When Daddy Comes Home (23 page)

D
uring the long evenings at the gate lodge, Ruth had often told stories of her own childhood.

The elder of two children, Ruth had been christened Winifred Ruth Rowden – ‘an ugly name’ she said often, with the pained expression of one who knows she has been badly treated. Ruth remembered her childhood as an unhappy one. Her mother Isabelle was a beautiful petite woman whom Antoinette had loved as a grandmother but whom she knew her mother found difficult. Even as a small girl, she could sense the discord between the two.

‘She was always so proud of her figure,’ Ruth had often said in withering tones.

Ruth’s father had been a dark, handsome man whom she had clearly idolized and it seemed to Antoinette that her mother had resented her parents’ happy marriage. ‘He was always under her thumb, of course,’ she said with disdain when she talked about them. Then, with a humourless laugh, she would say, ‘Somehow she had him convinced that she was delicate and needed looking after but you know, dear, what a will of iron your grandmother really has. Your uncle, of course, was the apple of her eye. Whereas I was my father’s favourite. To him, I was beautiful.’

Once Antoinette had told her mother that she wished for a baby brother and Ruth had said that she had never wanted hers. It seemed she had decided as child that younger brothers served no useful purpose and even as an adult, she had not changed her mind. She had never forgiven him for stealing her parents’ attention away from her and, later in life, his successful marriage and happiness constantly rankled. No wonder she had decided not to inflict the same fate on her own daughter.

There was a family photograph that showed Antoinette’s grandparents, her mother and her uncle in a stiff formal portrait taken in the early years of the twentieth century. It showed a handsome boy of about seven years old and a girl around ten sitting by the feet of two good-looking adults. The young Ruth looked a morose, sullen child, inclined to overindulge in eating. Nevertheless, Ruth’s reminiscences of her early childhood painted a picture of a happy time, before the First World War.

Her adored father had been a master tailor in Golders Green and it was a great treat for Ruth to be taken to the workshops. There, she would watch the men he employed as they sat cross-legged on the floor, painstakingly stitching the cut cloth and turning it into garments. The little girl felt so special when she was there – she was the treasured daughter of the boss, the little pet of all the men there. They gave her material, showed her how to stitch and it was there that she learnt her skill in dressmaking. She much preferred to be the centre of attention among the tailors than to be at home, with a mother she disliked and a brother she resented.

Then, when Ruth was twenty, her father died suddenly. She was grief stricken. Her father had only been in his early fifties and his death was utterly unexpected.

‘It was a blood clot that moved to his brain,’ Ruth told her daughter sadly every time she spoke of the man who had been the most important person in her life. ‘He worked too hard. He was always trying to please
her
,’ she said bitterly.

Antoinette knew that Ruth meant her mother, Isabelle, and that in some way, she blamed her for her father’s death.

The household was left completely bereft without its master. Now Ruth’s brother, three years younger and blessed with good looks, a gentle disposition and his mother’s love, was the man of the house. Ruth, still living at home as was usual at the time, found herself outnumbered.

‘My brother adored our mother, just like every other man,’ she would say with badly concealed resentment. ‘Well, he went and married a woman just like her.’

Later, when her mother talked about her brother’s wife, Antoinette sensed an aversion towards her and had not understood it. She only remembered a very pretty woman who had always made her welcome when she and Ruth had made one of their infrequent visits to her uncle’s London flat.

The Second World War had begun, bringing with it speedy romances and fast marriages. Within eighteen months of war being declared, Ruth’s brother had got married and produced a child. Meanwhile, Ruth, three years older, was still a spinster – ‘another ugly name,’ she sniffed to Antoinette. She minded that she was still unmarried and was jealous that her brother had found what she wanted – a spouse. To be almost thirty and still single was not to be envied at a time when women were judged by the status of the man they married.

