5.3 The Truth at Last

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. See right for more information. 

Silently, in slow motion, Frog nodded.

    I stopped breathing.
    ‘Have you . . . ?’ I asked, my voice echoing in this strange new place we’d found ourselves.
    Frog nodded again.
    ‘Everything?’
    He nodded again, still with that mixture of pity, guilt and determination.
    Then I started to understand.
    ‘Was it . . . was it . . . Sam?’ I asked.

    He’d been talking about a woman called Sam ever since the summer, when she’d joined the student radio station wanting to present her own blues programme. A woman was a rarity at the station and none of those there were did any music presentation. Frog had trained her in the use of the ‘deck’ – a table-sized array of switches, buttons and levers.
    ‘Yes,’ he said.
    I’d been a fool. I hadn’t suspected anything. But now the whole of the last six months – the way our conversations had so often descended into arguments, Frog’s disappearances, my visions of someone standing beside me - was falling into place.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
    And I knew he was. He wasn’t trying to excuse himself or justify his actions. He was telling me the truth at last.
    A light switched on in my head. Everything was going to be all right. This was our chance – finally – to get things straight.

I quizzed Frog all through the night as we lay in bed. I had to know it all. I had to cancel out the lies. They were worse than the infidelity.
    ‘That time when . . . ?’ ‘When you said . . . ?’ ‘Where did you . . . ?’ ‘How did you . . . ?’
    He answered every question.
    ‘I want to meet her,’ I said.

The next day, after Frog went to work, I found I couldn’t get out of bed. My legs wouldn’t hold me up. I lay under the duvet, trying to adjust to this new reality. Nothing similar had ever happened to me before.

    Frog rang halfway through the morning.
    ‘How are you?’ he asked.
    ‘I’m a bit weak, I said.
    ‘You’re allowed to be weak,’ he said.
    There was a pause and then he spoke again.
    ‘She’ll come over this evening’,’ he said, ‘but she’s very frightened.’
    It was new to me to have someone frightened of me. It was usually me frightened of other people. It gave me a sense of power, but I knew I couldn’t misuse it. I risked losing everything if I did.

She wasn’t particularly pretty, which was a relief. And she was obviously just as shaken, even less sure how to proceed, than I was, which was another relief.
    I can’t remember what we talked about but I do remember that she was kind. She’d been learning about reflexology and gave me a foot massage. I found some vegetable pies in the freezer and made us all a supper of sorts.
    As she and Frog said a loving goodbye to each other out on the drive, I stood to one side feeling utterly desolate. No one cared about me any more. I was all alone in the world.
    Sam got into her car and started driving but as she passed me she wound down her window, reached out and took my hand.
    Instantly, everything changed. I wasn’t on my own after all. I was included. Sam was now my friend too.

‘I just needed someone to talk to,’ said Frog when we were back inside. ‘And then – well – one thing led to another. And I thought, I was telling her all our secrets anyway . . . And maybe she can help us.’
    I’d almost wished for this. Sometimes when we’d had yet another of our fights over my inability to enjoy sex, I’d almost wished for another woman to take over that part of the relationship between Frog and me. We loved each other too much. It was all too intense and we couldn’t help each other. Maybe we did need somebody else.
    ‘You come first,’ he said.
    That was all I needed. How would I survive otherwise?
    But I wasn’t safe yet. One false step and he would be gone.

The next day I went for a walk in a nearby wood. I climbed the footpath, thinking only of survival.
    If men’s sins were of commission, then women’s were of omission and I’d done plenty of that – not dealing with the legacy of Brian in London, not making up my mind as to whether I was on the side of my parents or the side of Frog.
    But I couldn’t afford to waste energy on guilt. What a useless emotion it was. I needed every ounce of my strength to make my way forward.
    I stopped to do some breathing exercises. I’d been going to yoga classes for several years and breathing was an important part of the practice. I closed my eyes and concentrated.
    Breathe in for a count of four, hold for four, breathe out for a count of four, hold for four. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
    When I opened my eyes again the air sparkled. I felt calm and almost happy.
    I could do this.

To be continued . . .

PART FIVE. 2 The Accusation

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. (See the column to the right for more information.)
Click here for the previous instalment.
Click here for a complete list of instalments so far.

(NB I have published this instalment before and then removed it, so some of you may remember it.)

Please be kind. This series is me baring secrets, things I've never dared mention up until now. I stopped publishing the series in April after a couple of upsetting comments, but I’ve since discovered that I can’t write it properly without you.
Without you I write for publishers, agents and critics which results in stodge.
With you I write, I hope, for something that somebody real might want to read.

