Chapter 7: Confessions

It was growing dark when I reached Tetney and it was either that or tiredness that made me miss the house on my first pass. I went on for about half a mile before I found a place to turn round. By the time I got back, Emer was standing at the front door of the house; she had been waiting in the bay window when she saw our car drive on into the gathering gloom.

The homecoming was everything I could have wished for. She began kissing me passionately as soon as the door closed. I was rather nervous of being caught until she explained that Aine had gone to the cinema with her newly discovered grandparents. I wasn’t hungry, although all I’d eaten since early morning was a pork pie; now that I had stopped moving, tiredness was overwhelming me.

We sat together on a settee while I sipped from a glass of red wine. Emer wanted to know what Bert had told me, but she readily understood that I felt too weary to do the subject justice. I appreciated her forbearance since I could see that she was really keen to know, so I offered her a tiny piece of what I thought would be uncontroversial news.

“Your father and Bert go back a long way; they were at school together.”

“No they weren’t! Daddy went to public school; he’s very well educated, you know.”

“Your father doesn’t always tell the truth, Emer.”

“Why would he lie about where he went to school?” she demanded, pulling herself upright so there was a tiny gap between us.

If I hadn’t been so exhausted, I might have found a better answer, but I was irritated that she seemed to be taking her father’s side.

“Why would Bert lie about it?”

She moved to put her wine glass on the table in front of her and then settled back almost half a metre from me.

“Oh well, I don’t suppose it matters. I expect you weren’t listening, as usual, and got it wrong.”

I’m the first to admit that I switch off when I’m not interested in a conversation, but Emer knows that I am totally committed to the cause of saving our daughter from the evil old man my wife still calls ‘Daddy’. ‘Jack wasn’t paying attention and probably overacted to the business of the pills; let’s all go home and forget about the disgusting old pervert on Pabay’, was the view she appeared to be taking.

What made me most irate was the realisation that part of me wanted Bert to be lying; if he hadn’t told the truth about their schooling then perhaps, he was lying about Humphrey’s paedophilia.

Before I could turn on her with an angry rebuttal, the door opened and the cinemagoers breezed in. After fifteen minutes of feverish activity while I heard three conflicting stories of the movie, Aine was ready for bed. She would be sleeping on her own in the room Ruaridh and Morag use when they visit; Gramps and Nana are just next door and are to be the first port of call if anything goes wrong in the night.

I hardly had a chance to exchange more than smiles with my stepmother Rachel, but she found time to whisper that the room Emer and I would use was soundproof from the rest of the house. ‘I can’t speak for the neighbours,’ she added with a sly grin.

My wife was sitting at a dressing table when I went to the room. She was wearing a long, thick nightdress borrowed, I guess from Rachel, and she didn’t turn when I came in. There was an en-suite shower, and I used it to wash off the effects of my long drive. Emer still hadn’t turned her head when I came back wearing a towel and I raked through my rucksack to find fresh underwear since there seemed to be little chance that we would put Rachel’s assurance to the test.

Switching off the bedside light I turned my back on the illumination from the dressing table. I was still angry at being unjustly blamed, so I lay quietly fuming. Moments later, Emer got into bed and put out the last of the lights. We lay back-to-back for several minutes, saying nothing; I wanted to return to the easy intimacy we had enjoyed when I first arrived but I was too stubborn to make the first move. It was Emer who turned to face me, putting her hand on my shoulder.

“I don’t want us to fall out, Jack. We’re both tired and I should have listened to you when you said to leave things till the morning.”

Since this constituted a handsome apology, I turned so we were face to face. She moved her hand to my cheek, which she gently stroked, and I put a hand on her hip.

“You must admit though that you don’t really listen half the time.”

That pressed the button and my afterburners ignited.

“You just can’t face the fact that your precious Daddy is a serial liar. He doesn’t need a reason. He lied about his school – it was Maude that went to public school not Humphrey.”

She gave a little start when I said that name and I wondered just how much she didn’t know.