But the war brought excitement, adventure and opportunity into Ruth’s life and she often said later that her experiences then were some of the happiest she had ever known. She
did her bit for the war effort by working on a farm. It was there, out of the shadow of her mother and brother, that Ruth had blossomed and made friends. She was conscious of her age, though, and of the fact that she had no boyfriend in her life to swap gossip about. To protect herself from the pity of the other girls, she invented one and told her new friends that he had been her fiancé, but that he had been killed in the first week of the war. By the time she told Antoinette the story ten years later, she had come to believe it herself.

It was Ruth’s mother Isabelle who told Antoinette that it was a wild exaggeration. The ‘fiancé’ had been a married soldier who had once shared tea and scones with Ruth in a corner café. ‘I worry about her sometimes, Antoinette,’ her grandmother had confided to her. ‘She makes things up and then she starts believing them.’

During the war, Ruth met her future husband. She had gone to a local dance in Kent with a group of women from the farm where she worked. That night, she wore a becoming dress with a short bolero jacket that she had designed and stitched herself. Her girlfriends thought it was wonderful and were all the more impressed that she had made it herself.

On that hot noisy evening at the end of June, the women’s interest was attracted by a crowd of young servicemen who were dressed in well-pressed khaki uniforms and looked far more dashing then the men they were used to. The girls sat nearby and threw surreptitious glances at the young soldiers. One in particular caught their attention. He had twinkling eyes, a wide ready smile, and his dark auburn waves gleamed as brightly as his well-polished boots. Not only that but he showed a talent for dancing they’d never seen before as he waltzed a girl around the room.

His name was Joe Maguire and all the girls would have given plenty to be held in his arms with their feet dancing on air. Suddenly he appeared at Ruth’s side.

‘Dance?’ was the first word she heard him say.

‘Of course!’ she shouted inwardly, almost overcome that he had approached her and not one of the younger women, but she kept her outward composure, gave him a sweet smile and followed him to the dance floor.

That was the night he entered her life. After that first magical dance, he claimed every one as his. The handsome young serviceman literally swept her off her feet and found his way into her heart. She saw the looks of jealousy that appeared on other women’s faces and relished being the envy of her friends.

Ruth did not see the five-year age difference, hear the thickness of his Irish accent or notice his lack of education; she was completely mesmerized by his good looks and fell under the spell of his charm. That was the night the twenty-nine-year-old spinster found her hero. And Joe Maguire, a man who craved respect and recognition, saw a woman with poise who spoke in an upper-class accent, the sort he had never imagined having the good fortune to meet.

A few weeks later, on the thirteenth of August, they married. For different reasons neither of them quite believed their luck. She was thankful that he had rescued her from the disgrace of still being single at thirty and he believed he had found the woman who would win him the admiration he craved in his home town.

If it had not been for the war those two unsuited people would never have met. But Ruth felt she had achieved the first part of her dream: a handsome husband. Thirteen months later, their daughter was born.

As Antoinette pondered what she knew of her mother, she realized that the jigsaw was not yet complete. There was still something missing and Antoinette searched deeper into her mind to find it. She finally extracted two more memories and with them the explanation of the enigma that was her mother fell into place.

She saw herself in a tea shop. Dressed in her best frock, which her mother had finished making that week, she sat contentedly on a cushion that had been placed on a chair. Her discreetly made-up grandmother was wearing a light suit and a matching cloche hat from which curling tendrils of red gold hair escaped. She was treating Antoinette and her mother to afternoon tea.

Ruth was a sharp contrast to Isabelle, with her scarlet nails and matching lipstick. Her permed hair was uncovered and large gold hooped earrings dangled from her ears. That day she was wearing a new square-necked print dress of her own design. Both women looked happy as they chattered together.

Then an elderly woman, who clearly knew her grandmother, approached their table to be greeted with a welcoming smile from Isabelle. After some pleasantries, the stranger exclaimed, ‘Belle, I don’t know how you do it, you look younger every time I see you and this pretty little girl’s growing to be the spitting image of you. One would almost think she was your daughter, not Ruth’s!’ And, with a light laugh, she left.

