Half-truths & White Lies Read online

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Epigraphs

  Part One Andrea's Story Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Part Two Peter's Story Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Part Three Faye's Story Chapter Twenty-three

  Part Four Andrea's Story Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Part Five Peter's Story Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Part Six Andrea's Story Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Part Seven Peter's Story Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Part Eight Faye's Story Chapter Thirty-five

  Part Nine Peter's Story Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Part Ten Andrea's Story Chapter Thirty-eight

  Part Eleven Peter's Story Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Part Twelve Andrea's Story Chapter Forty-three

  Part Thirteen Faye's Story Chapter Forty-four

  Part Fourteen Peter's Story Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Part Fifteen Andrea's Story Chapter Forty-seven

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Chapter Forty-nine

  Jane Davis lives in Surrey with her partner of ten years. She has enjoyed writing as a hobby for a number of years while pursuing a successful career in insurance. Latterly, her hobby has increased in importance and she has now given up her full-time job to dedicate more time to it. Half-truths & White Lies is her first novel.

  For further information visit the author's website at

  www.jane-davis.co.uk

  www.rbooks.co.uk

  HALF-TRUTHS &

  WHITE LIES

  Jane Davis

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  ISBN 9781409081555

  Version 1.0

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS

  61–63 Uxbridge Road, London W5 5SA

  A Random House Group Company

  www.rbooks.co.uk

  HALF-TRUTHS & WHITE LIES

  A BLACK SWAN BOOK

  ISBN: 9781409081555

  Version 1.0

  First publication in Great Britain

  Black Swan edition published 2009

  Copyright © Jane Davis 2009

  Jane Davis has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and

  Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any

  resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library.

  This electronic book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  Addresses for Random House Group Ltd companies outside the UK

  can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk

  The Random House Group Ltd Reg. No. 954009

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  For Maureen, whose story telling was an inspiration.

  See you on the other side.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks are owed to many people, but there are some who are worthy of particular mention: to all at the Daily Mail and Transworld Publishers for this wonderful opportunity, especially Francesca Liversidge; to my agent, Teresa Chris, for your guidance; to those who read the early drafts including Daniel and Gillian Davis (truly the best hosts in all of Scotland), my fabulous sisters, Anne Clinton and Louise Davis; to Charlotte Martin, Bernie Barthram and Sarah Marshall; to Amanda Osborne and Delia Porter – your friendship means the world to me; to Dad, who broke the habit of a lifetime and didn't read the last page first; to Mum who refused to read it until it was in print; to Jean Porter for tea in china cups and words of wisdom; to Rosemary Williams for helping to remind me who I am; to Helen Williams (no relation) for keeping me sane and being an inspiration; and to William, Timothy, Dexter, Lara and 'Mimi', for making me smile on the bad days. But most of all, thank you to Matt for saying you would read it if I would write it, for your unfailing support and unquestioning faith in me – and for not even flinching when I handed my notice in at work: you are my rock.

  'I never saw any good that came out of telling the truth.'

  John Dryden

  'Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.'

  Benjamin Franklin

  Part One

  Andrea's Story

  Chapter One

  Is it possible to tell the difference between a dream and a premonition? Or is a premonition just a dream that life later adds meaning to, so that we convince ourselves that we have the power to see into the future?

  My family lived with my mother's mother who, it was whispered, could change the course of history with the use of a simple phrase, so concepts such as these do not seem so very extraordinary to me. Although she was oblivious to the extent of her powers, Nana's sentences that began 'Mark my words' were the kiss of death. She thought that she just had the uncanny knack of always being right.

  'Mark my words! That boy will never amount to anything.' She would cast her opinions carelessly, and a future of misfortune and underachievement would now be a certainty for her poor victim rather than a vague possibility.

  When she aimed her comments at one of us, we were quick to cross our fingers for luck, the traditional family method of preventing her from sealing our fates.

  'Mark my words, Andrea, you're going to regret having seconds later,' she scolded when I insisted on another spoonful of shepherd's pie. 'You won't have any room for rice pudding.' As I had to sit and watch the others eat my favourite dessert, she couldn't resist raising her eyebrows and saying, 'What did I tell you?'

  As a child, I had a recurring dream. In that dream I was falling in a rolling motion, gathering momentum all the way. The green of the grass, the brown of the earth and the blue of the sky became blurred, but provided clues of which way was up and which was down. Eventually, I would have to close my eyes when dizzying nausea overtook me.

