Читать книгу The Mother’s Lies - Joanne Sefton - Страница 8

Helen

In the end, she didn’t get any chance to mention the note on Saturday. Neil whisked them all off to a theme park for the day, then dinner at the local Italian. ‘Take our minds off it all,’ he said, repeatedly. Helen grinned for his sake, as much as for Barney and Alys. Barbara’s enjoyment, she was sure, was just as manufactured. The thought gave her an unfamiliar sense of camaraderie with her mother – for as long as she could remember, she’d found herself siding with her dad in the face of Barbara’s quirks and moods.

On Sunday morning, however, she woke up thinking about the note. It had lurked through her dreams, which had danced from Darren, to her children, then her parents; all unformed and fast-fading glimpses. Each encounter had played out on the sickly green landscape of the notepaper – those black capitals always there but never in focus. In those giddy predawn hours, something fearful woke in her belly, and, once woken, it shifted and clawed about inside her like a rat.

She was still turning the words of the note over in her mind as the grey dawn gradually crept round the edges of the heavy velvet curtains. They were cast-offs from Neil’s sister – Aunt Vicky – given away when she moved to Málaga, to replace the yellow ones that had been up since Helen was small. Good enough for the spare room, her parents must have decided, even though the size wasn’t quite right. She’d got used to sleeping here with Darren over the years. Now she was sleeping alone in the big old bed, with no one else to see the patterns the morning light made around the badly fitting curtains.

If only she could show Darren the note. Her Darren, not the new, arm’s-length, polite-chat-about-the-weather Darren who made her skin crawl. It wasn’t that she thought he’d have all the answers, just that she wasn’t used to having no one to share things with. They’d met at school and grown up together as an ‘us’. Suddenly Helen had to work everything out as ‘me’. And everything was bloody tough.

At first, her mind had tricked itself – he was on a business trip, or working late – God knew she was used to not having him around. But now it was more than six weeks, and the reality, the permanence, of his absence was becoming undeniable. All the more so since that awful call with her dad. The old Darren might not have been around when the au pair was sick or when she needed to decide on a holiday booking, but she could be confident that if the world fell apart he’d be there to catch her. Now it had and he was content to see her in free fall.

Gradually, the lumpy shadow-scape revealed itself as her assorted bits of luggage, strewn with clothes and toys and everything else that she’d not had the will to try to tidy up. The green dizzy dreams and the clawing rat seemed to shrivel in the light. It was too bizarre. To be looking at the fresh baked-bean-juice stains on her dressing gown, or the cascade of children’s books erupting from a Gruffalo backpack, and thinking that somebody out there was happy her mother could be dying, that somebody out there wanted Barbara to suffer.

Error, as the laptop would say. Switch it off and on again. If only she could.

She kept coming up with improbable explanations – the note was a prop from a murder-mystery party, or a handwriting test, or Barbara had written it herself as some sort of weird displacement activity. But why the mention of cancer? And why had it been on the doormat when Helen arrived? There was no simple answer to explain that away.

Finally she heard Alys start up her morning whimper, which, in her usual way, would soon become a chatter and then, shortly after, a wail. As Helen quit the stale bed and pulled on the bean-juice-stained dressing gown, the demons scuttled back to their dusty recesses. She pushed the curtains back, then, still fumbling with the belt of her dressing gown, she headed upstairs.

*

Helen found the blue dress later that morning, when she was going through some stuff in her old room. She’d hoped that one of the dusty boxes stashed under the bed would hold something that might keep the kids occupied for a while.

Of course, she’d packed for the journey in a hurry, with no real idea of how long they’d be staying, and the flaws in her organisation – no charger for Barney’s tablet, DVD boxes missing their discs, and Jess the Doll’s tragically deficient wardrobe – were now becoming woefully apparent.

It must have been twenty years since Helen had seen that dress. She knew the story of Neil buying it for Barbara on honeymoon in Glasgow and the shimmer of blue – more eastern Med than western Scotland – was instantly recognisable. She found the straps and held it up, letting the layers of satin and chiffon swing free. There were details she hadn’t noticed before, or didn’t remember: the old-fashioned label, sewn in by hand, the slight discolouration under the arms. Was there a breath of Barbara’s perfume, or was that just Helen’s imagination?

