In-Laws and Outlaws Read online

  “My dad brought us over for a year to experience the old country.” Joe explained. “Helen was the first girl I saw when I rocked up at school, and that was that, there’s never been anyone else, not for either of us.”

  “But then his Dad took them back to Sydney and we didn’t actually see each other for another three years until Joe came back when he was twenty.” Helen continued the story.

  “But we wrote to each other a lot . . .” Joe said. “Or at least I did. Hels wrote about three times, and one of those was a postcard. I thought she’d forgotten me.”

  “As if!” Helen exclaimed vehemently.

  “But we got through that and we’ve been together ever since.” Joe concluded. He and Helen shared a smile that hinted at a depth of relationship that only many years together can create. I felt a twinge of jealousy. I didn’t resent their happiness and things were going really well between Gideon and me, but I always think there is something arrogant about new relationships. Love that lasts is infinitely more to be admired than the infatuation of the early months as it is far, far easier to fall in love than it is to stay in love. Helen and Joe seemed to have managed both.

  Joe carried on sifting through the huge pile of photos that littered the floor. There were lots of Gideon and Helen as children alongside Malcolm and Marjorie on various family holidays or days out. One photograph in particular caught my eye. In all the previous pictures Marjorie had looked rather stiff and uncomfortable as if she had been drafted in to play the role of mother to this family, and not very convincingly at that. In this photograph however she was laying on the lawn of what looked like the garden of the Sheen house, propped up on her elbows, a hand on either side of her face and a look of theatrical shock on her face. Helen and Gideon were either side of her in the same pose. It looked as if they were having a great time.

  “This is a lovely photo,” I said picking it up. Helen’s unsettling comments seemed ridiculous in the face of a picture of such familial bliss.

  “Let me see,” said Helen taking the photo from me. “Oh, that’s not Mum.” I didn’t know what she was talking about, it was clearly her mother. “No,” she said, conclusively, “that is our aunt, Meg.”

  “Huh?” I queried.

  “Yes,” confirmed Gideon as he took the photo from his sister, “that’s Meg all right. She’s Mum’s twin. Identical twin,” he added as if that could possibly have been in doubt. “Twins run in our family,” he went on, “as you might have noticed. She was great fun wasn’t she?” He looked to Helen for confirmation. She nodded, a sad smile on her face.

  “Is she dead?” I asked, not unreasonably given that he had referred to Meg in the past tense and I had never heard her mentioned before.

  “No,” volunteered Helen, “we just haven’t seen her for a very long time. She suffers from depression, amongst other things. Mum sees her from time to time and tells me how she is, but she’s not really up to seeing anyone else.” Helen had taken the photo back and was gazing at it lovingly. “God, I adored Auntie Meg. She was so lovely. A bit of a ditz it has to be said, but very sweet and funny, even if she didn’t always mean to be. It’s so sad that the children have never met her, she’d have adored them, but Mum says she’s something of a recluse these days. Rarely goes out.” Helen looked wistfully at the photo in her hand. “She used to take us swimming every Saturday, remember Gid?”

  “God, yes! Mum hates the water so she’d never even come to the pool with us when we were kids. Meg couldn’t swim either, but she still took us along, week in, week out. She would sit and watch while we had swimming lessons.”

  “Where did she live?” I asked, remembering my strange encounter with Marjorie in Peter Jones the morning I had met Claire for coffee.

  “Somewhere off the King’s Road, near World’s End.” Helen replied. “I guess she’s still there, Mum’s never mentioned a move. She had a funny little rented bedsit. I’m afraid I lost the address years ago though.” She was still looking wistfully at the photo. “Why do you ask?”

