Punished: A mother’s cruelty. A daughter’s survival. A secret that couldn’t be told. (24 page)

I said stoutly, ‘If she didn’t make him happy, he should have left her. Life is too short to be miserable. My first marriage was a disaster so we both called it a day before we ruined our lives. Luckily for me, I made a fresh start and found Bob.’

‘It wasn’t done in those days, dear. It would have brought disgrace on the entire family. Men stayed in unhappy marriages and sometimes they made other arrangements that let them fulfil their needs. That’s all I’m saying.’

Arrangements. I remembered hearing my parents talk of their deal – and my dad saying that my mother had agreed to whatever it was. ‘Do you mean that Dad had other women?’

Suddenly I heard, clear as a bell in my head, Mum saying, ‘He’s with his other woman.’ She said it as though it was a joke. Perhaps it had been deadly serious.

‘We almost never saw him in the week,’ I added. ‘I always wondered where he was.’

‘I’ve got no idea whether he did or not but your father was an honourable man and I’m sure he never meant to hurt anyone.’

‘Mum isn’t the easiest of people to get along with,’ I said tentatively.

‘I know that you had a tough time with her.’ Audrey gave me a sympathetic look, peering over her glasses. ‘Muriel should never have had children. She wasn’t the type. She was far too selfish to be a parent. I could tell from when you and Nigel were babies that it was all going to go wrong.’

‘How could you tell?’

She told me the story about Mum holding a pillow over Nigel’s face to stop him crying, and about a letter she’d had from Mum when I was adopted in 1950 that said, ‘I’ve got the girl child.’

‘I don’t think she wanted to adopt in the first place,’ I said. ‘Dad talked her into it. He told me he should never have done it.’

‘No, you’re right. None of it should have happened. It was all a tragic mistake.’

I could sense she knew more than she was letting on. After dinner, we took out the photo albums and pored over all the old photographs. Audrey identified people I’d never met and told me stories of holidays and birthdays and the occasions on which pictures had been taken.

‘Is that Margery?’ I asked, looking at a picture of a woman with shoulder-length brown hair, wearing a checked dress, standing talking to Dad beside a parked car. She certainly looked like a younger version of the woman I’d met with him.

‘Yes, of course.’

I peered at the photo. Margery and Dad were smiling at each other in a very loving way. I’d never seen Dad look at Mum like that. ‘But that’s after Dad married. He’s losing his hair and he looks much older than in the pictures taken when Mum and he were courting. They look as though they were very close.’

‘Yes, I think they were. I’m glad he had a friend. Your mum was a challenging woman and obviously never very happy. In her letters she ranted on about how hard her life was, how much she’d given up, and how difficult you were. She’s got no idea how mad she made herself look when she wrote to me about you being “a demon monster” or “the devil’s child”. I don’t believe that children can be born evil …’

‘Did she really say all that to you?’ I wasn’t particularly surprised. ‘What did you reply?’

‘I said that you were only a child and that she shouldn’t visit the sins of the father on you.’ Audrey bit her lip as if worried she’d said too much. ‘Anyway, it’s all water under the bridge now.’

When I got back to the UK, some of what I’d learned preyed on my mind. In particular, I couldn’t stop wondering about the strong resemblance between Deanne and me. It seemed too close to be coincidental.

Could I be Dad’s natural daughter? It seemed the only possible explanation, and it would explain Mum’s cruelty towards me. If it were true, it wouldn’t have been easy bringing up her husband’s love child and living with a constant reminder of his infidelity under her own roof. No
wonder she resented me far more than she would a child who came from a completely anonymous background – like Nigel.

The pieces were beginning to fit together for me. I thought again about the letter Audrey told me Mum had sent in September 1950 saying ‘I’ve got the girl child’.

But I couldn’t see Dad as a philandering Jack-the-lad type. If he had had another woman, it was probably just one rather than hordes of them.

Margery’s face kept floating before my mind’s eye. Was it her all the time? Had Dad married the wrong woman, but come to an arrangement so that he could spend most week nights with the one he should have married in the first place? Could that be why we moved to Shernal Green, so he was closer to her?’