Antoinette felt the warmth that had engulfed the three of them dissipate as though a cold draft had blown into the tea shop. For a few seconds an uneasy silence hung in the air until Ruth broke it with some light-hearted comment told in a brittle voice. Even at five years old, Antoinette knew without understanding why that her mother was displeased at the compliment she had been paid.

The second memory was when she was three years older. She was doing what all little girls take a delight in, dressing up in their mother’s clothes, playing with her make-up and pretending to be an adult. She had smudged rouge into her cheeks and painted her mouth a vibrant red as she had seen her mother do so often. Then she hoisted up her over-long dress and went looking for her mother. She wanted to show Ruth how pretty she had made herself. But when she ran up to her with her arms out for a cuddle, she was surprised. Instead of the smile of pleasure she had anticipated, Ruth looked at her frostily.

‘Underneath that make up, you look just like your grandmother,’ she said. ‘Your eyes could be hers looking at me. Well, you are certainly going to be better looking than your mother.’

Looking back and remembering what she had heard and the tone of her mother’s voice, Antoinette knew that her mother had not liked what she had seen. She had never played dressing up again.

Now those incidents came together in Antoinette’s head. She understood properly that her mother had been plagued throughout her life by her insecurity and jealousy. Ruth had been jealous of her own mother, jealous of the love her father had felt for his wife, the devotion of her brother to his mother and the fragile beauty of Isabelle herself. That jealousy grew to include anyone who took away the attention that she thought was rightfully hers. And once her daughter had stopped being a malleable baby and had become a small person, her jealousy had extended to her.

And then there was Ruth’s need to keep up appearances and her fear of what other people thought of her. Her whole life and all her relationships had been sacrificed to maintain a fiction that she could show to the world and come to believe
in herself. She created a tissue of lies, a pretend existence where her handsome husband was a man she was proud of, not an ignorant beast who had subjected their child to abuse.

As she thought back over her life, Antoinette accepted that Ruth’s maternal love had been totally eclipsed by her need to protect her dream.

Joe’s hold over his wife was a powerful one. He had long ago honed his ability to read those around him, search out their vulnerabilities and then control his victims. His wife, whose mind was forever locked on the handsome Irish man she had married against her family’s wishes, was completely under his thumb. He had wanted to control Antoinette too, and once she was a teenager, with a mind of her own, he had set out to break her. When that didn’t work, he wanted nothing to do with her. Joe could not stand to have anyone around him who did not think he was wonderful. He had no wish to look into his daughter’s eyes and see the contempt there. Even the sound of his daughter’s name made him angry.

Ruth had to choose. And she chose him, every time. She had watched his cruelty and allowed it. She chose him even when she knew that he had made their daughter pregnant, and when she arranged for Antoinette to have an abortion. That abortion had gone horribly wrong and on the night that Antoinette had woken, in danger of haemorrhaging to death, Ruth had even been willing to risk sacrificing her daughter’s life, sending her alone in the ambulance to a hospital thirteen miles away from the nearest one. She had refused to accompany her daughter on that journey, a journey that she must have known could have been the final one. Antoinette remembered the shock on the ambulance driver’s face as they picked
up the stretcher and her mother’s cold stare as the doors closed with her remaining outside, and the ambulance with blue lights flashing began its race against time.

Ruth must have been told that, after that, Antoinette would never be able to have children. She had never said a word.

And then there was the breakdown that had brought her to this place. What had brought it to pass? What had finally made Antoinette collapse completely?

She had learnt coping strategies early. By the age of ten, she had created a room in her mind where she could retreat when the reality of her existence became too much to bear. Only in her imaginary world could she pretend to be what she thought a normal child was. In this room she was beautifully dressed, always surrounded by chattering little girls who vied for her attention and wanted to be her best friend. Here she was popular, listened to and the room rang with laughter. The sun always shone when she retreated there, its rays filtering through unseen windows bathed her in their warm golden light.