Perhaps that is what life is like, years of routine punctuated by events that disrupt everything for short periods of time, changing people’s directions, but not lasting long. And after the events of 1971 the next few years seemed to be a quiet time in the lives of the Donaldsons.
Susannah went back to live at Sandhey immediately after her mother’s funeral, and she began to be more peaceful. Perhaps it was hearing Carl on the radio, seeing him and listening to the enthusiasm behind those programmes that led to her decision to go back to University. She was going to earn that good degree she had failed to get five years earlier. She had changed subjects – to History – and was going to study like she should have done before. Circumstances were not going to get in her way this time. For some reason she had determined on Sussex and, as soon as her application was accepted in April 1972 she spent all her time in Brighton.
Meanwhile her children grew older without her. She had not seen them since the birthday party in 1970, she didn’t so much avoid them as make sure she was never in a situation where she would see them. They lived with a succession of mother’s helps in the houses next to the Parrys. They had frequent visits from Monika and Charles. The Parrys didn’t interfere – having made their point about the children being ‘Parry Children’ they seemed to be content as long as someone else paid.
Meanwhile, after Alicia’s funeral, I got my life back together at the flat in Millcourt and concentrated on the business.
I had tried to avoid Carl’s programmes when Alicia and Susannah were with me but now I made the effort to follow his career, watching his successful television series based on the battles of the Peninsula, listening to his participation in various quizzes on the Radio. He was doing well, juggling his development as popular communicator on television with his growing reputation in the academic world. He was also publishing fiction, historical novels which captured even more of the public to his enthusiasm for those times. They were going to film these, a well known actor was to star. Everything was going well for him.
I knew so much of what he was doing but direct contact was limited to Christmas and Birthday cards.
When, in July 1976, Susannah graduated Max wanted to mark the occasion. A party was held in the garden at Sandhey.
I stood in the brilliant sunshine of that long hot summer on the lawn of Sandhey that had seen so many family gatherings. Watching Susannah standing with champagne glass in hand, just as Alicia had stood on the afternoon of her daughter’s wedding, I was struck by how much she was like her mother and how little there was left of the young girl who had made that disastrous marriage twelve years earlier.
The thought occurred to me that it could have been exactly the same glass.
She caught me looking at her and walked over.
“Am I like her?”
“Very”
“Is that a good thing?”
“Very”
She laughed. The years of study had changed her, she had lost the defeated, vulnerable, child-like quality that had hung around her throughout her marriage. She was no longer a victim.
“Ted, I haven’t asked this for years – you know as well as I do why not – but how are the children?”
I laughed out loud, I knew she was going to ask me that so I had been to see them just the day before. Monika and Charles weren’t the only people who had kept up the contact with them.
“What are you laughing at?” she was bewildered
“I just knew you would want to see them now.”
“I didn’t say that! I just asked how they were.”
“But you do want to see them don’t you?”
“I am just wondering how they are.”
“Yes, of course you were ‘just wondering’.”
“Stop messing with me! I’m serious.” She was laughing, a relaxed, confident laugh such as I had never heard from her.
I stopped joking.
“Yes, Susannah – it’s about time you were serious about those children. They have not had a mother for 6 years. They have been brought up by nannies and they don’t know what or who they are.”
“You make it sound like it was my fault.”
“Fault doesn’t come into it. We’re not talking ‘fault’ we’re talking about what is best for those children of yours. Josie is nearly a teenager now – she’s old enough to know she’s been abandoned.”
“She hasn’t been abandoned! She’s had the best possible care!”
“And if Charles and Monika hadn’t visited them every week, if they hadn’t given them birthday and Christmas presents every year – if they hadn’t taken them away for holidays what do you think they would have been?”
“They haven’t done all that?”
“Of course they have. Didn’t you have any idea?”
“No.”
“You are so like your mother, so like the worst bits of your mother!”
“What do you mean?”
“Your mother was the most beautiful woman I ever knew. No don’t interrupt. She was beautiful, but she was also the most selfish and self-centred woman. Nothing existed if it wasn’t in her life, if she hadn’t a starring role in it. Just like you. You have had your eyes completely shut to everything and everyone since you started this course. You have been ‘focussed’ – that’s the modern term for it isn’t it? – focussed. Focussed to such an extent that the rest of the world can just take a running jump. Well we haven’t all been idle while you have been somewhere else in your mind. We’ve been looking after your children, your brother, you. We’ve been making sure everything went well for you because sooner or later we knew you would grow up. Well, we’re still waiting!”