New Year's Day, 1990

As we’d arrived back late in the evening, and as we'd been eating well for days, I made a simple supper of baked beans on toast.
    I brought the plates into the sitting room on two trays which I placed on the coffee table, before sitting on the sofa and placing my tray (with the smaller helping) on my lap.
    Frog was already on the sofa but he hadn’t turned the television on and he didn’t reach for his tray. He didn’t look at me either, or say anything.

After spending Christmas together at home we’d done a tour of the parents, staying first with John T who was managing just fine. He’d joined a dating agency and, being that rare thing, an older single man, had received countless replies from women who wanted to get to know him. He was working his way through them and Frog was disgusted.
    ‘It’s an insult to Ma,’ he said.
    John T had cleared the house of all Mollie’s things and piled them into the garage. He wanted Frog to deal with them but he refused.
    ‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘Not yet.’
    The house itself was now pristine and characterless, empty without Mollie’s presence.

Things were no better at my parents’ house, even if the house was bigger and easier to get lost in. No better for me anyway.  I carried on pretending to my parents that I was different from what I really was. It was an awful strain.

    In a strange way, however, my parents were warming to Frog, or at least they’d found a language in which they could communicate with him. What's more, he was still around, whereas the relationships of both my sisters had ended. Not that my parents said anything to me about their changing opinion, of course.

    The landmark was Christmas Eve a few years earlier when the dishwasher failed as sixteen people were expected for the Christmas meal and more on Boxing Day. Frog had spent all morning lying on the kitchen’s stone floor repairing it.

    Ever since then my mother had greeted Frog with a list of practical jobs she needed help with. My father wasn't practical. His speciality was numbers. I remembered my childhood as a catalogue of crises, with the car not starting, the television going 'on the blink', electricity failing or things leaking. I too loved having Frog around to deal with practicalities. 

     Frog was happy to help. It gave him a role in my family. He’d always done the same for his own mother and one of his missions in life, after spreading good music, was rescuing damsels in distress (not that my mother was a damsel).
    Another Christmas my father took Frog out to show him a chain-saw he’d bought for chopping logs but been too nervous to use. My father and Frog had spent a happy day working together, my father fetching and carrying and Frog chain-sawing. Ever since then, chain-sawing had been another of Frog’s jobs and whenever he didn’t know what else to do he would be outside adding to the log-pile.
  
During the visit Frog had done another of his disappearing acts saying he was going up to London. He loved shopping, unlike me, so I presumed he was off to some specialist music shop and didn't question him. In any case, I was afraid to say anything these days.

    He’d arrived back at 7pm, explaining that he’d waited for the (cheaper) off-peak train - which sounded a bit odd as he'd never done that before and, anyway, I hadn't asked for an explanation. I’d been watching out for him since 5pm and had raced out to the hall to hug him, just pleased to see him back. My mother, who was skulking in the kitchen doorway, gave us a funny look.

I paused with a spoonful of beans halfway to my mouth. My throat and stomach had locked. I felt as if I couldn’t carry on - with anything.
    ‘There’s someone else, isn’t there,’ I blurted out.
    It was one of those occasions when the words appeared before the thought. It had never occurred to me that something like that might be going on. I trusted Frog, and I was making the accusation as a challenge, expecting him to deny it vigorously.
    He looked at me with a strange expression on his face – a mixture of pity, guilt and determination.

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Note about the Autobiographical Series

I’m still writing this, but not publishing instalments for the moment.

This is because I’m into sensitive areas and I don’t want things to be taken out of context and misunderstood: the story needs to be read as a whole.

I may in due course publish chunks – ie several instalments in one go.

Or I may keep going till the end and then decide when/if/how I publish.

Whatever I decide, I’ll try and keep you informed.

Thank you for reading up to now. I appreciate every page view and comment.

And if you haven't read any of the series yet, click on the picture to the right and you'll find a full list of published instalments with links. 

PART FIVE. 1 'Frog'

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. See right for a link to the full list of instalments.

1987

I rang my parents to tell them about Mollie’s death.
    I was still trying to do the right thing – or what I thought was the right thing, the thing that normal people would do – by keeping my parents up to date with my life. The visible things anyway.
    Unusually my father answered and, even more unusually, he didn’t immediately hand me over to my mother.
    I started crying as I told him what had happened.
    ‘Chin up,’ he said.
    It was one of the nicest things he’d ever said to me.
    And it helped. It was good advice.
    I felt better after the phone call.

