When he finished, his voice finally broke into what they both knew was a sob. He turned it into a cough and wouldn’t meet Karen’s eye.
‘Believe me, I never wanted to tell you. I didn’t even want to tell you about Lottie. But this? It wasn’t who your mother was. It really wasn’t who she was.’
The sparse recounting had taken no time. The croquet game was still in full swing behind them on the lawn. The sun didn’t appear to have moved through the sky. Nothing in the day’s summery mood had altered the way that it should. There were no lowering clouds, no shadows extending creeping fingers over the grass; the temperature hadn’t dropped from the gentle warmth it had held when Andrew started.
And yet my father just told me that my mother was a murderer.
No theory that she and Markus could have imagined would ever have come close to this. The need for the solidity of his arms overwhelmed her, rushing back jumbled memories of Berlin. First of Markus and then, hard behind them, an older one. A time capsule of a shop and a sour-faced old woman.
‘I was there. At the dressmaker’s shop. It’s called Richters now. I found it when I went to Berlin in 1978 with the school. I stood in the place where it happened.’
He didn’t react; he looked too drained to react to anything. He looked like he wanted to run.
‘Why did she kill her?’
It was the most inadequate question. Karen wasn’t even sure why she asked it or what answer there could be except ‘Lottie’. But she had to say something: if she didn’t, if her father – who was poised on the edge of the bench – walked away, this revelation would disappear into the silence they were so practised at living in. So she opened her mouth and said the first thing that came into it. As it had done with Michael, her simple directness worked on Andrew like a key.
‘Revenge.’ Andrew sat back enough to suggest he might stay and uncurled his clenched hands. ‘That’s what she told me at first and I believed her. It seemed obvious enough. Then later, when she…’ He paused. ‘This isn’t easy for me. It’s not a conversation I ever wanted to have with you. Or with her. For a long time the whole… event… wasn’t discussed. I couldn’t bear it; I didn’t think your mother could stand it. Then, when the weight of it became too much for her and she started to talk… there were more layers. She talked about the guard’s death like she had been carrying out a punishment. A “mother’s job” she called it. But that made it sound deliberate, thought out, and I’m not sure it was. All I am sure of is that what she did that day didn’t bring her any peace. If anything, it added to her suffering.’
The scale of that clawed at Karen’s skin. ‘You said you were the one who found her, with the body?’
He nodded.
‘I went to walk her home. One of us, me or Michael, often did, especially at a weekend. I think I was planning to suggest going to the cinema – it was something we both liked to do. She was just standing there, blood everywhere.’ He coughed, swallowed hard. ‘It was me who brought Michael into it. I couldn’t have managed it all on my own.’
Karen had thought fixing more detail onto Andrew’s, and Michael’s, part in the story would make it more real. It didn’t. She still couldn’t grasp the events he had described. Her quiet and gentle mother, who had never raised her hand, clutching a murder weapon. The father she knew, the military policeman who lived his life by discipline, and Michael, the controlled man she had met in Berlin, hiding a murder, dumping a corpse. Two men who lived their lives by strict rules, a woman who she would have said wouldn’t have hurt a fly; all of them acting so out of character. And then Karen remembered the only truth that must have mattered to Andrew and Michael, the agony that Liese had suffered with Lottie’s death, and knew that, as impossible as it all sounded, it also sounded horribly true.
Andrew was shifting again, looking over to the lawn as if he was hoping for a rescue. Karen wanted to let him go. She wanted to let it all go. She wanted to curl up in a ball and hide and never talk about any of this again. She gripped the bench to stop herself rocking and pushed on.
‘How did you feel? About covering it up?’
He turned to her, his exhausted expression transformed to astonishment. ‘How did I feel? I have no idea. I didn’t think about it, not in the moment. I cared about her; Michael cared about her. She needed our help. What should we have done instead? Contacted the authorities? Watched them take away a good woman to hang?’
‘No! Of course not.’
His voice softened as hers rose. ‘We all paid for it, Karen. All three of us. No one walked away from that night unmarked. But at least she walked away. What we did in the shop, what I did in bringing your mother here, was the right thing to do. The only thing to do.’
She heard it then, the tremor in his voice which rang with uncertainty.
Didn’t she love you enough? She’d hurled that at him years ago, without any other thought except the hurt she could cause. Watching his spent face now, Karen realised her father had spent his whole marriage haunted by the same question.
‘I’m sorry – so very sorry, Karen – for having to tell you this. And for all the other things I should have said and never found the courage.’
The apology took her by surprise. How long had she waited to hear that? Now, Karen wished she had played her part better and not fought him, that ‘I’m sorry’ had never been needed on either part. She wished she knew him well enough to wrap her arms round him. She settled instead for honesty.
‘Don’t, please. There’s just as much fault with me as with you. You were trying to protect me, like you tried to protect her. I was too angry, too wrapped up in myself, to see it.’
This time he didn’t turn his back when his eyes filled.
‘Thank you for saying that, but the blame isn’t equal and I won’t let you go on thinking it is. I’m your father. I’m meant to take care of you, but I got the doing of it so wrong. Your mother died and then I kept her away from you. She wanted me to tell you about your sister. She told me to do it; she knew you needed to hear it. I didn’t know how. I thought you were too young when she died. Then you weren’t, but I was a coward and I kept missing the moment to be brave. I failed her and I failed you. That has been as hard to live with as her dying.’
It was the longest, most personal speech she had ever heard from him. But before Karen could acknowledge that, Andrew shook his head as if to clear out the memories and got up. Karen felt the newly closing gap between them lurch open again and panicked.
‘Please don’t leave it like this, with more holes. What do you mean she told you? How? When? Why did it matter to her, that I knew what had happened? Don’t you see? I don’t know her and I so need to know her.’
The words came out in a cry of pain she couldn’t stop.
‘That’s the worst of this. Ever since she died, she’s kept shifting. Everything I learn drives her further away. And I know there were good things, but they’ve got lost under the bad. I need my mother back, Dad. I really need her back.’
It was Andrew who took the leap they both were yearning for. He reached out a hand and pulled her into as close to a hug as the two of them knew how to do.