‘Alys!’ she shouted, after a moment or two. ‘Come and try on this princess dress.’

She knew Barbara wouldn’t mind a bit. After all, Helen herself had spent a good year around the age of six tripping around the house in its gauzy layers, the spaghetti straps nicely set off against her utilitarian white M&S vests. She’d called it her cocktail dress. As a child, Helen had liked to imagine Barbara’s youth had been spent swishing around sophisticated parties. She had a vague fantasy that Barbara had come down in the world when she married Neil and renounced a life of leisure and glamour and quite possibly even cigarette holders for love, a red-brick semi and her baby girl. She didn’t actually have any evidence for this exotic former life, but, in the absence of evidence of anything more prosaic, it was an attractive fantasy.

Alys duly trotted upstairs, but when Helen held up the dress she looked sceptical.

‘Which princess?’ she asked.

‘Not a Disney Princess. Another Princess. Princess Alys.’

‘Daddy buy me Belle dress.’

‘Did he?’ Helen was genuinely puzzled. Alys adored Belle from Beauty and the Beast and Helen couldn’t imagine she could have received such a prize and not been full of it for days.

The girl looked sad and a little confused. ‘I get it next time, he say, next time, but …’ She faltered, and her big eyes welled with tears.

At home, Helen had had to tell her over and over that Daddy didn’t live with them any more. Each time, it cut her up inside and the tears that she managed to hold in when she was with her children spilled out with interest after bedtime. Eventually, Alys seemed to have understood, on some level at least, but the visit up here could only have confused her.

‘Blue is for boys, Mummy.’ As ever, the three-year-old’s train of thought chugged on at pace.

Helen racked her mind for some Disney Princess assistance. ‘Cinderella wears blue,’ she said, encouragingly.

‘Not that blue, Mummy – that’s boys’ blue.’

Helen looked down at the dress, as if noticing its colour for the first time. ‘Oh! You mean I should give it to Barney to wear?’

She loved her daughter’s laughter, which bubbled thick and sticky in her throat like liquid fudge. Alys liked the joke of her brother wearing the dress and her chortles brought Neil to the door.

‘Good morning, ladies,’ Neil said, making Alys giggle even more.

‘Alys thinks Barney should dress up in Nana’s honeymoon dress. What do you reckon, Granddad?’

She expected Neil to laugh along. Instead, he reached out, groping like a blind man. His fingers touched the fabric, but then it slipped out of his grasp and the dress slithered to the floor. He sat down heavily on the bed. Helen cursed inwardly. Of course, she should have realised the dress might upset him. But a moment later he was smiling again and had pulled a toffee out of his pocket for Alys.

He turned to Helen. ‘I came to tell you there’s a phone call for you, love.’

‘Darren?’ she mouthed it silently over Alys’s head, and he nodded.

‘Now, young Alys.’ His grasp on the dress was firm this time, and the wet sheen on his eyes had been blinked away. ‘The thing you have to know about this dress is that it belonged to a mermaid once. That’s why you can see all the colours of the deep blue ocean in it – in fact, I’m sure I once saw a tiny golden fish flickering through just about here …’

The phone handset sat like a grenade on a chest of drawers on the landing.

‘Hello?’ She kept her voice low, going into the spare room.

‘Hi, Hels. How’s your mum doing?’ said the voice on the line.

‘She’s okay. We went to the hospital on Friday. They’re going to operate next week. We’ll know more then.’

‘I was gutted to hear it, really I was.’ She could picture him shaking his head, sorrowfully, rubbing the back of his hand against his designer stubble in that way he had. ‘Give her my best, yeah?’

‘Yeah,’ she agreed, knowing she’d say nothing.

‘I’ve been trying your mobile.’

‘I know you have. It’s not the easiest time, Darren.’

‘Yeah, I understand that. But the kids’ll be missing me.’ As he spoke, she tried to push away the image of Alys’s perplexed face, talking about the stupid Disney costume. ‘I’m not saying you shouldn’t have taken them up there, and we both wanted to deal with access informally, but …’

Bastard. Always trying to come across as Mr More-Than-Reasonable. He should be here with his family now, rather than having fucked off with his glossy, giggling area manager. That’s what Helen wanted to say, but the words wouldn’t come. She’d had explosive, raging, endless rows with Darren each day since he’d left, but only in the privacy of her own mind. When it came to real life, the words would never come.

