I Won't Forgive What You Did (21 page)

The nightmare pregnancy was over, and I couldn’t wait for Joe to see her. She was perfect, my little girl. Just perfect.

She looked strange, my new baby, when they brought her back to me. Having been breech, and born so traumatically, her little legs were bent up so that her feet almost touched her neck, which made putting a nappy on her a bit difficult.

But in all other respects, she really did seem perfect, and when they wheeled me to the ward after they had stitched me back together, I just lay on my bed, her clear plastic hospital cot beside me, marvelling at the blue of her eyes and her perfect little fingers and fingernails, and the way she just lay there and seemed to gaze at me.

The difference between Alfie’s birth and this one was immeasurable. I didn’t feel that awful blackness descending, or that terrifying sense of being overwhelmed. I would be tested, of course, over the months that followed, but for the moment I could barely believe we had created something so beautiful.

Joe arrived at eight the next morning, and pronounced himself delighted with ‘his little girl’. He thought she was beautiful too. He brought Alfie to the hospital later that day, and sat with him on the bed so that our little boy could hold his little sister. It was a perfect moment, and one I’d treasure for always. My joy, however, wasn’t to last long.

In retrospect, the signs had been there all along. Right back when Joe and I moved into our first marital home, there would be women, from time to time, turning up on the doorstep, asking me questions about him and our relationship. With hindsight, it had been odd for them to do that, but at the time, though I was unable to work out why they’d come, I reasoned that as they were the wives and daughters of other employees of the estate, it was feasible that they might want to know more about us – after all, I’d never been in that sort of situation before. Also, I so wanted to be
able
to trust Joe that I could invent reasons for everything.

I had even found excuses for the business with the girl, Meg, from the stables. I knew it hadn’t really happened, because he simply wouldn’t
do
that. I knew he wouldn’t go with another woman. He’d just been at a low ebb, and I’d been very ill – there had just been too much strain on our marriage. No, I’d decided, whatever had gone wrong in the past, I trusted my husband completely.

The early weeks with our daughter, who we called Jennifer Lee, were difficult and draining. Despite the difference in the circumstances of her birth compared with Alfie’s, I was soon repeating my previous ways of thinking, and also accepting (a feeling endorsed by my mother) that I wasn’t any good as a mum.

However, as the weeks turned into months I began, even though I still found it difficult emotionally, to feel more confident about looking after the physical needs of my children. The only problem was that money was so tight, and I had to work longer and longer hours. Juggling childcare was becoming difficult, and when I took a new evening job, at another residential home, when Jennifer was three months old, I had to arrange for my neighbour, Sue, to look after them every day till Joe finished work and could collect them. I’d become very close to Sue, who was older, and like a mum to me. Unlike my own mother, she was always praising me, telling me I
was
a good mum. I’d always listen avidly to any advice she gave, and would take pride in trying to emulate her, as I had great respect for her; working hard at getting my washing really clean, and pegging it out first thing like she did.

But Joe and I were seeing little of each other by this time, and I could feel my anxiety mounting as I sensed our relationship ebbing away. Even so, I still trusted him completely, and blindly, and always seemed to be able to find ways to ascribe odd goings-on to me just imagining things.

Even so, it was around this time that I had to concede situations that troubled me did so for a reason. We’d been invited to a party by a friend of my sister, and during this Joe disappeared. They lived next door to a pub, and it was here that I found him, in the car park, with my sister’s friend. As soon as they saw me they sprang apart guiltily, and I remember a rare feeling, which lasted for one intense moment, of murderous rage.

It was at another gathering only a few weeks later that I was given more cause for concern when a girl who had spotted Joe came rushing towards us, arms outstretched, beaming. She was just about to fling her arms around him when he warned her off. ‘This is
Faith,’
he said pointedly. She dropped both her arms and her smile, said a polite ‘Hello’ and backed away.

This time I plucked up courage to challenge him.

‘Who was she?’ I asked him. ‘How do you know her?’

‘From work,’ he said, looking uncomfortable. ‘I sometimes pick her up and drop her off at her work on the way to mine.’

I felt sick visualizing this. His guilt was so blindingly obvious. I didn’t press him, because with Joe it was impossible to have a discussion if he didn’t want to. He’d just refuse, and there was nothing I could do.

I was also afraid of what I might hear, and couldn’t face it. I left the party on my own and went back to the car, and waited for him to follow. Two whole hours I waited, feeling powerless and insignificant. But the incident was never mentioned again.

Though we seemed to be getting on (however inaccurate my thoughts were on that score) he was becoming very unsettled at work. When Jennifer was two, and Alfie six, Joe left his job as a bricklayer’s labourer and started working, as a labourer again, but for our neighbour. He was a wealthy businessman, and it wasn’t long before his wife, who I knew to stop and talk to, was telling me how lazy Joe was and he’d been caught taking naps when he was supposed to be working.

Alarm bells were now ringing, as I feared once again that Joe – who had always been a law unto himself – would just decide to give up on work altogether and we’d be back penniless and homeless. By now I was working far more hours than he was, but I told myself it was important to support him, because he was clearly depressed. He would often spend whole days now just lying on the sofa, and he looked so down that when I collected my wages I often gave him most of them to go and buy himself something to cheer him up. Unwittingly, I suppose I was acting as if I was his mother, and treating him like another of my children.

Then, out of the blue, Joe announced he had decided to become a taxi driver. Suddenly, instead of working barely any hours at all, he was working day and night six days a week. Then very soon after seven days a week, as he’d taken another job – a Sunday job, picking apples – to make up, he said, for having contributed so little for so long.

I felt grateful he was shouldering responsibility again, and also sorry for him, working such long hours.

