The Scrapbook (21 page)

Tommy was waiting in the car park at the dock, vast and still amongst the ebb and flow of the crowds. The hair tufting from under his cap was thinner and greyer and his face was a web of wrinkles. I stopped in front of him and sagged, tears blurring my first proper sight of home. He patted the air above my shoulder delicately and bent to take my case.

It's good to see you, love. Where's the rest of it?

I'd left behind everything that had belonged to the other Fern. I didn't need it anymore. I shrugged and walked ahead of him to his car in my cracked and faded, cherry red Doc Martens, and focused on the loose slap-slap of worn soles against tarmac. He tried to talk on the journey home, awkward attempts at conversation that I didn't respond to.

Mum was fidgeting at the open front door when the car stopped by the garden gate. She rushed to me, arms spread, stumbling down the uneven path in her slippers. She'd put on weight, jiggles of fat frolicking around her jaw and stomach. Behind me, I could sense Tommy averting his eyes.

And then I was squeezed against her.

Oh, Fern, it's so wonderful to have you home. You've dyed your hair red! Come inside, darling, and rest. We'll soon have you right as rain.

I turned to thank Tommy as she led me away and he nodded and got back into his car. My mother hadn't even noticed him standing there. She chattered as she shut me into the house.

Well, it's very bright isn't it, and I think I preferred it brown, but it does suit you. I've made you an appointment with Dr Harris, he knows all about what happened. You mustn't worry that I'm disappointed, it was just all too much for you. But you're home now. You're safe. Oh, Fern, apart from the hair you look just the same, you haven't changed at all.

She unpacked my case and examined my blister packs of tablets while I sat at the kitchen table and looked around the room. The kettle was different. The dresser stood bowed beneath the weight of half a dozen bottles of wine and gin. Everything had a blur of grime. I was home.

I pushed myself to my feet and walked through the hall and up the stairs to my old room. The bed was covered with a new duvet and pillows. The curtains were drawn. I lay down and faced the wall and when mum came in a few minutes later I closed my eyes. The floorboards creaked as she shifted in the doorway for a moment and then left.

I kept my eyes closed and concentrated all of my energy on willing my hair to grow. The sooner the original brown swallowed that alien red, the sooner I could forget that I had ever been anyone else but the person lying in this bed right now. It was over. I should never have believed I could get away.

*

Mum keeps seeking me out to talk about Rick, to marvel at the similarities between us. She's gloating just a little and I can't really blame her. The years of my condemnation, my refusal to pity her or understand the love that prompted her to sell herself so short, lie unspoken between us and I'm just grateful that she's only gloating a little. I've stopped crying now but she hovers over me and trails tissues from her sleeve in a never-ending stream of apricot, just in case I need them.

He said he'd call. He said he wouldn't leave until we'd spoken. But the phone doesn't ring. I've checked it twice already this morning and had to pretend I was just giving it a polish with my jumper sleeve when mum appeared at my shoulder with a knowing smile.

I sat by myself in the kitchen last night after she'd gone to bed and remembered the sting of Rick's stubble-scrape across my chin, the protuberant bone in his big toe that reduces him to a hobble if he walks too far. I rehearsed words to bring him back or drive him away altogether, swinging between outrage that he could call me a liar and shame that I've lied to him so much. I tried writing things down as they occurred to me, scribbling and crossing through, muttering to myself until I suddenly realised what I would look like if another person entered the room. Then I rushed upstairs, stooped to stand before the mirror in my room, searching myself for my mother but finding only me.

I wonder if there was always something deliberate about my choice of lover and lifestyle, a subconscious need to get closer to mum by copying her, trying out her life the way I used to try on her heels when I was a child.

‘How did you do it?' I ask mum over lunch. ‘Year after year, never knowing when he'd come for you. Weren't there times when you just wanted to end it, give yourself a chance with someone who'd be free to love you back?'

She ponders that as she strokes her hair away from her face. It's nearly all grey now but it suits her. ‘Of course there were, but those times didn't come often enough. I adored your father but I think I also adored the situation itself in a strange way. It appealed to me.'

I think I hear a car in the lane outside so I get up to check. As I take my seat again, stooped with disappointment, I avoid mum's eye.

‘How did it appeal to you?' I ask. ‘Was it the excitement of sneaking around and being the other woman?'

She moves her head minutely and is silent for so long that I think she must have forgotten the question. But then she sniffs and starts to speak.

‘When I met your dad I didn't know he was married but he was always so mysterious, so elusive, his wife might as well have been standing behind him every time we were together. Then I found out about her and it was as if I'd been handed a gift. I was suddenly freed from the conventional fairy tale trappings, the worrying about whether he'd ask me to marry him, whether he'd still love me as much after we'd shared a bed and a routine. It's the way for us Gilbert women. Your grandmother was the same, wasn't she? You know about her and my father.'

She reaches for her glass while I stare at her. ‘The letters? You've read them?'

‘Of course I have. I was determined to find something that would explain my mum and dad, and what they had. You forget, Fern, I grew up in a house with two people who loved each other fiercely and exclusively. I could see from a young age they weren't like other parents.' She chooses not to see my raised eyebrow. ‘Sometimes your granny would smile at him and his breath would leave his chest in one big rush as if she'd put her mouth against his and sucked it out. And she never stopped having that effect on him. When I found the letters that's when it all made sense; it was stolen love, and sinful, and that's why it was so special.'

I don't know what to say. So her view of love is based on a belief that the best kind is the one that you haven't any right to. Stolen love. She watched her parents and drew that conclusion even before she found the evidence to back it up. And have I in turn based my view of love on hers? It makes me shiver a little, to think of how far-reaching the collapsing dominoes of fate and learning are. If I were to research the family tree a little further, would I find an adulterous affair buried in my great grandmother's past? Would I hand this legacy down to my own child?

