She nods and I realise how refreshing it is to speak to this woman who grew up with my husband. She may not have seen him in years but sheknowshim in a way that perhaps no one else does. That’s just the way with siblings. They are with you throughout those pivotal moments that shape you into the person you will eventually become. I don’t think that thread can ever really be broken, not completely.
I listen with a greediness, eager to understand her past so that I might better understand my husband.
‘There was a distance between us long before I left the island,’ she says, ‘Each time I dared to push back at our parents or suggested to Jack that he might do the same, he withdrew. And I began to doubt myself. If my brother couldn’t see it, were things really as bad as they felt to me? Honestly, it made me feel like I was going crazy.’
I’m grateful for the sunshine as it falls through the windows and for the view of the sea and the mountains ahead. Otherwise I think I might feel as though I was falling into the past, or at least an imagination of the past conjured by Lorna’s words. The Land Rover feels hot and stuffy and I roll down a window, enjoying the wind in my hair and on my face.
‘They call it gaslighting these days,’ I say. ‘Jack has never told me that much about his childhood, but from the way his parents always talked to him, the way he behaved around them … Well, I’ve always wondered.’
I pull onto the verge for a moment to let another car pass. It’s Bob Campbell and I wave, then continue back onto the road. We pass by the church, the forest and the track leading back to the house where Lorna and Jack grew up and where Catherine and Maurice lived until they died.
‘What were they like?’ Lorna asks quietly. ‘I mean, with you, what were they like? I’ve always wondered if they … I guess I wondered if they ever changed.’
I’m uncertain for a moment what she wants to hear. Would it be harder for her if I told her that theyhadchanged? Would she regret the choice she made? And do people ever really change?
‘I always found your father unnerving. He’d be so quiet one moment and then would explode the next. And there was the drinking of course. We all noticed it – I think the whole island must have known – but no one ever really said anything about it. It was just one of those quietly accepted things. Mad really.’
I shake my head. Were we wrong to allow him to stew in his drink and his anger? Could anyone have done anything to change things, to help him even?
‘He wasn’t always like that,’ Lorna says. I raise an eyebrow, urging her to go on. ‘I mean, he was never warm and fluffy, not at all. He was strict and always had a certain hardness to him. But then he had the accident at work and it was like overnight he became incredibly bitter.’
Jack told me that when he was very young his father worked in construction, helping build new houses on the island and travelling over to the mainland for jobs too. But there was some accident – a falling scaffold – and after that he never worked again. All his life he walked with a cane, but I could always tell that even that was a struggle. But whenever I tried to help, offering my arm or rising to get him something so he didn’t have to he’d become so furious that in the end we all learnt to just leave him to it.
‘I guess that must have been hard on him,’ I suggest.
‘I think it was. We lived off his disability allowance but mostly from money our mother inherited from her parents. I think it pained him to be so totally reliant on other people.’
I think back to when my father was made redundant from the accountancy firm where he’d worked for years. I was a teenager and still living at home. For several months my usually sunny father withdrew, spending all his time in the garden or sitting on the sofa watching daytime television. I’d rarely seen him in anything other than his work suit or his gardening overalls, but he started wearing pyjamas in the day, often still in them at dinner time. Then he got a new job and the suit and the smiles came back. But I’ll never forget that time when he slipped and when darkness ventured into our home. I guess it was the first time I truly realised that my strong, jolly father was capable of falling.
‘Wounded pride,’ I say.
‘I saw him crying once,’ continues Lorna. ‘Not long after the accident happened. He was in pain and I caught him weeping in the living room. He was absolutely furious when he spotted me. I don’t think he ever forgave me for that – for seeing his weakness. He couldn’t stand it.’
I can imagine.
‘And what about your mother, what was she like when you were young?’
She tilts her head to one side, her forehead creased with thought.
‘I think mostly she was afraid of our father. She never stood up to him, although I can understand why. I always wanted her to be stronger though, for Jack and me. She was our mother at the end of the day. But I understand it.’
I picture Catherine, her shoulders hunched as though she wanted to fold in on herself. But I think of Molly too and how I would do anything in the world to protect her. At least, I hope I would. Who can really know for sure what they’d do if things were different?
‘Not much changed, then,’ I say.
‘I tried to get her to leave him, you know.’
‘Really?’
She nods, running her hand through her hair.
‘Many times. I even researched places off the island that we could rent, Mum, Jack and I. But she didn’t want to go. She told me she loved him and we all just needed to try harder to make him happy.’
We sit in silence for a moment. For once, I don’t know what to say.
‘I tried to get Jack to leave too,’ she says, her voice soft and quiet now. ‘I told him I’d get a job and find us a flat and I’d look after him.’
‘He didn’t want to go?’
