From the Kitchen of Half Truth Page 9

  “She already does,” says my mother sharply. Mark looks up at her, surprised by the edge to her voice. She smiles quickly.

  “Of course she does,” he agrees. “I understand her end-of-term paper caused quite a debate in the faculty, and if you can get people thinking, you’re halfway there. She’s a very intelligent girl.”

  He squeezes my knee, and I smile lovingly at him.

  “And a funny, compassionate, and sweet girl, too,” adds my mother.

  Mark nods distractedly as he picks at the crumbs on his plate. My mother watches him closely, waiting for his agreement.

  I want to intervene, to change the subject and stop them discussing me like I’m not here, but instead I find myself also waiting for Mark’s reply. What does he think of me? I mean, apart from finding me smart and intelligent and intellectually challenging? What does he actually think of me? Bizarrely, I realize he has never said, and, even more bizarrely, I realize I have never wondered.

  “Oh, yes, she’s lovely,” he says, realizing it’s his cue to speak. He takes a napkin and wipes his mouth. I watch him, waiting, wanting more, but when he leans back in his chair, sighs, and pats his stomach, I realize he’s finished.

  My mother reaches across the table and rubs my hand, smiling indulgently. “She always was a sweet girl. When she was little she was so sweet I used to dip her toes in my tea. It saved me a fortune on sugar. I used to lend her out to the neighbors. ‘Don’t bother buying sugar,’ I used to tell them, ‘my daughter’s the sweetest thing around, and she doesn’t rot your teeth.’”

  “Mother,” I scold sharply, pulling my hand away from hers.

  “The neighbors would knock on our door at all hours of the day with cups of tea or coffee, and they’d say, ‘Can we get some sweetener?’ and I’d dip one of Meg’s tiny fingers or toes into their cup—”

  “Mother!”

  I can feel my cheeks burning with embarrassment. It’s bad enough that Mark knows my mother is insane without his having to witness her rantings firsthand.

  “Then one day I noticed that Meg’s middle toes were starting to wither away. Have you ever noticed, Mark, how Meg’s middle toes are a little too short? It was all that dipping them in hot drinks that was the problem. Well, when I realized what was happening, I had to stop—”

  “Mother!” I snap angrily. “Mark doesn’t want to hear any of your ridiculous stories. Stop embarrassing yourself!”

  My mother stares at me, silent and abashed. I am so ashamed. Whatever must Mark think of us? Why must she do this? Why must she make us look like such fools?

  Slowly she stands up, her cheeks flushed, her hands fumbling to gather up her cup and her plate.

  “I must go and get on with things,” she says quietly. “You don’t want your silly mother sitting here rambling on all day.” She gives an embarrassed chuckle and goes to leave, but just before she gets to the door she turns to me. “I just thought Mark might like to know something more about you.”

  “He already knows everything about me that matters,” I say, annoyed.

  She gives a little smile, and I wonder why, when she is the one who talks such nonsense, I am the one who feels like a liar.

  Once she has gone, Mark shakes his head in disbelief. “Blimey, what a story!” he laughs. “I’m relieved to hear you take after your father, because your mother is crazy!”

  I feel hurt. How am I meant to respond to that? She might be a little strange, but she is still my mother. I look at Mark shaking his head in dismay, his gorgeous, pearly white smile conveying his amusement. He is so intelligent, so confident, so everything I would like to be.

  I force myself to laugh with him.

  “Yes,” I agree. “She is crazy.”

  ***

  Nothing feels right for the rest of the morning. My mother and I tactfully avoid each other. I feel annoyed with her for humiliating me, but also guilty for my outburst. Then I decide I shouldn’t have to feel guilty for my outburst, and my annoyance with her doubles. In order to get out of the house, I take Mark into town, where we eat stodgy sandwiches in a cheap café. I try my best to be interesting, adding what I think are fairly astute observations to our discussions about the latest political crisis, but my heart’s not really in it.

