Something to Tell You Read online

  ‘What did I tell you?’ laughed Paula, reappearing and grabbing Robyn’s arm in the next moment. ‘Come on, let’s stun the crowd with our moves.’

  ‘Embarrass our kids, more like,’ Robyn said, already predicting her son’s expression of horror when he saw her awkward attempts at dancing, but she overcame her reluctance, allowing her sister-in-law to tow her onto the dance floor nonetheless.

  A short while later, when she next glanced across the room to see what had happened to Harry and the stranger who’d appeared, Robyn noticed they had gone. So too had Jeanie. Perhaps it was nothing, she told herself, putting them out of her head.

  Except it wasn’t.

  Chapter Two

  Traffic was horrendous on the journey back to London, the motorway reduced to one slow-churning, bad-tempered lane somewhere in Northants, as the result of an overturned lorry. Closer to home, the outskirts of the city snarled with bottleneck after bottleneck, and Frankie felt gritty-eyed and numb as she changed from first gear to second and then back again, in a seemingly endless stop–start queue of cars.

  Back when she’d decided to make the trip to York, she’d had vague thoughts of making a weekend of it – wandering around the Minster and visiting The Shambles, enjoying imagining her mum walking those same streets once upon a time, young and carefree. She’d even daydreamed about returning, in some rose-tinted future, with Craig and Fergus to introduce them to Harry, tentatively joining her two worlds together in a family Venn diagram. But oh, such things seemed impossible now. Even the idea was laughable.

  Of all the many outcomes she’d considered for the weekend – that she was too late and Harry had died; that he wasn’t interested and told her to leave; that he denied all knowledge of her mother and wouldn’t so much as look her in the eye – it was safe to say that the scenario where she accidentally blundered into his Golden Wedding anniversary celebrations had never once occurred to her.

  Her mouth dry, her palms clammy, she had stood there in a panic at the edge of the room, feeling paralysed, as if all her power had been taken from her. Craig had suggested from the outset that she write a letter first, introduce herself at a distance in order to give the man some time to digest the situation in private. And sure, Frankie knew he’d had a point, but then Craig made his living as a writer, he’d have found that sort of thing easy, whereas she . . . didn’t. Far better to knock on a door, she’d thought: say hello in person, begin a dialogue right there and then. At least you’d know where you stood.

  Although look where she’d ended up: in a packed, steamy village hall, where a prancing tight-trousered singer was giving it his best Tom Jones on a stage, with flashing disco lights, inebriated dancers and a huge gold-foiled banner strung across the room: CONGRATULATIONS HARRY AND JEANIE! 50 HAPPY YEARS! She’d gone looking for a father, but she’d managed to stumble into his whole family. For so many reasons, this was most definitely not the place to launch into a delicate conversation about dads and daughters and decades-old secrets.

  And yet she’d driven all that way, she kept thinking in dismay. And Craig had rearranged his workload specifically so that he could spend the weekend with Fergus. And she’d already spent so much on petrol and the budget-hotel room, and it wasn’t as if she could afford to waste such a sum. But what was the alternative? Ruin Harry Mortimer’s anniversary party, just because she wanted to get her money’s worth out of the trip?

  Disappointment had coursed through her, weighting her feet to the floor. Wrong time, wrong place. This was what you got for being hot-headed, for making it all about you, she told herself despairingly. But then, just as she was about to sidle out of there again, leave them to it, she noticed a man across the crowd and a spear of recognition stabbed her. Tall, pink-faced, a white thatch of hair, laughing brown eyes . . . was it him? Was it really him? Impulse took hold, propelling her across the floor before she could stop herself and then, as he saw her, she caught his double-take of wide-eyed surprise. He’d made a beeline through the knots of people towards her. ‘Do I . . . have we met?’ he asked in a hoarse, almost tremulous voice, a haunted look on his face.

  This was her moment. The one she’d been wondering about for so long. And yet now that it had arrived, she felt as if there was static in her head, a huge lump in her throat, a too-bright spotlight dazzling her eyes. ‘I . . . no, we haven’t met,’ she replied honestly. She couldn’t stop staring at his face, seeing her own nose reflected back at her, the similar jawline. Here he was, this man in a beige linen jacket and polished leather shoes, still clutching his half-pint glass, a faint waft of lime cologne reaching her. This was him, the mystery revealed: a real person who was responsible for roughly half the genes in her body. She swallowed hard and forced out the rest of her reply. ‘But I think you knew my mother.’

