When God Was a Rabbit

Looking back, it’s quite clear my parents had made the decision to move by the time they returned from their trip to Cornwall that Easter. They’d been on a second honeymoon, Nancy said. They’d needed to reconnect, to find each other as people once again and when they walked through the door, ruddy and salty, there was an energy about them, an energy I’d never seen before; a kindness not bound by familiarity or duty, and when my father sat us down and declared that he had decided to quit his job, I felt relieved that the fragility of expectation that had hung over us during the last eighteen months had finally turned into the decisiveness of action.

My father worked out his notice by the end of June and then, shunning all goodbyes and celebrations, sat in his car in the deserted car park and cried late into the night. The police found him hunched over the steering wheel, eyes red and swollen like boils. When they opened his door, all he could say was, ‘Forgive me. Forgive me, please,’ and for a young policeman three weeks out of Hendon this appeared to be a shocking confession, as his imagination jumped from textbook to crime novel in one easy leap. He believed my father had murdered his family, and called for a squad of cars to rush over to our house. The door thundered under the blows of fists, and my mother, disoriented, torn from sleep, rushed down the stairs, fearful that the bearer of unbearable news had once again found his way to her door.

‘Yes?’ she said in a tone that was neither helpful nor passive.

‘Are you Mrs Kate Portman?’ said the policeman.

‘I am,’ said my mother.

‘Do you know a Mr Portman?’ said the policeman.

‘Of course I do, he’s my husband. What’s happened to him?’

‘Nothing serious, but he seems a little distressed. Could you come down to the station with me and collect him?’

And my mother did, and found my father pale and trembling in the fluorescent light under the care of a kind station sergeant. He was wrapped in a grey blanket and was holding a mug of tea. The mug was patterned with the insignia of the West Ham supporters’ club and somehow made my father look more pathetic, my mother said. She took the mug from him and placed it on the floor.

‘Where are your shoes?’ she asked.

‘They took them from me,’ he said. ‘It’s procedure. In case I did anything to myself.’

‘What? Like trip yourself up?’ she said, and they both laughed and knew that it would be all right – for the moment, at least.

And as they walked out to the car park, she stopped and turned to him and said, ‘Leave it here, Alfie. It’s time. Leave her here.’

Her name was Jean Hargreaves.

My father had been working in Chambers at the time and was chosen to defend a Mr X against child molestation charges. It was one of his first cases and, emboldened by new fatherhood and the responsibility placed on his green shoulders, he undertook Mr X’s defence as a sort of quest, a noble vocation against the dragon of slander.

Mr X was a known man, a respectable man of such gentle ways that my father found it unspeakable that he should be forced to defend himself against such heinous allegations. Mr X had been married for forty years. There was no whisper of affairs or marital grumblings, and their union was held up as the pinnacle to reach. They had two children; the boy went into the army, the girl into finance. He was on the board of directors of several companies; he was a patron of the arts and financed underprivileged children through university. But more importantly, he was the man my father wanted to be.

And then one day, a young woman called Jean Hargreaves walked into Paddington Green police station and unburdened herself for the first time in thirteen years, revealing the humiliating secret that liked to visit her at night. She had been ten at the time and subjected to a cycle of horrendous abuse, whilst her mother diligently cleaned the outer reaches of Mr X’s house. The police would have thrown out the case if it wasn’t for one mitigating circumstance: Jean Hargreaves could describe perfectly the heraldic ring her attacker wore on his little finger, and had noticed the smallest fissure across its shield.

The moment Jean Hargreaves took to the stand, her life was all but over, my father later told me. He broke her story down with swipes and body blows, and parried her uncertainty until she sat back slumped and unsure of everything including her name. It took the jury no time at all to say not guilty, and for Mr X’s firm cool hand to be thrust into my father’s naïve palm.

And then came the worst of timings. My father was leading Mr X down the corridor, when all of a sudden they saw Jean Hargreaves sitting alone on a bench, awaiting the arrival of her best friend, who had disappeared ten minutes earlier to look for a taxi. My father tried to pull his client back, but it was as useless as dragging a baying hound away from a bloodied fox. Mr X pulled away and strutted down that silent corridor, his heels clicking as arrogantly as fingers, and at the moment of passing he didn’t yell or vent his anger, instead he turned to Jean Hargreaves and whispered something and winked at her, and in that moment my father knew. Nancy said he stopped and reached for the wall; tried to pull himself free from his skin, something he tried in vain to do throughout the rest of his life.

Two weeks later Jean Hargreaves committed suicide, and in the time it took for her to fall twenty floors, my father lost faith in everything; but most of all in himself.

My father knelt down on the tarmac as cars came and went. The soft drone of traffic competed with his past. The June breeze billowed around his shirt and dried his damp skin – an illicit, welcome sensation to the memory of life. My mother stroked his hair.

‘I love you,’ she said, but my father couldn’t look at her. It was the final chapter of his breakdown, the moment when his glass was drained of everything, and its emptiness awaited only the choices to come.