Long Shadows

When I was eight years old I turned, more or less overnight, from someone who kept a secret to someone from whom a secret was kept. Of course I didn’t know at the time. At the time all I knew was that Calvin was a TV personality, but that I wasn’t to boast about it because that was bad manners and didn’t make you popular, though I wasn’t to lie if anyone asked. Calvin sometimes called my Mum Auntie Nina, though more often than not he called her just Nina, but he wasn’t my cousin. That puzzled me a bit, but Mum explained that Calvin had had what she called a “falling out” with his own parents when he was in his late teens, and she had taken him under her wing. She was careful not to be critical of Calvin’s Mum and Dad, and tended, if she said anything at all, to say things like “They’re not bad people, but it just wasn’t a good combination”. 

     Though I thought of him as my cousin, and he seemed to like it when he came round to our house, he was really old enough to be my uncle, though a very young uncle. I loved him dearly! He never did anything you could call outrageous, and in fact he had beautiful manners and a natural charm and charisma (not that I knew the word charisma at the time of course, though I was pretty precocious when it came to vocabulary) but there always seemed to be something daring and unconventional about him. Yet the panel show he appeared on was not one that was likely to attract any adverse criticism, or if it did, then for being too boring and safe. I’d watched it a few times, and really tried to be interested because Calvin was on it, and I had met a couple of the other participants, too, but I have to admit I never pestered to watch it. It wasn’t on all the time, and there were usually three runs of ten to twelve weeks every year, though, as Calvin told me, that was all a bit of an illusion as they filmed them in blocks over a very short period of time. That was another secret I was “in” on! 

     It was perhaps as well I didn’t have a big brother, as I fear he may well (with some justification) have been jealous of my devotion to Calvin. 

     I can’t consciously remember Mum or Dad changing the subject when I mentioned Calvin, though I’m pretty sure they must have done. And I have to admit that just as a child that age can be ferociously partisan, they can also be fickle, and whilst I didn’t exactly lose interest in Calvin when he stopped coming around, and Mum and Dad stopped talking about the show, I found other things to fixate on. And then other things to replace them. I was still young enough. I never quite forgot about Calvin, but I thought he had turned into a vague and pleasant childhood memory alongside other vague and pleasant childhood memories.

     I didn’t find anything out until I was in my mid-twenties and doing postgraduate work at university. And it wasn’t even as a result of my own studies. A friend of mine, Celia, was doing a Media Studies thesis on “The Fallen Idol”, but Calvin was little more than a footnote in her work, a name mentioned in a throwaway and random tone. But something must have stuck, and when she made that passing reference to “Calvin Bettany” a bell rung in my mind. “But he’s my –“ I paused, and then said, “He is – he was – a friend of the family. When I was little.”

     “Oh dear, Amanda, I take it you – er, well, don’t know ……”

     She was a decent person and seemed genuinely worried at how I might react to whatever her news was, for it evidently wasn’t good.

     “Whatever it is, you may as well tell me,” I said, sounding less than gracious.

     And she did – with the help of old articles. Calvin had left the show for reasons that baffled many people at the time – and then he was arrested on suspicion of murder, committed some years ago, found guilty, and sentenced to life with a recommendation he serve at least 10 years, with a degree of leniency shown for the fact that he had been very young himself at the time, though above the age of criminal responsibility. 

     Of course I tried not to show how deeply shocked I was, though on reflection, Celia may have thought it more normal if I had registered more shock. I know it’s a cliché, but it didn’t seem quite real. 

     Dad had died suddenly of a heart attack only a couple of years before, and though Mum was coping well enough, I decided not to confront her with what I had discovered. She had aged – not in obvious ways, like a surfeit of grey hair, or more blatant wrinkles, but though she still smiled and even laughed on occasion, her natural ebullience and ready wit that was sometimes a little sarcastic but never nasty seemed to have faded. It must have hit her so hard, I realised. In a way it must have been a worse loss than even Dad dying. There were so many questions squirming in my min, not least – had she visited him, and kept in touch with him? Once more, I was keeping a secret – not about his conviction and imprisonment, but about the fact I knew about it. Had it not been so horrible, there would have been pantomime elements to it.

     In the famous world of contradictory proverbs, I have always been more inclined to believe that ignorance is bliss than that knowledge is power, though perhaps actual bliss or actual power are rare in ignorance or knowledge. But I certainly had no urge to find out more about Calvin. Celia, who obviously did know more, though he was never likely to become the main focus of her thesis, was kind and tactful enough to keep her own counsel.

