After the Lie: A gripping novel about love, loss and family secrets

I
n June 1982
, I was thirteen. Pre-internet. Pre-Facebook. Pre-Twitter. We were oblivious to the
#proudparents
of four-year-olds who’d swum five metres for a duckling certificate. We had no idea how many people were eating perfect poached eggs for breakfast. We certainly didn’t know that our neighbour down the road ‘loved her husband to the moon and back – twice’. And we didn’t have the pressure of capturing the one nanosecond that the whole family was happy against a sunny backdrop of turquoise sea, so that everyone else could feel a grumbling sense of dissatisfaction with their own lives.

1982 didn’t seem different to any other year. At weekends, I’d disappear off on my bike with a couple of jam sandwiches, a bottle of squash and a warning from my mother to ‘Mind what you’re up to’ before reappearing at teatime hours later. When it was rainy, I’d lie on my bed taping Kool & The Gang off the radio with the microphone jammed up against the speaker, desperately trying to get a version of
Get Down On It
that didn’t have the DJ talking over the beginning or someone shouting ‘Dinnertime!’ in the middle. When it was hot, I’d sunbathe on the Norfolk dunes slathered in baby oil, flicking through
Smash Hits
and plotting how to buy and wear a mini skirt without my mother finding out. The perennial arguments still raged on: why I couldn’t have my ears pierced, why we couldn’t have a video recorder, why I still had to go to church every Sunday.

The one thing my mother and I weren’t at loggerheads about was how often I needed to cycle to the library after school to find new reference books for a particularly onerous history project.

Or at least, that’s what I told her.

And that little lie made the big difference. It led to the ten minutes I could never get back, never undo. Like smashing your iPhone, leaving your bag on the bus, driving into a bollard in a car park – but with consequences that money couldn’t fix. That sick feeling of self-loathing that all of this could have been avoided if you’d just slowed down, taken your time,
thought things through.
Or as my sixteen-year-old son would say now, ‘Not been such a dickhead’.

But in those glorious ten minutes, I didn’t even realise I was making a mistake.

Let alone one I could never leave behind.

If the internet had existed back then, I’d have dreaded logging onto Facebook. No doubt my classmates would have been retweeting and WTFing until their fingers fell off.

But in 1982, the only thing that went viral in my little Norfolk village was glandular fever. I wouldn’t have expected to get away completely unscathed, of course. I would have braced myself for shocked disapproval from the milkman, an abrupt halt to conversation in the greengrocer’s or some knowing looks from the neighbours. Worst case scenario, I’d have skulked past the bus shelter, ignoring the jeers from the boys sharing stolen Benson & Hedges and swigging Bacardi filched from their parents’ cocktail cabinets.

No, for a mistake to go viral in the ’80s, you needed a deputy headmaster for a dad. A dad who adored his daughter and ended up in prison. To make sure it haunted you forever, you needed a Catholic mother to fall on her rosary beads and declare that ‘all that business’ should never be spoken about again.

Ever.

B
irthday presents terrify me
. Nothing shows up the chasm between who you are and who everyone else would like you to be more than what they ‘saw and thought of you’. And what anyone thought of me never quite matched what I thought of myself.

By far the most dread-inducing present was the flourish of a gift from my mother, delivered in recycled paper carefully smoothed out and reused. Nothing screamed ‘this is the person I wish you were’ more than the parade of diaries, drawer dividers and polo-necked sweaters delivered to me over the decades. But this year, on my forty-third birthday, she’d surpassed herself. She sat with her hands folded in her lap, expectation scaffolding her face. She nodded at the box on the table. ‘Go on then. Open it.’

I picked at the Sellotape, taking care not to tear the paper. A gold cross necklace. I only wore silver. And I never wore crosses. Never. Of all the ways I’d tried to make amends over the last thirty years, giving in to my mother’s rampant Catholicism had remained a glittering exception. No conversation was complete without a variation on ‘God knows what’s in your heart’ – which was really my mother’s shorthand for ‘God will get you back’.

A great bubble of resentment surged up. An image of flinging the necklace into the patch of nettles at the bottom of the garden rushed through my mind.

‘That’s lovely, thank you.’

‘Put it on, darling. Come here, I’ll do it up for you.’

I sat down with my back towards her – a straight back in order not to cop the ‘You’re becoming so round-shouldered’ speech. As she clicked the necklace around my neck with a satisfied ‘Perfect’, I resisted the urge to leap up, throw open my kitchen cupboards and fling out the Wedgwood tea service she’d bought me ‘for best’. To sweep my Christmas present of fussy cut glass tumblers to the floor. To hurl around the collection of jugs she’d infiltrated into my home over the years in the hope that my children would stop their ‘uncouth’ dumping of plastic milk cartons on the table.

‘Go and look in the mirror.’

I walked out to the downstairs cloakroom and peered at myself in the mirror, amazed that my face looked smooth and neutral rather than like a ball of dough in the proving stage. I touched the cross. Not quite as hideous as the Pope Francis thimble, Pope John Paul II commemorative plate or the absolute
pièce de résistance
, the china Popemobile complete with waving pontiff. I could have made a fortune if I’d allowed the kids to put it all on eBay, but I kept it as an insurance against the day when she’d ask, ‘Now what happened to…?’

I knew Mark would tease me and say, ‘Why didn’t she have done with it and buy you a hairshirt?’ All our married life, he’d kept out of the tangled dynamics that passed for a relationship between my mother and me. He’d reluctantly agreed to have Jamie and Izzy baptised, but put his foot down about a full-blown Catholic upbringing. ‘I’m not having the kids indoctrinated with guilt, blame and shame in the name of religion.’