I felt sorrier still to see how little money these endeavours were bringing in. But when I asked him why that was, his answer seemed obvious. Taxi drivers had to spend a great deal of time waiting for fares, and no fares meant no money being earned. It was a similar story with the apple-picking, apparently, which was at the whim of both the farmers and the weather. You had to be available if you wanted work, and if there were no apples that needed picking at the farm you waited with all the other apple-pickers for work at other farms. If there was work, you’d then be driven to where it was needed, but if not you’d had a wasted day. But you dare not go home, because the farmer would tell you not to bother coming back. There were always plenty of others desperate for the work.

Poor Joe, I remember thinking. With no qualifications and no particular skill, he would always be at the mercy of employers like this. No wonder he found life depressing.

As the Christmas of 1978 approached, I was beginning to feel very low myself. So when Joe told me about the Christmas apple-pickers’ party, I was pleased to have something nice to look forward to, and I’d finally get to meet all the other people he spent his Sundays with.

‘What sort of thing should I wear?’ I asked him, excited.

He shook his head. ‘Sorry, Faith,’ he said. ‘But you’re not invited. It’s a works do. Staff only. That’s the rule.’

Joe didn’t come home on the night of the party. He said he was staying over with one of the other apple-pickers, as they’d be drinking, and he wouldn’t be able to drive. In fact, it wasn’t to be too long before I found out that there hadn’t even
been
a Christmas party.

Christmas Eve that year saw Alfie very excited. In fact, overexcited, as children tend to be when they know Father Christmas is imminent. But I was fretting. My family were coming to tea that afternoon and Joe wasn’t yet home from work.

Having my family visiting caused me anxiety at the best of times, not because of my mother, who’d generally be subdued, but because of my father’s unpredictability. On the one hand, I was always anxious about his swearing and aggression around my children (particularly around Alfie, because he seemed to hate all his grandsons), but the converse of that behaviour was very stressful too. If he wasn’t swearing, he was invariably stony-faced, and would just sit in an armchair, ignoring everyone. In this mode, he was equally difficult to deal with, as I would fuss around him – I couldn’t seem to help myself – trying to jolly him out of whatever had put him in a mood, in case he suddenly exploded about something. All in all, managing my anxiety around my father took up a ridiculous amount of my time.

The situation hadn’t improved between my parents either; indeed, things had got worse. Though he was still out womanizing, he’d also entered into a long-term relationship with a woman he stayed with three nights a week. When he wasn’t there, she’d telephone the house regularly, and he would chat to her, brazenly, while my mother sat in the other room, calling her his ‘whore’. That she could do anything about this was never suggested, much less discussed. His temper and foul language had also got worse, and he seemed to care less and less who he abused. Being around him made me almost unbearably anxious; you never knew when the next torrent of threats and swearing would be triggered, and the waiting was almost as bad as the moment when he vented his spleen in my direction.

I still had the powerful need to take care of my increasingly distracted mother and it ate into what little time I had free. I’d leave for work ridiculously early some mornings so I could walk – or indeed run – the four miles to where they lived, with Jennifer in her pushchair and little Alfie running alongside, to clean up her junk-filled house.

Grandpops was still a regular there, and though he’d long since given up trying to approach me physically, I watched appalled at how he’d turned his attention to ‘tickling’ my much younger sister’s friends. The terrible noise he made through his clenched teeth hadn’t changed, and the speed with which he grabbed them and furiously ‘tickled’ them hadn’t lessened one iota.

Watching my sister’s reaction was fascinating. She’d stand some distance away, as they would scream for him to let go, and watched intently, rubbing her hands together nervously, and laughing anxiously as she saw them wriggle free, saying: ‘I’m not getting near
him
again!’

Her own apparent fascination about how her friends would react – which was the healthy one of resolving to keep away from him – appeared so depressingly similar to my own that I wondered how many times he’d caught her and, like me, she’d been unable to escape.

I was still a very long way from accepting that the ‘tickling’ was, for him, sexually arousing, but I found it impossible to either be touched by him myself, or watch him do what he’d done to me to others. He was my grandad so by definition he was someone I shouldn’t feel upset by, but I was still wary around him and knew I always would be.

My nan hadn’t improved with age either. Now I was an adult she didn’t even try to hide her distaste for either my mother or myself. Unless I made a point of addressing her, she invariably ignored me, which left me – just as it had as a small child – wondering what I’d done to displease her. Yet she never felt able to leave without some parting shot being lobbed over her shoulder, either about my mothering skills, whenever I left my children with my mother, or to criticize me for thinking I was ‘better than everyone else’. She also liked to point out that if she was unfortunate enough to end up in the old people’s home I worked in, or had the misfortune of being unwell in her own home, that she wouldn’t want me anywhere near her.

Ironically, if she was running my mother down, I was the first person she tried to persuade to join forces, looking at me as she spoke, wrinkling her nose, and making faces behind my mother’s back. ‘I always wash up my own cup and saucer here,’ she’d tell me, ‘so at least I know there’ll be a clean one next time.’

Just as it was with my father, if ever Nan arrived when I was visiting my mother, I’d spend the rest of my time trying to please her while, at the same time, waiting anxiously for her to say something unkind. I never could work out why she was so chillingly cold and unkind to me. I spent my entire childhood and half my adult life – till she died – trying to work out quite what I’d done wrong.

When Joe still hadn’t arrived home by mid-afternoon, I began to worry – I couldn’t imagine what had happened to him. He’d done an overnight shift the night before and I’d expected him to be back before lunchtime.

I kept ringing the taxi firm trying to track him down, but the phone just rang and rang, and I wondered how a cab firm who didn’t answer ever managed to make money.