Friday reading

Ellen's letter offers new and unsettling insights into Deb's past

Dearest Deb

I hope you and Pearl and Rose are all keeping well, but especially you. I hope you are not neglecting yourself and are eating and sleeping well while nursing Pearl.

This is a very difficult letter to write. To tell you the truth, this is my third go at it. There’s a pile of torn paper in the waste basket beside me. Mr. Digby is rummaging there although I’m not sure what he hopes to find. I think he just likes the rustling noise. He’s bored and I’m at my wits’ end.

I’m writing on behalf of Jim. I know, I know, it seems cowardly of him to duck this responsibility, on top of all the others he has dodged. Please don’t be angry with him. You know, he’s a fragile person underneath all his bluster. That’s often the way isn’t it? The ones who do the most swaggering and blathering are often completely tongue-tied when it comes to talking about what matters most in life, the things we carry in our hearts.

He was genuinely overjoyed at news of Pearl’s birth. In fact he was all for catching a train straightaway to visit you three. I had to restrain him by reminding him that you might not want to see him, a) because he had let you down, again, when you were staying with us, and b) because you’re a new mother and probably exhausted. It took a while to get those points through to him but he eventually gave in and accepted you might be too tired and overwrought for a visit.

On the first point he was less sure, not wanting to see how he’d let himself down in front of you. In the end he raised his hands and said OK, OK, you win, which wasn’t really the point but I let it go once it meant he wasn’t going to rush straight to London and land in on top of you all unannounced. When he gave up on his huff he said he’d go later. Sending the card and the gift appeased him a little. No doubt it crossed your mind to wonder what gift, if any, he had sent at your birth.

Whew! I thought now we can get back to normal. He can be very moody and the mood can last a couple of days so you can understand why I wanted the clouds to pass. I was wrong though. At first we seemed to be going along as normal but soon I realised Jim was playing a part, acting as if nothing had changed while actually being distracted and inattentive. I began to wonder was he going deaf – the way I had to repeat myself so often.

When we were watching telly he looked kind of blank if I remarked on something a character in a soap said or exclaimed about a news report. He couldn’t even tell me the score of a football match. That was seriously worrying! I asked him was he feeling all right, should he go to the doctor, get his hearing checked. At first he brushed me off, saying I was overworked and should take a break so I let the matter drop, for the time being.

A few days later, when we were hiking on the moors, throwing a stick for Mr. Digby, as usual, Jim opened up – broke down really. He said he’d been thinking about my questions about his health and he decided he had to be straight with me because he wasn’t feeling too good. My heart jolted for a moment and I put my hand on his arm. No, no, he said, it’s not that I’m sick or not in the way you’re imagining. He said he needed to tell me something he probably should have told me long ago. He was afraid I might hate him when he’d said his say. For a moment I expected him to tell me he was having an affair although I couldn’t think how he how he thought he’d get away with it in our scutty town but you never know.

I took a deep breath, told him to spit it out and let me decide for myself what I thought. Unless he’d committed a terrible crime, I said, my feelings were unlikely to change. I don’t know that it’s a crime, he said but it’s not nice. I continued walking and picking up and flinging the stick for Digby, without looking at Jim. It was easier that way. Let him say what he had to say without having to look me in the eye. He beat around the bush for a long time, pausing now and again, waiting for me to comment. I only said, go on, I’m listening.

Here is what he told me, without all the ifs buts ands and long ways around his confession. He spotted your Mam, Dolores, one day on a bus. Next day he took the same bus and the day after that and after that one until he saw her again. This time he got off at her stop, followed her home, at a distance. Soon he was hanging around your grandmother’s hairdressing salon, and took to nodding to Dolores – or Doll as he called her – passing the time, until one day she confronted him and asked when he’d pluck up the courage to ask her on a date.

After a year or so they began to talk about marriage. And yes, they did ‘go all the way’ – his words! – but he swore he always used protection. He got on well with your grandmother, Agnes, and he knew Betty well too because he often stayed in their flat when he ‘missed’ the last bus home. Betty was three years younger than Doll and, in his words, ‘a bit spoilt and flighty’. Doll worried about the way her little sister couldn’t seem to settle to anything, one day she’d be happily working in the salon, the next she’d be talking about going to secretarial college, or trying out for modelling.

Jim thought maybe they babied her too much. He said she was like someone wearing the wrong size clothes, never easy in herself. A funny way to put it. All the same I know what he means about restless people. Doll, on the other hand, was already into her ‘playacting’ with a local drama club. Yes he said she was more grounded than Betty. He saw her in a play and a panto and said she was quite good. She loved the dancing and singing, he said.

Photo by Augustine Mullick on Unsplash

One weekend himself and Doll were invited to a 21^st birthday party but Doll wasn’t feeling well. He said she’d often be sick for a day or two at her time of the month. He sounded irritated as if he thought she was hamming up the sickness. His sisters were never like that, he said. I let that go because I didn’t want to interrupt him once he’d started on his story. He said it wasn’t like Doll to miss an opportunity to get out in the glad rags and have her hair done up by her mother or Betty. I honestly bit my tongue!

