The Hidden Years (39 page)

The flat, as he casually termed the upper two storeys of
the middle property, which he had redesigned for his own use, could be
reached only via a private lift tucked away discreetly in the main
octagonal hallway, or via a set of stairs, hidden behind a false piece
of panelling.

Using the stairs, Daniel emerged on to a cream-walled
hallway, the plasterwork details picked out in authentic period
colours, the rug adorning the polished floor a valuable antique which
he had picked up at a country house sale, long before anyone else had
realised the potential of such items.

Inside, the flat was furnished with antiques he had
collected in a similar fashion. His drawing-room overlooked the trees
and railed-off garden which ran the length of the small square. Behind
the drawing-room was a good-sized dining-room, large enough for
entertaining, and adjacent to that a comfortable kitchen with access to
a small roof garden.

Daniel had no live-in help, preferring to fend for himself
and to preserve his privacy. When he entertained he hired caterers, and
none of the women who had shared his life had ever spent more than a
succession of separate nights under his roof. None of them had ever
been invited to move into the flat with him. He was not a man who
considered himself to be a sexual stud, or who had any desire to do so.

He liked women; he enjoyed their company, their
conversation, their personalities and their minds as much as he enjoyed
their bodies. From time to time, when they were short of something to
print, one or other of the gossip columns would run a piece on him,
naming his latest lady, speculating on whether or not this time he
would marry. He was not against marriage. Or at least not against the
theory of it… but its practice was fraught with so many
pitfalls. What he was against was divorce, especially when there were
children involved.

He walked over to a large breakfront bookcase, opening one
of its drawers and extracting from it a bottle of whisky and a glass,
and then, frowning, he put them both back, resolutely closed the door
and went through into the kitchen, opening the fridge and extracting a
bottle of mineral water instead.

For a man of thirty-seven, who spent long hours seated
round boardroom tables, he was extremely fit. He wasn't obsessive about
punishing physical exercise, hours spent sweating in a gym or pounding
through Hyde Park, but he spent as much of his free time as he could in
the country, riding, and walking, and he also used the pool at a local
health club two or three times a week.

He shed his jacket and picked up his mineral water, the
muscles in his back and arms hard under the fine cotton of his shirt.

Opening the door, he walked out on to the roof garden,
putting down his glass and going to lean against the railings, looking
over the roof-tops of London.

As a child growing up in one of the worst slum areas of
Liverpool, the kind of luxury he enjoyed now had been something he
could not even have imagined, but his mother had loved beautiful
things, telling him about the furniture in the houses she cleaned, the
people who lived there, and he had known then with the impotent misery
of childhood that his mother wasn't happy, that it wasn't just because
they did not live in one of the houses she was telling him about that
he could hear the sadness in her voice.

His mother was Welsh, a pretty dark girl from the valleys
with a voice so melodic that it caught at your heart. His father was
Irish, a huge burly bear of a man who got work whenever he could, and
when he couldn't spent his day in the pub drinking. He was their only
child, and he had heard from his mother of how she had met his father
when he had come to work on the new road which had opened up the
valleys, how they had married and come to live here in Liverpool, where
his father's family had lived for the last two generations.

They were from County Cork originally, and, despite their
years in Liverpool, had remained resolutely and defiantly Irish. His
grandparents had raised seven children in the tiny shabby terraced
house down near the docks; a rowdy, noisy gathering of Ryans, who had
eventually spilled out of the parental nest to marry and produce Ryans
of their own.

Sometimes Daniel thought that Liverpool was populated
entirely with his cousins. But he wasn't like them. It was something to
do with Mam being Welsh. The others, unlike his father, had all married
good Irish girls, and although nothing was ever said in his presence,
Daniel sensed that his family was different. For a start there was the
way that Nan Ryan never quite looked at his mother, and then there was
the way that all the others, all his aunts and uncles, had produced
several children apiece, while his parents had only him.

For some reason he felt that this failure had something to
do with him… that the reason his father never picked him up
or hugged him the way Uncle Liam did his boys or the way Uncle Joe did
his had something to do with the fact that it was his fault he was the
only one.

One thing he did know, and that was that for a Ryan to
produce only one child was a failure of some kind. His mother sensed it
too…otherwise why did she always change so much when they
paid their Sunday visit to Nan's? When it was just the two of them on
their own, although sometimes she was sad, there were other times when
she laughed, sang, when she told him stories in her little Welsh
voice—stories of dragons and heroes that made his eyes grow
as round as saucers and his heart clench with fearful excitement.

But on Sundays his mother was different…just as
though somehow all the life had drained out of her.

And then there was the mystery of Mam's parents. Daniel
knew that they lived in Wales, but they never went to see them, and
only at Christmas did they hear from them. A Christmas card, and a
pound for his savings book.

He often wanted to ask Mam about them. It was a strange
thing that, although she talked about Wales and her girlhood, she never
talked about her family.

Daniel longed to ask about them, but her silence on the
subject stopped him. He was a sensitive child, smaller and more frail
than his Ryan cousins, who taunted him and called him a sissy. Daniel
was wary with them; the boys he could cope with, but not the girls, for
they pinched and tormented, and then screamed as though he had been the
one to torment them. Their screams would bring one of the adults to see
what was happening.

'It were that Daniel,' one of them would claim tearfully.
' 'E pinched me…'

And Daniel would get a cuff from whichever adult had been
roused from an enjoyable gossip in the parlour to see who had caused
the noise.

'That Daniel of yours is a real troublemaker,' he had once
heard Nan caustically telling Mam. He had wanted to protest, to claim
that it wasn't true, but there had been a huge lump in his throat,
because he had known that Nan wouldn't believe him, that for some
reason it pleased her to call him the cause of the trouble. He couldn't
understand that, just as he couldn't understand why he was never pulled
on to her lap for a cuddle, why whenever the precious sweets were being
handed out he was invariably forgotten, why his uncles never picked him
up and tossed him up into the air the way they did the other boys.

