Everything to Gain. Barbara Taylor Bradford

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СКАЧАТЬ this random thought surfaced, floated to the front of my head, I examined it as carefully as I was washing the lettuce leaves under the running water. Wasn’t I being just a little bit unfair? No one in this world is perfect, least of all my father. He was a human being, after all, not a God, even if he had seemed like one to me when I was growing up. He had been all golden and shining and beautiful, the most handsome, the most dashing, the most brilliant man in the world. And the most perfect. Of course. Yes, he had been all those things to me as a child. But he must have had his flaws and his frailties, like we all do, hangups and weaknesses as well as strengths. So … should I not perhaps give my mother the benefit of the doubt?

      This was so startling a thought I took a moment to adjust to it.

      Finally, I glanced over my shoulder at her. She was calmly sitting there at my kitchen table, talking to Diana, methodically making her famous potato salad, one she had prepared so religiously every fourth of July throughout my entire childhood and teenage years.

      Unbidden and unexpected, taking me by surprise, it came rushing back to me, a fragment of a memory, a memory prodigiously beaten into submission, carefully boxed and buried and thankfully forgotten. Suddenly resurrected, it was flailing at me now, free-falling into my consciousness. And as it did I found myself looking down the corridor of time. I saw a day long, long ago, twenty-eight years ago to be exact. I was five years old, and an unwilling witness to marital savagery so shocking, so painful to bear I had done the only thing possible. I had obliterated it.

      Echoing back to me along that shadowy, perilous tunnel of the past came a mingling of familiar voices which dredged up that day, dragged it back into the present. Exhumed, exposed, it lived again.

      My mother is here, young and beautiful, an ethereal, dreamlike creature in her white muslin summer frock, her golden hair burnished in the sunlight. She is standing in the middle of the huge kitchen of my grandmother’s summer house in Southampton. But her voice contrasts markedly with her loveliness. It is harsh and angry and accusatory.

      I am afraid.

      She is telling my father he cannot leave. Not today, not the fourth, not with all the family coming, all of the festivities planned. He cannot leave her and her parents and me. ‘Think of your child, Edward. She adores you,’ she cries. ‘Mallory needs you to be here for her today.’ She is repeating this, over and over and over again like a shrill litany.

      And my father is explaining that he must go, that he has to catch his plane to Egypt, explaining that the new dig is about to start, telling her that as head of the archaeological team he must be there at the outset.

      My mother starts to scream at him. Her face is ugly with rage. She is accusing him of going to her, to his mistress, not to the expedition at all.

      My father is defending himself, protesting his innocence, telling my mother she is a fool, and a jealous fool, at that. Then he tells her more softly that she has no reason to be jealous. He vows that he loves only her; he explains, very patiently, that he must go because he must do his work, must work to support us.

      My mother is shaking her head vehemently from side to side, denying, denying.

      The bowl of potato salad is suddenly in her hands, then it is leaving her hands as it is violently flung. It is sailing through the air, hitting the wall behind my father, bouncing off the wall, splattering his dark blue blazer with bits of potato and mayonnaise before it crashes to the floor with a thud, like a bomb exploding.

      My father is turning away angrily, leaving the kitchen, his handsome face miserable, contorted with pain. There is a helplessness about him.

      My mother is weeping hysterically.

      I am cringing in the butler’s pantry, clinging to Elvira, my grandma’s cook, who is my best friend, my only friend, except for my father, in this house of anger and secrets and lies.

      My mother is storming out of the kitchen, running after my father, in her anguish not noticing Elvira and me as she races past the open door of the pantry.

      Again, she is shouting loudly. ‘I hate you! I hate you! I’ll never give you a divorce. Never. Not as long as I live. Mercedes will never have the pleasure of being your wife, Edward Jordan. I swear to you she won’t. And if you leave me, you’ll never see Mallory again. Not ever again. I’ll make sure of that. I have my father’s money behind me. It will build a barrier, Edward. A barrier to keep you away from Mallory.’

      I hear her running upstairs after my father, railing on at him remorselessly, her voice shrill and bitter and condemning.

      Elvira is stroking my hair, soothing me. ‘Pay no mind,’ she is whispering, her plump black arms encircling me, keeping me safe. ‘Pay no mind, chile. The big folks is always mouthing the stupidest things … things they doan never mean … things no chile needs hear. Pay no mind, honeychile mine. Your Momma doan mean not a word she ses.’

      My father is here.

      He does not leave. An armed truce is struck between them; it lasts only through the fourth of July. The following morning he kisses me goodbye. He drives back to Manhattan and flies off to Egypt to his dig.

      He does not come back for five months.

      I closed my eyes, squeezing back the tears, pressing down the pain this unexpected memory, so long concealed, has evoked in me.

      Slowly, I lifted my lids and stared at the kitchen wall. With infinite care, I placed the lettuce leaves in the colander to drain, covering them with a large piece of paper towel. My hands felt heavy, like dead weights, and nausea fluttered in my stomach. Holding onto the edge of the sink, I calmed myself and endeavoured to regain my equilibrium before I walked across the kitchen.

      Eventually, I was able to move.

      I paused at the kitchen table and looked down at my mother.

      It struck me, with a rush of clarity and something akin to shock, that she had probably suffered greatly as a young wife. I should stop my silent condemnation of her. All of my father’s long absences must have been difficult to endure, unimaginably lonely and painful for her. Had there been a mistress? Had a woman called Mercedes really existed? Had there been many other women over the years? Most probably, I thought, with a sinking feeling. My father was a good-looking, normal, healthy man, and when he was younger he must have sought out female company. For as long as I could recall, he and my mother had had separate bedrooms, and this situation had existed long before he had left for good, when I was eighteen. He had stayed in that terrible marriage for me. I had long believed this, had long accepted it. Somehow, today, I knew it to be true.

      Perhaps my mother had experienced humiliation and despair and more heartache than I ever realized. But I would never get the real truth from her. She never talked about the past, never confided in me. It was as if she wanted to bury those years, forget them, perhaps even pretend they never happened. Maybe that was why she was so remote with me at times. Maybe I reminded her of things she wanted to expunge from her memory.

      My mother was looking up at me.

      She caught my eye and smiled uncertainly, and for the first time in my adult life I asked myself if I had been unfair, if I had done her a terrible injustice all these years.

      ‘What is it, Mal?’ she asked, her blonde brows puckering, a spark of concern flickering in her hazel eyes.

      I СКАЧАТЬ