  He nodded slowly, as if he’d already guessed. ‘Kathy,’ he said and his mouth buckled for a moment, emotions playing across his face. ‘You’ve got the same eyes as her. I always wondered what—’

  ‘She’s dead,’ Frankie interrupted quickly, just to get it out there. ‘She died last year.’ Her hands flapped uselessly by her side; she hated thinking about those final days in the hospice, followed by the funeral and then the wasteland in her own heart afterwards. ‘Anyway,’ she went on, just as he said, ‘I’m so sorry.’ There was a moment of intensely charged silence and then he spoke again.

  ‘Katherine Hallows,’ he said faintly, as if the memories were filling with colour inside his head. ‘She just vanished at the end of that summer. I never heard from her again.’ He stared at her, drinking her in. ‘And you . . .’

  ‘And I was the reason for that disappearance, yes,’ Frankie replied. Stating the bleeding obvious, as Craig would say. ‘Look,’ she went on apologetically, ‘I realize this is not exactly the best day for us to be meeting, so—’

  ‘Everything all right, Harry?’ There was a woman by his side suddenly, with bobbed silvery hair and a mint-green dress, placing a proprietorial hand on his jacket sleeve. Her quick, flashing glance tick-tocked between Frankie and Harry, and the air seemed to crackle with suspicion.

  ‘So it can absolutely wait for another time,’ Frankie said quickly, guessing that this was his wife – the Jeanie of the fluttering foiled banner – who presumably knew nothing about what her husband had been up to thirty-five years ago. ‘Don’t worry about it.’

  Harry hesitated. ‘I don’t even know your name,’ he said quietly, his eyes kind and friendly. ‘Will you tell me your name?’

  ‘Harry, they want us to cut the cake after this song,’ his wife interrupted, tugging at his arm. Her face had gone very tight and pink, and she was no longer looking at Frankie. Had she guessed? Frankie wondered with a gulp.

  Guilt twisted her insides. Starting a family ruck had really not been her game-plan. ‘It’s Frankie,’ she replied as the woman began hustling Harry away.

  He looked back over his shoulder at her. ‘Frankie,’ he repeated earnestly and they stared at one another for a final moment. ‘Well, then. Another time. I promise.’ Then his wife steered him firmly across the room, and that had been that.

  With a wave of hot shame at her own impetuous blundering, Frankie had slunk out of the hall and scuttled, head-down, back along the road to her car. Her hands shook as she clicked in her seatbelt, and she felt very much like leaning her head on the steering wheel and crying. It was only the vision of the nosy neighbour rapping on the window – ‘Everything all right, love?’ – and asking prying questions that compelled her to turn the key in the ignition and drive away.

  Once in the anodyne safety of her hotel bedroom, she had sunk onto the bed in a daze, her head seething and whirling with what had just happened. She had met him. She had spoken to him. He was real. He had looked at her and seen her mother’s eyes in hers and they had recognized something in one another, blood signalling to blood. Kathy, she kept hearing him say, with that catch in his voice.

  But then her mind would snag on the memory of the stif
f expression of his wife, who, after one lightning assessment of her husband’s disquiet, seemed to have jumped to a damning conclusion, possibly even the truth. Frankie cringed as she remembered the way the woman had tightened her grip possessively on her husband’s arm, how desperate she’d been to wrench him away.

  ‘Well, I’m sorry, Jeanie,’ Frankie said aloud now, as the traffic crawled to yet another standstill. ‘I didn’t mean to upset anyone. But I do exist. I am a real person. And like it or not, that’s partly down to your beloved husband.’

  ‘So he’d put his foot down, telling her, “No, it’s too late, we’re over”, and she was absolutely gutted, begging him, pleading with him to change his mind – but he was so angry, you could see the hatred in his eyes, and he pushed past her, really roughly, to get out of the house.’

  ‘God,’ said Robyn, shelling peas at her mum’s kitchen table.

