2. 4 An unwanted visitor.
Post date: 23-Sep-2015 17:15:23
‘You have a visitor,’ the desk sergeant said when I answered the phone in my office one day, about three weeks after I’d received the letter from my “mother”. ‘She says she’s your sister.’
‘I haven’t got a sister,’ I began. Then I remembered the photograph of two women with the caption “me with your sister, Jane” and realised, with a sinking feeling, that the visitor might well be this Jane. ‘Never mind. I’ll be right down.’
I went down to the reception area and found a short, dumpy woman who looked to be in her mid to late thirties. Her hair was a pale auburn, with a darker colour showing at the roots. She seemed to have a lot of makeup on her face: very shiny pink lipstick, something to make her cheeks red and rather garish (to my mind) green eyeshadow. Her eyebrows appeared to have been shaved off and then drawn on again in a high arch and her lashes were thick with mascara. I suppose she must have been trying to look her best for her new “brother”.
She was wearing a full, floral-patterned skirt that came down below the tops of a pair of brown leather high-heeled boots, which I assume she thought made her look taller. In my opinion they looked rather ridiculous.
When she saw me, she immediately got up and advanced towards me with her hands out. I managed to avoid the hug that she looked to be intending to bestow and shook her formally by the hand.
‘Miss Jane Harris, I presume?’
‘So you did get Mum’s letter!’ she exclaimed rather breathlessly. ‘When you didn’t write back, we thought it mustn’t have found you. Yes, I’m Jane – but it’s not Harris, it’s Carrington. I changed my name when I got married and didn’t bother to change back after the divorce.’
‘And what can I do for you, Mrs Carrington?’
‘Jane, please. After all, we are brother and sister, aren’t we?’
‘No,’ I couldn’t resist saying, ‘I don’t think we are.’
Her face fell.
‘So, aren’t you the right Peter Johns? Isn’t that your birth certificate that Mum’s been keeping all these years? Why didn’t you say?’
‘I’m not disputing that your mother may be the woman named on my birth certificate. I just don’t accept that that gives her the right to go round calling herself my mother.’
‘So who do you say is your mother, then?’ she demanded, showing more spirit than she had up to then.
‘No one. I don’t have a mother. I never have had one. I managed without for fifty-five years and I don’t intend to take one on now.’
I suppose that outburst must have sounded rather petulant, but I couldn’t help myself. I just wanted to get rid of her and go back to life as normal. She sat looking at me for a moment without saying anything and I was just starting to hope that she would give up and go away, when she began again.
‘Won’t you at least come and meet her?’ she pleaded. ‘Mum has been ever so excited about the idea of finding you again. It will be awful for her if you reject her.’
‘I’m not rejecting the bloody woman. She just irrelevant to me – don’t you understand? Now, if you don’t mind, I have a lot of work to do and can’t afford to waste time chatting to you. Please, just go home and tell your mother to forget about whatever it was that happened to her fifty-odd years ago.’
But she wouldn’t go. She just stood her ground and kept reiterating her demand that I meet with her mother, or if not meet in person, at least telephone or write. She got a photograph album out of her handbag and started trying to show me pictures of the Harris woman at different ages and various other members of what she insisted on calling “our family”.
In the end, I noticed the desk sergeant watching us and I wondered how much of our conversation she had overheard. I decided there was nothing for it but to take Mrs Carrington away somewhere private, where we could talk more freely. I was still hoping that I could finally convince her to give up the idea that I was her long-lost brother, who was going to fall into her mother’s arms and live happily ever after.
I put her in an interview room and then had the bright idea of calling Paul Godwin to join us. He came down right away, pleased to have an excuse to leave the paperwork that he had been doing. He has his own problems with his mother and father, so I knew I could trust him to have some sympathy with my predicament and not to blab about it afterwards.
‘Sergeant,’ I said when he entered the room, ‘this is Mrs Jane Carrington. We are interviewing her on the subject of wasting police time and obstructing a police officer. Mrs Carrington, Sergeant Godwin is here to ensure that there is no dispute over what is said in this room. Do you understand?’