I had said far too much – but yet still nothing like enough. I watched the shock on her face, hating myself for spoiling her big day, the day she had worked so hard for.
So yet again I left, hoping things would sort themselves out – a failing of mine that seemed always to cause more problems than it solved but which I couldn’t correct.
I got a phone call from Max the next day.
Susannah had asked for a serious talk with him, and she then found out all the extended family had done for the children, all she owed him and Charles and Monika. She talked to them long and hard around that wretched kitchen table at Sandhey that had seen so much of the family history. She had learned of the childhood illnesses, the traumas, the broken bones, the Christmas presents, the way Josie acted as a little mother to the boys, how they always asked how their mummy was, “is she better?” “When is she coming to take them home?”
She then sat in the garden with Max and Monika, finding out all the little details of the family that she thought she had no feelings for looking through album after album of photographs that Monika had kept, for when she might need them. She went inside and asked to talk to Charles on his own, he told her how they knew she would pull through someday – that they all understood how awful it had all been, how Monika had always told them that one day ‘Mummy’ would be better.
“You’ve kept them together.”
“Yes, we have. We’ve kept them together for you.”
“Ouch! Have I really been that selfish?
“Yes. Don’t expect me not to tell the truth now you’re strong enough to take it.”
“That’s a compliment isn’t it?”
“Probably.”
“Will you go and talk to Monika?” Charles knew there was much Monika wanted to tell this new Susannah.
“Let me tell you something you don’t know.” Monika was sitting with Susannah on the sea wall at the bottom of the garden, mugs of iced tea in hand. Two hours later they were sitting on that wall with their arms around each other, both crying.
It must be a difficult thing, at such an age, to realise that there are people whose feelings and thoughts matter as much as your own. In those two hours Susannah learned that she had more to look forward to than many, that she had more to be thankful for than most and that she had a wonderful future ahead – if only she would face it.
“I’m so sorry.”
“No need to be sorry Susannah, just understand. Just understand through all your book-learning – that there are people who love with no return, who love where there is no reason, who love through thick and thin, who care for other people simply because they are other people with feelings and who are hurt.”
After the phone call from Max I called Carl. I had been calling him regularly every month to keep him up to date with Susannah’s progress and the children. We spoke frequently enough for him not to think too much of it, but this time he knew exactly what the call was about.
“She did it didn’t she?”
“Yes, Carl, she did. She did what she should have done years ago. She got her First. They’ve offered her a job doing research.”
“I’m so pleased for her. She deserves something to go right for her.”
“She still wants you, Carl. She hasn’t ever forgotten. She won’t ever forget.”
“Did anyone ever tell her?”
“No. No one ever did.”
“I won’t marry her, Ted. You know that. I can’t have children. It wouldn’t be fair.”
“I think she has enough children Carl, I don’t think that’s a problem.”
“Is she back with them?”
“Practically.”
“I’m glad.”
“Are you ever going to do anything with your life, Carl? Other than work I mean. Are you ever going to do anything if you can’t have Susannah?”
“Nope. Her or nobody – always has been, always will be. But sometimes I almost give up hope that she will need me as much as I need her. She’s got to need me – not because of desperation or pain or that she had no one else – but simply because she’s on top of her life and thinks I would make it even better. Do you see what I mean?”
“I believe I do.”
Susannah came to see me at Millcourt that evening. She told me what had happened, she asked how much I had known – I had shrugged – and I listened as she asked question after question.
We sat into the night, talking, sitting on the same window seat that she had played on as a child with brother Charles and Carl.
Now was the time. I could put it off no longer – nor did I need to.
“Susannah, when do you think things all started to go wrong with your life?” I had changed the subject hesitantly but she answered immediately and with force. “That Sunday, when they told me Carl was my brother. That was the day I met Joe, that was the day my life headed off at a tangent from the route it should have taken.”
“Did you mean to kill yourself that afternoon?”
“No. I don’t think so. I wanted to hurt Daddy. I wanted him to feel pain like I was feeling – the loss of someone I loved. I wanted him to feel that. I hated what he had done to our lives. He had moved Carl and I about like we were pawns in a chess game....”
