Chapter 30
Jane heard Grace’s sharp intake of breath scrape against the inside of her throat, but that was the only sound she made and Jane was glad she’d shocked her into silence.
She sat up in bed then and flicked on the reading light.
Grace’s expression was one of someone who had just been slapped and hadn’t a clue what to do about it.
‘Allow me to start from the beginning,’ said Jane. ‘You might think I’m going round the houses, but it’s necessary. Is that all right?’
Grace nodded, slowly.
Jane took a sip from the glass of water she’d put at her side. She was going to need her own throat to hold up for this story. She wouldn’t even have gone into this much detail in one sitting with Clifford.
‘He was friendly, good-looking and knew it, and he wanted to know why I had a big wet beetroot crying face. He offered me a cigarette and I pretended I could smoke and made a fool of myself coughing and he laughed. He paid me some attention and that’s very intoxicating, especially when my heart and my ego were in bits and looking for something to heal them.
And when he asked if he could take me to the pictures, I said yes.
Not because I fancied him but because I needed to feel…
wanted. I didn’t tell my parents because they wouldn’t have let me go with an older man, one twice my age. So, we met in secret.’
It was right that Kitty and Wilfred got together.
Everyone thought she was just a glamour puss but in fact she was a hell of a woman.
Years later, when Wilfred had a bad accident at work, she fought tooth and nail for compensation for him, way before the blame-game culture – and she got it and she nursed him and looked after him and they loved each other for their rest of their lives.
‘Eight months after the dance, Kitty and Wilfred were married and I was one of her bridesmaids. And I got horribly drunk on fizzy wine and I let David Carteret finally do to me what he’d been trying to do since our third date. “You can’t get pregnant on your first time,” he said.’
She looked at Grace to see if she had guessed what was coming.
‘It hurt, my, it hurt. I’d never been told what sex was like.
Was that what all the fuss was about? I thought.
I certainly couldn’t talk to my mother about it and I had no sisters and all my close friends were virgins.
My parents were furious and I had to get married.
I didn’t want to, I was terrified but I felt I had no choice.
My parents would have thrown me out on the streets if I had brought shame on them.
David wanted children very much; he was older, time was ticking…
so I was rushed down the aisle and seven months later my baby was born.
The official line was that he was a honeymoon baby that had arrived early.
Russell. He was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, he was perfect.
The love… it just engulfed me like a tidal wave.
I know you know what that’s like, Grace.
I didn’t think I could ever feel anything as powerful again but ten months later, Duncan arrived and twelve and a half months after that there was Alan and each time the love was no less.
Those boys were my reason for breathing.
David wasn’t bad to me, but he wasn’t particularly good either.
There was no pleasure in sex because he wasn’t interested in giving me any.
I never felt cared for or valued other than as someone who made the meals, looked after the children, cleaned the house… served his needs.
‘He had a good job, he provided. He wouldn’t allow me to work, but I painted – not that he would have seen that as a job; a little hobby maybe in between dusting and cooking.
I had always wanted to go to art college, but I’d scuppered that for myself by opening my legs, as my mother said.
What a disappointment I was to her. But David loved the children, adored them and I would never have split up the family, however miserable I was, because I had the boys to think about.
I couldn’t anyway; where would I have gone? What would I have lived on?
‘Russell was four when I noticed that things weren’t right.
My mother said he was clumsy, but it was more than that, I felt it.
And I felt it in Duncan as well, something…
not as it should be; he was very crabby and unhappy.
We went to hospitals and Russell was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy.
We were told he would probably die before his eighteenth birthday.
And we were also told that his condition was my fault because there was a correct suspicion it was passed on from the mother.
We were devastated. I hoped and prayed that Duncan hadn’t got it, but he had.
I thought Alan had to be all right, not all three of my boys, please God.
Every time Alan fell over, my heart leapt, but he seemed okay, it was a fall, just a fall.
And then when he was five, he started to cry from pain in his legs and I knew… ’
Grace’s hand pressed against her heart.
‘So yes, when I said that if my son wanted to go in the army I would have gladly let him… I would have waved him off because he would be living and doing what he wanted because he could. Russell died when he fifteen. Duncan just made it to seventeen. Alan died on his eighteenth birthday. They’re all buried in the same grave.
David held up for the funerals and then he just…
let go, he was in such desperate pain. I understood, they were every bit his boys as well as mine; just because I gave birth to them didn’t mean they were any less his.
He gave them all the love he had to give. ’
She left a gap for Grace to absorb this before continuing.
‘After Alan died, all David’s hatred for me poured out as if it had been stockpiled for years.
He blamed me, of course, for everything because people need a tangible target, something to project all their anger onto and he didn’t think I deserved to grieve for what I’d caused.
They were a terrible two years. David drank to blot everything out.
I couldn’t stop him, I couldn’t save him either but I did try.
I took his blows, Grace, mental, verbal, physical, because I blamed myself too.
The last time he put me in hospital I knew that if I stayed, he would kill me and I thought he just might have a chance to rally if I wasn’t around constantly reminding him of the damage my faulty genes had inflicted upon his life.
So I left him. I went to my parents for help, my Christian parents who told me all of it was God’s punishment on me, the wayward daughter.
I never saw them again after that. I stuck a pin in a map and moved where it landed: Manchester.
I had a small bag with me and enough money to get a room and start again.
I’d been there only weeks when David died, fell over a banister, drunk.
I’d like to think it was instant, that he didn’t feel it; it was only a matter of time before it would happen.
