuckolded.
He!
But he was very ill, and Tom had said he had been weeping on the phone. It was all so out of character.

Tom had spoken to our dad again a couple of times in the past few days and informed him that I wanted to go ahead with the DNA test. He told me our father had begun to prevaricate and wanted to wait a few days before going ahead with any test. Why, I thought? What was
that
about?

I woke up on the Sunday and decided I needed to speak to the man myself. I knew from the start that I would eventually have to make this call. It was becoming ridiculous that Tom was forced to be the go-between between my father and me. This was about me, not Tom. And I could see the toll it was taking on my brother, every upsetting interaction being compounded by having to relay it back to me. Tom didn’t deserve that pain.

I asked Tom for my father’s phone number and called him. It went straight to voice mail.
Understandable,
I thought. He doesn’t know my number. I wouldn’t pick up a call to my home from a number I didn’t recognize. I cleared my throat and wondered if I’d be able to say what I needed to say.

The machine beeped.

“Hello, this is Alan . . . Cumming. I’m calling to speak to my . . . to Alex . . . Cumming. I really need to talk to him about some things that I think he’ll know about, and I would really appreciate it if he would call me back as soon as possible.”

I thought I was about to hang up, but found myself saying more.

“It’s urgent. It’s really urgent, so please do call me as soon as you can. Thank you.”

I recited my number and hung up. And the waiting began.

Tom had told me that my father was recuperating from an operation. He was clearly at home. In fact, Tom had spoken to him that morning and told him to expect my call. So as the minutes turned into hours, the fact that he was purposely not calling me back made me more and more angry. Yet again he had all the power. He couldn’t stop himself, I thought. He was so used to keeping me weak, vulnerable, anxious. Though I imagined that part of his failure to speak to me was also due to some trepidation on his part. I wasn’t scared of him anymore, and I think that scared him.

I called again at 7
P.M
. No answer.

My father’s silence was stopping me from getting out of the hole he had just dug for me. I felt like I was back on the estate again, waiting for him to come and inspect me, but this time I was more angry and frustrated than anxious. I wanted it to be
over
.

I started to think of how I could deal with this situation if he never spoke to me. Grant had told me that I didn’t need him to do a DNA test, as men hand down identical Y chromosomes to all their male offspring. Tom and I could do a test, and if Y chromosomes didn’t match, that would be proof enough that my father’s story was true.

So we found the kits on the Internet and ordered them to arrive on a night I’d be back in England. Tom would come to my house, and we’d take the test. I felt I should wait up until my dad called, but eventually my fatigue won. I was utterly exhausted, but also slightly alarmed that I was going on camera the next morning looking so raddled. There was no makeup or hairdresser available to me for this shoot, no one who could disguise the effects of all I had learned. This was au naturel, baby, and I cursed myself for not being more demanding.

As we climbed up the steps into the sleeping loft, I told Grant that whatever happened, I needed to find out the truth for
myself
. If my father gave me no more information than what he’d passed on through Tom, I was going to make it my mission to get to the bottom of the story, and go and talk to my real father if necessary. Once more I went to sleep, as I had done so many times as a little boy, with the full knowledge that I could never rely on my father.

I was forty-five years old. I had been waiting for a phone call from my father since I was twenty-nine, my age the last time we spoke.

I guess I should have known what to expect.

I
n the morning I woke early and got ready. It felt like my first day of school. Despite everything that had happened since I arrived in London, I was actually excited about appearing on
Who Do You Think You Are?
There was nothing more I could do about the issue of my father, or my real father, at that moment. I decided to focus on diving into the TV show. The fact that my father had backed off from the ongoing investigation in my present almost gave me more breathing space to look forward and, dare I say it, enjoy the experience I was about to undergo from the past. My progeny issue was on hold, certainly until the DNA test kit arrived and was completed, and I was ready to fully commit to
Who Do You Think You Are?
And the reason I had agreed to the show in the first place: to solve the mystery of my maternal grandfather, Tommy Darling.