“What did he tell you about your brother?”

“My brother is dead,” she whispered, her voice shaking.

“Your brother is alive and well, living in Birmingham.”

The hand on my cheek was drawn back, formed into a fist and thrust into my face; luckily it mostly missed although it stung my ear. For several minutes I struggled to catch Emer’s wrists as she made repeated attempts to punch me; she was also trying to kick me, but her legs were tangled up in the thick cloth of the long nightdress. Even after I had her pinioned, she spat at me.

Two nights ago, we had made love with a passion we had never before reached. Now we achieved even greater intensity of feeling but driven this time by hate rather than love. She was yelling at the top of her voice, but the words were often jumbled. It wasn’t difficult, however, to understand that I was a liar and an utterly useless husband and father. The one coherent sentence she got out was a vigorous denunciation: her Daddy would never have lied to her about the death of her brother.

She calmed enough when she had tired herself to settle quietly sobbing. I put on a guest bathrobe hanging behind the door and went to spend the rest of the night on the bottom bunk below my sleeping child. There was no sound coming from Dad’s room so Rachel must have been right about the soundproofing. If the neighbours heard us, I wonder what they thought was happening.

I lay awake for a long time, slowly accepting that my anger had nothing to do with schools or lies; I was devastated to learn that my wife, the woman I love, was molested by her father when she was a child. Far from blaming the man for corrupting her, she still believes in him – more than she believes in me, apparently. Just as I was falling into an uneasy sleep the phrase ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ came into my head.

Aine woke me with a question I found hard to answer and my father repeated it as he joined us: why was I sleeping here instead of with my wife? It would be wonderful if sometimes you could turn the clock back.

“I said something stupid, and your Mum got very angry.”

“Does that mean that the holiday’s off?” Kids have an unerring instinct for the awkward question.

Suddenly, I knew what to do; if you can’t go back then the only way is forward.

“Only for a day, love, but you’ll get to meet another new uncle in consolation.”

Dad made tea while I told them that Emer had a brother living in Birmingham and that we had to go to see him to convince her that he didn’t die more than thirty years ago. So, at eight o’clock in the morning, give or take a minute, I phoned Bert and asked for Eric’s address and telephone number. When I had filled him in on the whole sorry tale, he gave me the house number and postcode but insisted that he would do the phoning to prepare Eric. I hadn’t even thought of the shock it would be to his system to be confronted by his sister.

Rachel came in while I was talking to Bert, and she organised things at our end. Aine still looked puzzled, but she agreed to let her new Nana go alone to take a cup of tea to her Mum. It was almost an hour before she returned and gave us a ‘thumbs-up’.

Apart from substituting ‘hurt’ for a more detailed description of the abuse, I told Aine and Dad the whole story of the treatment Emer and her brother endured at the hands of their parents. I praised Bert for saving Connla, making no comment on his failure to return to save Emer. I was finding that there was a gulf between understanding Bert’s behaviour and forgiving it. Dad and Aine spent some time arguing about whether she should come to Birmingham or stay with him; it was no surprise when she won her point: she is now a fully participating member of the family.

When Emer made her appearance, refusing breakfast, she hugged everyone but me; her back was rigidly straight as she got into the back seat of the car. Aine joined me in the front, and we gloomily drove away from the concerned couple wishing us luck. The journey took almost three hours and Emer didn’t say a word for the first hour. I told Aine what Bert had said about the early days on the island, concentrating on the funny bits where possible.

When I was telling her about the two children living in the distant cottage with Bert and Maude, Emer interrupted: ‘We called it the Gingerbread House’. She thought it was Bert who first suggested that they were like Hansel and Gretel, sent away by their parents. Maude was happy enough to be the wicked witch. Only Bert was allowed to visit the big house without an invitation, but he mostly stayed with them.

“We were so happy, Connla and me with Bert as our faithful woodcutter and Maude trying and failing to be wicked. It seemed to be always sunny, and the days were endless.”