  I associated that dream with a heady feeling of excitement a
nd anticipation in the pit of my stomach. The point where the familiar meets the unfamiliar; the solid ground of the gentle slope giving way to the sheer drop.

  I felt drawn to activities that induced that feeling. Somersaults, cartwheels, spinning in circles; being blindfolded at the start of a party game; rolling down grassy, daisy-speckled banks, arms folded over my chest. Sliding down slopes on tea-trays in the fresh snow; riding the big wheel when the fair came to town. Handstands on the side of the swimming pool, legs hovering aloft, waiting for the moment when the water reaches up to swallow you. I would jump into my father's arms from a height, safe in the knowledge that he was there to catch me. The pause at the top of the slide before letting go translated into the hesitation at the top of the ski slope before digging in the poles and pushing off. On my first holiday alone, I tried bungee jumping from a suspension bridge.

  'That girl has no inbuilt sense of fear,' was Nana's reaction. 'She doesn't know when to stop. Mark my words, she'll come a cropper.'

  'Weren't you scared of falling?' My mother, a vertigo sufferer, asked with genuine wonderment when I showed her the photos.

  'It's the feeling of falling I enjoy,' I tried to explain. 'It's the only thing that makes you feel free.'

  'Oh, I couldn't.' She shuddered. 'I'd be the one standing at the top refusing to jump.'

  'It's not the fall you want to worry about, love,' my father joked. 'It's landing that'll kill you.'

  'Oh, Tom!' Nana tutted, convinced that others were capable of bringing bad luck into the house.

  It seemed to me that my parents had always played it safe. Semi-detached in suburbia, room enough for me and, because she couldn't cope on her own, for Nana. Nine to five. Fish-and-chip takeaway on a Friday. Sunday roast. Ford Escort. Two weeks' holiday in the same hotel in Spain every summer. God knows they deserved it. The truth is that I had long since outgrown the safety of the semi but, like so many of my generation, I lacked the means to buy a property of my own and the inclination to rough it in the sort of bed-sit that my wages would have afforded. I led a charmed life, although I would have taken great offence at anyone who suggested as much.

  Our very average family was illustrated by a family tree that I had drawn as part of a school project at the age of eleven. It hung in the hall among family photographs, something that I passed several times every day and took little notice of, but I would have been embarrassed to admit that it was my handiwork. I can remember being criticized very harshly by my teacher for failing to make an entry for my paternal grandfather.

  'But my daddy didn't have a father,' I protested, repeating what he had told me over the years. (I enjoyed this small piece of information – as I grew older it was the only thing that made me think that there might be a story behind my family that was actually worth hearing.)

  'Of course he had a father,' the teacher insisted. 'Everybody has a father.'

  When I asked my father about this, he told me that my diagram was one hundred per cent accurate and that he was more than happy with it.

  'Who does she think she is?' he asked with genuine annoyance. 'You would think that I would know if I had a father or not.' I knew better than to push him any further on the subject. I could twist him around my little finger, but there were certain subjects that were simply not up for discussion. 'My mother loved me enough for two,' was all he would say. This did not prevent him discussing the matter with my teacher. I was humiliated to learn that he had paid a visit to the school and told her that neither he nor his family would be forced to fit into whatever outgrown idea of a family they had in mind.

  'But what did you say?' I asked miserably, trying to prepare myself for whatever sarcastic comments might pass my way.

  'Nothing for you to worry about. I simply told her that I may not want to be a tree and that I can be a twig, a bush or a herbaceous border if I chose.'

  'You didn't!' I squealed.

  'Now I come to think of it, I shouldn't have stopped there. I might like to be a family triangle, or a family rhomboid or a family flow chart. Or even a family Venn diagram.'

  'A Venn diagram?' I was horrified.

  He sketched a series of three interlinking circles for me. 'Yes, that works just fine. That's Mummy, that's you and that's me. You can tell Miss Whateverhernameis that from now on we will be a Venn diagram.'

  'Andrea, don't listen to him, love,' my mother sighed. 'Tom, she's just trying to teach them about where they have come from. This isn't personal.'

  'They should be trying to teach children to think, not to stick ridiculous labels on people.'

  You can guess who won that debate by the fact that the family tree found its way into a frame and on to the wall.

