part0017

T hree swings of the hammer and the drawer is open. There’s now a hole where the lock used to be and I pull it open easily with the tips of my fingers. Mother watches from her bed, immobile, a look of disbelief on her face. Even now she thought that I wouldn’t do it, imagined that she still had some control over me.

The first things I see are boxes, or rather jewellery cases, old fashioned jewellery cases; velvet covered and worn smooth around the edges. I pick out the nearest one, a rounded, red square box with a tarnished gold hook keeping it closed. I unhook and open it and the glint of gold catches my eye, a delicate gold watch with diamonds set around a mother of pearl face, the wrist strap a delicate chain mail in gold. It speaks of cocktail parties, evening dresses, cigarettes in holders and long, elegant gloves. I can’t imagine Mother ever wore it, I doubt it would even fit around her wrist.

‘Very pretty, Mother.’ I hold up the watch and the light dances and sparkles off the diamonds.

‘It was your grandmother’s,’ she states flatly, glaring at me.

I try to imagine the austere, thin woman that I’ve seen in the photograph album wearing this watch.

‘She wore it all the time when they were in India. Daddy, your Grandfather, was posted there just after the war. One long round of gin and parties by the sound of it.’ Mother purses her lips disapprovingly. ‘Before I was born, of course.’

I knew that Grandfather worked for the Foreign Office but I had no idea what he did. Of course they were young once, they weren’t always old and thin and worn-out looking.

I wrap the watch around my wrist not expecting it to fit and am surprised when it does. I snap the clasp closed and hold my arm in the air to admire it.

‘It’s beautiful’ I say. A feeling of loss hits me; the loss of a father I’ll never know, the loss of grandparents that I can’t remember. A feeling of what could have been had Mother been different, if Mother had loved me. If my grandparents had lived longer would she have been nicer to me? Would they have spoilt me and indulged me?

‘It’s not yours, you know. It’s mine,’ Mother snaps at me.

She has to spoil the moment. Always.

‘But you’re not wear going to wear it are you?’ I snap back. ‘It’s wasted on you, you’re not exactly going anywhere are you?’

‘It’s still mine though.’

‘I think I’ll just borrow it for a while, Mother. A watch like this deserves to be worn and shown off, not shut in a drawer.’

‘It’s valuable, you’ll only go and lose it, or break it. Put it back in the box. Now.’ There’s a hint of panic in her voice but I ignore her and close the empty box and put it back into the drawer. I select another box and take it out; long and narrow this time. I open it and inside nestles a string of yellowing pearls. I study them for a while and then close the box and put it back in the drawer. I go through all of the boxes and there are lots of them; they take up half of the drawer. The other half is full of papers, some loose, some tied together in bundles. I deliberately don’t look at them wanting to concentrate on one thing at a time.

All the boxes contain jewellery of some sort, a man’s watch with a leather strap, assorted brooches, clip on earrings. I put them all back with the exception of one; a black leather box containing an emerald necklace. I put it on and admire myself in Mother’s dressing table mirror; a delicate gold chain that sits just on my collar bone with a line of six emeralds set in gold edged in tiny diamonds. It brings out the green of my eyes and I decide that’ll I keep this one too.

‘Put it back, you can’t wear that, you’ll lose it.’ Mother sounds and looks panicked. ‘What if you lose it? It’s not insured.’

I pay no attention to Mother and start to pull the loose papers out of the drawer and put them on the top of the dressing table. What I’m really interested in is the bundle of what looks like birthday cards and photographs tied with a shoelace.

‘Don’t look at them.’ Mother has gone pale; she doesn’t look very well.

‘You know I’m going to look, Mother. I’d hardly go to the trouble of breaking the drawer open if I’m not going to look.’

‘It won’t make you feel any better, you know. Everything I did was to protect you.’

I pull the bundle out of the drawer and sit down on the end of her bed, just out of her reach. The knot in the shoelace is too tight to undo so I pick up Mother’s nail scissors and snip it. The cards and photographs spill off my lap and onto the bed.

Birthday cards; a picture of a rabbit is on the first one I look at, For a Daughter who is One Today! inside the handwriting is small and neat, To my darling Alison, with lots and lots of love from Daddy XXX . I stare at it and pick up the next card, and then the next. Each one more or less the same, although the words differ slightly. Through a blur of tears, I look at each card, one for each year up until age five and then no more.

‘You told me he didn’t care.’ I finally say in a hollow voice.

‘He didn’t. He left. You weren’t even a year old.’