In the end he brought Betty to the party, partly to spite Doll. He said she looked stunning in a bright yellow and red dress, her hair all shiny with a new bob, like ‘some kind of a rare butterfly’. She flirted with him from the moment they set out for the party, seizing his hand, putting her arm around his neck, and so on. Yes, I know, this is his version of events and sadly Betty is no longer here to give us her side.

No prizes for guessing what happened next. They had sex and not just the once but a couple more times after the night of the party, all while he continued ‘going steady’ with Doll. She wasn’t long about getting suspicious. According to Jim, the trouble was Betty was forever dropping hints about their carry on. Who’s to say now what the truth of the matter is. After a few more encounters with Betty he called a halt because he said didn’t like deceiving her sister. She took it badly but he was adamant.

At least he was until Doll told him Betty was pregnant. To be fair to Betty she never actually said he was the father but Dolores was nobody’s fool, as I’m sure you know. She threw the book at him, calling him every name under the sun, for doing the dirt on her and on her little sister, as if she didn’t worry enough about her. He offered to marry Betty but she didn’t want to marry him and your grandmother, God bless her, told him to go away and leave her daughters alone. She said he was after causing enough trouble without marrying the one who didn’t want him, after breaking the heart of the one who did. He took the mailboat a week later.

So you see, this is what I have to tell you: Betty was your mother, not Dolores. By the time she gave birth to you, in your grandmother’s kitchen, with Dolores and a friend of your grandmother’s on hand, Betty had decided she couldn’t keep you. After the birth she was too listless anyway to feel up to looking after you.

She said she wanted to go away and forget about everything, she wouldn’t be able to give you a home and an education, she gave out to her mother for not letting her go to England to put an end to the pregnancy and so on. She tried to nurse you but her milk wouldn’t come, which made her all the more sure she wasn’t cut out for motherhood. She was obviously suffering from baby blues or post-natal depression. Your grandmother and Dolores took over, surely hoping that Betty would recover herself in time. When it was clear she wasn’t able for the responsibility of minding you Dolores stepped in and said she’d raise you like her own.

Jim wrote occasionally to Betty thinking somehow this would help her. Her replies were full of anger, giving out to him for ruining her life, he said. She wished she’d never laid eyes on him. He says he couldn’t understand it because of the way she was throwing herself at him. I tried to explain to him how sometimes young girls want to appear sophisticated even though they’re immature underneath the make-up and bob. ‘Maybe you’re right,’ he sighed, ‘but then I was young too and I suppose I thought I was smarter than I was.’

As soon as he got a job he sent over some money which Dolores made Betty send back, saying they didn’t need his guilt money or anything else from him. He did ask Betty for a snap of you and she sent a very small one which he kept in his wallet for a long time until he burnt it once in a drunken fit of gloom. He never thought he’d see you. You need to believe he’s really happy you found him, even if it has brought up all this troubling history.

I’m sorry to be the bearer of such a complicated and confusing story. It’s taken me a while to see past the grief he caused Betty, Dolores, your grandmother and most of all, You. I’m not sure I’m reconciled to it yet. Probably I never will be because in a selfish way I feel betrayed too. Don’t worry, I’m not looking for your sympathy or trying to compare my distress to yours, or theirs. It hurts me to know he didn’t trust me enough to tell it to me this before now and to think I might never have known it only for you and Pearl.

He says you put him in mind of Betty, not so much in your looks but in your ways. He asked me to tell you he’ll understand if you’d rather not see him again. If you ever do feel up to meeting him he’d be happy to come to London to see you and meet Pearl and Rose.

And so would I. The one good thing to come out of this story is you, and now Pearl. I hope you know there’s nothing in the world I’d like more than to see you all. I’d like to meet Lucy too, having heard so much about her from you. Maybe some day we will be able to set aside our wounded feelings and meet in a happy way.

For now, incredibly, Jim has managed to stay on the waggon. I feel myself watching him, looking out for the signs that he’s slipping but so far so good. I have to believe someone, somewhere is looking out for us. Maybe it’s a relief for him to have finally told me the truth about his past and about you. He’s correct, in the strict legal sense, to say what he did wasn’t a crime but it was wrong, deeply, unconscionably wrong, and he knows it was a shameful business.

I’ll sign off now as my tears are beginning to smudge the page. Whether I’m crying for pity or weariness or both I don’t know. Take good care of yourself, Deb, and of little Pearl. I feel sure Rose will help you deal with these revelations. I know it will be difficult to tell the story to Lucy too but something tells me she’ll be able for it. She has been through so much herself in her young life already.

I sign off in hope of you someday communicating with us again while at the same time I will more than understand if you’d rather not.

Love from me and from Jim

Ellen xxxooo

---