Perfectly Ordinary People(112)

‘Pierre was Grandpa Christophe’s name before he changed it. And his family name wasn’t Solomas either. It was Meyer.’

Dad put his beer down with precision and stood with studied calmness. ‘This is . . .’ he said. He scrunched up his nose and shook his head. ‘I’m not sure what you think you’re up to, but it’s really quite unpleasant.’

‘Dad, sit down,’ I said, then, ‘Dad! Please sit down. I haven’t finished.’

‘I think I’ll just go home now,’ he said, sounding so everyday that he seemed a bit mad.

‘You were adopted, Dad,’ I said as he pulled on his jacket, hoping to stop him in his tracks. ‘They saved you. Genny and Pierre saved you from the Germans by pretending to be a couple and adopting you.’

And just for a moment, with one arm in his jacket, Dad paused. ‘I don’t even know a Pierre,’ he said. ‘You’re talking nonsense.’

‘I just told you,’ I said. ‘You’re not listening. Pierre Meyer. That was Grandpa’s name before the war. He changed it to Christophe, and he was Grandma Genny’s best friend. Her gay best friend. And when the Germans invaded Alsace they saved you.’

But it had all gone wrong, and I thought about the fact that the reason I’d been unable to imagine how the conversation would go was because the reality was this: the conversation simply could not happen.

‘Dad,’ I said, as he crossed to the door. ‘Dad!’

But then my front door slammed shut.

Buggles, who’d picked up on the atmosphere and had hidden beneath a dining chair, peeped out, glanced at the door and then back at me.

‘Sorry, Bugs,’ I said. ‘That’s not how that was supposed to go.’

My mother phoned me at eight thirty the next morning. It was when I knew my father generally left the house for work so I was in no doubt as to the reason for her call.

‘What’s wrong with your father?’ she asked without further ado. ‘What did you do?’

‘I didn’t do anything,’ I said, childhood reflexes kicking in.

But over the course of the next hour, I told her exactly what I had done. I told her everything. And she was as furious as I’ve ever known her to be.

‘Why the hell didn’t you tell me first?’ she kept saying. ‘You stupid, stupid girl!’ She could have managed him, she insisted. She alone knew how to manage my father. And I had to admit that she was probably right about that.

The one thing she didn’t do at any point was cast doubt on the veracity of Genevieve’s revelations.

‘I always knew there was something dodgy about that lot,’ was her only real comment. ‘But now it all makes sense.’

‘Dodgy?’ I repeated.

‘Yes, dodgy.’

At the end of the conversation, she asked me for a printed copy of the interview and I promised I’d drop one over during the week.

‘But it’ll have to be while your father’s out,’ she told me. ‘I don’t want one word about this from anyone. And I mean not one word, or so help me God, I’ll never speak to you again.’

The problem, evidently, was Jake.

He phoned me on Saturday evening, so I told him what had happened, and what Mum had said.

‘No way,’ he said, immediately. ‘There’s no way I’m pretending this didn’t happen. I don’t care how much they want to stick their heads in the sand. Not talking about this is not an option.’

‘Please, just wait a bit,’ I pleaded. ‘And please just talk to Mum first.’ I pulled a face at Dan, who’d just arrived and was looking at me accusingly.

But Jake would not wait. Instead he stormed over there first thing on Sunday, and demanded that my father discuss his Jewish heritage. Which was almost certainly the worst possible way for that particular snippet of information to be revealed.

Thus was born The Second Great Falling Out.

In the end, Dad – who I suspect genuinely believed Jake and I had lost the plot – threw Jake out of the house. It was the only way he could shut him up, I think. And I don’t mean he ‘threw him out’ figuratively. Jake, by all accounts, ended up on the pavement with a nosebleed.

Sad times had fallen upon our family, and I couldn’t help but wonder if Dan had been right all along. Perhaps Dad hadn’t needed to know. Certainly no good seemed to have come of my telling him.

Dad apparently became depressed. I say ‘apparently’ because all family get-togethers had ceased by then. ‘Your father isn’t up to it today,’ Mum told me for the first three Sundays in a row, and by the fourth we’d got the message and had stopped asking.

Within two months Jake had announced his wedding for the following September while quite spectacularly not inviting Mum and Dad, a gesture that caused alternating ripples of alienation and allegiance that would spread far and wide, so that by the time his wedding took place not one family member felt able to attend without falling out with everyone else. The deal breaker for me had been the fact that he’d refused to invite Mum and Dad. I’d attempted to blackmail him into submission by refusing to go without them, but my plan had failed. He’d simply un-invited me too.

The wedding drama had led to a unique combination of sadness on my mother’s part for having missed it and unpleasant smugness on Dad’s side at the fact that none of us had ‘bothered to go’, as he liked to put it. The atmosphere back home felt so sad and toxic that even I stopped visiting them for a while.