It was the one time I’d been forced to stand up to my mother when she got her needle stuck on when they were going to be confirmed. I’d fudged it by saying we’d let them decide when they were old enough. Now they were teenagers and refusing even to go to church, my mother was on a mission. But so far, neither of them appeared the slightest bit worried about going to hell.

I walked back in, concentrating on a light, sunny step.

‘So, what are you doing for the rest of the day?’ my mother asked, in a tone that suggested she’d been the highlight.

‘I’ve just been elected chairwoman of the fundraising committee at school. They want a new rugby clubhouse, so I need to go to a meeting about that.’ Even I could see that as birthdays went, it was rather short on celebration.

I was prepared for a little dig of ‘Hasn’t Mark planned anything special for you?’ but instead my mother burst out with an animated ‘Really, darling? You should have said earlier. You have done well.’

My mother wasn’t given to over-the-top praise. Any praise, in fact. But she was teetering right on the edge of a squeak of approval at my ‘news’, which was proof indeed that my bar for success was not so much low as buried. Hallelujah for climbing up another rung on the redeeming scale. I usually managed to haul myself up a notch about every five years. There was nothing she liked more than a crumb of evidence that Lydia Rushford, miscreant offspring of Arthur and Dorothy Southport, was no longer the social pariah of yesteryear.

She grabbed my hand and squeezed it. The softness of her skin surprised me.

I waited.

My mother selected a tone several decibels below the one she’d used to congratulate me. ‘It’s wonderful how you’ve moved on from all that…you know…’

I stared at her. In our family, no one
moved on
. The passage of time had covered the worst wounds with a scattering of normality. But like watchful crows gathered on a garden fence, our conflicting resentments were always waiting to swoop down for a vicious peck. Just before I took my dad’s arm to walk down the aisle to marry Mark, my mother clutched my hand and whispered, ‘It hasn’t turned out so badly, considering…’ My first born, Jamie, had barely taken a breath in the world before she murmured, ‘We’ll keep an eye on this one, we don’t want history repeating itself…’

Too flipping right about that. Whatever mistakes Jamie made, I wouldn’t cling to them like a koala to a eucalyptus for three decades.

Unfortunately, I now had my mother’s full attention. ‘What will you have to do on this committee, dear?’

The full horrors of what it would entail eluded me. Despite my mother’s delight, being voted chairwoman wasn’t a question of ‘doing well’. In any half-accurate poll, I reckoned there would be a one in two chance of people opting to clean the sports hall loos rather than chair a school committee.

Personally, I would have happily put on the Marigolds and got scrubbing. I was cringing at the thought of sitting in front of the headmaster, discussing the merits of a hog roast over a quiz evening. I should have refused immediately when the class über-rep, Melanie, had put my name forward at the coffee morning. The enthusiastic endorsements from the others had paralysed me. It seemed easier to get the spotlight off me if I agreed than to explain why the very word –
headmaster
– made me want to hide behind the bike sheds and start smoking for the first time in my life.

When I tried to discuss my misgivings with my mother, she might as well have stuck her fingers in her ears and tra-la-la’d. ‘You spend your life fiddling about with balloons and coffee in that wedding business of yours, don’t you? You’ll be perfect.’

After all these years, it was astonishing that my mother could still engender a little frisson of fury every time she talked about my career. ‘That business of mine’ often took care of the exorbitant school fees, plus the running of the whole Rushford household whenever Mark’s kitchen business was in a slump. But unlike my doctor brother who saved lives, my job keeping bride and groom calm with precision event planning was a little frippery – a small step up from origami and pom-pom making.

‘I’m not centre stage at work. No one is watching me. I’m just creeping about behind the scenes, straightening bows and making sure there are enough wine glasses.’

But nothing would derail my mother from her cock-a-hoopness that her daughter had reached the pinnacle of social acceptability. Who could blame her? After the miracle of snagging a husband in the first place, I’d spent nearly two decades airbrushing myself into a perfect wife. Just enough small talk, Boden and discreet pearl earrings to pass through life, slipping under the radar, as unremarkable as a mid-range estate car. No wonder Melanie had peered at all the mothers scrabbling down the hallway, FitFlops flapping at the mere mention of ‘volunteers needed’ and thought, ‘Where’s Lydia? She can organise baskets of almond favours and rose petals on tables. A couple of quizzes and a raffle should be well within her grasp.’

As a measure of my mother letting her hair down in wild celebration, she sawed another slice off the birthday Battenberg, saying, ‘I shouldn’t really,’ and mumbling, ‘Accolades like that don’t come along every day.’ If I’d just kept my mouth shut, I wouldn’t have to endure months of my mother wanting to know the minutiae of every tedious meeting. Or worse, grilling me on my social connections: had I met any lawyers, doctors or dentists? Whether or not they were nice, decent people didn’t even feature. And now her interrogations were spreading down the generations with ‘innocent’ enquiries whenever she clapped eyes on my children –

‘Izzy, so who are you friendly with now? Hannah? Isn’t her mother the one with a stud in her nose? I wouldn’t bother with her. Don’t you see anything of the little girl whose father’s a surgeon in London, what’s she called, Alexandra?’ – followed by Izzy disappearing upstairs with the insolent stomp of a thirteen-year-old.

If Jamie wasn’t quick enough to evaporate at the same time, the focus would switch to him. ‘I hope you’re going to join the orchestra? It’s a very good way to get to know the right people.’ Which was enough to make him sever a few fingers so he’d never have to pick up his saxophone again. Luckily, at sixteen, Jamie had mastered the art of the grunt that could be construed as a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’.

As usual, my mother heard what she wanted to hear.

Eventually the conversation came full circle, a rainbow of Battenberg crumbs flying out of my mother’s mouth as she made the point – again – that ‘after all that business’ I’d been lucky to end up with a husband and family.

After thirty years, the only reply that allowed us to grind along without bloodshed was ‘Another piece of cake?’