As I rang for the elevator to take me down to the streets of Soho my phone rang. It was him.

“Hello there. This is Alex Cumming.”

At first I didn’t recognize his voice. There was kindness in it. And of course he didn’t say, “It’s your dad,” so I was thrown all the more. I had started my day determined to take control of my feelings and my situation. Now I panicked. The bell of the elevator pinged to signal its arrival. My phone would lose signal when I stepped in.

He went on: “I’m sorry I missed your calls yesterday, I was—”

“I can’t speak to you now,” came from somewhere inside me. “I have to go to work.”

There was a pause.

“Well, don’t worry about it. We’ll get this sorted out.”

Who was this person? He sounded
concerned.

I suddenly remembered reading in one of the hundreds of e-mails sent to me with the details of my week that I would be done by 5
P.M.
this afternoon.

“I’ll call you back at five o’clock,” I said firmly. I couldn’t believe how calm and forceful I was being.

“Okay, five o’clock. I’ll talk to you then, Alan.”

I hung up, the elevator door opened, and I stepped in. My legs buckled from under me, my stomach churned, and I burst into tears. I longed for that elevator to break down, to trap me there, to give me time to recover and regroup. Aside from “Hello” and “Take care” at my granny’s funeral, those were the first words I had spoken to my father in over sixteen years.

I spent the next few
hours being filmed wandering round Covent Garden watching the street entertainers. This material would be used for the beginning of my episode of
Who Do You Think You Are?
with the sonorous voice-over setting the scene for my story. It was a sunny day, and I looked like I didn’t have a care in the world.

Nobody knows,
I thought as I watched a sinewy topless man do a handstand walk over a line of hapless prone tourists. “Nobody knows.”

I was just so relieved to have a break from the constant buzz in my head that had started three days ago. Now I had new things to think about, new people to meet. I’ve never been one of those performers who purports to believe that acting is a welcome refuge, something to deflect or cover up things they can’t or don’t want to deal with in their real lives. I just
like
acting; that’s why I do it. But that day I completely used acting to push away my present, to gain some respite from the chaos and, yes, the fear I knew I’d immediately drop back into when my attention was no longer diverted. It was just that today the part I was acting was myself, or this casual celebrity strolling around pretending not to notice the cameras.

We went to an apartment nearby to do an establishing interview about my reasons for doing the show and what I hoped to find out.

“I sort of pride myself on being connected to my Scottish heritage,” I began. “But in more specific ways, I realize that I don’t really know much about my family beyond the ones that are alive.”

Every word I spoke seemed to me dripping with irony. And it got worse.

“You base who you are on your immediate lineage, and so if there are gaps in that, and mysteries in that, there are mysteries in you.”

I switched the focus back on the direction the show was going to take, the investigation of Thomas Darling. “And my mum’s dad is the family mystery. He’s the black hole.

“There’s a picture of him on my hallway wall and each time I go past him, it’s a big zero. I know nothing.”

It was true. Tommy Darling to me was just a face, a handsome face in an open-necked shirt with a strip of military honors just above his chest, a little black moustache. His expression was blank. I didn’t yet know that this picture was taken only a few months before he died.

“He didn’t come back after the war, and he never came home,” I went on. “He died in a shooting accident. But at my granny’s funeral someone sort of intimated to me that it wasn’t an accident.”

This, I think, had been the inadvertent catalyst to my taking on this whole odyssey and agreeing to do this show. At Granny’s funeral, just five years prior, my main preoccupation had been to make sure my mum was doing okay. My other preoccupation, sadly, had been to keep away from my father’s partner who, earlier, in an act that redefined inappropriateness, had blurted out that she needed to get my autograph for her granddaughter as she shook my hand in the crematorium receiving line mere minutes after we had sent my granny’s coffin into the flames. I was literally struck dumb. Next to me I actually could feel the ire exuding from my brother’s body and quickly placed a hand on his forearm to calm him. I hoped that my mother, just a couple of feet away, had not heard.