Don't You Love Your Daddy? (19 page)

Sue was bursting with pride as my father opened the front door. ‘First rule of the house, children. We all take our shoes off as we come in. Hurry up now, I want to give you the tour,’ she said, and I saw my father was already untying his laces. By the front door on a neat mat lay an assortment of cotton slippers. Pointing at the second smallest pair, Sue said, ‘Those are yours, Sally. Now, help Billy with his too, please.’

It was the most pristine house I had ever seen. Cream carpets covered the stairs and hall while the floor of the L-shaped room that Sue insisted I called ‘the lounge’ was covered with a thick white shag pile rug. I thought that if Dolly did manage to get in there, which I already knew was strictly forbidden, we would never see her. ‘Second rule of the house – remember, Sally, what we told you? No dogs. Also, no toys, no food or drinks are allowed in here,’ Sue chanted. It seemed there were going to be strict rules for each and every room.

The new furniture was already in place. Two white leather settees, a chrome-and-glass coffee-table, shelves with crystal figurines and grey and white pottery figures, which Sue told me proudly were something called ‘Lladro’. A bar shaped like a globe stood in a corner and my father opened it to show me the assortment of bottles inside. Against the wall near to an imitation stone fireplace, there was another shelving unit where the new eight-track stereo system stood. A completely round white television on a white stand was on the carpet. It was unlike anything I had ever seen before and I wondered if Billy and I would ever be allowed to watch it.

In the dining area there was an oblong table made of a pale shiny wood with six chairs that had cream-upholstered seats. The matching sideboard was covered with framed photographs of Sue and her parents. Those of her and my father’s wedding were also there, although there were no group ones showing any of our family. Pastel prints and gilt mirrors hung on the walls and at the windows there were floor-length beige velvet curtains tied back with gold tasselled cords.

With Billy trailing in our wake, Sue showed us around the rest of the house with pride. The kitchen was gleaming white with shiny stainless-steel pans on the stove, the bathroom was tiled in pale green, and Billy’s room had a single bed with a brightly coloured quilt. ‘You can keep all your toys in here. Nothing is to be left out,’ she told him, as she opened a cupboard and left him staring in bewilderment at his new surroundings. I knew that playing anywhere downstairs would not be allowed. Then a few feet from his room she stopped and swung open the door of the room she announced was mine.

It was decorated in pink and white. My bed was covered with a pale pink frilly eiderdown and beside it stood a small table and a lamp with a pink-fringed shade. On one wall there were built-in wardrobes, some bookshelves and a small desk. ‘For you to do your homework on,’ she told me. ‘No more having to sit at the kitchen table to do it.’ She sat on the bed then, and motioned for me to sit beside her. ‘Sally,’ she said, ‘I want you to call me Mummy from now on. You can’t keep calling me Auntie Sue, can you?’ Her arm went round me and I could smell her perfume, a cloying scent that I didn’t like. I shifted down the bed a little – her closeness made me feel uncomfortable. ‘You like your room, don’t you? I chose the wallpaper myself.’

I looked at the pink-and-white-striped walls and whispered, ‘Yes.’ I knew she wanted more, that a flood of girlish words expressing my delight was expected, but this room with its fitted cupboards and pale carpeting was nothing like any place I had slept in before and I found it intimidating.

Her eyes slid around the room. ‘I don’t know any little girl who wouldn’t love a bedroom of their own looking like this.’

Finally I managed the words I knew she wanted to hear. ‘Thank you. It’s lovely.’

‘Thank you who, Sally?’ she chided.

‘Mummy,’ I managed to force out.

‘Sally, I know we’re all going to be so happy here,’ she said then and, with a smile, she left me to sort out my things.

I put my books on the shelves with my Tiny Tears doll. My dolls’ house, which my father had carried upstairs, went under it. Then I hung my clothes in the small white fitted wardrobe. The last thing I took out of my case was the treasured photograph of my mother. I held it for a few moments: my mother’s face had become blurred in my mind and seeing her image made it clearer. I placed it on my bedside table facing my bed so that it would be the first thing I saw when I woke.

