Exposure (49 page)

It was just as he had imagined, then.

'Did Mum go? You and Geoff and Mum?'

'Oh, yes, till a year or two back. Yes—off to bingo. And down the pub quiz with old Ben Singer, your mum used to. Oh, yes, love.'

Ivy spoke about everything with nostalgia—even the current or recent facts of her life. There she was, elevated by her years—as if she was literally gazing down from a quiet place a long way above the struggle. It was only her distorted hands that spoke of immediate sensation, of pain. Her hands and the brief allusion to her hips.

Did she need a hip replacement? Damn the National Health Service and its waiting lists, he thought. He hoped she was not in constant pain and then felt certain that she was. How lucky he and Rosalind were that they would never be without their private health insurance, never have trouble buying another milk jug or replacing anything that broke. Whatever happened now, after all the wise investments, they would be well-off until they died.

Ivy was laughing: 'Yes, every Monday, down the George and Dragon, a little glass of sherry or a half, she always had, and her packet of pork scratchings. She had a bad hip like me, but there was no stopping your mum. Never was, though, was there?'

'No,' he said, smiling.

'Well, except when it came to you, love.'

Alistair put down his cup of tea and looked straight at Ivy, knowing this was something he had to face. He was going to have to hear what it had done to them—his disappearing like that.

He remembered Rosalind telling him about giving birth to Sophie. They had been sitting on their bed with their miraculous little girl on the blanket in front of them. He had asked her if the labour had been very painful: 'It's funny,' Rosalind said. 'You start off shouting and crying and everything, but then it's as if you suddenly see that giving birth to your baby is the one thing in life you can't get out of, no matter what. It's the one kind of pain you know you can't get angry about, as if it wasn't fair, because it's more important than your body. It isn't fair or unfair, it's just happening with or without your consent. So you just accept it and get on, I suppose.'

Rosalind's answer had impressed him profoundly and he knew that now he must be as brave as his young wife.

'Oh, Alistair,' Ivy said, 'whatever did you vanish like that for?'

'I was ashamed,' Alistair told her, trying to speak as honestly as possible, no matter how crass it sounded. 'I wanted to be with smart rich people in big houses, far away from Dover.'

'But this is where you were raised. It's where you come from, love.'

'Yes. I know.'

'Couldn't you have written? Visited?'

'I couldn't keep you in my life. I couldn't have explained it. I'm not proud of it, Ivy, but I was making a new life for myself and, well, the people in it, they would have looked down on—on everything. And I couldn't bear it.'

'We wouldn't have cared about a bunch of snooty so-and-sos.
I
wouldn't.'

Alistair laughed sadly. 'No,' he said, 'you were always too wise for that. But
I
cared. I was the one who cared. If you want to know the truth I was scared they wouldn't accept me and I wanted their kind of life so much, Ivy.'

'Dear me,' Ivy said. 'Did you hate us that much, then? Are we that dreadful?'

Alistair reached out and took up her bent, bony little hand. 'No. I've been wrong and very stupid,' he said.

'And with that big brain God gave you ... What a waste.'

'Yes.'

'She sounded nice, too, your wife. Not the snobbish type, really.'

'Oh, no, Rosalind isn't at all snobbish,' he said confidently. 'She's never looked down on anyone in her life...'

And then he thought: It has always been me, hasn't it? I'm the one who needed the cripplingly expensive ski holidays in Val d'Isère, the children at extortionate public schools, which they hated anyway. I'm the one who needed the chandeliers and the damask silk hung on the walls at a hundred pounds a metre in place of ordinary paper. Hadn't Rosalind once said she thought it would be rather lovely if they lived in a little cottage with Alistair writing a history book the way he had said he wanted to when she first met him? He had told her she'd miss her pearls and her fur coat and her seat at Glyndebourne, her tennis at Queens. But perhaps she had been telling the truth.

'Well, it must be quite a feeling, coming home after all this time,' Ivy said.

'It's changed a lot.'

'You're not wrong there. That huge terrible ferry-port making all that racket. Lot of foreign faces, too. There are wars in the world, you see. They come here for safety.'

Trust Ivy to see it this way, he thought. She was a genuine liberal.