“Rather like you’ve done with your children.....”
“Shit. Yes. Probably. But no, I didn’t want to die.”
“What went wrong next?”
“Getting pregnant I suppose. It was pretty much downhill from then on.”
“So the children were always the problem? Without them you would still be free? The children tied you into a life you didn’t want? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Probably. Maybe that’s why I didn’t want to be part of their lives.”
“Now if I were to say that is exactly how your mother felt what would you think?”
“What do you mean?”
“If I were to say that your mother felt as trapped by you and Charles as you do with Josie, Bill, Al and Jack would that make you think about her – and them – differently?”
“But how could it – how could she feel as trapped by us? She had all the money, the husband and everything.”
“Susannah do look at the facts. Your mother was several months pregnant when she married Arnold.” I didn’t say “your father”.
“Charles was born when they had only been married for 6 months. They married on her 21st birthday because her father refused to give consent. You can say this for Arnold – he accepted your choice of Joe without demur – despite all the problems that he foresaw.”
“So they had to get married – so what? That was happening all the time during the war. I was born well after that wasn’t I? You’re not saying that Daddy forced himself on Mummy as Joe forced himself on me are you?” That was the first time I believe she had spoken objectively of the difficulties in her marriage.
“When Joe forced himself on you why didn’t you ask for help? Charles, Max, me – we would all have helped you. You know that we would have done. If you’d asked.”
“It isn’t rape when you’re married – you’ve got to do it haven’t you? The man has the right doesn’t he?”
“Legally perhaps, but I don’t believe morally. But we digress. Your mother married Arnold because she wanted to escape her parents – that is a story for another day but believe me it is true – she married Arnold to escape her father and because Charles was on the way, probably Charles was on the way because she wanted to escape her father.”
“I can understand that.”
I nodded in recognition of her interruption.
“She learned very soon after her marriage that it had been a dreadful mistake. Arnold was not right for her. They had some dreadful times together. His mother was clinging in the extreme and, of course, he had been having a long standing affair and was probably in love with someone else.”
“Kathleen?”
“Exactly. Kathleen. He continued his affair with her, right under your mother’s nose – placing her in more and more embarrassing and humiliating positions – the whole town knew what he was up to. Your Mother was very brave. Then Kathleen got pregnant.”
“Carl.”
“Yes, Carl. He was the child of Kathleen and Arnold.” Still I would not say “your father”.
“What they didn’t know at the time, and no one knew for certain until after he’d died was that Kathleen and Arnold were brother and sister.”
“Shit.”
“Arnold’s father, George, had kept a number of local women – many said his wife was frigid and refused to let him touch her after the conception of Arnold. Anyway – one of these kept women was Kathleen’s mother. She could easily have been having other affairs – she was an attractive woman and I don’t think George was particularly strict with his women – but she believed George was Kathleen’s father but didn’t tell her until it was too late.”
I waited for the family tree to form in her mind.
“So ….Carl’s parent’s were brother and sister. Oh poor Carl! How long has he known? He must hurt so much!”
“He’s known for about five years.”
She looked so concerned, so hurt for him.
“Who’s helped him through it? I mean it must have been such a shock. It must make him feel so… oh I can’t think. He must seem so worthless. No I don’t mean worthless but.. Oh poor Carl.” she finished, unable to find the right words.
“I think it has made him feel very lonely. Indeed. He says he will remain unmarried as he feels he must never have children.”
“So what happened?” She wanted to know everything now.
“Arnold arranged for Kathleen to marry his cousin Henry, a pleasant but weak man who had lost his fiancée and parents at the end of the war. Henry, I truly believe, never doubted that Carl was his son.”
I continued, thinking there was no way out now – it had all to come out.
“Can you imagine what your mother felt? Her husband’s mistress was having a child? He spent no less time with her, continuing his affair after she was married and the four of them went away, at Arnold’s instigation, for Christmas 1945.
“Henry and a pregnant Kathleen, Arnold and your mother.”
“Christmas 1945 – that must have been about the time I was conceived.”
“It was New Year’s Night. Your mother went to bed early leaving the others drinking downstairs. She was raped by Henry.” I ignored Susannah’s face and continued “Henry and Arnold had been so drunk they couldn’t remember what had happened. But Alicia knew. Henry is your father, Susannah – not Arnold.”