Even his own father seemed to prefer the others to him.
Scowling at him when they were out, ignoring him when they were at
home… Not that Daniel saw much of him.

He didn't come home at teatime like the majority of the
other men, but went straight to the pub, often not coming back until
Daniel was in bed. He would hear him returning, cursing and swearing as
he hammered on the door, shouting at his mother, demanding to know
where his supper was.

It was at times like this that Daniel winced and pulled
the bedclothes up over his head. Other fathers raised their
voices—he had heard his uncles do it to their
offspring—but somehow or other when his father raised
his… Daniel shivered. He was reasonably sure that he didn't
love his father, at least not in the same instinctive, elemental way he
loved his mother, and he suspected that his father didn't love him
either, and that gave him a funny pain inside, a sort of sad, soft pain
that was sharp as well.

When Daniel was eleven years old he sat the state Eleven
Plus examination along with all his peers.

When the results were published and they learned not only
that he had passed the examination but also that he had won a free
place to a prestigious fee-paying local school, his mother was
delighted.

Not so his father.

He came home late, reeking of beer. Daniel and his mother
were in the kitchen when he arrived. As his father walked into the
kitchen, Daniel saw the way his mother tensed. It suddenly struck him
how small she was. He had been growing and now he was practically as
tall as she was, both of them dwarfed by his father's heavy
six-foot-odd frame.

His father was in a bad mood—Daniel could tell
that immediately. He was swearing and complaining about Dick Fogarty,
the foreman of his gang, and Daniel felt his heart sink. Work wasn't
that easy to come by in Liverpool, and his father had already been sent
off too many jobs, had too many fights with the other men. He had heard
his uncles discussing it, seen them exchanging significant looks.

Quickly his mother produced his father's meal. He liked to
eat the moment he came home. Personally Daniel thought that his father
ought surely to go upstairs and get washed before sitting down to eat.
His fingers were ingrained with dirt, the nails black and broken.
Daniel and his mother had fish-paste sandwiches for their meal, but she
had managed to scrape enough together from her meagre wages as a
cleaner to buy enough stewing steak to make his father a pie.

Although nothing was ever said, Daniel knew quite well
that his father did not always give his mother any money and that often
all she had to spend on food and pay the rent was the money she earned
cleaning. It grieved Daniel to see her walking down the street
sometimes. She looked so tired, her shoulders bowed, her eyes
dull…just the way she looked whenever his father came back
late like this and drunk.

Daniel heard him swear as she served him the pie,
complaining that it was no meal to put in front of a working man.

'Some of me mam's stew, that's what I want… and
that's what I'm going to have,' he snarled, pushing away his plate and
getting up. 'You know what the trouble with you is, don't you?' he
added from the door. 'You think yourself so high and mighty, but you
don't know how to treat a man. Well, think on this: if it wasn't for
me, you and that brat of yours—'

'John… John, please wait a moment…'

Daniel heard the desperation in his mother's voice and
hated his father. Hated him for what he was doing to his mother.

'Daniel…Daniel's won a place to the Drapers
School. Isn't that wonderful…?'

For a moment there was silence, and then Daniel saw his
father turn and stare at him. There was cruelty in his eyes and malice
as well. The venom of the look he gave him almost took away Daniel's
breath.

He had known that his father didn't love him, but
this…this hatred, this enmity…

'Wonderful… Is that what you think? Well, I
don't think it, and I'll tell you this—no son of mine is
going to some poxy posh school. No. He'll go to Mile End, same as his
dad, same as his cousins.'

Mile End… the largest and worst secondary
school in the district. Daniel knew all about Mile End, about the
fights, the gangs. His eldest cousin ran one of them. Daniel shivered.

'No, John… please… You don't
understand—this is a wonderful opportunity for Daniel. If he
does well he could go on to university. He could—'

'He could do what? Set himself up above his father and his
cousins?'

His mother was clinging to his father's arm as she pleaded
with him. The tension in the small kitchen seemed to smoulder with
suppressed emotions, the strongest of them his own fear, Daniel
recognised.

He dared not speak to his father, dared not try to plead
with him.

'John, please,' his mother begged. 'He must have his
chance.'

An ugly look crossed his father's face. 'Oh, he must, must
he? He's my son, Megan. You just remember that. He's my son, and he'll
get his schooling where I say. The trouble with you is that you've only
got him to worry about. You know that Father Leary says…'

Daniel watched as his mother gave his father a fearful
look. Daniel knew all about the priest. He visited Nan's every Sunday
and he spoke to everyone apart from Mam and himself. But they weren't
Catholics. His mother was Chapel, and had stayed in the faith of her
childhood even after her marriage to his father.

Initially it had puzzled Daniel when he had not gone to
church like his cousins, but then he had discovered about Mam being
Chapel and had assumed that it had something to do with this.

Now, as he saw the nervous look his mother gave her
father, something inside him contracted. He wanted to go up to her and
put his arms round her, to protect her.

'John, please,' his mother begged again, and Daniel tensed
as his father pulled away from her, shaking her off as easily as though
she were a child, half pushing and half throwing her across the small
kitchen, so that she fell against the stove.

'He's not going and that's that. What does a Ryan want
with a fancy school? And who's going to pay for it? Soon as he's old
enough he's out on a building site same as his cousins, earning his
keep.'

His mother was leaning against the stove, her face tight
with pain, her hand gripping her left hip. Daniel watched in silence as
his father pushed past her and went out.

He didn't come back until Daniel was in bed. It was the
sound of his raised voice that woke him. That, and his mother crying.