Lost in my thoughts I didn’t hear Sue’s footsteps so I jumped when I suddenly realized she was back in my room.

‘Sally, what’s this you’re looking at?’ she asked, and pulled the frame out of my hands.

‘My mummy,’ I said, and started to tell her how my grandmother had given it to me. I stopped when I saw that Sue’s mouth was pursed and her eyes flashed with anger.

‘Sally, I thought we’d just had a little conversation where you agreed that I’m your mummy now and I don’t want you talking about any other one. Now, have you finally got that into your head? Because I don’t want to have to tell you again. Do you understand me?’

‘But what else can I call her?’ I asked, more puzzled than alarmed at her displeasure.

‘I thought your daddy had also told you not to talk about her. Hasn’t he?’

‘Yes. But Nana said that was because it made him sad. He didn’t say I can’t talk about her to anyone else.’

I knew the words I had said were the wrong ones, but I had no way of retracting them and my voice just dried up. I felt a wave of apprehension as I saw Sue’s rage reflected in her face.

‘Well, I don’t want to hear her name again. You’re not to talk about her. In fact, I want you to forget that you ever had another mummy.’

I just stared at her in shock. How could she say that to me?

‘I don’t want to,’ I said defiantly. ‘I don’t want to forget my mummy. She loved me.’

‘Sally, if it wasn’t for me, you and Billy would have ended up in a home. You know that, don’t you?’

I started to argue that my nana would have looked after us, only for her to brush that statement aside. ‘Your nana’s getting too old to look after small children, Sally. She told you that herself, didn’t she? And it’s up to me whether you stay here with us – do you understand me?’

‘Yes,’ I said, although I didn’t really.

‘Good! So, no more answering me back. Ever. Do you hear me?’

I heard her, and the words she spoke brought back the memory of how frightened I had been at the thought of being taken away from everything I loved. But Sue, in just a few short weeks, had managed to do that anyhow. Wanting to get away from her, I made movements to leave the room, which suddenly felt claustrophobic.

‘Sally, before you go I want you to promise this is the last time I’ll need to speak to you about this.’

I looked mutinously back at her and said nothing.

The veneer of Sue as the loving stepmother who wanted to do her best for us disappeared, and I felt the force of her will dominate that room. I also felt it in the tight grip on my shoulder and saw it in her glare. I shrank back from her.

‘Say it. Say you’ll never talk about her again. I want to hear it before you leave this room!’ she shrieked.

My tongue seemed to swell in my mouth, blocking the words she was trying to make me say, and all I could do was stare silently at her with my lips moving silently.

‘Sally, I’m warning you! Say it!’ she spat.

Against my will I managed to force the words out: ‘I won’t talk about her in front of you again.’

‘And who am I?’

‘Mummy,’ I replied dutifully.

‘Now if I’m your mummy, the only one you have, who is that a picture of?’

I didn’t understand what she wanted me to say.

‘Sally, it distresses me that you have that photograph in a room I’ve had decorated for you. It seems to me you’re a very ungrateful little girl.’

‘No, I’m not, really I’m not,’ I protested, and tears threatened to spill over.

‘The only thing I expect from you, Sally,’ Sue continued, taking no heed of my distress, ‘is that you show your gratitude and treat me with the respect I deserve. Do you understand? Then we’ll get on well again. Now, you don’t want to spoil our first day in our new home, do you?’

I shook my head, still not knowing what she wanted from me. I was soon to find out.

She gave me back the photograph and I went to put it in my case out of her sight.

‘Oh, no, Sally! That’s not what I want at all,’ she said sharply. ‘Here, give it back to me.’

She lifted my face with one of her slim white hands and, her sharp nails digging into my cheek, forced me to meet her gaze. ‘You can show me just how grateful you really are by doing the one thing that will please me, can’t you? You want to do that, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ I answered softly.

‘Well, what I want you to do is take that photograph out of its frame and tear it up now,’ she said.