‘But he sent me cards.’

Mother makes a noise of disgust, ‘Birthday cards and presents, what good is that? I needed him here, not his money or his presents.’

‘What presents? I never got any presents and you never gave me the cards. You told me you didn’t know where he was.’

‘Oh, I knew exactly where he was,’ she snorts. ‘He seemed to think he could have you but not me! I wasn’t having that. He didn’t want me so he wasn’t having you either.’

‘But he was my father, you should have let me see him. Where did he live?’

Mother clamps her lips together and shakes her head. ‘I don’t want to talk about him anymore.’

I know Mother; wild horses won’t make her tell me if she doesn’t want to. Why did he stop bothering? Why did he give up so easily? I wish I could remember him; I have absolutely no memory of him. I’d surely remember if he’d visited me, why didn’t he?

‘Why keep them?’ I ask, ‘Why keep them if you weren’t going to give them to me? You threw the presents out so why keep the cards?’

A look I know well crosses her face; the caught out look and a memory of my fifth birthday leaps unbidden into my mind. A shiny, red bike with stabilisers and a little basket on the front to put my dolly in. The best birthday present that I ever got from Mother; I can’t remember the ones before that but I remember the subsequent ones; gifts of clothes, knitted hats and scarves, pens and pencils, the occasional cheap toy if I was lucky. All things that I would have needed anyway but were given as presents by my tight-fisted mother.

‘He sent me the bike, didn’t he? For my fifth birthday? And you pretended it was from you.’

She sighs in a martyred way. ‘Well, I couldn’t afford fancy presents like that could I? I remember you were thrilled with it, so what’s wrong with that?’

‘You could have told me it was from him, given me the card as well.’

‘You’d never met him, it would only have confused you.’

I look at Mother and wonder why she’s so spiteful and full of hate. Did her parents make her like that or was she just born nasty? Something else I’ll never know.

‘Why keep the cards? Why not throw them out?’

‘I’m not a monster you know. I thought maybe one day I’d give them to you.’

She pins a sad look on her face but I don’t believe her; more likely she saved them to torment me with. She says she’s not a monster but she’s not normal; there’s something wrong with her, no one should be so bitter and hateful towards their own child.

I give up talking to her and pick up the bundle of photographs but they are of me and my grandparents; my grandmother holding me as a tiny baby in her arms on a sunny day, taken in our back garden. The awkward figure of my grandfather standing stiffly beside her, tight-lipped smiles on their faces. I’ve seen similar pictures in the photograph album. There are very few pictures of me in there; a couple of studio shots of me as a baby and the obligatory school photograph but no snaps of me growing up; no holiday snaps because we never had a holiday. I remember that Mother didn’t even want the school photographs as she considered them a waste of money and I had to beg her to buy them. They stop at age eleven; hideously self-conscious by then I no longer wanted a mug shot of my spotty face above an unflattering school uniform.

There’s no photograph of my father but I didn’t expect one; Mother’s hardly likely to keep a picture of a man she hated, is she? Old receipts, ancient out-of-date newspaper coupons, and then a yellowing, folded up sheet of paper clinging to the back of a photograph of my mother holding me as a tiny baby, the hint of a smile on her face. I pull the paper off it and open it out, carefully smoothing the creases flat. Frogham Magistrates Court is emblazoned across the top and I realise that I’m looking at a court order. The date is nearly two years after I was born and with a jolt I realise that my name is on there. As is my father’s and Mother’s. It’s an injunction against my father stating that he’s not allowed to contact my Mother or me in any way.

‘What’s this about?’ I hold the order up to Mother.

‘What does it say it is?’ Mother sneers.

‘It’s an injunction.’

‘That’s right. To stop him pestering me.’

‘What did he do? Did he threaten you?’

Mother laughs nastily. ‘Well, that’s what I told the court. But no, he didn’t threaten me; too weak to do that. But he kept on, wanted to see you, thought he had rights .’

I stare at Mother in disbelief.

‘You lied to a court to stop him from seeing me?’

‘Served him right and the courts always side with the mother. He didn’t want me , thought he could still have you and go back to her . So I made sure he couldn’t. Shows how weak he was, didn’t take him long to stop sending the cards and presents. He gave up after a few years.’

I continue to stare at Mother as it slowly dawns on me.

‘He was married?’

‘He couldn’t be bothered,’ she says spitefully. ‘He didn’t want you enough.’

‘You haven’t answered my question, was he married?’

