Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

Tom must have thought he was going to die and perhaps that is why he did what he did, hoping to make amends before he went, relieving himself of his sins before he met St Peter. She remembered him asking the doctor to leave the room, his voice weak and husky, and the doctor nodding solemnly as if he understood everything about this, pain and suffering and people. Picking up his black leather bag, he had walked out of the back door to his car, leaving just Tom, lying on the table, his head propped up on a cushion, Theresa and her mother. Lifting one arm Tom had taken Theresa’s hand and drawn her closer to him. She remembered thinking how pale he was, pale and fragile, his naked chest collapsing with each breath, the tightly curled hairs dark against his skin. He was a farmer, and she had only ever known him with the colour of an outdoor life in his cheeks. With that colour drained she saw how old he was, really, behind his work and his clothes. It was ten years ago, she must have been twenty-two or twenty-three.

He didn’t say much, but for him, she knew it was the most he would ever say on the matter. And she was not surprised when he didn’t look at her as he spoke, but chose to stare at the ceiling instead, holding her hand limply in his.

‘Theresa,’ he’d said, ‘I know I wasn’t always fair. It was wrong, girl, I know that now.’ A pause, during which he shuts his eyes and lets out a tired breath. Then he spoke again, ‘Take cart- of your mother, won’t you?’

But there had been no need for that passing request. A couple of months later he’d made a full recovery and was back to his old self. She was living in London by then, and though she came to visit them often he never mentioned it again, either his apology or what he had been apologising for. Theresa, however, knew only too well what he had been speaking about.

As a child she had never understood why her father always took against her. Why he punished her so harshly for reading in her room, or being late to the table, or for not doing a chore well enough. Her brothers, in comparison, always seemed to escape his anger whereas with her, he not only flew into a temper at the slightest provocation but even seemed to resent her any success. When she won a scholarship to Lewes Grammar School for Girls she had expected the news to cheer him, but it did the opposite. He remained in a black mood for days and found countless reasons to criticise her behaviour. As she got older she came to assume it was simply because she was a girl. That, unlike her brothers, she was not able to help her father on the farm with the heavy or manual work, that he had wanted a boy and that she, a girl, was no more than a burden to him. Over the years his treatment stopped seeming unfair or even unusual. It was just the way of things, and that is how she thought of it, until at the age of fourteen, she discovered the truth herself.

It was a package that did it. A package sent to the school in Lewes from her Aunt Lotty who had addressed the parcel (intentionally or accidentally, she will never know, her mother forbade her to speak to her aunt again) to ‘Theresa Sargent’. It was then, and only then, after Theresa had written to her, that her mother came to Lewes and, no doubt fearing that someone else would tell her if she didn’t, told Theresa the truth about her parentage. The truth about a young man called Arthur Cripps, a curate she had known in her youth, who, she admitted, looking red-faced and flustered at the floor, had been her lover. A young man called Arthur Cripps who was Theresa’s father.

They were sitting in a tea house in Lewes. She remembers it all so clearly. Her mother’s face, close enough to feel her hot breath on her cheek. Her hand over hers on the soft leather of the Bible she carried in her handbag, as she made her swear to never tell anyone about her parentage, ever. Then holding her tea cup, its handle hot against her fingers, its thin china trembling against her lip as her head swam and her eyes filmed over with tears. The feeling that sitting there, in that tea room, she was somehow drifting away from herself like a boat she had once seen, loosed from its mooring on Rye pier, slowly drifting out to sea, diminishing and fragile on the swell of the waves. Her mother carried on talking, but she could not hear her. Her mind was scattered, racing, unbelieving. Everything was altered, like when the optician had placed the testing spectacles over her eyes and slipped in lens after lens, turning the world strange.

Despite the shock and the shame, she did not cry. Not there in that crowded, smoky tea house. Nor did she cry outside, in the busy Saturday street. But later, when her mother had gone and she sat alone on her bed in her dormitory (the other girls had been at supper), retracing her life, testing her memories against what her mother had told her, then she had cried. Hard, bitter tears of frustration, confusion and anger, welling up from inside her, and drawing with them, like water drawn from a bore hole, a thousand unanswered questions. Who was Arthur Cripps? What type of a man was he? Where was he now? Why had he left? Why had her mother never told her before? Did her brothers know? Did the school know?

She was angry with everyone: her mother, the stranger who was her father, her aunt and even her brothers. But she was especially angry at Tom. She was sure this was why he had hated her. Knowing why, however, did not make his treatment of her any more forgivable. If anything, in Theresa’s eyes, it made it worse. Because he had not hated her for how she was, but for who she was, and that was something she could never have done anything about, something she could never have changed. However much she had tried to win his favour, he would still have hated her, because she could not escape who she was to him: another man’s child, reared as his own under his roof. An illegitimate. A bastard.

♦

Theresa looks about the heath. The light is fading from the day, but the clouds are still bright on their flat undersides, and the heath is still moving with people. She takes a deep breath and looks at her wrist watch. Still five more minutes. She looks up again and is glad she chose a Sunday and not a weekday. On any other day she may have felt conspicuous, sitting here, waiting on her own, but on a Sunday the heath is full of people and no one was really alone. On her way up to the hill she had passed old men walking to swim in the ponds, their white hair blown in the wind, young, earnest men strolling along, their hands in their pockets, reaching decisions, mothers and nannies pushing their children in prams along the paths. On the bench just along from her there is another woman sitting alone, a lady older than Theresa, reading a novel and wearing a winter coat and a fur stole, despite the Indian summer sun. And along with the other individuals, there are groups of people to dilute her solitude too. Families laying out picnics (two boys squabbling remind her of her brothers), an outing of schoolchildren passing along in crocodile formation and gaggles of young women in hats, secretaries or office workers, followed by groups of young men, swaggering in their Sunday suits with cigarettes wagging at the corner of their mouths.

Theresa is waiting for her own young man, Stuart Hildred. Although, she supposes, neither of them is that young any more. She has left it late for this kind of thing, she knows that. Her mother can’t understand why she has, but Theresa wouldn’t have had it any other way. Unlike the other girls she’d spent her twenties travelling rather than looking for a husband, and she had needed those years. To find a bigger world, accessible, new and different. Just to know it was there, the possibility of escape, of undoing ties, pulling up roots. She and her best friend Dina would take off on their two-week holidays whenever they could: to Venice, the Italian Lakes, Biarritz, Switzerland. Back in her digs she had thick albums of photos and postcards from her travels, the plane tickets for each trip stuck on the pages in between. She had seen the Alps, the Dolomites, the waves of the Mediterranean. On one of their excursions, she had even met a man, an Italian called Mario. She has photos of him in her album too, his arm about her shoulder on the shore of Lake Como, a pipe in the corner of his mouth and his shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows. When she returned to England he had written dramatic love letters to her, but she knew he would never follow the letters, that he was in love with love not her, and that he would never follow her to England.