‘No – please, it’s my only one.’

‘Sally, if you care what I think you’ll do what I ask of you.’ She turned the frame over, undid the tiny clasps holding the photograph in place and removed it. ‘I’m not leaving this room till you do this.’ Feeling an all-consuming hatred for her, I did as she asked. I took one last look at my mother’s features and tried with all my might to imprint her likeness for ever in my memory. As my fingers ripped the picture I watched in horror as her face became a pile of tiny jagged pieces. I wanted to cry but somehow I stopped the tears. That was the start of the invisible, impenetrable wall I built, brick by brick, between myself, Sue and everything else that hurt me.

Sue, I swore silently, was never going to see me cry again and, over the painful years that followed, she never did.

Apart from the first miserable days of living in the new house, everything that happened, coming up to Christmas and the few days after it, has been driven from my memory. Glimpses of those months when I was around eight sometimes float into my mind, and I can see the lounge with a tall white artificial Christmas tree in the corner. No pine needles could be allowed to fall on the new carpets, and my mother’s lovely collection of old glass decorations had been abandoned when we left the old house. Sue kept arriving home with boxes and bags of sparkling new decorations, all in her colour scheme of white, silver and pink. Of course there would have been presents, but I can no longer remember what they were.

There were drinks parties that she called ‘cocktails’ or ‘at home’ for the new neighbours and her many friends. Banished to our bedrooms, Billy and I could hear laughter and the Christmas music playing in the lounge. I know we went to Sue’s parents for our Christmas dinner, but all recollection of the meal has vanished from my mind.

The one thing I can recall in perfect detail is the terrible row Sue and my father had.

When my grandfather died, everything in my life began to change again. It had snowed heavily on that memorable Friday night. Great flurries of thick white flakes had fallen, carpeting the lawns and transforming the bare branches of the trees into objects of great beauty.

Christmas had come and gone and the new year had already been heralded in when we heard the terrible news. It was while we were eating breakfast that the telephone rang and my father went into the hall to answer it. I knew something was wrong even before he told us what had happened. His shoulders were slumped and the colour had drained from his face when he came back into the kitchen.

‘My father’s dead,’ he said to Sue, forgetting that it was also the death of Billy’s and my grandfather he had announced so bluntly. ‘A heart attack,’ he said. ‘My mum thought it was indigestion and went to get him something to take and when she came back he was already dead. It happened in just those few minutes.’

When Sue asked when, he said it had been the evening before, but my grandmother had waited until the morning to ring him. ‘She thought we might have been out, New Year and all,’ he said, ‘and she didn’t want to have to tell the children or the babysitter.’

For the first time in my life I saw my father’s eyes water with emotion, and with his grief came remorse and guilt. ‘We should have gone for Christmas, Sue. They asked us. Mum and Dad wanted to see the children so much and they wanted to give us our presents, not send them by post like they did.’

Her reply was characteristically unsympathetic. Something about he couldn’t have known it was to be his father’s last Christmas and he mustn’t blame himself for not going to see them.

He didn’t blame himself, he shouted. He blamed her. And that was when their row started.

She was controlling, he was ungrateful, and as the shouting escalated, Billy and I slid off our seats and disappeared up to our respective rooms.

It was later that my father told me the funeral was to be in three days and, unlike my mother’s, I was to go. I didn’t let on that I had heard this mentioned in the row.

‘Sue’s not coming,’ was all he said, but I had heard enough to know he didn’t want her with him any more than she wanted to go. I had heard her tell him in a shrill voice, grown nearly hysterical with anger, that she didn’t want to go with him and that she knew his family didn’t like her. They blamed her for taking him and the children away and for not going to church.

In response to ‘What on earth will I tell them if I turn up without you?’ she told him to say she was looking after Billy and that he was too young to go to a funeral. He retorted that she could hardly expect them to be fond of her when she did nothing but talk about herself and her father’s money, and put obstacles in his way when he wanted us to visit his parents.