  To make matters worse, our return to the house perfectly coincides with the gardener’s arrival. Mark usually insists on parking his perfectly buffed and shined car in the driveway, just in case anybody should see fit to steal it, but today, for some reason, he pulls up right behind the gardener’s rusty, clapped-out van, looking strangely satisfied. Unfortunately, the new parking arrangement does not seem to work quite so well for the gardener, who taps on Mark’s window just as we are unfastening our seat belts.

  Mark opens his door slightly, looking annoyed and muttering something about the filthy smudge that the gardener has left on his window.

  “Do you mind backing up a bit?” asks the gardener. “I need to open the back doors of my van.”

  Mark doesn’t respond, so engrossed is he in examining the streak of dirt the gardener has left on his window. I feel slightly embarrassed and want to whisper to Mark that it really doesn’t matter, that we have plenty of Windex inside the house and that I will be more than happy to clean the dirt off later. But I don’t think that would help matters.

  “Didn’t expect to see you back so soon,” says Mark. “I expect you need to work every day, though, don’t you, to make your line of work pay?”

  I feel impressed and relieved that Mark has adopted such a friendly and sensitive tone. For a moment there I thought he was going to be insulting.

  “Just on my way back from another job,” the gardener says. “Thought I’d swing by and finish off the staking. Ran out of bamboo yesterday.”

  “Stretching the job out,” Mark says with a nod. “Very clever.”

  They stare at each other for what feels like an embarrassingly long time, and I shift awkwardly in my seat, thinking that Mark can’t possibly have realized the implication of his comment. But the gardener just smiles.

  “I’m not charging for it,” he explains. “I just don’t like leaving a job unfinished.”

  Mark nods slowly, and I can see his mind whirring while he thinks of a response to this.

  “We’ll reverse a bit,” I say quickly, wanting to end this exchange.

  “Be careful not to scratch my hood when you take your tools out, won’t you?” says Mark, going to close the door.

  “Right you are, governor,” says the gardener, giving a little salute. “Miss.” He winks at me and gives another little salute before giving the top of the car a hearty pat and walking back toward his van, pretending to tip his imaginary cap. I try to suppress a smile, telling myself there is nothing funny about this insolent little comedy routine, while Mark shakes his head, disgruntled, and puts the car in reverse.

  ***

  Mark isn’t terribly good with heights, which is why, later that day, I am the one perching precariously at the top of a ladder with my head inside the loft hatch while he passes up my suitcases.

  “What’s that?” I hear him ask from the landing below.

  He suddenly tugs so hard on the case I am struggling to hoist into the loft that I am forced to let it go or come tumbling down the ladder with it. It is only by grabbing onto the edge of the loft hatch that I manage to stop myself from falling and breaking my neck. I hear a cry of pain and look down to see Mark holding his head, the old, battered leather suitcase at his feet.

  “Meg,” he says, looking up at me, “can you try to be less clumsy?”

  “But you—”

  “You could have killed me.”

  “Sorry,” I say, thinking if anyone could have been killed, surely it’s me.

  “What’s that?” I ask, looking at the piece of paper Mark is examining.

  “Just looks like a
n old flier for some rock band,” he says, rubbing his head. “It was sticking out from the seam of the suitcase. I thought it might be important. Not so important I wanted to risk my life for it, though.”

  “What do you mean, a flier?” I ask, intrigued. I descend the ladder and take the piece of paper out of Mark’s hand.

  The Frog and Whistle, King’s Cross, presents CHLORINE (nearly featured in That’s Music! magazine). Tickets at the door.

  The date is the year of my birth.

  “Probably something from your mother’s crazy teenage years,” Mark says. “Was she into bands? I can imagine she was. Probably did drugs. That would explain a lot…”

  I turn the piece of paper over. On the back, in my mother’s faded handwriting, is an address: 15 Gray’s Inn Road, London.