     But in the end, the scab had to be picked at. And it wasn’t pretty. With a mixture of old-fashioned microfiche readers for old newspapers, and the infant stages of the internet whose offerings would seem ludicrously sparse now but were mind-boggling then, I discovered that he had stabbed another man in the backstreet of a suburban town – the kind of backstreet that almost all towns have, whether their more respectable residents care to acknowledge it or not. And he had taken the man’s wallet. He was described retrospectively, as being “of no fixed abode”. I’m never sure whether that expression is euphemistic or condemnatory. Just one of those legal phrases, I suppose. 

    And it caught up on him, and that was when I had a secret kept from me instead of keeping a secret.

     I suppose you could say that I came to terms with it. It was part of the past, I told myself, doubly part of the past, of my past and of Calvin’s past. To use that cliché, I would not let it ruin my life. But you can never be left wholly unscarred by the ruining of a childhood memory, no matter how deeply you imagine it to be buried.

     Still, I got on with my life, and did more or less what was expected me, which was more or less what I wanted anyway. I ceased being a student (eventually!) and became a lecturer. I am entitled to put “Dr” in front of my name, though I rarely do, unless it’s strictly relevant, and how much is modesty or mild embarrassment, and how much is not wanting to be bothered with people’s questions about their bunions or biliousness, I don’t know. I got married to a fellow-lecturer called Johnny, and we’re very happy. He’s a quiet, intelligent, deeply kind man with a surprisingly wry sense of humour. We have two children, Sylvia and Robert, aged ten and three now. Their Grandma Nina dotes on them, and though such things can seem trite, they really have given her a new lease of life. Sylvia is an old head on young shoulders, droll and thoughtful, and Robert is a happy, boisterous toddler, who throws an occasional mega-tantrum, but is back to his sunny self after a few moments. At times I did wonder if, had things been different, I might have chosen Calvin as a name, or at any rate, a middle name, for a boy, but things were not different, and Robert’s middle name is Leonard, after his grandfather. 

     But sometimes life, or fate, or chance, decides that things are not going to stay firmly, if sometimes uneasily, in a past that we can pretend (sometimes even to ourselves) we have half forgotten. 

     Last week I was at a conference in our county town, and in the foyer of the hotel, I saw Calvin. I knew at once it was Calvin. The years had been both kind and unkind to him. I had once heard a former prisoner say that no matter how long after your release (and even if he’d served his full sentence, it would be a few years now) if you had served any amount of time, you had a perpetual prison pallor – and no amount of tan, fake or real, could ever hide it. Maybe that was fanciful, and maybe it was just that, like me, he was much older, but nobody would ever describe him as fresh-faced again. He had not run to fat, though I doubted he worked out in the gym now, and wasn’t especially wrinkled. I think recognition lit up in both our eyes at more or less the same time, and we both knew that pretending it hadn’t happened wasn’t an option. There was a little lounge of those kind of armchairs that are less comfortable than they look at one end of the reception area, surrounded by artificial yucca plants that were fairly realistic until you got too close up. We were both wondering if those filler-phrases like “long time no see” would be appropriate or not. 

     “I’m here for a conference,” I said, awkwardly. “I’m a lecturer now.”

     He smiled, and it was not exactly a shadow or a parody of his old smile, but it had lost much, if not quite all, of its brightness. “You always were clever,” he said, and the compliment seemed sincere. He did not immediately tell me why he was there, and I did not raise the question.

     “It’s obvious that you know,” he said, quietly. “So let’s have no pretence about that.” I nodded. “I found out – more or less by accident, while I was at university.”

     “That must have been nasty, though I suppose I might be flattering myself. Something I’ve never been averse to. I wanted you to be told – at least some sort of expurgated version – at the time – but Nina wouldn’t have it and I suppose she was right.”

     “I don’t really see how it could be expurgated,” I said, aware of my own hypocrisy. I’ve always prided myself on my liberality in matters of crime and punishment.

     “Probably not,” he agreed, without any hint of belligerence or self-pity. Despite myself I was remembering why, despite his “ways”, as Mum called them, I had always been so taken with him. “In case you’re wondering, I’m waiting here to meet up with Tony. He started off as my probation officer, now all the official side of it has finished, but he’s still – well, I suppose you’d call a mentor, though he’s probably younger than I am – and a friend. He’s helped me get a job in telesales. Despite what you hear about that kind of job, I don’t mind it. Never been averse to the sound of my own voice!” 

