Messy, Wonderful Us Page 2

  I quietly pad across the floor, wondering how they sleep in such a chilly room, with two windows wide open. Letting in ‘fresh air’ is a constant preoccupation of Grandma Peggy’s, as if there is a limited amount of it on offer.

  The sound of laughter drifts upstairs from the kitchen as I gently open her wardrobe door, releasing a faint scent of lily of the valley. The interior is tightly packed with dresses and suits, all in muted fabrics, some still covered with plastic from the dry cleaners. I take out a dress and examine the label. It’s a size 16, which surprises me, so I put it back and check out some of the others. Only, there’s a whole array of sizes, ranging from 12 to 16, and no indication as to which might be the most accurate.

  I close the door and decide to look in her chest of drawers instead, where I’m more likely to find a top that I know she’s worn recently. I work from the bottom up, opening the first drawer to find a stack of sweaters and the cashmere cardigan she had on when I saw her a couple of weeks ago. I take that out and check the label: size 14, much more what I was expecting. I want to leave the clothes as neatly as I found them, so I remove the pile to refold each item. But when I attempt to straighten the drawer liner, I realise there’s something underneath. I slide my fingernail under the edge and carefully lift it up. It’s then that I find the envelope.

  It’s dry and faded with age, ripped open at the top. I don’t know what it is exactly that compels me to pick it up, slide out the letter and unfold it, carefully unfurling the old newspaper page concealed inside. I do it almost without thinking, stroking my fingers against the grey print before I can even contemplate the ethics of my intrusion.

  It’s the date that I register first – 11 June 1983 – before I cast my gaze over a spread of pictures from a summer party held at Allerton People’s Hall to celebrate its centenary. There are two rows of photographs, some of austere-looking men in cricket whites, others of women in pleated skirts and batwing sleeves. There are teenage boys in Ray-Bans and polo shirts with popped-up collars, girls in crop tops and lace, looking sticky under the dying heat of the day. Then I spot the name on one caption: Christine Culpepper.

  When my eyes settle on my mother’s face, at first I don’t think beyond the tug in my chest, a jolt of something sad and indefinable. But as I take in each detail, a creeping realisation begins to take hold. Something doesn’t add up.

  My mother is holding hands with a young man I don’t know, someone I’ve never even seen before. Her mouth is curled up in a mysterious smile and teenage infatuation shines brightly in her eyes. The name of this unknown person, according to the caption, is Stefano McCourt. He looks to be older than my mother by a couple of years and has dark eyes, a full mouth and a gap in his teeth. I look at the date again, trying to reconcile each contradictory detail, but one in particular: the photo was taken nine months before I was born.

  ‘Five minutes until dinner,’ I hear Dad shout from downstairs. I don’t answer, ignoring the rapid thudding in my chest as I turn my attention to the handwritten letter. It is addressed to my Grandma Peggy and dated December 1983. There’s no address from the sender.

  Dear Mrs Culpepper,

  I write to respectfully ask you not to contact Stefano, myself, or my husband Michael again via his office at the Museo di Castelvecchio.

  While I understand that you are in shock about Christine and Stefano – we all are – no good can come of us continuing to maintain contact. I am particularly upset about you writing to my son about his supposed responsibilities to his ‘flesh and blood’. This kind of emotional blackmail is very wrong when he already made his decision not to have anything more to do with your daughter before our family left Liverpool. The fact that he moved back to Italy with us should have made this very clear.

  From what you said in your letter, Christine has now made amends with her boyfriend. He will no doubt make a good father to the baby. So why rock the boat by trying to bring Stefano back into the equation when nobody needs to know the truth?

  He is not going to change his mind and he has absolutely no intention of returning to the UK. I am deeply sorry if this sounds harsh under the circumstances, but I’m sure you appreciate that it is not just you who has been upset by events.

  Yours truly,

  Signora Vittoria McCourt

  I look again at the photograph on the newspaper cutting. At the date. At my mother’s enraptured smile. But most of all, I am drawn to the young man with dark hair and a gap in his teeth that’s so identical to my own that it makes my breath catch in my throat.