But then, what about the name on my birth certificate? It was not inconceivable that José Langman might have been paid to pose as my mother in order to disguise the identity of the real one – after all, checks were much less stringent in those days, and the Caseys could certainly afford to pay some poor girl a few hundred pounds to register the birth as her own child.

It was a huge leap but it was just possible that Margery was my real mother. I thought about how kind she had been to me that day when I was recovering from my suicide attempt, and how upsetting it must have been for her if I was really her daughter. How could she bear not to say something?

I decided that I had to see Margery again, and drove to Shernal Green one afternoon. Pear Tree Lodge had been converted into a big country hotel and there was no sign of life in Pear Tree Cottage, but just down the road there
was a woman trimming her hedge so I got out of the car to have a chat with her.

‘Do you know Margery Wyatt who used to live here?’

‘Yes, indeed. Were you a friend of hers?’

‘My dad used to know her and I thought I’d look her up.’

‘I’m sorry, I’m afraid she died just a few months ago.’

My heart sank. ‘Did you know her?’

‘A little, but not well. She was a strange woman. Never married until late in life but she lived here on her own all that time. I couldn’t quite fathom what made her tick. She wasn’t a very open sort of person; it was as if she had her secrets and she wasn’t going to share them.’

That all fitted but it didn’t help me to confirm the truth. I’d hit another dead end. There was only one person who knew the answers. The only question was – would she be willing to tell me?

It was not long after this that I found my mother’s unconscious body blocking the door to her little house, and followed the ambulance to the hospital. After undergoing emergency care, Mum was diagnosed as having suffered a minor stroke. When she was out of immediate danger, she was transferred to a rehabilitation unit in the heart of the Warwickshire countryside.

Mum was put in a ward with eleven other patients with varying degrees of disability. She was unable to walk, but when I visited I’d usually find her dressed and sitting in a chair by her bed, from which she couldn’t quite see out the window. She quickly became very frustrated and angry
about her situation, complaining about the way the staff treated her and the antisocial behaviour of other patients, but most of her vitriol was directed at me.

‘Don’t you think you should lose some weight? You’re getting really fat,’ she would say. ‘You’re such an ugly woman, aren’t you?’

And she would issue orders. ‘There’s my washing. Make sure you get it done, and press it properly this time.’

When I arrived, her first question was always, ‘What have you brought me?’ I took magazines and chocolates, new clothes, perfume, cosmetics, face cream, whatever she requested and I let the nasty comments wash over me. I’d had a lifetime of them and I was used to it by now. It was her way of striking back at her illness and her inability to look after herself. If it made her feel better, I could tolerate it. I would just ignore her jibes and smile sunnily at her. That infuriated her more than anything.

One day I arrived to find her sitting at the window as usual. I stood in the doorway for a moment and observed her as she sat there. At the age of eighty-eight, Mum still had a faded beauty, with pronounced, angular features and bright blue-grey eyes. I had arranged for a woman to come to the rehab centre to do her hair and nails once a week, because she continued to take great pride in her appearance. Her skin was heavily wrinkled, of course, but her nose was neatly powdered and she wore a slick of soft pink lipstick. I bought most of her clothes – loose, comfortable garments to cover the thickening of her once-willowy figure – but she coordinated her outfits every morning and issued strict instructions to the nurses who helped her get dressed.

When she heard me in the doorway, she turned, demanding sharply, ‘Where have you been? You never visit me. After everything I’ve done for you.’

‘Mum, I was here yesterday,’ I objected, but she ignored me.

‘I prayed that you would come,’ she said, folding her hands. ‘Where’s Dad? Why didn’t you bring him?’

I hesitated. Did she mean my dad who had passed away ten years earlier, or her own father, Charles Pittam? That terrifying, sickening man had now been in the grave for over forty years.

‘I wish Charles was here,’ Mum said. ‘Such a talented, clever man. He was so proud of me being a model, you know. He kept all my pictures. Such a wonderful father. A lovely man. I loved him so much …’ She drifted off, lost in thought again.

I felt sick, thinking about what that ‘lovely man’ had done to me many long years ago. I wondered again if she had suffered the same as I had – it was the only way I could understand how she could have let any child undergo it, almost as though it were completely normal for an old man to rape a small girl.