She realised he was still talking. He was still going on in his calm let’s be adult about this voice that she’d so quickly come to despise.

‘… So I’ll come up at the weekend and stay with my mum. Just me, not Lauren – I don’t want to make things harder. But I want to see the kids properly, not just an hour over lunch or something. Okay? And I want to speak to them. Are they there just now?’

Helen pressed the handset closer to her ear. Alys’s laughter was louder now, but not so loud that he’d be able to hear it down the phone line.

‘Mum’s taken them both to the park,’ she lied. ‘You only caught Dad and I because we were finishing the dishes. We’re just going to meet them.’

‘Right.’

‘Yes.’

He sighed. ‘Look, call me later – just let me say goodnight to them at least.’ His voice might have cracked, or it might have been static on the line. She was learning, to her surprise, that Darren could be a good actor. It was bizarre, thinking back to how she’d always been able to read him like a book. Perhaps he’d never had the will to deceive her before, or perhaps it was the distance that had opened up between them making it harder for her to really see him the way she always had before. She ached even more for the man she had married.

‘I don’t want them to get upset,’ she said.

‘For God’s sake, don’t make me beg to speak to my own kids, Helen.’

He didn’t sound to her like a man who was begging. She felt the familiar lump swell in the back of her throat. This was why she couldn’t fight with him: whenever she tried to give voice to her anger, the rage choked her before she could let it out.

‘Tomorrow,’ she managed.

‘First thing.’

She nodded uselessly into the phone, tears running down both cheeks now. Finally she said ‘okay’ just about loud enough for him to hear, and then hung up.

God knew she didn’t want either of the kids to catch her looking like this; they’d seen enough tears. Taking care to be silent, she slipped out of the bedroom and walked down the stairs. She wanted to return the handset to its charger quickly. Whilst she held it, it felt as though she was carrying Darren around, and he would know that she’d lied to him and be able to see her falling apart.

Just thinking about Darren was so painful, yet she couldn’t stop herself. She had no reference point for what was happening to her and that left her completely bewildered. As she and Darren had been together since high school, she’d never had any sort of break-up before. And her parents’ relationship had always been rock solid. Barbara had her quirks – always had – she was often distant with her daughter and could be sharp with her tongue. Occasionally her claws came out and Helen could remember the odd ring of a slap or the twist of an arm when her mother was angry.

But, even though he could be on the receiving end of her sharp tongue too, Neil had adored his wife with a constancy that was unshakeable. Even more remarkably, he’d had love enough for both of them, so Helen had never felt the need to compete, and never questioned the security of their family.

Now, it looked like her own children were going to have none of that, and she veered between righteous rage towards Darren and anxious guilt about what more she could have done to keep her family together.

Helen could hear Barbara’s voice in the kitchen as she came down the stairs. Although the green and inky haze of the dreams had faded, it hadn’t left her completely. It occurred to her that if Barbara knew what the envelope contained before she picked it up from the doormat, then perhaps there had been others. She’d not thought to look for any until now, and her decision to confront her mother had lost impetus through the bittersweet family outings yesterday. The thought of interrogating Barbara about the note in the midst of the turmoil of a cancer diagnosis made her squeamish. Given how emotionally vulnerable she felt herself – her hands were still shaking after the phone call – it didn’t take much to persuade herself to put it off. She was decided; before confronting her mother, she would look for more notes.

In the hall, she replaced the phone on its cradle and pulled out a tissue. She dabbed at her face in the mirror and managed to tidy it a bit. At least she’d learned to avoid wearing mascara these days. Now that she was closer to the kitchen she could hear Barney’s voice too. He was explaining the plot of one of the films he watched endlessly. It seemed unlikely she’d be disturbed by either of them any time soon.

She retraced her steps, stealthily, to the staircase. There was a little hotel safe at the back of Barbara’s wardrobe, hidden by a clutter of shoes. It contained passports and building society books and pension stuff. Much duller stuff than Helen had hoped to find when, aged fifteen or so, she’d idly observed her mother opening it and gone on to crack the code: 2973. She could still remember it. Would Barbara have changed the code over the years?