  “Oh, you know what . . .” I was about to blurt out the details of my encounter with the woman I was almost certain must have been Meg, but something made me stop. The woman I had seen didn’t match the description Marjorie had given Helen of her aunt at all. Although I had only seen her from afar, the Meg I had seen looked to have all her faculties working perfectly. If Marjorie had some reason for keeping her sister away from the rest of her family, and it wasn’t the reason she had given, then it might prove useful to me to find out more. Knowledge is, so they say, power. I had learnt enough about Marjorie one way or another to make me realise that I would have to find some way to manage her. I had no idea whether or not Meg could be of any use, but until I knew more I felt it best to keep my own counsel.

  “What?” asked Gideon.

  “I fancy another glass of wine, that’s what. Anyone else join me?” I would pay for that little lie in the morning when I woke feeling less than chipper, but right then it was the only thing I could come up with.

  CHAPTER 6

  Meeting Helen and Joe and their children had, despite what I had learned about Marjorie’s ability to interfere in her children’s relationships, lifted my spirits enormously. They felt like the kind of family I might like to have, which is something that I have rarely experienced. Part of the problem, I think, is that I have no memories at all, not a one, of my parents. I don’t even have a very clear idea of what they looked like, as whatever family photo albums there may have been somehow managed to get lost when my parents’ home was dismantled (by whom I have no idea, I only know that it was).

  I have come up with various reimaginings of what my parents may have been like but how close these are to the truth I do not know. I remember bits and pieces about my life before their deaths, but where my parents should be there is just a blank. I know more about how they died than I do about how they lived. They were killed in a head on collision while on their way back from somewhere, possibly a party. They were hit by a van driven by a man who had, in all probability, fallen asleep at the wheel and drifted across in front of their car too late, presumably, for whichever one of my parents was driving to take evasive action.

  I had, at the time of their death, been asleep for several hours, even though I had tried to stay awake until they came in. I do remember that I always did the same thing whenever they went out. I would press my right cheek against my bedroom window so that I could see the main road at the end of our road and watch for their car. If my parents were not in the first car that passed I would wait for another three cars. If they still failed to return I would allow myself another three, and so on until either Tessa (the teenaged babysitter who was watching over me and Dominic while our parents were out somewhere, dying) came to check on me or I got too tired and was forced to give up. I have never been able to shake off the feeling that, had I waited longer that night, I might have averted the whole awful tragedy. The idea that anything in this world or the wider universe can be controlled by our thoughts alone is ridiculous, and yet I still cling to the idea that somehow, at that moment, I could have been omnipotent if only I could have stayed awake.

  At six years old I obviously didn’t really understand what had happened. Had I been asked I would have presumed, if six year olds can presume, that my life would go on much as before in the absence of my parents. My brother and I would carry on living in our house with, perhaps, Tessa to look after us. I found out quite quickly however, that my presumption was very, very wrong.

  The first, totally unexpected and very unwelcome, consequence of my parents’ death was that my ballet teacher, who happened to be a neighbour and one of my least favourite people in the whole world, was unaccountably put in charge. I had been on the receiving end of Mrs Green’s discipline more than once, and it had never been a pleasant experience. First, I had got into terrible trouble for refusing to dance at the back in a concert given by my ballet class. I was a short child and couldn’t be seen if I was hidden at the
back and, as I had a rather higher estimation of my dancing ability than Mrs Green, this led to some friction. Second, Mrs Green had once tried to imprison me in her garden following an incident involving her daughter Susan and a swing. The swing was one of those triangular framed ones and it wasn’t attached to the ground properly. Mrs Green’s husband had just run off with the art teacher at the school where he taught (I only learnt about Mr Green’s infidelity much later, from Susan. She wrote to me every month for the next ten years without ever once receiving a reply, which I think says quite a lot about both of us). Mrs Green had therefore put the swing up by herself when she was probably in no fit state to be doing DIY. As a result when Susan and I began to swing on it rather too enthusiastically (probably at my instigation as Susan was not a natural thrill seeker, unlike her father) the whole edifice toppled over hitting Susan on the back of the head on its way down. Having seen events unfold from her kitchen window Mrs Green came running to Susan’s aid. Thinking that this would be a suitable time for me to leave I began sidling across the garden towards the side passage with the intention of making my exit to the street beyond. Mrs Green was not having any of it.