Other than that, I can’t remember much at all about the immediate aftermath of Mollie’s death.
    I know that I went to London on my own to stay with my brother Jo and his wife Emmie. I was frustrated by John and the gulf that seemed to have opened between us.
    ‘He won’t talk to me about his mother at all,’ I complained to the two of them as we queued for pizza at an Italian restaurant.
    ‘Maybe,’ said Emmie, ‘but he would still want you there.’
    More wise words. It was a reprimand, but said with such kindness that I didn’t mind.
    John and Emmie got on so well together that sometimes I was afraid.
    I went straight back home.

Again, in spite of the struggle of our emotional lives, both John and I were progressing at work.

In his job at the university John was known as Freddie the Frog, Freddie for short. This was because on his first day there, because he found everyone so stiff and formal and in order to break the ice, he fallen to a squat and croaked ‘Ridip’.
    It was the sort of thing he did. He had a whole vocabulary of words he’d made up and used when he didn’t know what else to say. It was an inspired idea and I wished I had the courage to do something similar.
    Then when he started doing his radio programmes, both on URE, the student radio station, and at DevonAir, the commercial one, he’d taken on the alias John the Frog. Soon this was shortened to Frog and his URE programme came to be called ‘The Frog Prog’. Which was a brilliant name, although people did get confused and think the ‘Prog’ bit meant that he only played ‘progressive music’, ie rock that had gone off-the-scale ridiculous, which wasn’t true at all.
    The programme was hotchpotch of rock, pop, folk, blues, classical, humour, TV themes – in fact anything that had caught his ear over his long listening life. He even read from books he loved.
    Sometimes he played around with the music too, ‘splicing’ tape on his gigantic tape-editing machine that he’d bought second-hand from the BBC in London and we’d manoeuvred together into the back of his Hustler, a gigantic Mini kit-car he’d made (another story), in order to drive it home.
    Anyway, soon DevonAir asked him to do a Frog Prog as well, an extraordinary honour as such freedom was unheard of on commercial radio.
    And everyone was calling him ‘Frog’, even me.

I meanwhile had become an editorial ‘consultant’ to an Exeter publisher. This meant being in charge of books from start to finish - liaising with authors, writing ‘blurbs’ (the bits on the book jackets that told you what was inside) and even introductions, and going into the office at least once a week for meetings. This was much more fun than simply copy-editing and proofreading, and was making me realise how much I liked writing myself. I began to wonder if I could do more of it.

But something was going very wrong with our personal life. 
    Sometimes it seemed as if we couldn’t talk to each other without it descending into a ferocious argument.
    Sometimes in bed at night I thought we might kill each other. Broken glass loitered in a cobwebby corner where I’d thrown a glass. There was a hole in the wall behind the bed where Frog had punched it.
    Sometimes Frog would descend into what I called ‘victim mode’, in which he would moan for hours about how hard-done-by he was, how nothing I did for him was right. It infuriated me but there was nothing I could say to stop him, so I took to blocking my ears and hoping he couldn’t see in the dark. Because if he did see what I was doing he would erupt in fury and I would have to run from the bedroom and hide. He would then rampage about the house looking for me.
    I took to going away for weekends on my own – to see my parents, to stay with a beloved aunt in Staffordshire.
    Frog was hardly ever at home. Often I didn’t even know where he was, and he would come back with some excuse or other.
    I had the strangest sensation that when he looked at me there was someone standing next to me and I was being compared with them.

Then, on New Year’s Day 1990, it all came to a head.

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4.8 'You could come and live with us'

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. See right for a link to the full list of instalments.



‘You could come and live with us,’ I said.
    The suggestion had burst out of me without me thinking about it but, now I’d said it, I realised that I meant it. It solved everything – both Mollie’s problems and those of John and me.
    Mollie and I were out for a walk together while we stayed with John’s parents. It was autumn. Hedges overflowing with berries divided the flat countryside of Bedfordshire. The sticky grey mud round the edges of the fields where we walked clung to our boots like plates.

    Mollie loved the countryside and many of her reading choices reflected that – BB, Alison Uttley, Flora Thompson, Richard Jefferies, Tolkien. She read Lord of the Rings once a year. There was always a book in her corner of the kitchen, left open on its front in order to mark where she’d got to.

