Trisha Ashley: Sowing Secrets

Mind you, I’ve never said he wasn’t either, so perhaps it’s not surprising that Ma, my husband and now even my daughter assumed it, and also that I never wanted to talk about it simply because he abandoned me.

And I don’t want to think about him, either; why rake up old hurts?

‘Well, Granny says he must have been, you hadn’t been going out with anyone else, but when she wanted you to write and tell him you were pregnant, you refused,’ she persisted.

‘Because it was nothing to do with him,’ I said patiently, though I suppose it was, in a way. If Tom hadn’t told me it was over between us on the night of the end-of-term pub crawl and party, maybe I wouldn’t have had too much to drink and ended up pregnant.

That put paid to the last year of my graphic design course, though Rosie, when she arrived was such a perfect creation that I felt I should have been allowed to submit her like a work in progress at the end of finals and get my degree anyway.

And once I set eyes on Rosie I never regretted having her, of course – except when she was giving me the third degree like now, and frowning at me as though she could extract the truth by telepathy: but only the one she wanted, a tidy truth with checkable details. A name, a face – a father.

I couldn’t give her any of those things, but clearly the time had come to give her what I had; to expose the bare bones of a buried past. I knew it had to come one day.

‘OK, Rosie, I’ll tell you everything I remember, which isn’t much – it was such a long time ago.’

I patted the sofa cushion and she plumped down, looking at me expectantly. ‘This had better not be another of your fairy stories.’

‘It isn’t, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to like it any better. Granny was partly right about Tom – we did meet in my first term at university, though he was a year ahead of me. But he dumped me right at the end of my second year because he was off to Rome on an arts scholarship and didn’t see me as part of his new future. It was a bit of a shock.’

That was the understatement of the year – I was devastated. He’d even given me a ring a few weeks before with ‘Forever’ engraved inside it, though ‘For Now’ would have given me more warning of his intentions.

‘Poor Mum! And then you realised you were pregnant in the summer holidays?’ prompted Rosie sympathetically.

‘Yes, but not by Tom,’ I said, quickly scotching any ideas of a romantic tragedy. ‘Your father was someone I met on the rebound.’

Seeing she looked totally unconvinced I elaborated. ‘It was like Brief Encounter , but with sex. All I really remember about him now were his amazing eyes – sort of hazel with green rays round the pupils, and a lovely warm, deep, comforting voice.’

There had to have been something compelling about him at the time, or I wouldn’t have gone off with him like that, even on the rebound and far from sober, would I?

‘Come on, Mum, you can’t expect me to believe that! You? A one-night stand? Per-lease!’ she said scathingly. ‘And after everything you’ve told me about safe sex and loving relationships?’

‘Because I didn’t want you to make the same mistakes I did,’ I said, though I suppose if it hadn’t led to pregnancy I would have conveniently forgotten the whole Midsummer Night’s madness – or put a romantic gloss on it.

‘Why does even Mal think it was this Tom, then?’

‘He just assumed it, like Granny, since it’s not an episode I ever wanted to discuss, even if it did mean I had you, darling, which I’ve never regretted in the slightest. And please don’t bring the subject up when he’s about, will you? It’s all best forgotten.’

Mal is the jealous kind, so one previous lover seemed as much as he could take when we were at the true-confessions stage of our relationship. Mind you, although I didn’t tell him who Rosie’s father was – or wasn’t – my words circled in an endless holding pattern around this perfectly obvious gaping hole in my narrative, and he never once asked the question.

Rosie had got up and was wandering restlessly about, scowling. ‘But if you are telling the truth this time, Mum, then you can tell me something about my real father, can’t you? You did at least know who he was? Didn’t you want to tell him about me?’

She came back across the room, a paler, taller version of myself at her age, as though her father had been a ghost, which for all I could remember of him he might well have been. I mean, in eighteen years I’ve nearly convinced myself that there was no second party involved, so Rosie’s was practically a born-again virgin birth: she’s mine, all mine.

‘So what was he called? Where did you meet him? What did he look like?’

‘I … can’t remember,’ I said uncomfortably, but I could see I wasn’t going to be allowed off the hook until I’d given her more than that. ‘He was just passing through the town and we picked him up in a pub somewhere and took him on to the end-of-term party with us. We’d all had a lot to drink. He said his name was Adam, and he was a gardener, but that’s about all I know about him.’

‘And you expect me to believe that?’ she said angrily.

‘Well, I did. And he had an old camper van,’ I added, though that’s one of the details I have allowed to go fuzzy over the years … except that sometimes I wake up with a thumping heart in an absolute panic, thinking I’m back in the damned thing and trying to creep out before the stranger I’ve spent the night with wakes up.

(And it smelled like a potting shed, come to that, so perhaps he really was a gardener, generous with his seed. But let’s leave the analogy there before I start to feel like a Gro-bag.)

‘Mum, you could at least tell me the truth, and not fob me off with yet more fairy stories!’ she said vehemently. ‘A camper van!’

‘I have, Rosie,’ I said, getting up and giving her a hug, which she endured rather than returned. ‘I have told you the truth, and if I knew more details I’d tell you those too. But I love you, and Granny loves you – isn’t that enough?’

I didn’t include Mal, fond as he is of her in his way, for the relationship’s always been tinged with mutual jealousy, though things are better now that Rosie’s away during term-time studying veterinary science. But she’s always spent a lot of time with her granny anyway, since Mal is not a pet lover, and so most of her menagerie stayed with Ma after we married, something I’m not sure she’s ever quite forgiven him for.

Mal’s footsteps sounded upstairs and Rosie said quickly, ‘I wish I knew if you were telling me the truth this time!’

‘Rosie, I’m sorry if it’s not what you wanted to hear, but that’s what really happened,’ I assured her. (And how did I come to have such a bossy little cow for a daughter?) ‘And by the time I knew I was pregnant there was no way to find out more – no means of tracing him. I never even knew his second name.’

‘You must have talked to each other!’

‘Yes, but we had both drunk an awful lot, don’t forget,’ I said patiently. ‘I don’t remember what we talked about, but he must have been really nice or I wouldn’t have gone back with him. I was only horrified next morning when I was sober, because I thought I still loved Tom.’

‘But if Tom was your boyfriend, why are you so sure he’s not my father?’ she demanded.

On any list of twenty questions you didn’t want your daughter to ask, this would come fairly high up.

‘I just am … And although I wasn’t on the pill, we always took precautions.’

‘Accidents happen,’ she pointed out. I hope she doesn’t know this from experience, but am not about to ask her while she is interrogating me. Or even at all.