Mum pushes her plate away and gets to her feet. ‘He will call you, Fern. Don't worry yourself about that. I'm going to try and have a nap now but come and get me if you need me.'

She strokes my hair on her way past. I catch hold of her hand to stay her. ‘But would you do it again? You've got the advantage of hindsight now, and the loneliness of the last twenty years. Surely you wouldn't do it again?'

Her eyes fill with tears. ‘Again and again and again. I love him. But the real question is: would I want that for you? Because, no, Fern, I wouldn't. It hurts me to think of you going through any of what I've been through. It may have suited me but you're a very different creature. Despite the similarities, despite the child you're going to have.' She shakes her head and shifts slightly so that she can look at me.

‘If he'd met me first he'd have married me, I know it, and maybe he'd even be sat in this room with us right now. But I've thought about it a lot over the years and I've come to the conclusion that I wouldn't have had it any other way. If he'd met me when he was free to marry me I might not even have loved him enough, not without the sinful baggage. And then there wouldn't have been you.'

She shrugs and laughs, and tugs her hand loose. I let her go. I can't remember ever being with her like this, so close, and I'm suddenly keen to end the moment now, before one of us says the wrong thing and the other takes offence and it's all ruined.

‘I'll wake you in a couple of hours, mum.'

She sighs as she walks out. ‘Oh, I doubt I'll be able to sleep, love. I'm too churned up to relax.'

Rick pulls up in the lane outside an hour later. I meet him at the front door with a finger pressed to my lips and shut us both into the kitchen where our talking won't disturb mum. He smiles a little when he hears her snoring through the living room door. ‘So that's who you've inherited it from.'

He looks tired but composed. No sign of the anguish that's been my lot since last night. I have to resist a cruel desire to say something horrible just to see his face fall and know that he cares. We sit at the table but don't touch.

‘I'll leave for the mainland on the last ferry tonight,' he tells me, ‘if you want me to.'

I get up to make coffee. I know he's following me with his eyes as I move around the room but I avoid his gaze until I'm sat opposite him again, and then I stretch my fingers across the table and touch them to his. ‘Don't go. Don't ever go.' I watch him carefully.

He blinks at me. ‘What do you mean?'

We've never come close to this before, to a serious discussion of Our Future, and I know that's been entirely down to me. I chose to believe my sidestepping and my silence were evidence that I had a conscience buried beneath my desire for him. If I never asked about his wife, never let him even suggest the possibility of leaving her, then the damage done could be repairable.
But, like mum, I was just selfishly pursuing my own skewed love-ideal, keeping him at arm's length so that I wouldn't have to surrender the fantasy.

‘Leave her. Or leave me if you can't leave her. No
,
leave her. I want you to stay.'

I can't take it back now. I don't think I want to. The relief is tremendous and I know I'm smiling too widely for such a solemn moment but I can't help it. It doesn't last long. Rick stares at me until my mouth is a dry, tight line and my hands are shaking. I hadn't considered his response, hadn't ventured any further in my thought process than overcoming my own lifetime's fears and failings, but now I do. In the moment before he speaks I think I've lost him and I know I can't bear it.

‘But how can I trust you, Fern?' he asks. ‘What if this is another one of your games and you change your mind tomorrow?'

So it's not an outright rejection. The relief makes me smile again. ‘It's not a game, I promise. I want you to be just mine, and I want us to raise our child together. I want you to leave your wife.'

He still doesn't move to touch me and he's not smiling. I try to think of something else to say, something more persuasive, but panic has emptied my mind so I just sit in silence and wait.

‘I know I'm supposed to be the villain of the piece, the married man dangling two women's hearts,' he says slowly, looking down at the table and then back at me, ‘but with you I feel more like the victim.' He ignores my gasp. ‘You lie to me, Fern, you lie all the time, about everything. I don't know who you are; I don't know anything about your life. You've never let me.'

He holds his hand up to stop me from speaking. ‘I know you love me, but on your screwed up terms, always on your terms. I think you like this situation we have, you get a kick out of it, and I don't believe you really want to change anything. You don't want intimacy. You don't want me to know you.' He takes a deep breath in. ‘So, if you really mean it about me leaving her, you're going to have to prove it to me. Your word just isn't good enough anymore.'

This is it. This is the damage I've done. It's sitting opposite me in the shape of the man I love and telling me I'm not to be trusted. And he's right. Of course he's right. But I don't want that life anymore. I don't want to raise a child and begrudge every moment that child takes from my other love. I don't want to make my child believe their father doesn't love them, and I don't want to blame them when their father eventually leaves. Because he will leave, if I don't change.

Maybe that's why my own father left us. Not because of me, or because he got bored of us, but because my mother denied him any real place in her life. She didn't want him to exist in any concrete sense.

I stand up and walk around the table, put my hands either side of Rick's face and kiss him on the mouth. ‘You're right,' I tell him. ‘You're right about all of it. I keep secrets as if my life depended on it, and I deceive people as a matter of course. It's so ingrained an impulse that it doesn't even feel wrong. I don't want to blame mum, but she's the same as me. Or, I'm the same as her. We've always been like that.'

I reach over and take the padded envelope from the dresser drawer, and I lay it on the table in front of him. He looks confused.

‘My father left when I was nine,' I say. ‘He was married, like you, and my mother loved him more than anything. She loved him more than she loved me. She didn't know anything about him, not even where he lived, but she liked it that way. I've been trying to find out what happened to him, for her and for me. Open the envelope. Tell me what's inside.'