  ‘And then she lost her balance and fell over right there in the hallway, banging her head on the radiator as she went down. So she’s lying there, not moving, and you can see on his face, he’s thinking: Oh, shit, have I killed her? What have I done? – and then it was the end. So we won’t find out if she’s dead or alive until next week!’ Alison’s eyes glittered with the thrill of it all as she peeled carrots; she was a lifelong fan of Casualty and never missed an episode. I can’t possibly come out, she would say if invited anywhere on a Saturday night. Sometimes with an incredulous laugh in her voice, as if the question was absurd. Not when my favourite programme’s on!

  Robyn wouldn’t have minded so much if her mum didn’t have a similar must-watch show for every single night of the week, which meant she effectively never went out socially these days. And no, don’t be silly, of course she didn’t want to watch anything later, on catch-up. It wasn’t the same! She was part of some telly-lovers’ Internet forum where they’d all chat excitedly to one another online during a programme; dissecting plot threads, speculating on potential twists the story might take, aiming to spot ‘whodunnit’ from the outset. Alison had recently been asked to become one of the forum moderators, which meant she felt obliged to spend each evening keeping an eye on the unfolding discussions. ‘Stops me getting into mischief,’ she would say, but Robyn was starting to wish her mum would actually indulge in more mischief, not less.

  ‘Sounds very dramatic,’ she commented now, running her thumbnail along another peapod and glancing through the open back doors to check on Sam (silent and unmoving in the hammock) and Daisy (crouched in concentration, painstakingly building an obstacle course for woodlice down by the shed). The day was overcast but whenever the breeze did occasionally stir, it would waft in scent from the frothing white gardenias and bee-sodden lilies outside, reminding you that it was actually midsummer. This red-brick Harrogate house was where Robyn had spent the second half of her childhood after the big move; if she shut her eyes, she could be fifteen and doing her science homework at this very table, humming distractedly to Radio 1 in the background.

  A pea skidded between her fingers, bouncing down onto the floor, and Robyn bent to retrieve it just as her mum asked, ‘So John’s okay, is he, apart from being called in for this mysterious family meeting? What’s all that about, anyway?’

  Good question. ‘I’m not sure,’ Robyn replied. There had been a phone call from Harry first thing, requesting that John join the rest of the Mortimers at his and Jeanie’s house for a ‘family war cabinet’, and Robyn had been a bit taken aback at the urgency in her father-in-law’s voice. She hoped everything was all right. ‘It’s probably a post-mortem of the party, but I can’t see why that would be so important,’ she went on. ‘Especially as Harry and Jeanie are off on this second honeymoon of theirs this afternoon. Sorry,’ she added, with a glance over at her mum, hoping she hadn’t taken John’s absence as too much of a snub. ‘Hopefully, he can still join us, if they sort whatever it is out quickly. Otherwise . . .’

  Alison waved a hand to signal that she would survive the disappointment. ‘And how was the party? Was it a good one?’ she asked. She had been invited, of course, but Robyn had had to pass on her apologies as usual. (‘Is everything all right with your mum?’ Jeanie had asked in concern. ‘She never comes along to any of our get-togethers. I haven’t seen her for . . . goodness, it must be two years!’)

  ‘Well,’ said Robyn, trying to conceal her irritation as she remembered how awkward she’d felt at that moment, ‘you could have seen for yourself, if you hadn’t been too busy watching the telly. You know –’ she hesitated, trying to find the right words – ‘I think Jeanie was a tiny bit offended that you didn’t come, Mum.’

  ‘Offended? Give over. She’d have had that many guests, she wouldn’t have paid me a second thought. Probably glad to have one less mouth to feed,’ Alison replied, peeling faster than ever and with a certain amount of huffiness. ‘I’m very happy for them to have been married fifty years – how lovely for them – but I don’t see why I should have to trog all the way up the A59, to some village hall, in order to say that. For a glass of lukewarm wine in a room full of people I don’t even know!’

  Her voice was rising. ‘All right, all right,’ Robyn said, backtracking. ‘I only meant—’

  ‘Your dad was the party-goer, not me,’ Alison said defensively. ‘And I had a whole bridal party to do yesterday morning anyway: seven-thirty start, barely time for a cup of coffee, and I didn’t get away again until nearly two. After that, I just felt like putting my feet up and catching my breath. You can’t deny me that, surely.’

