afterwards. She seemed washed out, exhausted, and Helen was a mewling, puking baby who caught everything a baby can catch. Finally though she came through it all. It was like she’d got everything over early and all at once. I don’t think she’s had anything worse than a cold since she was two and a half. I half believe Mum looked at her, thought, that’s you safely out of the woods, relaxed her hold on life, and just slipped away.
Heart failure, the doctors called it. You can’t get much vaguer than that. After I stopped blaming her for dying, I blamed Helen. And, of course, my father.
Daddy never seemed to be around much, which could be why I was so close to Pal. I’ve got photos of Mum and Daddy together, of course, but it’s a funny thing, I don’t have any picture of them together in my memory. Not one.
After Mum died, Aunt Vinnie moved in with us for a while. She wasn’t quite as eccentric then as she is now, but well on the way. An eleven-year-old girl’s capacity for being embarrassed is pretty high and I found Aunt Vinnie acutely embarrassing. I’d have a couple of friends round to the house to play records and suddenly she’d burst in and insist we all went out into the garden to see a lesser twitted willie-warbler, and when we got there it would have gone and we’d hang around for ages waiting for it to come back despite the fact that it was minus two and raining. Girls at school started flapping their arms and whistling whenever they saw me in the playground. I hated it.
But I was talking about Daddy. He needed someone to look after Helen, I can see that. And Vinnie wasn’t the answer, not in the long term. Also he needed someone to look after the house. And above all, I realize this now, he needed someone to look after him. Sexually, I mean. He was a big vigorous man and to be honest I don’t think he’d been getting much if anything since Mum gave birth to Helen. I was only a kid but growing up fast, and girls have an instinct for that sort of thing.
The perfect answer would have been a housekeeper-cum-nanny who fucked, just a matter of advertisement, careful selection, and the promise of a specially big Christmas bonus.
But Daddy was the great businessman. He saw a way to get all three without having to pay out a penny in advertising or wages.
He got Kay.
What were her motives? Not love, I don’t believe love. She was younger than I am now, with a good job and great prospects. What the hell was there about a middle-aged Yorkshire businessman with a gammy leg and three kids to attract her? Remember Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester, you say. Listen, there was nothing romantically mysterious about Daddy, believe me. OK, his father-my granda-was all Irish, but in Daddy the little green genes had long since lost the battle with Yorkshire pudding. Pal was convinced it was some kind of set-up. Ashur-Proffitt were dead keen to get their hands on Maciver’s and when Daddy played hard to get, instead of upping the ante, they told Kay to up her skirts. Why did she have to go the whole hog and marry him? Maybe they wanted someone close in there to keep an eye on him in case he still tried to meddle with the way they were reorganizing the company. Maybe she saw the chance of setting herself up after a couple of years with a nice nest egg as a rich divorcee. Maybe she was prescient and foresaw a future as a merry widow.
I don’t know. I just know that Pal and I could see from the start that she was doing this purely for herself. The thought of her in my mother’s house, in my mother’s bed, using my mother’s things, made me ill.
She soon caught on that she hadn’t got Pal and me fooled, so she concentrated on Daddy and Helen. Four years old, what do you know? She’d lost one woman who devoted the whole of her attention to her. Now here comes another apparently willing and eager to do the same. Helen took to her like a fly to jam. As for Daddy, I don’t know what she was doing to him in bed, but he was besotted. Pal and I did what we could by way of resistance, but we both knew we were on a loser.
It was worse for me, I think. Pal was fifteen, his life was full of things that took him out of the house. You know what boys are like at that age. It was all girls and football. We were still close but maybe not the way we’d been a couple of years earlier. Kay’s arrival threw us back together, which was the only good thing you could say about it. But it also separated us because I decided I couldn’t put up with having to share a house with her all the year round and I spoke to Daddy and told him I’d changed my mind about going away to school.