  “…drugs fry the brain. That’s probably the problem, you know. Irresponsible behavior always takes its toll sooner or later…”

  I’m not really listening to anything Mark is saying. All I can think is that I am holding a piece of my mother’s past in my hands. A real, concrete item from the year I was born that has transcended the passage of time and ended up here, now, today, between my fingers. It feels rather surreal.

  “It must have worked its way into the lining of the case,” says Mark. “You should just get rid of this old thing. Look at the state of it.”

  I touch the piece of paper as if it is a priceless museum piece.

  “This belonged to her,” I say thoughtfully, “around the time I was born. Maybe even before I was born.”

  “Mmm. So do you want to keep this case, or shall we throw it out?”

  Mark clearly has no idea what this means. Despite everything I have told him about my past—or lack of it—he still doesn’t really grasp the extent of the void. And how could he? How could anybody? No one understands what it feels like to have a hole where a life should be.

  “Do you think it’s important?” asks Mark, spying the intrigue on my face.

  Whose address could this be? I wonder. Could it be family? Could it be an old friend of my mother’s? Could it be the address of my father’s family, who might not have been French at all? Could it be the address of my father?

  “It’s probably nothing,” I say.

  Mark eyes me closely.

  “Are you sure? Because if you do think this is important in some way, then you need to—”

  “Oh, no,” I say, waving my hand in the air dismissively. “It’s nothing. I’m sure of it.”

  I haphazardly fold the paper and stuff it in my back pocket as casually as possible, as if I’m merely going to keep it there until I can reach a bin. I don’t want Mark making a big deal out of this, because I know exactly what will come next. He’ll tell me to ask my mother, to search out the facts, to make her talk…but he just doesn’t understand. And I don’t need that kind of pressure right now. So it’s better to be nonchalant and to pretend that finding a scrap of my mother’s past is something that happens all the time, that my heart’s not pounding, that my mind’s not whirring, and that I’m not having visions of myself knocking on a house on Gray’s Inn Road and screaming “Daddy!” before flinging my arms around the neck of my long-lost father.

  “Right, shall we try that again?” I ask, quickly scrambling back up the ladder before any more can be said about the matter.

  ***

  “I’m afraid I won’t be able to come down next weekend,” Mark says as we stand by his car. “James has an award ceremony in London on Saturday evening, and I promised I’d be there.”

  “That’s fine,” I reassure him, thinking I could have done without this reminder of Mark’s family. They are all incredibly sane and successful. His brother, James, is a microbiologist who seems to keep making amazing discoveries, and his parents are both doctors. I have only met his parents once. They were very smart and respectable, and neither of them felt the need to invent ridiculous stories about their son’s childhood.

  “I’ll come down the following weekend, though,” Mark says.

  “That’s fine,” I say again.

  If the truth be told, I am quite keen for Mark to get in his car and go, which is a terrible thing to admit. I really do appreciate everything he has done for me, and it was very good of him to pack up all my belongings and bring them down, but I can feel the flier in my back pocket, burning like a hot coal through the denim of my jeans, in need of urgent attention.

  I’m sure it’s nothing. But what if it is? What if this could lead me to someone or something from my past? My mother is so scrupulously secretive. She has woven her web of lies so carefully that no trace has ever existed for me to follow. But now I have something. A little scrap of paper with an address on it. It might mean nothing. But then again…

  Mark cups his hands around my face and plants a firm kiss on my lips. “Talk to your mother,” he advises me, wisely. “She really needs to start facing the truth about what’s going to happen. Get some more advice from the doctor. And call a lawyer, won’t you? You don’t want to just leave things; you need to plan ahead. If you want, my parents have a great attorney—”

  “It’s fine,” I say quickly, squeezing his arm. “I’ll sort it out.”

  He smiles at me.

  “I know you will. That’s the thing I really admire about you, the fact that—”

  “Oh, Mark, look at the time! You’re going to miss the car wash. It closes at five.”