  Chapter 4

  There are eight of us for dinner once my uncle Peter, Dad’s younger brother, has arrived with his wife Sara and their two young sons, Oscar and Nathan, aged four and six. While everybody else chats happily as they thread into the dining room, I am unable to concentrate on anything but the buzzing in my head, the thrum of my heart against my chest wall.

  ‘Is this a new toy?’ Dad asks Oscar, as a remote-control car hits him on the back of the ankles.

  ‘Yes, I got it because I filled up my sticker chart.’

  ‘Well done! You must’ve been a good boy,’ he says, taking a seat at the table.

  ‘I wiped my own bum every day for a week.’

  ‘Congratulations,’ Dad replies.

  ‘Will you teach me how to play a song on your guitar again, Uncle Joe?’ Nathan asks.

  ‘Oh, sorry, Nathan, I haven’t brought it with me today. It’s at home.’

  Dad looks more disappointed than my nephew that he’s missed the opportunity to get his old Gibson guitar out and play a tune. It’s his prized possession – crafted in 1979 and ‘just like BB King’s’, as he never tires of telling us.

  The table is technically too small to accommodate eight people and the amount my dad has cooked, but we squeeze round it, before Grandma says grace. ‘For food that stays our hunger, for rest that brings us ease, for homes where memories linger, we give our thanks for these. Amen.’

  Everyone tucks in enthusiastically, while I find myself gazing at the table wondering how I’m going to stomach anything.

  ‘You’ve surpassed yourself, Joe,’ Aunt Sara tells Dad, as she spoons some carrots onto Nathan’s plate. ‘This is tremendous.’

  The talk around the table involves the kind of minor family dispatches I’d ordinarily join in with: what the kids are up to at school, Sara’s plans to extend their kitchen, the fact that Grandma and Granddad’s Golden Wedding Anniversary is coming up at the end of the year.

  ‘Oh, you’ll have to do something special,’ Sara says.

  ‘Hmm. We’ll do . . . something,’ Grandma replies, the unspoken implication being that there will not, under any circumstances, be any fuss.

  ‘Why don’t you go on a cruise?’ Sara suggests, unabated.

  ‘Muriel and Bobby put us off,’ Granddad tells her. ‘They went on one last year and weren’t keen. Bobby lost his dentures down the toilet in the first week and he was stuck without them for the rest of the trip.’

  Dad chuckles into his wine.

  ‘Don’t laugh,’ Granddad continues, though he’s absolutely laughing himself. ‘Muriel stuffed herself at the buffet, but poor Bobby had to eat soup while his teeth were floating somewhere in the mid-Atlantic.’

  ‘Everything all right, love?’ Dad asks and I look up sharply. My eyes are drawn to his fair hair and the way it curls around the pale skin on his neck. Then the face of another man altogether tears through my head.

  ‘Fine. Sorry. Just a bit tired. It’s been a busy week.’

  ‘What are you working on at the moment, Allie?’ Sara asks.

  ‘Um . . . gene-editing technology,’ I mumble. ‘We’re trying to find a cure for people with cystic fibrosis, basically.’

  ‘Gosh, isn’t Aunty Allie clever?’ she says to Nathan.

  ‘Do you still study fizzy drinks?’ he asks.

  As Dad and Uncle Peter begin chatting about the football results, my mind drifts to the Christmas before last, when my fathe
r sat in that same spot where he’s seated now. Grandma Peggy and I handed over a gift about which we had both been apprehensive but in complete agreement: a subscription to a dating website. I held my breath as he opened the envelope, his expression changing as he read the voucher.

  ‘We all thought it was about time,’ Grandma Peggy had said, in her usual matter-of-fact way, yet the monumental implications of this gesture were clear to all.

  He lifted his eyes and pressed his lips together into a smile. ‘Did you now? Sounds like a conspiracy to me.’ I think we all knew nothing would come of it.