‘YES!’ she shouts. ‘He was married and he went back to her after our fling as he called it. She couldn’t have children of her own but she thought she could have mine. He thought we could share custody. Well, I made sure that would never happen.’ Mother smiles in satisfaction .

I feel dazed; my whole life she’s told me that my father didn’t want me, didn’t care about me enough to contact me and I believed her. I made no attempt to find him and now it’s too late; I’ll never meet him. I feel devastated but I won’t think about that now; I won’t crumble in front of her . My life could have been so different. I could have had a father and a stepmother, a real family.

‘Don’t you have any pictures of him at all?’ I gather up all of the paper and photographs into a pile.

‘Pff! Why would I keep a picture of him ?’

‘Because he’s my father, maybe I have a right to know what he looks like.’

‘Right?’ she bellows. ‘Don’t talk to me about rights! Who brought you up? Who’s fed and clothed you all of your life?’

I open my mouth to reply but she shouts over me.

‘And what thanks have I ever had for it? After all I’ve done for you, you treat me like a prisoner and rummage around my personal possessions. You’re just like him , totally selfish.’

Mother’s going to have an episode , the signs are all there; the raised shrill voice, the self-righteous certainty that she can do no wrong. I get up and walk out of her room and carry on straight down the stairs and into the kitchen. I take a bag for life shopping bag from the hook on the back of the kitchen door and go back upstairs. By the time I reach her bedroom she’s shouting, ranting that will soon turn into unintelligible screaming about how ungrateful I am. I will most definitely not be staying around to listen to it.

I go into her room and sweep all the papers, cards and photographs off the bed and into the carrier bag. I stand up and pause for a moment and then go to the broken drawer and pick out all of the jewellery boxes and drop those into the bag too. This causes a flurry of louder screaming from Mother; liar, thief, just like your father, are some of the things that I manage to pick out from the screeching.

She is screaming and glaring at me but I refuse to meet her eye and I come out of her room and close the door. I go along the landing into my bedroom and shove the bag into the bottom of the wardrobe and then quickly take the watch and necklace off and change into my running gear. I jog downstairs to the dining room and pull out one of the heavy dining chairs from the table and with immense effort I manhandle it up the stairs. I place the chair backwards in front of her bedroom door, tip it backwards and wedge the back underneath the handle. She won’t be able to open it now. Mother can hear me doing this and it causes more screaming from her but I hold my tongue; I have nothing else to say to her. I’m going to have to think of a more permanent solution in case she tries to get downstairs again. Maybe a lock on her door, a padlock, possibly. I’ll think about that later; the chair will stop her for now.

I’m going for a very long run and by the time I come back Mother will have exhausted herself and will be asleep.

I need peace and quiet to think.

I go back downstairs and just to be on the safe side I pick up the handset from the telephone holder and put it in my pocket. As I let myself out of the front door I can still hear Mother screaming but I think it’s getting fainter; I think she’s tiring herself out.

All the same, I’m thankful that we live in a detached house.

I run and run, trying to make sense of events. One part of me is devastated that I’ll now never get the chance to meet my father but the other part is elated that he didn’t abandon me deliberately; he tried but she stopped him.

I can’t really mourn someone that I’ve never met but I mourn for what I might have had; what might have been. I knew Mother was vindictive but to deny a father the right to see his own child takes vindictiveness to a new level, even for Mother.

First thing on Monday I’ll ring the solicitors and make an appointment to go in and see them. Perhaps my father has left me a letter or photographs? There must be some way I can find out about him, find out what he was like. I wonder if I have half-brothers and half-sisters and then realise that of course, that’s not possible. How could I have siblings if I’m his next of kin and Mother said his wife couldn’t have children. I could have aunts and uncles though, couldn’t I? I could have other family apart from Mother. Maybe they could tell me about him. Perhaps I have relatives on my father’s side who would welcome me; who would be a proper family to me.

I run past The Rise; it’s warm for early May and the late afternoon sunshine has bought out dog walkers and joggers aplenty. I nod as I pass a familiar runner whom I often see on my nightly runs and a sudden bubble of happiness surges through me. It’s so unexpected that I slow down to analyse why on earth I should feel happy.

What do I have to be happy about? My father has just died and I’ve never met him and now never will, that’s hardly something to rejoice about, is it?

No, it’s not. But I now know that he didn’t abandon me, he cared, and that counts for something. I’m no longer the fat, unhappy downtrodden lump that I was, I’m fit, slim, young, and I have my whole life ahead of me.