  Mark checks his watch, looking as panic-stricken as I have ever seen him.

  “Does it? Right. Better go, then.”

  As Mark slowly drives down the road, I wave to him and tap my foot restlessly on the hot pavement, feeling rather guilty for wanting him gone. By the time his car reaches the end of the road and stops at the intersection, its turn indicator flashing, I have already pulled the flier from my pocket and am clumsily unfolding it with one hand while continuing to wave to Mark with the other. Even though there is never any traffic on these roads, I know Mark will be checking—left, right, left again, right again—just like he always does. By the time he carefully turns the corner, I have managed to convince myself that this little scrap of paper is the key to the universe, and I can’t wait a moment longer.

  “Right,” I tell myself, already halfway up the garden path. “Time for the truth.”

  ***

  “I was never very good at making toad in the hole. I could never get the toads to stay in the batter long enough to get the dish in the oven. They knew what was coming, you see. As you know, toads don’t much like the heat, so the moment I opened the oven door they’d be off, hopping across the work surface, leaving little batter footprints everywhere.”

  I hover behind the blackberry bush, listening to my mother’s ravings. She must be talking to the gardener. I am surprised at how sociable my mother is being; usually she avoids other people like the plague. Unfortunately, it seems that finally she has found someone willing to endure her nonsense for hours on end.

  “Trying to catch those toads was impossible!” she is saying. “They’re slippery enough as it is, but when they’re covered in batter you haven’t got a chance!”

  I close my eyes and resist the urge to scream. Or cry. It’s bad enough having Mark think she’s a lunatic, but when it’s a complete stranger…

  “Maybe you should have used frogs instead, Valerie. I know toad in the hole is more traditional, but the thing is toads are really smart creatures, whereas frogs, well, they’re not so bright.”

  “Really?”

  “Sure. Why do you think the French eat so many of them? They’re easy to catch, no coordination. Toads, on the other hand, they’ll be off and out of sight before you know it.”

  “Well, I never knew that. That would have saved me many an hour running around the kitchen after those wretched toads. Actually, to you tell the truth, even when I caught them I never put them in the
oven. They had a way of looking at me with their big sad eyes—”

  “I know just what you mean. Toads are real emotional blackmailers.”

  I put my hands over my face in despair. My God, they’re both as crazy as each other! He’s just encouraging her. Out of all the gardeners in the world who could have knocked on our door…

  “Hi, there.”

  I peek through my fingers at the gardener, who is standing in front of me with a bamboo stake and some twine in his hands, looking at me curiously.

  “Are you okay?”

  I take my hands away from my face and straighten my blouse.

  “Yes, thank you. I was just looking for my mother.”

  “Hello, darling,” she says, emerging from behind the bush in an enormous straw sunhat and sunglasses that swamp her face. Her voice has lost the excitement of a moment ago, and she looks slightly nervous, as if she is waiting for me to tell her off again like I did this morning.

  I feel horrible. I didn’t mean to make her feel bad. Seeing her looking so timid—and so ridiculous in those glasses—my heart softens, and I wonder whether I should question her about the flier after all. Wouldn’t it be easier just to smooth over the events of this morning with a nice glass of lemonade and a chat, lying side by side on the lounge chairs? I’m sure she’s got some recipe she wants to tell me about, and it’s such a lovely day…but no! If this could mean something, if this could be a link to the past, then I need to know.

  “Mother, what is this?” I ask, holding the piece of paper out to her. “It was in the lining of your old suitcase.”

  My mother takes the paper from my hand and examines it, turning it over and reading the address. An expression I have never seen before suddenly clouds her face. She looks like she’s just opened her own death warrant. Her hand flutters at her throat, and the color seems to drain from her rosy cheeks.

  “I don’t…I really…I have no idea,” she stammers.

  “Whose address is that?”

  My mother touches her lips nervously.

  “I don’t know, darling. I really don’t know. Is it yours?”