Reminiscences of that time kept the girls occupied until we turned into a tree-lined street and stopped outside a seventy’s bungalow. There was a gate and a short path through flower beds to the glazed front door but there was no sign of life, not even a twitching curtain in the front room. I checked the piece of paper on which I’d written the address, wondering if I should call Bert to check again.

Just then my eye was caught by a man who had entered the street about a hundred metres away. He was dressed in a business suit, complete with tie, and he was in a hurry. He was walking very fast and breaking into a little run every metre or so; I saw movement out of the corner of my eye and glanced round to see a woman standing inside the gate. She was wearing a tweed skirt and a jumper with matching cardigan – I think they call it a twin set.

The man stopped and looked in at me, but it wasn’t until he looked past me at Aine that his face changed to total astonishment. I still had my window up so I couldn’t hear the word he mouthed but I watched as he peered closely into the back seat where Emer was sitting bolt upright staring back at him. By this time, I’d put my window down and I could hear them, both talking but still separated from each other by a pane of window glass.

“Oh my God, it really is you. I couldn’t believe it when Uncle Bert called,” he was muttering.

“Connla! Dear God! Connla!” over and over again, was all my wife could articulate.

Without conscious volition, we were all on the pavement; Eric and Emer were facing each other, his hands on her shoulders and hers clasping his face; the woman introduced herself to me as Elaine, Eric’s wife; and I only noticed that Aine was clinging to my arm with both hands when I tried to shake hands. The siblings, oblivious to the rest of us, were staring into each other’s eyes and making largely incoherent noises: the only thing that was clear is that they had both been certain that the other was dead.

Elaine was the only cool person on the sunlit pavement of that quiet suburban street. The trees overhanging the few parked cars had that tired look that city trees seem to get and the low walls at the edge of the properties made the street look neat and unthreatening. She ushered us inside the house, reminding me to wind my car window up before I locked it.

She guided brother and sister into the first room on the right, a lounge with a bay window, and shut the door on them. We passed the next room which she said was the dining room when they moved in but was used as a library nowadays where the kids did their homework. We finished up in the kitchen, a bright, cheerful room at the back of the house where Elaine put the kettle on to boil and reached into a cupboard for mugs.

“We didn’t know if you’d come,” she told Aine. “I decided to send our three to their Gran. Bert phoned to say you were coming but we didn’t know what to expect.”

She and Eric have a son and two daughters who have worn her out during half term. Elaine didn’t give any sign of wear as she and Aine discussed how much make-up girls should be allowed to wear in secondary school. The only indication of nervousness came when she rattled the spout of the kettle against the mugs as she poured boiling water over the tea bags.

Eric is a partner in an accountancy firm and he had to rush in to brief his deputy after Bert called; he was taking the rest of the week off. Elaine had seen us arrive and it was her call that had him rushing up the street while we sat outside his home. Aine told her about the warehouse and the souvenirs we supplied. I was finding it extremely difficult to come to terms with what was happening. Even in our most intimate moments, Emer had never given any indication that she had a brother. It wasn’t simply that she didn’t acknowledge that he was dead; it was as if he had never been born. I had no experience of a hurt so deep that the source had to be totally eliminated. I was deeply ashamed that I hadn’t even suspected that this cancer had been consuming my poor wife.

Elaine and Aine had been chatting about inconsequential things for almost half an hour before my daughter mentioned that her Mum thought Eric was dead. Elaine gave a little cry of anguish and put down her mug with elaborate care before she finally let her control slip. She faced me, demanding to know why Eric’s own father destroyed his childhood and why he had been told that his sister was dead. What she repeatedly asked was why Bert had allowed her husband to believe such a dreadful story.

She’s a year or two older than her husband and the families had been neighbours since Eric arrived aged ten. He had been a very troubled teen but, unlike Bert and his father, he had turned his angst inwards. He had counselling but it was clear to me that it was Elaine’s love that had brought him out of the depth of his depression. Most of the time now he was fine but there was a dark area in him that he sometimes visited, excluding his wife and his children.