He’d been keen for both of us to go to boarding school when we moved into secondary education. Pal had refused point-blank. He said all his mates were going to Weavers and that’s what he wanted too. When it came to my turn, I followed suit. I’d just started there when Kay came on the scene. Suddenly, boarding school didn’t seem such a bad option. I talked it over with Pal and he said he’d miss me but he understood why I wanted to go and there’d be the hols to look forward to. So I went.
From my point of view it turned out great. I was a bit homesick at first, then I thought of Kay and got over it. I soon made friends and pretty soon I started to enjoy myself. I wrote to Pal, of course, describing all my adventures and he wrote back, telling me what was happening back here. But he never mentioned Kay. It wasn’t till a lot later that I found out what had been going on almost from the moment I left.
I don’t know if she really fancied him. It wouldn’t have been surprising. Like I say, he was a hunk in the making by the time he was twelve; in his case the gangly spotty stage hardly lasted a year, and suddenly, in his teens, there he was, a dish fit for a queen. And there was always something a bit royal family about Kay. You know, quiet, controlled, never a hair or a word out of place. The royal family like it used to be. And maybe the idea of having father and son turned her on. I felt from the start she was a bit of a sexual athlete. It doesn’t matter how prim and proper the exterior, a woman can usually tell.
Or maybe it was just that it got up her nose when he and I made it so plain she didn’t take us in and we didn’t like her. She tried the all-girls-together-let’s-be-friends approach on me but gave up when she saw it was getting her nowhere. With a boy it’s different. You men, all of you in your teens, and some for a long time after, once a woman gets hold of your dick, no matter what your personal circumstances or feelings, you’re lost. I know. I’ve tried it and it works. God didn’t give us much in the battle of the sexes but He gave us that.
So she went after him.
She’d bump into him accidentally on purpose. Or he’d be passing the bathroom and she’d come out with a towel over her shoulders, everything on show, and wink at him as they passed. Or she’d be sunbathing topless on the lawn and ask him to rub some sun oil on her back.
Pal didn’t know what to do. How do you tell your father something like that? And things weren’t so good between them anyway. I think Daddy had some crazy notion of his boy making good in the business world and wresting back control of the old family firm, but from an early age Pal made it clear he wasn’t interested in that kind of work. He never took to rock climbing either or game shooting, and sometimes he’d deliberately put on a real Irish brogue and say he supported the IRA just to get up Daddy’s nose. So now when he’d have really liked to be able to talk to Daddy, it was pretty well impossible, especially on this subject. So he had to suffer in silence and when he did let his antagonism towards Kay show, Daddy would tear a strip off him for his bad manners!
And there was another complication.
Pal genuinely found Kay’s behaviour repellent, I’m sure of that. But he was a young man, full of rising sap, and though he’d never admit it, I could see that despite himself he found it exciting too. It all came to climax, literally, one day when she followed him into the shower. From the sound of it she intended to go the whole way, but for once she underestimated her powers of provocation and he climaxed before she could get him into her.
This time I was hot for him to tell Daddy but still he wouldn’t. He was too deeply shamed. That’s something you have to understand about Pal. He could come across as pretty laid-back, even cynically amoral, but underneath it all he was a good caring human being. I know that sounds like sentimental hokum, but I can’t think of any other way of putting it. Anyway, he made me promise I’d keep my mouth shut too, and I did. But only as far as Daddy was concerned. I’d made no promise about not talking to Kay and I confronted her one day and told her loud and clear what I thought of her and I made it plain that if I ever got the slightest hint she was sniffing around Pal again, I’d tell the world, damn the consequences.
And that was it. After that it was Cold War between us. I did my best to be polite when Daddy was around but he must have noticed the chilly atmosphere. Fortunately Pal went up to Cambridge soon afterwards (to read Art History, which Daddy made clear he thought was a waste of time), and with me away at school it was easy to keep contact down to a minimum. But I guess she knew the game was up as far as we were concerned and decided her best bet was to get out of the marriage with maximum profit to herself before one of us let the world know the kind of depraved bitch she was. I think the first thing she did was turn off the sex with Daddy, to put him in the right frame of mind for a generous divorce settlement. I can’t say this definitely of course. It’s not the kind of
