Page 53 of Once Upon a Thyme
My father. I tiptoed out of the front door. I had a father. Alive, well and a very successful manager to a famous band. I wondered whether he’d really changed his name because it was more rock and roll or whether it had been to prevent my family from hounding him. Then I remembered that Simon had been sending Mum money. She’d spent the money he’d been sending for me, on herself. A house. Alcohol. The money I could have used to find what I really wanted to do with my life.
I got into my car and started it up. I couldn’t sleep, so I might as well hunt for my answers now. I drove the few miles to the village, this time without my usual wondering, ‘Was this the place? Or this?’, as I searched for the location of my father’s ‘death’. All those years that I’d imagined his last moments somewhere along this road. All those years that I’d studied women whose fathers had died young, searching for an identity, a commonality, and all of those years it had all been a lie.
There was a light on in the house, despite the late hour. A pink glow from the living room, which meant that the lamp was on in there. Mum might be watching television, she often couldn’t sleep and sat up with dubious programmes on late night TV. I’d sat through more of them than I cared to remember, staying with her to keep her company.
Had she just been waiting for me to go, so that she could drink? Or was her bedroom rammed with empties from years of ‘early nights’ and ‘just popping up to freshen myself up’? Why had I never noticed?
I let myself in through the kitchen. I could hear a laugh track echoing through the house, but the TV was playing its eighties comedy to an empty room. The kitchen was likewise empty, but there were no lights anywhere else. I crept up the stairs.
‘Mum, are you in?’ I pushed her bedroom door open, surprising her sitting on the end of the bed, in the dark.
‘Natalie? Oh, you made me jump! Why are you here? It’s gone midnight.’
She hadn’t quite been quick enough. Not quite. The covers beside her bulged with a recognisable lump, vodka or gin by the look of it. A big bottle.
‘I came to tell you that I know.’ I stayed in the doorway, watching her struggle to adjust to the situation. Usually I didn’t come unannounced, I came when summoned, irritably and looking for things to do, or I called out when I came into the house. Giving her time I hadn’t known she needed.
‘You know?’ Mum was still dressed. She’d been downstairs watching TV and she’d come up here to – what? This was her house, she could have bottles in every room if she wanted, so why did she need to come into her bedroom to drink?
The answer came to me, stark as the expression on her face right now.Because then it’s all hidden away. Everything she needs is in here.
‘What is it you think you know, Natalie, darling?’ I could hear the drawl now I was listening for it. Before, I would have put it down to her not being well, her inability to speak clearly down to the fatigue she felt constantly. Well, of course she did, she sat up all night drinking! The flame of anger lanced through my chest and I stepped into the room.
‘My dad is alive and well. That, for starters.’
I flung open the door to her wardrobe. It was full of dresses and coats, but a momentary fumble behind the shoes piled on the floor turned up two litre bottles of vodka, one half full and the other empty.
‘And this.’ I flourished the bottles.
She blinked at me, astonished at my statement, at my presumption.
‘You and Granny lied to me. And the money to send me to school? That I thought was just because the herbs were doing well? Turns out that Simon… thatDadwas sending you the money for me.’
I began pulling things from the wardrobe. Two coats clonked with bottles in the pockets and there were more empties tucked inside a pair of boots.
‘All the while I’ve thought that you had some rare illness’ – I threw the coats down, pulled out a small suitcase which turned out to be rammed with bottles, mostly half full – ‘you were drinking, drunk or hungover!’
She let out a little cry of alarm and tried to stop me, but she was so fragile and weak that I could push her back down onto the bed with one hand. ‘Natalie, darling, you don’t understand…’
‘Then you have the nerve to try to persuade me to sell Drycott! What is it, are you running low on money? Is Dad refusing to send you more cash?’
Another little mew of a cry.
‘So you’d happily see me out of the farm, having to find myself a job somewhere, just so you could sit and drink yourself into insensibility?’
‘You’re my daughter!’ she managed. ‘You are supposed tohelpme.’
‘He’s been sending you money, every month, more and more as he’s got successful, thinking that you were passing it on to me. Money that could have put in a new irrigation system, or kept us ticking over during winter – you’ve spent it on buying yourself a house and alcohol.’
I could feel the anger draining away now, leaving me with an odd emptiness. My mother turned her worn face towards me, scrunch-eyed as though she was trying not to cry.
‘You don’t know, Natalie,’ she said quietly. ‘You have no idea.’
‘No, because I was never allowed to ask. Never allowed to talk about anything that mattered. Everything was pushed down and stamped out of me so that I wouldn’t dare mention anything that might upset you.’ I sounded tired now. ‘So the fact that I don’t know why you drink isn’t my fault. And, right now, I don’t care. I came over to tell you that I know, that Simon has told me nearly everything. Anything else I need to know I shall ask him. So if there’s anything you feel you ought to tell me, then you should do it right now, because I’m going to find out anyway.’
I got a weak headshake for that. A slow, ponderous negative that I wasn’t even sure that she meant. ‘I tried so hard to keep you away from musicians,’ she said weakly. ‘Iknewhe’d try to find you, one day.’
‘And that’s why you panicked when you heard there was a band filming in the gardens?’