The room was quiet for a few minutes as we both sipped our drinks.
“So I’m the child of rape, just like my little ones.”
“Your mother never wanted you, I’m afraid to say, but she wouldn’t have an abortion. She left the house as soon after you were born as she could.”
“History does repeat itself.”
“I’m very afraid it does.”
“It wasn’t their fault, was it? Just as it wasn’t mine?”
“No Susannah, it is not your fault and it was not theirs.”
“Can I have another drink?”
I got two more large brandies and sat down beside her on that window seat looking out over the golf links.
“I know what you’re going to ask now.” I said
“Why did she say we were brother and sister?”
“She was trapped by the lie, once told she could not rescind it. The longer it went on, the less she felt able to tell the truth. I came close several times but never had the courage.”
“Once a lie starts it isn’t easy to kill is it?” After a few moments pause she continued, “You loved her very much didn’t you?”
There was no answer to that. In any case it hadn’t really been a question.
“I don’t think she ever wanted to tell you because that would mean you would be with Carl. Remember she hated Kathleen, she was humiliated by her and by your father – how could she bear your being happy with the child of that union?”
Another rhetorical question neither of us tried to answer.
We drank our brandies – the lights shining across the golf course reminded me of other nights we had talked like this.
“I have always loved him, you know.”
“Have you loved him or the idea of him?”
She left the question in the air but I persevered.
“Do you even know him?”
“I see him on the television, I read all his books and his articles. I know what he was like.”
“13 years ago”
“Why did no one tell me?” There was no anger in her voice, no self-pity or recrimination – simply curiosity.
“At first, of course, we didn’t know. But when we did we didn’t say anything as we believed you to be happy. You had a lovely house, lovely children. Charles and I, because it was really only the two of us who could tell you, truly thought you were happy. We couldn’t upset your marriage in that way. And then, when we discovered how desperately unhappy you were we couldn’t see that Carl would be right for you. You were so ...”
“unstable.” She found the word I couldn’t.
“Unfortunately so, my dear, you were very unhappy for a long time. Carl would not, could not, have helped you. How could we risk your being rejected by him, we didn’t know how supportive he would be, we could not know whether or not he loved you...”
“enough to take me on in the state I was in.”
“Indeed. It wasn’t until your mother died that we realised how strong he is and how much he still loves you but by then we knew why he felt he could never be a real husband to anyone.”
“That still leaves five years!”
“Five years isn’t so long a time really, Susannah, when you love someone. You will wait. You will wait forever if that is what is required. You just wait until the moment comes and is right. Carl knew how much you wanted to prove yourself. He knew you needed to get this degree, he knew you had to do it, if he had come into your life you wouldn’t and you would have resented him. He was not going to interfere with your studies, he wanted you to find your own self. I don’t think he knows how to cope with loving you and the problems he faces because of his parents. He doesn’t want to hurt you. He never has, he has tried to protect you from more hurt.”
I wondered if she remembered the times we had come close to talking like this in the past, and whether she understood why I had always backed away.
“You’re going to have to make the first move, Susannah. I think you really are strong enough now to give him the help he needs. He needs you to want to get to know him the way he is now. He’s been the strong one for years – he needs to know you want him as he is now not as he was years ago when you were both very different people.”
As I said it I realised the truth in what I was saying.
I had always assumed Carl was the strong one and he would save Susannah, but it was the other way around. Carl needed Susannah’s strength.
“Do you really want to meet him again or are you happy just having known him in the past? Do you want to risk being disillusioned or do you want to move on?”
“I want to meet him and move on.”
It seemed like the right answer.
“If you’re sure I’ll see what I can do.”
“I am.”
I called Carl the next morning. He was surprised to hear from me so soon after our last conversation so I explained that, after all these years and after all the procrastination and weakness, I had finally told Susannah everything she needed to know.
“Everything?”
“Everything.”
“Even about my parents?”
“Absolutely everything.”
“She’s OK?” He seemed so tentative and so vulnerable.
“She seemed to take it all in her stride. I believe your Susannah may finally have got rid of her demons and may actually be able to help you get rid of some of yours.
“Should I..?”
“Yes”
“I’ll be there in four hours.”
And he was.