I buried him with his boys, with our boys. ’
Jane blew out her breath to steady herself. She was back there in those dreadfully sad days. She knew her words would be swirling around in Grace’s brain. She hadn’t intended to outdo her in the grief stakes, but she did want her to believe there was hope after losing someone.
‘I met Clifford ten years later. I was working as a secretary at the university and I was drafted to him, the newly appointed Head of Psychology. Our connection was instant, a magnificent force. What a wonderful human being he was, a man who respected me, treasured me, loved me, a partner in every sense of the word. Such a difference from my first marriage. There was true equality in our relationship but also fun, romance, passion. I found real happiness with him. It made me wonder how many women are in relationships where they don’t have it, where they think all that is just an idealistic myth and have no idea what could be, as I once thought.
Your Frank reminds me of Clifford; there is a reverence, a respect in the way he talks to you. I notice these things.’
She let that sink in too.
‘But how… how did you move forward, Jane?’ There was a note of desperation in Grace’s voice, as though the answer would be a holy grail.
Jane took another sip from her glass. Even the tap water on board tasted of superior quality: purer, somehow.
‘When you are told your child has a life-limiting condition, you can either drive yourself mad by imagining all sorts of scenarios that the future will bring, so many variations of horror, or you can live in the present and enjoy it, treasure each day for the gift it is, and that’s what I learned to do.
My survival mechanism.’ She yawned then because she was tired.
She had talked a lot today and it had been wonderful because she could go days now at home without talking to anyone.
She and Clifford had chattered away like a pair of lovebirds and she missed their conversations so much – on everything from ancient Rome to Celebrity Big Brother.
‘I’ll tell you more tomorrow, it’s late now. I will say that I have treasured memories, Grace, but the present is my focus, where it should be. Don’t let the past steal it from you. Sleep tight. It’s too easy to do that in these beds, isn’t it?’
Grace lay in the dark, her brain racing, sparking. She thought of David blaming Jane, wanting to wound her for something out of her control because howling at the moon wasn’t enough and being so consumed by his own pain he couldn’t – wouldn’t – recognise hers.
‘She blames me,’ said Frank. ‘And for a time, she’d convinced me that I should blame myself too, for not standing in his way.
Then I thought about how happy he was – and he really was.
And how miserable he’d have been if he’d done something else, “to be safe”.
But he wouldn’t have been really, because if he’d sold cars or pushed a pen, he’d have bust his guts in the evening running, climbing, lifting weights, because that’s who he was.
She won’t listen though. For five years I’ve jumped through every hoop to try and heal her.
She wanted me to give up the boxing gyms – I did.
She wanted to move away because there were too many memories, buy a different pub – I did.
But there was one thing I couldn’t give up.
’ Frank suddenly realised how long he’d been talking.
‘I’m sorry, Vincent, I’m laying all this on you. ’
‘Honestly, mate, go on, I’m listening. What is it you can’t give up?’ He hadn’t a clue what Frank could mean. It couldn’t be a mistress, he didn’t seem the type.
‘Billy had been seeing this girl in the army. We’d never met her.
He just told us about her. He was smitten.
He’d had a few girlfriends and as soon as we’d seen them, the next minute they were gone.
But this one – Ella – there was something different about how he was with her.
We both said, “I bet this is the one” and I think she probably would have been.
We met her for the first time at the funeral, she was in bits, though so were we, it was all a bit of a blur.
Then, seven months later we got a letter to say that she’d had a baby – Billy’s baby.
She hadn’t wanted to tell us before in case something went wrong, didn’t want to give us any more heartache.
She’d had a little girl and she’d called her Billie May – Billie, after her dad – and she wanted us to meet her. ’
‘Ah, that’s lovely,’ said Vincent. ‘Surely that helped?’
Frank shook his head slowly from side to side.
‘Grace went ballistic. No, she didn’t want to meet her granddaughter at all.
She thought Ella was lying, then she thought Ella was after money, then it was that Ella was trying to manipulate us but it was none of that really, she just didn’t want to see the baby and be reminded of her loss, of the boy who was gone.
I told Ella to give us a bit of time, but I so wanted to see the little girl. ’
‘And did you, Frank? Did you go?’
‘I couldn’t get her out of my head. So yeah, I did.
I didn’t tell Grace though. Ella’d left the army and gone back to her parents’ house in Norfolk.
Lovely people. She didn’t want anything from us, except to be in Billie’s life because we’re her family.
Vince, that little girl… it was like having a precious part of my son back.
She was the spit of him when he was a baby, the way she pulled some faces, it was like it was him, but not him if you know what I mean; her own person, but she was made from him.
She’s beautiful. I thought Grace would come round, but she didn’t.
If anything she dug her heels in more, didn’t want to hear a single word about them.
So I never told her I went to visit. Ella wrote letters to Grace pleading with her to meet up but she wouldn’t even open them.
‘Then a pub came up for sale. In Norfolk, near to where Ella lived. We’d been to see a few and they were all right.
But this place was by the sea, in a cracking little village and as soon as I walked in, I knew I wanted it.
It felt like home. Grace didn’t have a clue where Ella lived, she didn’t join the dots.
I manipulated it, I admit that, but I’ve never felt that it wasn’t the right thing to do, the right place for us to be. ’
‘Did she… ever find out you’d been to see them?’ asked Vincent.
‘Yeah, earlier on today. And now she wants me to choose between her and my granddaughter.’
‘Fucking ’ell,’ said Vincent, after rolling that around in his head. ‘What you gonna do?’
‘I don’t feel I’ve got a wife any more to choose, Vincent.’