Free The Full Legacy by Jane Retzig Page B

be with her.  
    Anyway, it was a mistake. And it was Luke and his partner Jon who patched me up afterwards. They got me back on my feet without my mother ever finding out, which was a miracle, considering the official psychiatric diagnosis of ‘Delusional Psychosis’.
    I didn’t see Corinne for dust during that time. She never spoke about it afterwards either, but I think I freaked her out. She didn’t want to be lumbered with a girlfriend with ‘issues’, and I didn’t want to see her anyway. I didn’t want the shame of her seeing me in that state.
     
    Luke’s eyes were full of concern as he waited for me to say something. He never pushed me or got impatient with me when the words wouldn’t come. Maybe it was his counselling training, or maybe, more likely really, it was just the way he was.
    Finally, the words formed themselves into a coherent sentence in my head.
    I took a gulp of tea. It had already begun to cool while Luke waited. I noticed he had almost finished his.
    He gave an almost imperceptible nod that said ‘That’s it. I can see. Just go for it.’
    I nodded back quickly in reply and took a rush at the words.
    ‘I think it’s starting again,’ I said. And then I began to cry.
     
    All my life I’ve been trying to escape my father’s legacy. In his prime, he was a world renowned medium, author of countless books on the afterlife, leader of his own independent spiritualist church. I imagine that people must have questioned his judgment when he got my mum pregnant. Especially when she was only seventeen and he was in his thirties. But at least he ‘made an honest woman of her’, as they used to say back then, and he was handsome and charismatic and powerful and he had a cold, frightening way of looking at people if they crossed him, so nobody ever really liked to question him much about anything he did.
     I can still remember the day the police came to arrest him. My mother screaming at them not to hurt him as he tried to run and they forced him to the ground and into handcuffs. She believed utterly in his innocence. Her unquestioning love for him shone out for all to see. She feared him too, in that Old Testament kind of way that people feared God. I think that’s why she was never charged as an accessory. Anyone could see that she was just another of his victims.
    At the trial she sat in the public gallery with some others of his more gullible women. The local press said that she smiled and called out to him as he was led into the dock, but he never once looked at her. I imagine he couldn’t bear the shame of being brought so low. Then she listened to two days of evidence about all the money he’d conned out of grieving widows and parents desperate to contact their lost children. Ostensibly it was to build a new meeting place for his ‘Church’. In fact, it had all been poured down the black hole of his gambling addiction. Fifty thousand pounds or more, a fortune back then, squandered on the roulette tables where his powers were meaningless.
    My mother’s simple faith in him was shattered. She was appalled at what she heard.
    She didn’t go back to see him sentenced.
    She divorced him while he was in prison and fought to stop him having access to me when he came out.
    Then on the 7th of May 1968, the day we received the news that my father had hung himself in a squalid bedsit in Tower Hamlets, my mother shut herself in her bedroom and the sound of her sobbing almost broke my heart.
     
    ‘Okay,’ said Luke gently. ‘Let’s start from the beginning with this.’
    So I told him - starting with the party on Saturday night.
     
    Later, when he had listened and calmed me down somewhat by trying to convince me that I wasn’t going mad, he phoned Jon and told him he was bringing me home for dinner. And Jon, bless his heart, was delighted to see me when I arrived.
     
     

 
The Poet
     
    It was late as we walked through the echoing East London streets to the Tube.
    I was clutching a