‘No,’ she said, looking around in confusion. ‘I don’t understand why you’re taking this attitude. I would have thought you would have been pleased-’
‘Sergeant,’ I cut her off, ‘do you remember a few weeks ago we got a call from a Mrs Harris purporting to be for the purpose of imparting information about the Cowley arson attacks?’
‘I don’t remember that call specifically,’ Paul began, so I went on.
‘She insisted on speaking to me personally. Do you remember the occasion now?’
‘Yes, sir. I remember she kept you on the phone for some time and afterwards you said she had no information and was just wasting our time. You described her, as I recall, as “a nutter”.’
‘That’s right, sergeant. Mrs Carrington is her daughter. Now Mrs Carrington, tell me: were you aware of your mother’s malicious telephone call to the team that was investigating several serious arson attacks?’
‘She told me she’d rung, yes, but it wasn’t malicious. She just didn’t know how else to get to talk to you.’
‘But while she was on the line, other members of the public couldn’t get through. People with important information may have given up trying to give it to us as a result. She may have contributed to the fact that we still have not apprehended the offenders and that, since that time, two more attacks have taken place.’
I piled it on thick, hoping to shock her into giving up and advising her mother to do so as well.
‘I never thought about it like that. And I’m sure Mum didn’t either. She was just desperate to make contact with her son after all those years. Can’t you understand that?’
‘Did you encourage her to make the call?’ I went on relentlessly, sensing that I had at last made some sort of impression on her.
‘No. She didn’t tell me about it until afterwards. We watched the news report together, and when she heard your name and saw your face, she said, “That’s my Peter. He looks so like his father! It must be my Peter!” Then she went very quiet and thoughtful. She rang you the next day while I was at work and I only knew about it when she told me that you wouldn’t answer her questions and she didn’t know what to do next.’
‘I see. So you weren’t an accomplice in the offence, but you are confirming that your mother, Mrs Harris, deliberately rang a police hotline although she did not have any information for the enquiry?’
‘But she didn’t mean to interfere with the investigation. She never thought about her call preventing other people getting through. Anyway – you ought to have more lines, if one person can make a difference like that. You can’t be serious. You’re not really thinking of charging her, are you?’
I have to admit that, for a moment or two, I was tempted to string her along for a bit longer. Maybe it was because I couldn’t trust myself to behave reasonably that I’d called Paul Godwin in.
‘No,’ I said in the end. ‘We won’t be charging her – or you – just so long as you go away quietly now and stop preventing me from getting on with my work.’
She got up as if to go and then seemed to change her mind and sat down again. She looked me in the eye and said very coldly, ‘I think you are being very callous. Our mother believes that the reason you didn’t reply to her letter is because you blame her for deserting you all those years ago. Why can’t you at least have the decency to tell her that you forgive her?’
For a moment I couldn’t think what to say. I started to feel guilty for not having replied, but then I felt angry that she was using moral blackmail to get me to do something that I was convinced would be a big mistake for all of us.
‘Well,’ I said in the end, ‘tell her from me that there’s nothing to forgive. I had a happy, stable childhood and a wonderful marriage and I’ve got a good job that I enjoy and some wonderful kids and everything is just fine. She has absolutely nothing to reproach herself about at all.’
‘If all that’s true,’ she argued, ‘why can’t you tell her yourself? What are you frightened of?’
That really struck home, because, of course, she’d hit the nail on the head. I was frightened of meeting my “mother” – I will always think of the word in inverted commas – and being expected to form some sort of relationship with this stranger. I suppose that’s why I found myself saying things that afterwards I realised were rather cruel. ‘I’m not frightened,’ I lied. ‘I just know that all this bringing long lost relatives back together business is a load of nonsense. We can’t possibly have anything in common, so meeting up is bound to mean disappointment all round. Tell your mother that she did the right thing putting me into the care of the NCH. I’m sure I was much better off than I would have been with her in whatever circumstances she was in then. I’ve never had a mother and I’m too old to start now. I don’t need a mother – or a sister for that matter. I’ve got all the family I need already. So now, Sergeant Godwin is going to escort you out and I will leave instructions with the front desk that you are not to be allowed in again. Do you understand?’