  'This is nice, isn't it?' my mother would habitually say as we settled round the dining-room table for Sunday lunch. The question was serious enough, and she looked around the table searching, almost as if she expected someone else to appear, sometimes challenging us to disagree, checking that we were all satisfied with our individual lots. Occasionally, I felt that she was trying to convince herself that this was what she worked so hard for every week. The chance to have her family around the table and share a home-cooked meal. It seemed such a small reward. I knew that I could never be satisfied with the life that she had settled for.

  'Smashing, love,' my father replied as he carved. 'You've done us proud again.'

  'Oh, yes,' Nana would agree, frowning at the pink centre of the meat and the crispness of the vegetables, which were not to her taste. Steamed, for goodness' sake! 'The roasties look marvellous. Done to a "t".'

  My mother beamed at this, the ultimate compliment. 'You must have taught me well, Mum.'

  It was the same routines that I found so tedious at times that made us feel safe, made it possible for us to go out into the world, to be who we were and do our own things. Without those routines, for that one meal of the week when the television was turned off, we didn't always have enough to say to each other. My father would comment, 'It must be good, love, it's all gone quiet. You could hear a pin drop in here.' It was in the silences that my mother would take the time to look at us in turn and smile. 'This is nice, isn't it?'

  And then it all changed. All the routines were taken away, and I can hardly believe that I miss them the most.

  To celebrate my parents' twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, my father surprised my mother by arranging a weekend away. He had let me in on the secret, of course. I was needed to stay at home to look after Nana, otherwise he wouldn't have put it past my mother to refuse to go. Or to want to take Nana with them. But he had planned for that.

  He kept one surprise even from me. That Friday evening he arrived home from work in an open-topped Austin-Healey 3000, sleek in black and chrome with red leather seats. Only two red leather seats. It had been a dream of his to own one, a dream which had been whittled away gradually and demoted to a dream to drive one. Even so, the grin on his face told me that it was not a disappointment, although the luggage I had so carefully planned had to be downsized to fit in the boot.

  'One hundred and fifty brake horse power.' He rubbed his hands together.

  My mother became a teenager again when she saw the car. Any reservations that she might have dreamt up at the thought of being whisked off at a moment's notice were quelled. Normally, she wouldn't have even contemplated the idea of a weekend away before completing a full inventory of the freezer to ensure that there were enough single-sized portions of homemade cottage pie to feed Nana and me for a good few weeks.

  'I wonder . . .' She paused outside, tapping a finger against the side of her mouth and narrowing her eyes. Then she turned and ran into the house.

  'Laura!' My father called after her. 'We've got to get going. The traffic on the motorway is going to be chocka. Oh, it's no good.' He looked momentarily deflated. 'Once she's got an idea in her head . . .'

  'Ta-da!' She appeared wearing a pair of red sling-backs that looked as if they had seen far better days under her jeans and clutching a
red dress, which she was trying unsuccessfully to fit into her handbag.

  It seems that those shoes had much the same effect on my father as the car had done on my mother, and he looked ten years younger as he opened the car door for her. 'Your lucky shoes! Now you're talking.'

  I stood at the end of the path to watch my parents disappear down the road, their eyes aglow, hands touching thighs and laps, feeling that I was intruding. Feeling strangely parental. Shouting, 'Keep your eyes on the road!'

  Nana knocked that out of me quickly enough by commenting, 'Mark my words, that thing looks like a death trap.'

  The news came about four hours later, delivered by two policemen who arrived on the doorstep just as I was about to go to bed. It was without any outward sign of emotion that I heard that my parents had been driving in the middle lane of the M6 when a foreign lorry driver had pulled out and clipped the edge of their car, sending it into a spin. In all likelihood, the car would have been too low on the road for the lorry driver to see in his mirrors. My mother had been at the wheel. She tried to correct the unfamiliar vehicle but veered to the left at speed, crashing through the barrier before the car rolled down the bank. There was talk that her red sling-backs had become caught in the pedals, causing her to lose control. At that point, there was quite a steep drop and the car would have bounced before rolling several times, giving alternate views of steel, lights and sky. Steel, lights and sky. My mother wouldn't have seen much of the blurred view or felt the nauseous feeling of anticipation in her stomach for long. She was decapitated, possibly as early as the first roll of the car, her body thrown clear of the wreckage, fuelling speculation that she hadn't been wearing a seatbelt. My father's neck was broken, but witnesses say he was still alive in his position trapped upside down under the vehicle, facing my mother's head, where it had come to rest in the ditch.