The little door swung open smoothly, and that small disturbance was enough to shift the stack of mismatched papers. Even through the gloom, a knife-edge sliver of green caught Helen’s eye. Clearly, the note from the other night had not been the first. Again, this envelope simply said ‘Barbara’.

From the bedroom, she heard Alys pause to ask, ‘Where’s Mummy?’ Rather than risk them coming out to look for her, Helen stuffed the envelope into the large pocket on her hoodie to read later. After a few seconds, she felt safe enough to carry on. Riffling through the rest of the papers in the safe, she quickly found two more. Then she replaced everything as accurately as she could and stuck the two new envelopes alongside the first in the front of her hoodie. She’d take them back to the downstairs loo to read, where she could lock the door and not worry about being disturbed. If nothing else, this intrigue might give her something to occupy her brain other than the constant, cycling worries about Darren.

As soon as she got to the bottom of the stairs, though, Barney erupted from the kitchen and threw himself at her, without stopping for breath in his chatter. Helen twirled him around and he dragged her back to the kitchen, where she had to enthuse over the half-done jigsaw on the table. Moments later, Neil appeared in the doorway with Alys, who wanted to show off her princess dress.

While Alys performed curtsies, Helen watched Barbara applaud with no sign of sentiment over the reappearance of her dress. Barney talked all the louder for fear of his little sister getting some attention.

Neil moved across to the window, where Barbara stood by the sink with a tea towel in her hand. She let her husband rest his arm across her shoulders for all of three seconds, before she gently lifted it and twisted away.

‘Shall I get us all some tea?’ Barbara asked, brightly.

*

It was half an hour, in the end, before Helen managed some time alone. The three new notes were not identical to the first, but they were all similar: short and mysterious but written with unmistakable venom.

HELLO BARBARA

THIS IS JENNIFER.

I KNOW WHO YOU ARE.

HELLO BARBARA

I KNOW WHO YOU ARE.

I KNOW WHAT YOU DID.

I’VE COME TO PAY YOU BACK.

JENNIFER

HELLO BARBARA.

DOES NEIL KNOW?

OR WOULD YOU LIKE ME TO TELL HIM?

JENNIFER

There were no dates on any of them, but that was the order that seemed to make most sense, leading up to the cancer one. There was no clue as to how long it had been going on for, nor as to whether ‘Jennifer’ had approached Neil or done anything else.

Helen had been well aware whilst growing up that her mum wouldn’t speak about the past; that she would admit to no family, no history – in fact, no life at all before meeting Neil at the age of twenty. Occasionally, he would call her his girl who fell to earth. Helen had badgered him over it at times, mostly when she was in her teens, but as life unfurled, the mystery seemed minor in the scheme of things. It had become part of the scenery.

‘I know who you are,’ the notes said, and the words made Helen’s blood turn icy, because the truth was she didn’t. And she never had.

She tried to imagine asking her dad about it now; her relationship with Neil had always been simpler. He was her dad; he loved her, worried about her and thought she was a superstar. She was his daughter; she loved him, allowed him to bore her with his gardening chat and bought him socks for Christmas. For as long as she could remember, they’d been able to talk easily about just about anything.

But she hesitated, only now realising that the one thing they never really talked easily about was Barbara. Her mind was full of the image of his face, crumpling at the sight of his wife’s blue honeymoon dress. The notes would be devastating – doubly so if Barbara hadn’t told him about them herself, which Helen was convinced was the case. ‘Jennifer’ had threatened to tell Neil something – Helen had no idea what – but if she showed him the notes she might well blunder into the very threat that ‘Jennifer’ was holding like an axe to Barbara’s neck. So she was left with the first option she’d thought of. And the one Helen had always found most difficult – trying to talk to her mother.

She folded the notes into their envelopes, tucking them deep in her pocket to return when she had the chance. Then she washed her face as quietly as she could, using cold water to try to subdue the redness. The tears had been close to the surface since that awful phone call with Darren, and her anger on reading the notes had quickly brought them back. When she finally looked human, she combed her hair through, listening to the hum of the house around her and the laughter and chatter of the children with their grandparents.

On the surface, she thought, this looked like perfection. No fly on the wall, or neighbour peeping through the net curtains, would know the different ways in which every heart in this house was breaking.