  “And where do you think you’re going?” she had thundered. I was rendered completely speechless, never having been shouted at by another child’s parent before. “You will stay here while I see to Susan. You,” Mrs Green said, pointing at me accusingly, “are completely responsible for what’s happened.” I didn’t even to stop to remonstrate with her about the unfairness of this assertion (it probably wasn’t unfair, but at six you think most things are unfair), but used the head start I had to outrun her and leg it down the side of the house to freedom, my promising career as a ballerina coming to an abrupt end in the process.

  You can imagine my horror therefore, on coming down to breakfast on the morning in question, when I found that not only were my parents missing, they had been replaced by a tear stained Mrs Green. Many years later I would reflect that Mrs Green was actually in a very bad place at this point in her life and that she did a sterling job in taking on the task of looking after two bewildered children. She did a much better job, in truth, than our own relatives, who arrived shortly afterwards, supposedly to take over. At the time I was incapable of such clear thinking however and was simply appalled.

  The first relative to appear was Aunt Audrey, our father’s sister. She had not played a major part in my life up to this point and, despite the fact that I would go on to live with her for the next ten years, she never did play a major role. Following close on the heels of Aunt Audrey were Uncle Mike and Aunt Karen, the brother and sister-in-law respectively of our mother. We still had two of our four grandparents living, but they had fallen out with our mother when she married our father and they had never reconciled, even following the births of their grandchildren. Being people of principle they clearly didn’t think they should change their stance just because there had now also been some deaths in the family.

  The next few days were the most confusing and difficult that I have ever experienced, and I have had quite a few confusing and difficult times so I know of what I speak. The adults who were supposed to be in charge kept disappearing behind closed doors and shouting. Dominic had no real idea what was going on and kept asking where our mother was and looking for her in the most unlikely places. He became fixated on the idea that she was hidden behind the wardrobe in my bedroom. It was in an alcove and there was barely room for a toddler to squeeze down the side of it, let alone a full grown woman. But no matter how many times I tried to tell him that the only thing to be found behind the wardrobe was a collection of half eaten biscuits that I had thrown there when my eyes proved to be bigger than my stomach, Dominic would still sit for hours on the floor of my room, waiting for our mother to come out from behind the closet. He was, however, quite happy to believe that our father was at work and so did not feel the need to hold a vigil for him. I’ve sometimes wondered if Dominic’s belief in all sorts of things that are clearly impossible are predicated on his clearly impossible belief that our mother was hiding behind my wardrobe. Perhaps if one of his other bonkers theories is proved true he believes she’ll finally reappear.

  After several days of shouting and crying behind closed doors the adults seemed to come to some sort of agreement and within a few hours of the last bellow from Uncle Mike we were whisked away. Dominic was bundled into a car with Uncle Mike and Aunt Karen, but it would appear that they didn’t have room for me (that I was, as I have already mentioned, a very ugly child while Dominic was quite cute may have had something to do with their decision), and I found myself in the back of Aunt Audrey’s Hillman Imp heading for somewhere called Norwich.

  As I was driven away I could see Mrs Green waving goodbye from their front room window. Susan, who was standing next to her mother, couldn’t wave as she was clutching my only recently acquired cat, Mr Perkins, to her chest and nuzzling his head. In all the shouting about which child would go where the only thing on which they all agreed was that Mr Perkins was staying put. It was this that finally caused my tears to fall. My parents, wherever they had gone were, I was quite certain, together, but I was all alone and seeing Mr Perkins sitting contentedly in Susan’s arms was just too much. I cried solidly all the way to Norwich, which only served to annoy Aunt Audrey and didn’t make me feel any better, or bring about the return of Mr Perkins.

