‘All right.’ She scrunches her hands into balls. ‘All right.’ She pulls in a quick breath, obviously bracing herself.
I’m still trying to work out what she could possibly be finding so hard to get out, when …
‘I think you need to talk to Eleanor Norland,’ she says.
I frown.
The name means nothing to me.
‘Who’s Eleanor Norland?’ I ask.
‘She lives over there,’ says Mum, gesturing at the Georgian houses on the green. ‘She’s retired now, has been for years, but she was a psychiatrist. Your nan took you to her.’
‘I don’t remember … ’
‘Yes,’ she says, nodding grimly. ‘You do. She used to give you those Rich Tea Biscuits. You couldn’t manage her name, so you called her Ellen. Mrs Ellen.’
I could be angry.
I could be bloody furious.
I am, at first.
‘Have you heard of the term gaslighting?’ I demand of Mum, who my whole life through has sworn blind to me that Mrs Ellen never existed.
‘I haven’t been gaslighting you,’ she insists. ‘I’ve been trying to protect you.’
‘From what?’
‘Too much … ’
‘What, though?’
‘If you’ll let me speak, I’ll tell you.’
‘Fine,’ I say. ‘Fine.Go ahead, please.’
And she does go ahead.
Not in the cemetery.
‘I don’t want to do this here,’ she says. ‘Let’s head back to the house.’
So, we head back to the house, crossing the green, then the fields, and as we walk, she explains herself, and gradually my anger seeps from me.
Because although I still hate that she’s lied to me, I do understand her reasons.
They’re good reasons.
Devastating, but borne of love.
And to my disbelief, they’re all to do with my father.
She has talked to me about him before. Not much. She’s always claimed she didn’t know enough about him herself.
‘He wasn’t the type who could allow anyone to know him well,’ she once told me. ‘That was his shield. His superpower. He needed it, the way he grew up.’
His mother had died not long after having him, and his father was disinterested, so he spent all of his childhood in care. He started at UCL the same year Mum did, studying philosophy too. The two of them met at a party, and Mum was apparently like a moth to a flame when he singled her out.