     We were silent for a moment or so, and though it was far from a comfortable silence, it wasn’t one of those horrible screaming ones, either. There was a machine offering complimentary coffee, and Calvin went over and got us a cup. He spoke first. “Let’s get this straight, Amanda, I’m not offering any excuses. What I did was wrong. Hideously wrong. I’d get very short shrift from Tony if I’d ever tried to claim anything else. But some of the reporting was inaccurate.” He held up his hand in a gesture I remembered, “Oh, I don’t mean that there were any lies about what I did. But I expect you’ve seen that no fixed abode stuff.” I nodded. “Well, I’d been sleeping rough for a while, and that’s a fact. But by then Nina had already taken me under her wing. To this day I’m not quite sure why I went back to one of my old haunts. Some kind of symbolic rite of passage, or closure, or reminding myself how lucky I was, or all of them, or none. And that’s all I meant to do. And it was more of a fight than an attack. But there are situations you just don’t get yourself into. You’ll hear this romantic cra- rubbish about the solidarity of people on the streets,” I wasn’t sure if I found it touching or absurd that he moderated his language as if I were still a child. “Oh, there are some wonderful friendships! But being poor doesn’t automatically make you a better person or have better friendships than being rich does. Brian and I had never got on. As much my fault as his. Probably we both thought we were a bit above the others but that caused even more friction. We were both the worse for drink – oh yes, I drank then, Amanda, though that was the last drink I had. He – said things. About Nina. About your Mum. Vile things. If he’d said them about me, I could have taken it.”

     “Knight in shining armour,” I muttered, all manner of emotions gnawing at my mind and not knowing if I wished it had come out sounding more or less acerbic.

     “I’m not claiming to be anything of the sort!” He was plainly close to tears, and one thing I did know, no matter how I felt about anything else, those tears were genuine. “Nina was – in shock when I told her. Bloody furious, too. But she never tried to make me turn myself in.”

     “Wait,” I interrupted. “You mean that Mum knew about it all along, not just when it came out all those years later?”

     “Oh yes,” he nodded. “Sometimes I could even have half-convinced myself she didn’t, but she did.”

     He looked over his shoulder and said, “That’s Tony coming now.” Hurriedly he scribbled a phone number. “That’s my number, Amanda. What you do with it is up to you.”

     He introduced me to Tony, who struck me to be much as Calvin had described him, a no-nonsense, but kind man, as “an old friend I ran into”. Tony raised an eyebrow, but we shook hands and exchanged a couple of pleasantries.

     I went through that conference on autopilot. So far as I know I didn’t either give the impression of being miles away or make a fool of myself, if it’s the case, people have been tactful enough not to tell me. Perhaps it was no bad thing that I had something to take my mind off things, if only on the most superficial surface-skim level.

     The matted canvas of secrets had attained yet another dimension. Should I tell Mum that I had met Calvin (I didn’t even know if they were still in touch!) and that he had told me she knew from the word go. For what it may prove I never thought she was acting irresponsibly in letting me form a childhood friendship with a self-confessed (even and the more I thought of it, the more I was prepared to yield on that with extenuating circumstances) killer. She knew that he would never harm me, or her. He had had his moment of madness and had also found something he would never want to hurt or lose. 

     I didn’t know what to do about that phone number, either. In the end, I did ring it. Beyond a perfunctory “You okay?” I didn’t make small talk and half-surprised myself by the question I asked. “Calvin, what was it like – waiting and knowing it might catch up on you? For all those years?”

     “There’s no easy and simplistic answer to that. I guess what I’m “supposed” to say is that it was such a relief when it finally happened because the strain had been unbearable. Sometimes it was and yes, sometimes, I thought just, for God’s sake let’s get it over with. But – did I feel like that all the time? Did it obsess my every waking moment and haunt my every dream? No. Call it – emotional self-preservation, though I know you could call it far less complimentary things.”

     But the secrets are going to end. Oh yes, I worry about how it will affect Mum. If this is just a mixture of my own wishes and virtue-signalling. But I think she can cope with it. I hope and pray she can. The three of us are going to meet up and talk. I have no illusions. It will not be some cosy and unproblematic happy ending. Too much has happened, and too many secrets been kept for too long, for the right or wrong reasons.

     At least, by Monday, I will know.