Tom was rubbing tears away with his thumb. I suddenly felt so sorry for him. He was still the big brother, my protector. And here we were once again, weeping and scared and clinging to each other. I thought our father had no power over us any more. I was wrong.
“Find out what, Tom?! Please try and tell me quickly. I’m scared. My heart is beating so fast. I think I’m going to have a heart attack.”
Indeed, my heart was pounding so hard I felt the need to clutch both hands to my chest, just to make sure it stayed inside my body.
“You’re in shock,” Tom said. “Take deep breaths.”
He continued. “He called me again this Thursday, and apologised for being so hysterical on the phone the first time. He said he’s on a lot of painkillers for his cancer and he thinks he must have overdone it. But he wanted to assure me, well, to assure you, that it was all true, and he was going to leave you a letter telling you everything in his will, but he wants you to know now and he says if you ask Mum she’ll deny it, but he’s willing to take a DNA test . . .”
“Who is my father then?” I sobbed. “Who is he?!”
Tom said a name. It was not someone I knew, but a name I remembered as a family friend from long ago—from, in fact, the time and the place we lived when I was born. Just hearing that name made everything a bit less abstract. Its familiarity grounded me, and I began to calm down. My breathing became more regulated, my pulse slowed. This was real. It wasn’t just a joke to hurt or scare me, like so many of my father’s edicts from the past. It was real.
“What else did he say?”
“He said that he and Mum were at a dance at the Birnam Hotel in Dunkeld. Mum was gone for a while and this guy’s wife said he was gone too, and Dad and the wife both started looking for them. They went all over the bar and the dance floor and then they went through into the hotel and they saw them, Mum and the guy, coming out of a bedroom together.”
“And then what?”
“And then nine months later you were born,” he added, like he was telling me a really fucked-up bedtime story.
I couldn’t quite believe that my father wasn’t doing this just to hurt me. One last hurrah, if you will, before he died. And the timing of it! How could he possibly think that Who Do You Think You Are? would focus on something so sensational and upsetting and undocumented? And then I remembered my father’s experience of dealing with the media, and it made total sense. Was he actually trying to protect me for once? Of course, I also reasoned, he would also be protecting himself. His cuckolding going public would dent the ego of a man like him immeasurably.
I was not my father’s son.
It wasn’t supposed to have happened like this at all. Tom had discussed it with Grant, and they both felt that I should be told when I was home in New York, with Grant by my side. Tom planned to fly over in a couple of weeks once I had returned from filming in South Africa and tell me in as calm and protected an environment as possible. Poor Grant, therefore, had known this secret for the last few days we were in Cannes, keeping it to himself and never suspecting that events would dictate that Tom would need to tell me so soon.
What had happened was that the reporter from the Sunday Mail had found my father. Once again the tabloid press had managed to cause havoc in our family. Earlier that day, Tom had been driving home when my father called him, fuming and ranting about a reporter outside his front door. It is difficult to express the intensity of my father’s rage. I am sure that even as a dying man it would be terrifying. Suddenly Tom saw a police car parked on the side of the road and so took the phone away from his ear for a moment. When he picked it up again our father was still railing, so Tom assured him he would deal with the matter and hung up. He panicked that our father’s suspicions were correct and that the imminent shoot of my Who Do You Think You Are? had indeed prompted the news of my true lineage to somehow be leaked, and the idea that I might find out the news by seeing it splashed across the front page of a newspaper horrified him. He decided he had to tell me that night and called Sue to find out what time I was arriving.
After he’d spoken to me, he finished his journey home and then called our father back to tell him he’d set the wheels in motion and was on his way to tell me everything before I found out via the press. Of course this is when our father told him that the reporter hadn’t mentioned anything about who my real father was, but had in fact merely wanted a comment about that Times article. Our father’s fury was actually directed at me for having mentioned he had cancer, not that this massive secret had been exposed. Tom was distraught. But now it was too late, and he had no choice but to follow through.
“What about Mum?” I asked. “Did you talk to her about it?”
“Not yet,” said Tom. “I wanted to let her know I was going to tell you but I didn’t get a chance.”
“Don’t!” I blurted. “Don’t talk to her until this is all sorted out in my head.”
Our family had always been one of secrets, of silence, of holding things in. The fact that my mother had never told me this, even in the decades since she and my father had divorced, was, perhaps surprisingly, not a surprise to me. She must have had her reasons, I thought, and whatever they were, I respected them, right now at least. It was incredible to think of my mother being the one who had strayed, when it was my father’s infidelity that had so upset me as a child. Perhaps my mum’s silence was even to protect my father—something we all seemed unremittingly conditioned to do. She was the most loyal person I knew, and if they had made a pact to stay silent all those years ago, it was no surprise that finally the one to break it would be him. Although I was shell-shocked by the news, I was also so glad my mother had had someone else in her life, some love, someone who hopefully treated her with kindness and tenderness. If I was the product of that, it couldn’t be such a bad thing, I decided.
Tom told me more of what our father had said in the phone call, how he had suspected my mother of having an affair with this man and how when he had seen them come out of the hotel room that night all those years ago he merely said, “Well, there’s no point in staying here any longer”, grabbed her by the arm, and marched her home. It was never spoken of again.
“Well, there’s no point in staying here any longer.”
That was exactly the kind of thing I would expect my father to say in that situation—something gruff, uncaring. Though I had never imagined the idea of my father being in a situation where he would be the one discovering his spouse’s infidelity.
You see, my father was a big philanderer. His disregard for his wife’s feelings, and indeed anyone who knew him, by the audacity of how openly and often he paraded his infidelity was almost autistic in its terrible repetition, and it still manages to shock me. Everyone knew. Even when I was at primary school I was aware that he was having affairs. I can’t remember exactly how I came to know, but I do remember the first time I recognised the pain that knowing gave me. I was eight years old, sitting on the grass of the playing field at Monikie Primary during lunch break. A little girl from my class was threading a daisy chain nearby.
“Why are you sad, Alan?” she asked me, out of the blue.
I hesitated, slightly shocked that my sadness was palpable. I realised I needed to learn how to hide my feelings better, even outside the home. My training in the ways of the actor came early, you see.
I wasn’t sure how to articulate it.
“Today is my mum and dad’s wedding anniversary, and they’re not celebrating it,” I said finally, a dry lump in my throat.
It was true, but it wasn’t the whole story of course. Somehow I understood that the whole truth was shameful and must not be spoken of. I understood that I had to collude, to protect my father, even though he didn’t deserve it.