    I’d spent my childhood outside, playing in the garden, fields and river of my parents’ house with my brothers and sisters, exploring the North Downs on foot and by bicycle. It was where I felt most myself. It was somewhere to get away from grown-ups and their rules.
    Since leaving school however at seventeen, living in London and then Exeter, I’d largely forgotten about that connection, but now that I was working at home I was rediscovering it. I’d started to punctuate my working days with exploration of the fields, streams, copses and lanes around our house.
    Walking in the countryside was a pleasure that Mollie and I loved to share with each other.
    We crossed a rickety wooden bridge over a tiny stream.

    ‘Of course, not,’ said Mollie. ‘I couldn’t possibly do that. I wouldn’t want to be a burden. How would I earn money?’
    ‘You wouldn’t be burden,’ I said. ‘Far from it. We’d love it. And I’m sure you could find work.’
    Mollie hurrumphed.
    She’d been telling me how worried she was about money and how stressful she found it living with John T.

    She was haunted by her poor childhood. As well as the story of her mother ordering a pot of tea for one and six cups (for herself and her five children), she would mention how they’d never been allowed to eat fresh bread because they ate too much of it. Her mother always waited until it was stale before giving it to the children.
    John T, according to my John (who was I think quoting Peter Ustinov), was that scary thing – a poor man who lived like a rich one. He took trouble over his appearance, always carefully dressed in smart clothes, and every time we visited seemed to be wearing a new pair of shoes.
    He’d always wanted to be an artist but hadn’t been allowed to by his Australian father: ‘No son of mine goes to art school.’ He’d sold the shop that he and Mollie had run together and now got by with a succession of jobs, while Mollie worked part time at as a secretary at a local building company.
    Nor had John T been faithful to Mollie, and my John recounted terrifying evenings as a child listening to his parents shouting at each other.
    Mollie stuck by her husband however.
    ‘I made my vows,’ she would say, ‘and I’ll keep them.’
    John had been his mother’s champion, sticking up for her against his father as soon as he was old enough to understand what was going on. Once he got his driving licence he drove her around and helped her with the shopping.
    ‘Pa’s an idiot,’ he would say to me. ‘Ma’s so much more intelligent.’
    He was ashamed to be male, the same sex as his father.
    Things between Mollie and John T seemed to be coming to a head and I longed to help Mollie, but didn’t seem able to.

Later that day we went shopping together. I’d offered to make Mollie a shirt and we were buying material and a pattern for it.
    I could remember learning how to sew from my mother at a very young age. She made many of the family's clothes as it was cheaper at that time than buying them and she had five rapidly growing children.
    I hadn’t been interested in playing with dolls but I loved making clothes for them with scraps of left-over material. In my teens, when I shot up to five foot ten inches, I had to make my own clothes because nothing in the shops fitted me.
    I was far from an expert at sewing but it was something I did. I still used the machine my parents had given me for my twenty-first birthday.
    We found a soft brushed cotton in small sage-green checks – perfect for the season and Mollie’s green eyes. But as we walked back to the car, Mollie stopped and put her hand over her heart. She was breathing fast.

    I was a bit clueless about illnesses but she was fifty-nine, so pretty old, and all sorts of things happened to people at that age. Perhaps breathlessness was one of them.
    I waited, trying to be sympathetic without making a drama out of whatever was going on, and eventually Mollie shook herself and gave me a rueful smile.
    ‘OK now,’ she said.

Back in Devon I busied myself making the shirt, adapting the pattern to fit Mollie's measurements and taking as much care as I could.

    As soon as I finished it, I put it in the post, and a few days later Mollie rang me.
    ‘It’s perfect,’ she said. ‘It’s the best-made piece of clothing I’ve ever had.’
    I glowed. Like John, she spoke the truth. She never made false compliments.

    'Tell the truth and shame the devil' was one of her sayings. John had taken it on and often quoted it to me when I was doubtful about how to behave in some situation or other. I loved it. It made everything so simple. It was so unlike the way my family behaved.

One evening a few weeks later the phone rang and John answered it.
    ‘It’s Jenny,’ he mouthed at me.
    I nodded. Jenny was his sister, and phone calls with her were never short. She still lived in Bedfordshire, near their parents.

    I pottered around, trying not to disturb the conversation.
    But John wasn’t saying anything. I glanced over at him and could see that he was listening intently, but his face had caved in.
    I went and sat next to him on the sofa.
    He was starting to look grey.
    I took his hand and he grasped mine tightly.
    He put the phone down.
    ‘It’s Ma,’ he said. ‘She’s had a heart attack. She didn’t make it. She’s gone.’

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