  CHAPTER 7

  “Mum’s invited us for Burns’ Night,” Gideon announced over breakfast one morning in early January.

  “Really?” I tried not to sound too incredulous. After all that had happened over Christmas I was surprised to be invited back into Marjorie’s home so soon, but I took it as a positive sign that recent events were to be consigned to history.

  I should explain that my first Christmas with Gideon had not gone exactly as I might have wished. I had thought that we would have a quiet Christmas, just the two of us, but Marjorie had decreed that we were to have lunch at her house. I had been reluctant to go as a day spent in the company of Marjorie was, in my estimation at least, a day that could have been better spent doing almost anything else. But Helen, Joe, and their numerous children would also be in attendance so that made the prospect altogether more bearable. It might even be fun. I envisaged family board games perhaps or even, in my wilder imaginings, Twister.

  The first intimations that all might not go well came a few days before the day itself, when I had to ask Gideon a huge favour regarding Dominic. Gideon and I were Christmas shopping at the time, trying and so far failing, to find a present for Marjorie.

  “How about this?” I said pointing to a piece of glass shaped like an owl. It was hideous but Marjorie had lots of similarly ghastly ornaments dotted around her home so it seemed a reasonable choice.

  “Maybe, but Mum is quite hard to please, present wise. She might not like it.” Gideon picked up the lump of owl shaped glass. “What is it anyway?”

  “How could she not like it? What’s not to like?” I replied. There was a lot not to like about this hideous object but having already proffered countless potential gifts, none of which Gideon felt would pass muster with his mother, I was prepared to throw almost anything in his path if it would bring this hellish experience to an end. “It’s an owl.” I added.

  “Mmm, an owl,” Gideon said thoughtfully. “It might do.” He held it gingerly between his thumb and forefinger and turned his hand so that he could look at it from various angles as if this might help him to come to a decision on its worthiness. “But then again, she might not like it.”

  “Surely she’d like anything you bought her?” I said. I thought that’s what mothers did, accept any old tat from their children with protestations of great joy. While I had no recollection of ever buying my mother a present, I’m sure I must have given her at least one or two in the six years we spent together. I’m equally sure that she would have professed to love whatever it was that I had given her.

  “Mum knows what she likes,” Gideon said
. “I got her a lovely piece once. An abstract sculpture made from driftwood. I saw it in a gallery on the Suffolk coast, but a few days later I got it back in the post. It came with a note from Dad saying that she didn’t want it in the house.”

  “Is that the thing on the hall table? Looks like a petrified penis?” Gideon nodded in confirmation. I couldn’t help but have some sympathy with Marjorie’s position. It was a uniquely horrid object. “Christmas,” I said grabbing Gideon’s free arm and snuggling up to him in what I hoped was a charming manner, “it really is a time for families, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose so.” Gideon pulled his arm away and returned the owl to its place on the shelf before picking up a sculpture of a couple of cats nuzzling one another.

  “Oh,” I said as if the thought had taken me by surprise and was quite inconsequential. “I don’t think I told you, but Dominic needs somewhere to stay over Christmas. I said he could come to us.” I tried to sound bright and breezy, as if it were the most natural thing in the world that my brother should spend Christmas with his sister, which in a normal family it would have been.

  The thing is that I was pretty sure that Gideon would not be happy. He and Dominic had not exactly hit it off on the one occasion they had met. Dominic had decided to launch an attack on the proliferation of universities (like the one at which Gideon taught). He went on to explain, at some length, that these places were cynical money making machines providing a second rate education to young people who had been carefully nurtured by devoted teachers (like him) in secondary education. Such institutions did nothing to expand these youngsters’ minds, gave them no real career prospects, and left them saddled with debt. “It’s not your fault,” he had assured Gideon, “I’m sure you try your best, but the whole system stinks.”

  “Why can’t he stay in his own flat at Christmas?” Gideon replied, replacing the nuzzling cats on the shelf.