I suppose I can understand why my mother fell for my father when they met: he was charismatic and could be affectionate when he wanted to be, and it was easy to imagine him sweeping her off her feet. What does seem extraordinary, though, is the fact that she still loved him – which she did. I don’t know if he’d ever loved her or whether, for him, it had been a marriage of convenience – her family and background affording him the veneer of respectability that was so important to him, as well as the possibility that she might provide him with access to considerable financial resources. In reality, however, I doubt whether he was capable of feeling genuine love for another person. What he was good at was gauging exactly the right moment to be nice to her again so that she was always striving to please him and to win his affection and approval. It was what I did too, as both a child and an adult, and even though there were countless occasions when my father frightened and bullied me, I still just wanted him to like me.
Chapter Five
Before Sam was born, I did wonder if all those unhappy memories of my childhood had anything to do with the mild depression I’d begun to feel, and with the ‘baby-blues’ that developed almost immediately after I took him home from the hospital. I continued to go through the motions of feeding and looking after him, and most of the time I managed to hide – from myself as well as from everyone else – how depressed I was becoming. But when I went back to work, when Sam was 11 weeks old, I began to feel as though I was drowning. I didn’t realise I was ill; all I knew was that I was constantly anxious and afraid, and that I’d become incapable of making even the simplest of decisions.
The house Tom and I had bought when I was pregnant needed a lot doing to it. We knew from the outset that it was going to be a struggle to pay the mortgage – which we could barely afford even on both our incomes – and that I’d have to go back to work as soon as possible after our baby was born. But it seemed worth it to have our own place. We were happy there and when I was pregnant, despite all the fears and worries I had, I’d sometimes stand in the doorway of the room that we were painting and refurbishing as a nursery and allow myself to imagine my baby lying there, safe and warm, in the little wooden cot Tom and I had bought and brought home together so proudly.
For almost as long as I could remember, I’d felt as though I was acting the part of someone leading a normal life – getting a job, falling in love, buying a house and having a baby. Suddenly, though, the role I was playing had expanded beyond anything I had any experience of or could even understand. I was pretending to be someone who was calm and capable, whereas in reality I knew that I was useless and worthless – just as my father had always told me I was – and that I was not at all the sort of person who could look after a baby. There were so many terrible things that could happen to Sam. Many of them were real enough to any first-time mother, but some of them were things I couldn’t actually put a name to; and it seemed that I was the only person who stood between Sam and all those countless, awful, unidentifiable dangers.
I spent every waking moment of every single day in a state of panic. Just the thought of Sam’s defenceless little body lying in his cot was enough to make my heart race and the palms of my hands become clammy with sweat. The depression I’d already been suffering from was made worse by the fact that I knew I was supposed to be happy now that I was a mother. And I did love Sam, passionately. But, as well as being afraid for him, I was also, for some reason, afraid of him.
To begin with, no one seemed to notice there was anything wrong. Gradually, though, I could feel myself becoming more detached from Sam and from everything and everyone else in my life. It was as though I was on the outside looking in. I fed him and changed his nappies, but as soon as Tom came home from work I’d almost thrust Sam into his arms. And as soon as I knew that Tom had taken over the responsibility of looking after him, I could finally allow myself to relax a little as I concentrated on what I really wanted to be doing – cleaning the house.
I’d become obsessed by cleaning, to the extent that I eventually found it difficult to think about anything else. Even sitting with Tom watching television in the evenings became a form of torture, and I’d jump up after a few minutes and almost run to the kitchen to scrub the floor or clean a work surface I’d already scoured with bleach half a dozen times that day.
People began to notice how irritable I was becoming, and how often I cried. However, I think even those closest to me had only just begun to realise that something might be wrong, when all the fear and confusion that had been building up inside me finally erupted.
I’d been having terrible nightmares. They’d started at around the time Sam was born and almost all of them involved my father. Night after anxious night, I’d wake up in the middle of a vivid dream, frightened and sweating, with my heart thumping painfully, thinking I was a child again. In some of the dreams, I was hiding in a wardrobe, holding my breath and listening to the slow, heavy tread of footsteps as someone crossed the bedroom floor towards me. I had something draped over my head, so I could only hear the sound of the wardrobe door as it creaked open.
Sometimes, I’d wake up at that point in the dream, waving my arms wildly in front of my face and shouting ‘No, no!’ And at other times the wardrobe door would swing back on its hinges, the cover would be lifted from my head, and I’d see my father looking down at me. For a moment, I’d feel a sense of relief. But then I’d see that his face was ugly and his expression sneering, and as he reached down and lifted me roughly out of my hiding place, I’d feel a terror so powerful I’d think my heart was going to stop.
On some nights, I’d dream that I was in a bath and I’d stretch out my hand to touch the cool, shiny surface of the blue-tiled wall beside me. Then, suddenly, I’d feel cold and sick, and when I turned my head away from the wall, my father would be sitting in the bath facing me. Dressed in just the jacket of a pinstriped suit, he’d frown angrily at me and say, ‘It’s your fault, Katie. It’s – all – your – fault.’
Sometimes, I’d dream that I was in the bed I used to sleep in as a child and that I’d woken up to find my father leaning over me, completely naked except for a top hat. I’d try to scream, but he’d clamp the short, strong, thick fingers of his hand over my mouth and hiss at me, ‘If you say anything, I’ll kill you. It won’t be the first time I’ve put someone six feet under.’ Then he’d laugh a nasty, humourless laugh, and I’d wake up sobbing.
As the dreams became increasingly frequent, I began to be afraid to go to sleep at all, and before long, as each tiring day was followed by another restless night, I was exhausted.
Then, one morning, a couple of weeks after I’d gone back to work, I stood up from my desk, picked up my jacket and handbag and walked out of the office. As I passed through the reception area, heading for the door to the street, Jackie, the receptionist, called after me, ‘Katie! Is anything wrong?’ She sounded worried, but I didn’t answer her, and I didn’t turn around. I didn’t want her to see the tears that were pouring down my face and then have to try to explain what it was I was crying about – because I didn’t know.
For the next couple of hours, I walked through the streets of the town, wiping my steadily flowing tears on to the sleeve of my jacket, and going nowhere. Eventually, I found myself on a road I recognised; it was the road where Sally lived.
Sally had been my father’s girlfriend after my mother left him, when I was seven, and she’d become, briefly, his second wife. She moved into our house just a few days after my mother and I fled into the night, and she slept in my mother’s bed and wore the clothes my mother had left behind in her wardrobe.
Despite their apparently similar taste in clothes, though, Sally and my mother were about as different from each other as two people could possibly be. My mother was a neat, house-proud, quietly spoken, well-brought-up, attractive, twinset and pearls sort of woman; whereas Sally was brassy, untidy, chaotic, loudly raucous and hard-headed. But, apparently, my father had been happy to replace a wife who cooked his meals, catered for his parties and looked after his house and children for one whose talents lay in the bedroom.
However, perhaps equally importantly, as far as my father was concerned, was the fact that Sally knew a lot of girls and young women who were willing to go to parties at my father’s