to Manhattan. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that she’s avoiding me now Edwin has told me everything he knows.
My relationship with my mother has been fractious for years, mainly due to her refusal to tell me who my father is. But despite this, every few months the umbilical pull back to West London is too strong to resist. I have long since lost count of the number of times I’ve made the journey from Cambridge to Kensington; train to Kings Cross, the fast one if I can get my times right and then the Circle line going west and south, looping through Baker Street and Bayswater, stations I’ve travelled through for half of my life but never got out at, until my stop, High Street Kensington.
There are probably quicker ways, but I love the Circle line. It was the first tube I ever remember travelling on and the first I ever travelled on alone. It’s as much my home as the streets of Kensington above and there’s something about its circuitous nature that appeals to me. There is no end of the line here, just a sensation of going around and around until you find what you are looking for. I’m probably the only person in London who has warm feelings about the Circle line. Most people find it as useful as a chocolate teapot.
I’ve never had a proper conversation with my mother about her life before I was born. When I was little, her past had been something that seemed glamorous and mysterious, that I was too young to understand. All her old headshots and magazine covers were kept in pink filing boxes at the bottom of the wardrobe in the smallest bedroom at the top of the house that my mother ostentatiously refers to as her office. As a child, I used to go through these boxes in secret, looking in awe at pictures of my mother advertising make-up, modelling on the catwalk, arriving at parties. I never heard any stories about those times, even when I pushed and pushed to be told. My mother just smiled sadly and changed the subject.
These days, of course, it only takes a simple internet search to realise how famous Philadelphia Simmonds was and how quickly she had fallen from grace. In the early 80s nobody was interested in a model with a child. If there wasn’t a husband, then there wasn’t a six-page magazine spread either.
My mother went from being one of the most famous faces on the planet to has-been in one fell swoop and all by the time she was my age.
No amount of internet searching or scouring old newspapers and library records has ever given anything away about who my father was. God knows I’ve searched enough over the years.
My earliest memory is from 1986, my third birthday. It’s summer, twilight, but still warm. I’m wearing a sundress with red dots and I’m barefoot. We are in the garden and there are dozens of people everywhere, inside and out. Philadelphia Simmonds’s parties were legendary, perhaps less so in the 80s than they had been in the 70s but infamous nonetheless.
The air is thick with smoke and laughter and music, so much wonderful music. There is a song playing that I really love and I ask for it to be played again and again while a man with long dark hair and a beard that tickles my cheek spins me round and round. Whenever I think about it I can still smell the faint aroma of spice and turps that surrounded him. He tells me the song is called Penny Lane and I tell him I like the bit about the fire engine best.
And then the memory disappears. I can’t work out what happened to the man with the beard or who he was. Whenever I’ve asked my mother about it she claims she doesn’t know what I’m talking about.
Part of me has always liked to daydream that the Penny Lane guy was my dad and that he had to go away on some secret mission, or something equally romantic. Suddenly today I’m wondering if he was, in fact, my father. If that guy with the long hair and beard was Bruce Baldwin circa 1986. I know absolutely nothing about Bruce Baldwin – I didn’t even recognise the name when my mother first mentioned him, but as Pen said, I’m an absolute philistine when it comes to art. I know that picture of the melting clocks was by Salvador Dalí, but that really is the limit of my knowledge.
If the guy from my third birthday is Bruce Baldwin I’m sure Google Images could let me know quickly. But right now I don’t want to find out, because if that isn’t him then the only thing I’ve held on to from childhood will be a lie.
The practical side of motherhood did not always come easily to Philadelphia Simmonds. While she was always there for kisses, cuddles and games, it was often her long-suffering personal assistant Johnny who was there for the big moments in my life. It was Johnny who bought my first school uniform, who took me to school on my first day, who was there when I opened my GCSE and A Level results. It was Johnny who met me off the train at Kings Cross when I came back from my interview at Cambridge University. He stood on the platform in his little pebble glasses and his perfectly pressed handmade suit bearing a huge bunch of flowers and a big grin. He was the nearest thing I had to a father, even if he did get paid to do it.
So, as I sit down at the kitchen island, my mother’s note in front of me, and pull my phone out of my handbag, it’s Johnny I ring first.
He picks up on the second ring.
‘Hello, sweet girl, I was expecting your call. How are you?’
‘Did you know?’ I ask, even though he must have done.
Johnny pauses for long enough for me to realise he knows exactly what’s going on and is now trying to work out where his loyalties lie. ‘You’ve been to see Edwin then,’ he says. It doesn’t sound like a question.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I demand.
‘I think you already know the answer to that.’
I don’t know what to say and I really don’t want to take my anger out on Johnny, who was just doing his job.
‘Julia,’ he says, interrupting my thoughts.
‘How long have you known?’ I ask.
‘I’ve always known. I couldn’t tell you; I promised your mother I wouldn’t tell you.’
‘And she left it to her lawyer to tell me?’
‘Well, to be honest, I wasn’t happy about that. I begged her not to go to New York. I begged her to tell you herself.’
I know as well as anyone that if my mother has her mind set on something wild horses aren’t going to change it.
‘Do you want me to come over?’ he asks.
I sigh. ‘No. I think I need a bit of time alone to get my head around all this. And apparently there’s a lot of legal stuff to go through.’
‘You take all the time you need,’ he replies. ‘You know where I am if you need me.’ He always has been way too understanding with both me and Mum.
‘And, Johnny,’ I say before he hangs up, ‘tell Mum to come home.’
I sit in the kitchen with my phone in my hand – wondering what to do with myself to avoid thinking about what I found out this morning – when it suddenly starts ringing. Alec’s name flashes up on the screen.
‘Hey, you,’ I answer.
‘Julia, where are you?’ Alec, my boyfriend of the last decade is an academic at Cambridge University and muddles through life in a sort of hurried bemusement. He clearly wasn’t listening last night when I told him where I’d be today.
‘In London – I told you. I had to see that solicitor.’
‘But