  To be absolutely fair, he did eventually go on a couple of dates, including one with a woman in Hull. He drove all the way over there, only to find out that she bore about as much resemblance to her profile picture as I do to a Victoria’s Secret model. She’d told Dad regretfully that she didn’t really think it was going to work out between them. Nevertheless, she’d be prepared to give him a go on the basis that he was an Aquarius and she was a Leo, which meant though their chances of compatibility and communication would be poor, sex would be passably good. He finished his cappuccino and left. So we all gave up again, just like we’d done nearly a decade ago when he split up with Sarah, a nurse he’d technically been seeing for years, but who always felt more like a companion than his girlfriend. We all know the reason why he’s still single and it’s not because there’s anything wrong with him. He’s no Calvin Klein model, but he’s honest, practical, caring and he makes an exceptional roast dinner.

  The real issue is that he doesn’t believe he’ll ever love someone like he loved a woman who died nearly three decades ago. My mother, the woman in the newspaper photograph that’s hidden upstairs, along with a whole load of secrets it’s very clear that Dad and I were never supposed to know about.

  *

  I get tipsy over dinner. Not falling down drunk, but infused with enough of a wine buzz to agree to teach Nathan how to use his pogo stick in the street in my tights. When we return inside for dessert, Granddad appears at the table with the cake that he’s tried to convince the children was all his own work, even though they saw him taking it out of a Tesco box. He cuts a piece and hands a plate to Sara first, before I notice him glance at Grandma anxiously.

  ‘I hadn’t realised it was lemon cake,’ Granddad replies.

  Grandma says nothing, but even Nathan senses that something in the room has shifted, as if the air circulating around us has suddenly become denser.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he asks her.

  She smiles at him defiantly and pats his hand. ‘Nothing at all. The cake looks delicious. Lemon was my Christine’s favourite so it always reminds me of her, that’s all.’

  My mother’s name silences us all. It still has an ability to do that, all these years later.

  ‘All right, Peggy?’ Aunt Sara asks.

  ‘Of course,’ Grandma replies. Then she looks up at Granddad. ‘Come on now, Gerald. There are two hungry little boys waiting patiently here.’

  As Granddad hands him a plate, Nathan tugs my sleeve. ‘Is Christine the one who died? Your mum?’

  ‘That’s right.’ I nod.

  ‘That must’ve sucked. Your mum dying I mean.’

  ‘Yeah. It was a long time ago though.’

  ‘And at least you’ve still got your dad,’ he says, as I look up and feel my heart flare.

  Chapter 5

  Watering my house plants always takes a little time. They sit on every shelf in the kitchen, a tangle of green leaves that spill over the bare wood surfaces and white metro tiles. But today I feel slower than usual, at this and everything else.

  Six days after my discovery of the letter and newspaper cutting, my chest feels tight and acidic, the manifestation of repeated episodes of insomnia. The whole thing has become such a preoccupation, or an obsession, that by the weekend I know I’m going to have to do something about it. I put away my watering can and throw the dregs of my tea in the sink before washing the cup and turning it upside down on the drainer. There’s nobody to silently disapprove of me not putting it away before I leave the flat anymore.

  I spent four of my nine years in Cardiff living with my ex-boyfriend, Rob, a soft-spoken Geordie with gentle eyes and a love of football, Vietnamese food and science. We met while I completed my PhD and collaborated on two concurrent projects, which meant long hours in the lab, gathering data and listening to Etta James on a portable speaker.

  Our relationship was never a grand passion in the Gone With the Wind tradition, but it survived us being apart for six months during my MRC training fellowship in the United States, at Chapel Hill in North Carolina. He didn’t merely understand my ambitions to lecture and have my own lab, to work independently and make discoveries. He shared them. But with hindsight, I accepted my current job in Liverpool before I thought through what would happen to our relationship, assuming that it’d all just work out like it had after my stint in the US. Only he ended things, which felt like a punch in the gut, even before I discovered that he’d spent the night with an Argentinian researcher at a CF conference in New Orleans the previous year.

  Since moving back to Liverpool, I’ve lived by myself but don’t have time to be lonely. I have a full and rich life, with my family nearby and several sets of friends with whom I go to pub quizzes, play tennis, or just share a cup of tea. It’s been less fruitful on the romance front, except for a purple patch last autumn when I tried Tinder. I was on it for three and a half months, before giving up, fatigued and empty, much to Petra’s disappointment as she no longer got to hear all the details on our tea breaks. At thirty-three, I’m not altogether deaf to the ticking of my biological clock but it’s on snooze. My parents had me so young that I was brought up with the words there’s no rush being drummed into me. Perhaps I’ll still be telling myself that when I’m on HRT.