'It's still your home, though—your roots are here,' she said, blowing on her hot tea.

He studied her lovely old face and wondered how many people there were left in England who would die in the same street they grew up. She had been born two houses along. 'Ivy,
your
roots are here,' he said. 'I don't think I ever really had roots.'

'Now why d'you say that? Go on with you, Alistair. You had a home and a mum who loved you as best she could, and there was always me and Geoff.'

'I know. I know. I just ... it was not knowing about my father, I suppose.'

There.
He had said it. It was out and now the world seemed quieter—the way it did when you ran all the way up the cliff path with the wind and rain crashing in your ears, and then you saw an alcove and ducked in and it all went peaceful.

'I can understand that, dear,' Ivy said. And then her eyes fixed on his for a long time—perhaps as long as thirty seconds—her eyebrows contracting in response to her thoughts. She was frightening him. He gazed into her old face: here was the impenetrability of another human mind.

He remembered the extraordinary way he had summed up the issue of his father to Karen Jennings, that night at the Ridgeley Hotel. It had been spontaneous—and totally out of character. Over a glass of whisky, he had calmly revealed to this perfect stranger how his mother always told him that she and his father were planning to marry but that his dad had got killed in the war. It was just a sob-story, he explained, which stopped adding up when he was about eight. He had even told her how he had marked this realization by throwing all his toy soldiers into the sea. He said he hadn't seen his mother for nearly forty years, 'possibly to avoid the conversation'.

The formula was so absurd he had known immediately that there was an element of truth in it. He had avoided emotional contact with his mother just as he had avoided physical contact ever after the day he came home unexpectedly from his confirmation class. (Afterwards, he was sure he had known something wrong was happening when he ran up the path—that the house had grown ugly, that the air had seemed to cool and darken as if for rain.)

He had found them there in the hallway, on the carpet, struggling. At first he thought Mr Bisset was attacking her, but as he pulled back Alistair could see she was enjoying it. Then she saw him. 'Oh, Alistair,' she said, 'I thought you were down the church.'

She had always been passionately insistent that he get to Sunday School on time. And now he knew why. 'I forgot my sandwich,' he said. 'I got hungry.'

Even now he found it difficult to go into a church. Rosalind had wanted the children to be Catholic, just as she was, and he had had no problem in leaving it to her. He had washed his hands of the whole filthy business of religion.

'Ivy,' he said, 'do
you
know anything about my father?'

'Yes, love. I do,' she replied.

He stared at her incredulously. After all these years to learn something -
anything
- about this absent figure. What he had dreaded most of all was that no one knew, that his father had been just one of his mother's sunny afternoon 'jaunts', just one of her Sunday treats or her late-night 'talks'. 'Tell me what you know, Ivy. Please?'

'It's Geoff, love,' she said.

That a human voice should reply so simply, that it should provide anything so contained as an answer, was almost as stunning as the answer itself.

'Geoff? Uncle
Geoff? Your
husband?
I don't ... How can that be?'

'Geoff, my husband,' she said, nodding.

'But how can that ... how can that
be,
Ivy?
How?
'

She sighed. 'It just
is,
love,' she said.

Alistair stared at the objects on the table: biscuits, saucers, cups and spoons—things reduced to mere physical presence, stripped of their significance. They might as well have been pebbles on a shore or leaves on the grass. Briefly, he saw them with the eyes of a patient historian, ten thousand years after this day.

'Alistair?' Ivy said. 'Alistair? Are you all right?'

'I'm not sure,' he said truthfully.

'I always wished he'd tell you—for what it's worth to you now.'

'How long were they...
when,
Ivy?
When did it start?
'

'It was no more than a year or two they saw each other in that way,' she said. He watched her pick the biscuit crumbs off the edge of the plate, squashing them under her forefinger and brushing them off into the palm of her hand.

'A year or two? But you must have been
married
by then. She was your closest friend.'

'Yes,' Ivy said. 'It sounds bad. The thing is, you've got to understand, things were different in them days. I was trying for a baby, Al, I wanted nothing more in the world than a little baby. Anyway, I fell pregnant and in them days we all thought you mustn't have ... well, you mustn't have
relations
with your husband, if you had a baby in you. All in all I had a baby in me for almost two years...'