  ‘Okay, I’m not criticizing,’ Robyn said, even though she had been, in her head. She prised open another peapod and there was silence for a moment. ‘I don’t remember that about Dad – him being a party animal,’ she added humbly. Her mum barely mentioned Rich, Robyn’s father, who’d died of a sudden heart attack when Robyn was just eight years old. Younger than Daisy. One day he’d been there, as normal, and then the next morning Robyn had woken to find her mother catatonic with grief and her grandmother in the house, stuffing clean pants and socks into a bag, saying that Robyn was going to have a little holiday with her for a few days. He was just thirty-five – so bloody young – and she had been paranoid for years that the same fate awaited her. ‘Does my heart sound okay?’ she always asked anxiously at the doctor’s, braced for history to repeat itself.

  ‘Well, in the early days he was,’ Alison said vaguely, her eyes misting over. ‘But anyway.’

  Robyn wanted to ask more, greedy for any new nuggets of detail about her father that might illuminate her own paltry memories, but sensed her mum closing down the conversation, as she so often did when he was the topic. ‘How are things with you?’ she asked instead. ‘What’s the latest news?’

  Alison was a mobile hairdresser, zipping between appointments in her pastel-blue Honda Jazz, her concerned, listening face every bit as important as her skill with a comb and scissors. It was amazing what people confessed to her while she was snipping away behind them, she often said. Perhaps it was having experienced her own share of tragedy that made her a good confidante; perhaps it was her general air of non-judgemental kindness; for whatever reason, Alison knew everything there was to know within the community. If there was a story, she’d be the first to sniff it out. In another life she might have been an investigative journalist, following her nose to one juicy scoop after another.

  Robyn went on shelling peas as her mum detailed tussles between neighbours regarding gigantic garden-shading Leylandii, Rita Daly’s plans for her retirement party over at The Bridge, and Josie Simpson’s new baby having been born on a pile of tea-towels on her kitchen floor, could she believe, with Anil Singh, a local delivery lad, fainting clean away when he looked through the window to see what all the shouting was about. ‘Right there by the front door!’ Alison chuckled, enjoying the story. ‘He’s had a bit of ribbing about that, by all accounts, soft idiot.’

  Robyn laughed too, but she’d been pierced by a sudden flash of memory that her mind had churned up
unexpectedly: of running towards her father’s legs as he came home from work, the evening sun golden behind him as he stood in the doorway, then being swung up into the air, aloft in his strong arms. ‘Daddy, my daddy!’ she had cried. ‘Robyn, my Robyn!’ he’d replied with a laugh.

  You got to Robyn’s age – the wrong side of forty – and childhood memories were so much fuzzier. Had the moment really happened or was it just her imagination, hopefully proffering a fictional scene in order to appease her hunger for him? Soon after her dad had died, they’d moved out of their old house in Wolverhampton and up here to Yorkshire, but she still carried around small moments of having lived there: could remember, for example, how it felt to lie on the brown, tufty living-room carpet, how you could never get the Playmobil people to stand up properly on its uneven surface. There was that lozenge of glass in the front door with the large, rounded bobble that made people’s faces distort; she remembered bursting into tears when her grandpa had peered through it one day, because he looked all wrong. The fake coals in the fireplace – how she’d puzzled over Father Christmas being able to come down the chimney because it didn’t look like the pictures in books.

  Meanwhile Alison was still talking about the unexpected delivery. ‘She was fine anyway. Little girl, seven pounds ten ounces,’ she said, briskly sweeping the carrot peelings into an empty margarine tub, destined for next door’s guinea pigs. ‘They’ve called her Tallulah – very sweet.’ She took a knife to the bare carrots, fast and efficient, the round wet slices toppling like pennies.

  ‘Ta-dah!’ came a triumphant cheer from outside just then and they looked out to see Daisy, with dusty knees and a streak of dirt across one cheek, beaming at the newly built woodlice-house before her. ‘They love it!’ she cried. ‘Come and see.’

  Out Alison went immediately, exclaiming over Daisy’s cleverness and laughing at the sight of the pale-grey woodlice that, with surprising cooperation, now trundled up and down the twiggy walkways constructed for their benefit. ‘My goodness, and you made all of this yourself?’ Alison cried, and Robyn smiled to see how pleased Daisy looked, her thick red hair falling around her face as she regaled her grandma with a series of new facts.