  I head to the bathroom and unzip my make-up bag, before looking in the mirror. I mean, really looking. At my thick, dark hair. The honeyed undertone of my complexion, which looks nothing like the pale skin of either my mum or dad. And the distinctive gap in my teeth.

  I pick up my phone and click on the picture I’d copied from the newspaper cutting. Stefano McCourt has all of those features but his resemblance to the face in the mirror goes beyond that. The arch of his eyebrow follows the same pattern as mine. The almond shape of his eyes are set the same distance apart. It’s as if the lines and curves of his face have been traced over mine with translucent paper and a pencil. I take out my mascara and force myself to think straight.

  Did my mum lie? Did she have a baby – me – by another man and let my father believe that I was his? If that turned out to be true, if his entire family was built on deception, it would quite simply ruin his life. These issues boil inside me, until the moment I zip up my make-up bag and realise this comes down to one single, inconceivable question. Is the man I’ve called ‘Dad’ for thirty-three years really my father?

  *

  Grandma Peggy is on a small stepladder washing the window frame on her front porch when I arrive at her house. She’s not tight with money, but of a generation that wouldn’t dream of paying a stranger to do a job like this simply to make life easier. Instead, at seventy-six, she stands three feet from the ground, pumping her arm back and forth, until not a spec of dirt remains.

  ‘Why don’t you let me do that, Grandma?’ I ask, peering up at her.

  ‘No, no,’ she says dismissively. ‘I’m nearly done.’

  ‘Are you sure you’re all right up there?’

  She frowns down at me. ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

  My Grandma hasn’t sat still since she retired a few years ago from her job as a secretary at Belsfield, a fee-paying secondary school far posher than the comprehensive I went to. Her refusal to relax goes back longer than that though. If there’s something to be cleaned, or organised, you can guarantee she’ll be on her feet doing it. Eventually she climbs down and snaps off her rubber gloves, dabbing a faint sheen from her forehead with t
he back of her sleeve. ‘To what do I owe the pleasure?’

  ‘I just thought I’d pop round for a cup of tea. That’s all right, isn’t it?’

  She looks so pleased at the idea that I wish I’d done this more often, in less difficult circumstances. ‘Of course. Come in.’

  In the kitchen, she refuses to let me make the drink, instead flicking on the kettle and taking out two gold-rimmed china mugs, painted with turquoise leaves and pink camellias. I sit down as she brings over the tea, trying to remember exactly how I’d planned to broach this subject.

  ‘Is everything all right, Allie? You’re very quiet.’

  ‘I . . . yes, I’m fine. I’ve just been thinking about Mum.’

  The light in her eyes seems to change and she sinks into her seat. ‘About anything in particular?’

  ‘A few things, I suppose.’ I feel the edge of my teeth biting against the inside of my cheek as I try to just come out with it. But it feels easier to skirt around the issue first. ‘Do you think Mum regretted having me so young?’

  She looks surprised. ‘Of course not. You might not have been planned, but you were the best thing that ever happened to her. It meant that she got to be a mother before she became ill. She wouldn’t have had it any other way.’

  ‘It must’ve been a shock though,’ I reply. ‘When she found out she was pregnant, I mean.’

  ‘I can’t deny that. She was only seventeen, after all. But if anyone thought it couldn’t work, her and your father proved them wrong. They had a wonderful life together.’

  ‘So they were happy?’

  She looks confused by the question. ‘You know they were. They brought out the best in one another and your dad was her rock. He made her last months bearable.’

  ‘And did . . .’ But the words dry up in my mouth.

  ‘What?’

  I feel my neck redden. ‘I just wondered if Mum ever had any other boyfriends, apart from Dad.’

  There is a subtle alteration of her demeanour. It’s barely perceptible beyond the slowing of her movements, the stiffening of her jaw, the gradual whitening of the skin on her knuckles. ‘A couple of adolescent romances, but nobody you’d call a boyfriend. Nobody like your dad.’