'Ivy, I don't understand.'

'What I mean is, I kept losing them. Three little babies in a row—miscarriages - before we knew I couldn't do it. And ... well, it was in that time he must've got tempted. She was a very attractive woman, your
mum, June—
all that lovely red hair and that full figure of hers.'

'Tempted?
' Alistair repeated.

'She and Geoff were sweeties as children, you know.'

'No, I didn't know.'

'Yes. His childhood sweetie, June was. But she was always a will unto herself and she took up with that Nigel Benson whose dad owned the tackle shop out by the Britannia. Anyway, everyone thought they'd tie the knot, but Nigel got killed in the war. Heartbroken, she was. Me and Geoff, we got together a little bit before it happened—when Geoff was home with his shrapnel in his leg. I'd been writing, you see. I'd always had a soft spot for him. I wrote him letters when he was serving.

'Oh, Al, I used to think he was sorry he chose me—you know, I thought he must feel if only he'd waited a bit he might have had June. I can tell you it ate me up for a while, that did. But I know he loved me now. You can't argue with sixty-odd years, can you?'

'No.' He shook his head slowly. 'How can you be so reasonable? Ivy, you say you always wished Geoff would tell me...'

Her face seemed to crumple with pain. 'It's true, love. I did
always
wish that. Part of me won't never forgive him.'

'But if you felt it so strongly, why didn't you
make
him? He respected you, Ivy. You'd forgiven him so much. He would have listened to you.'

'Me?
' she said. 'Oh, no, love. You've got it all wrong. See, your mum and Geoff—they had no idea I knew.'

Alistair leant back in his chair as if a huge blow to the chest had pushed him there. 'What?'

'No, love. Not to this day.'

'I ... I don't understand,' he said.

But he did understand. She had not wanted to spoil what she had, and her humility was such that she had simply weathered it through and hoped the affair would end.

But to be in her rival's company so much—to continue to be his mother's closest friend? To suffer Geoff referring to them affectionately as his 'girls'?

But once a thing was said it could not be unsaid. He knew the awful truth of this as well as anyone. He took in Ivy's kind old face, the watery eyes still brimming with humour and affection—inexplicable affection—for him, her husband's illegitimate child. 'You loved me like a son,' Alistair said.

'You were the closest I got, love. There was Martin, I suppose, but for me it was always you. My queer little Alistair with his book and his big frown.' She looked at him with heartbreaking tenderness and then she laid her hand on her stomach. 'I couldn't give him a child, you see. I was no good in there.'

'Ivy, you can't blame yourself, surely.'

'No. Not really. Not any more.'

'Geoff could never have blamed you.'

'No. He never did. And, anyway, it's you I owe my sorries to, really.'

'Me? Why? You were always wonderful to me. All your encouragement, all those birthday cakes...'

'Yes,' she said, laughing, 'you loved a Victoria sponge with lemon icing. Bit of jam and butter cream in the middle.'

'Yes, Ivy, I did,' he said, almost too moved to speak. 'How can you possibly think you owe me an apology?'

'For keeping you from your father, love. You see, I had a choice, and I thought it came down to my marriage or your father. And I chose not to rock the boat. I was scared if it came out in the open he'd leave me, that I'd force it to happen. You'd have
known,
love—d'you understand? But—oh, I don't know, I used to think they'd go off to London. God knows. You think love just disappears when you're young, don't you?, but it lasts for ever, really, like it gets in your bones. Oh, Al, I thought they'd
leave
me and take you away and go and be a family somewhere like I could never give him. I thought I'd lose him and June
and
you if I said anything.'

'Ivy,' he put his arms out and held her frail body, 'it was for them to tell me,' he said. 'It was for
them.
Not
you.
' They moved apart, and as she dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief, which she always had in her sleeve, he said, 'But I don't think I'll ever understand how Mum could keep it secret. Not when I was old enough to keep quiet.' He looked out of the window at the little back garden.'
Would
I have kept quiet? I suppose I would ... Oh, how could she
live
with all that deception? How could she tell all those stories to her
own child?
'