I changed the subject and started reminiscing with her about Dad and then about Nigel – she got misty-eyed remembering the son I believe she had truly loved.

Then I decided I would ask her one more time for the answers that only she knew.

‘Mum,’ I said tentatively. ‘There’s something I wanted to ask you. You know that I met Audrey and Deanne when I went to Canada. Something Audrey told me has been weighing on my mind and I need to ask you about it. Is there any chance that I could be Dad’s natural daughter?’

She was immediately on the alert. ‘Your father’s daughter?’ she scoffed. ‘I think your imagination’s running riot again. Did your so-called spirits tell you this?’

‘I really need to know where I came from, Mum, so that if there’s anything hereditary my own three children are aware of it.’

‘I told you before. Your father was a black man and your mother was an ugly old crone who got herself up the duff back in 1949.’

‘But I look exactly the same as Deanne.’

‘I haven’t seen her since she grew up but Audrey’s no oil painting so I’m not surprised she had an ugly daughter. Is she fat like you as well? Does she have trouble keeping a husband?’ Mum had been fiercely disapproving when I divorced John and had never accepted Bob. I could understand this in a way – after all, she had been locked into an unhappy marriage.

I ignored her comments and said, ‘Mum – did Dad carry on seeing Margery Wyatt after you were married?’

Her eyes turned cold and she stared out of the window again.

‘There had to be some reason why he spent so much time away from home,’ I persisted. ‘And I heard you speak about your arrangement. You even mentioned “the other woman”. Did Dad have a double life?’

Mum turned back to look at me and now she had a sneering, triumphant look on her face. ‘Margery Wyatt? I don’t know who you’re talking about.’

‘She was Dad’s first fiancée.’

‘If you say so. I’ve never heard of her.’

I could hear the gloating in her voice and my heart sank. I should have realized that if she guessed how
important this was to me, she would take pleasure in denying me any information.

‘Was she my mother?’ I asked, hoping that I could somehow provoke her into speaking the truth. Would she finally tell me?

‘You’ll never know who your real mother is. I can’t remember now. What does it matter? Nothing will ever make you any less of a miserable excuse for a woman.’

I saw the pleasure in her eyes and I knew that my last chance to discover the truth had gone. She knew how much it mattered to me now. She would do all she could to thwart me.

‘And I was a perfectly good mother to you,’ she added. ‘You were the one who made everything so horrible.’

‘Can I bring you anything next time, Mum?’ I asked. I had to go. There was only so much that I could stand at any one time.

Her eyes flickered. ‘Cold cream. You never bring me any cream and it’s so drying on the skin sitting here all day long, day in, day out. That it should come to this!’

I bent slightly to kiss her on the cheek but she twisted her head away and stared towards the window.

‘Goodbye, Mum,’ I whispered and left her there.

Towards the end of 2007, Mum’s health deteriorated rapidly after she succumbed to a chest infection. She became painfully thin, until I was scared to squeeze her bony hands any more in case they cracked under my touch. She also started to spend more and more time in the past, imagining herself back in the glory days of her
twenties when she could get any man she wanted just by snapping her fingers and fluttering her lashes.

‘He’s madly in love with me,’ she claimed, pointing at a junior doctor on his rounds. ‘He wants to marry me, but I told him I haven’t made up my mind yet.’

When I visited with Bob, her eyes would light up and she’d ignore me as she chatted to him with great animation about her glamorous life. She appeared to have no concept of how old she was. What did she think when she looked in a mirror and a heavily wrinkled, faded old woman looked back?

‘You need to make your peace with her before it’s too late,’ Bob advised after one visit when she had seemed particularly frail. ‘Just for yourself. She could go at any time, and you don’t want to feel there’s unfinished business.’

I knew he was right but felt stupidly nervous. I rehearsed what I might say over and over in my head, until I finally managed to get the words out one day when she appeared to be in a calm, benign mood.

‘Mum, you and I haven’t always had the greatest of relationships,’ I began, searching her eyes for some indication that she knew what I meant – but they remained expressionless. ‘I just want you to know that those things that happened when I was a child …’ I paused, not knowing how to put it into words. ‘I just wanted you to know that I forgive you. And that I love you.’