His Secret Family (ARC)

by Ali Mercer

  Then a door opened further along the corridor – one of our other housemates on the move. Sean retreated into the safety of the bathroom, and I bolted.

  * * *

  Later that afternoon I got up the courage to creep downstairs and find the house phone, which was on a long, curly extension cord, and take it back up to my room.

  I’d practised what I was going to say over and over again. I had to do it. I had to get it out of the way before I went out of my mind.

  But it wasn’t him who answered the phone.

  It was a woman.

  Her.

  All she said was, ‘Hello?’

  I garbled something about a wrong number and hung up. How obvious was that? If he was there, he’d know for certain that it was me.

  * * *

  Sure enough, about an hour later the phone rang. I didn’t recognise the number, but picked up anyway. I had a feeling it would be him, and it was.

  ‘You really, really can’t do that again,’ he said. ‘Paula’s vulnerable. Unstable. If she has any idea that something’s going on, I have no idea what she might be capable of doing. She can be a very volatile character. Do you understand?’

  There it was, my chance to tell him.

  I hesitated.

  Then I said, ‘Yes.’

  He breathed a deep sigh of relief. ‘Good. I had to leave the house to ring you. I don’t think she suspects anything, but I might not be able to get away with it another time. Now, was there something you wanted to tell me?’

  ‘No. Not really. I shouldn’t have called. I get that, now.’

  ‘OK. Goodbye, Jenny.’

  ‘Goodbye.’

  And that was it. I wished I hadn’t even made the attempt, that I’d left him alone as he had asked. He could hardly have been clearer: whatever happened to me in future, he really didn’t want to know.

  * * *

  A little before nine the next morning, I knocked on the girls’ door and said, ‘Ellie, can you let me in?’

  Just as I had expected, she did, ignoring the faint grumbling from Ava who was still in bed. She must have got dressed and ready for the beach in the dark; the curtains were still closed. She’d picked at one of the room service breakfasts sitting on trays on the desk; the other was untouched.

  ‘I had to read my book in the bathroom. Ava won’t get up,’ Ellie said as I went over to pull back one of the curtains.

  ‘Probably feeling the after-effects of the night before,’ I said. ‘No more Armagnac for you, young lady.’

  Ava mumbled something and sat up and gave me a look that was unambiguously hostile. Her face was puffy from sleep – or perhaps from crying – and her hair was tousled. Usually she would have hated anyone to see her like this. Usually I wouldn’t have insisted on intruding, but if there had ever been a time for not respecting her boundaries it was now.

  ‘Ellie, if you’ve got your all your things ready, you can go next door and get Mark, and go down to the beach with him,’ I said. ‘I’ll come down and find you in a bit.’

  Ellie immediately looked apprehensive, but steeled herself to do as I had asked. ‘OK. Make sure that you keep my rose.’

  ‘Your rose?’

  Each of the breakfast trays was adorned with a single rose in a small silver vase. Ellie’s rose was missing; looking round, I saw that she’d put it in a glass of water on her bedside table.

  ‘Nobody ever gave me a rose before,’ Ellie said, and I was reminded – not that I needed any reminding – of how strange this must all have seemed to her, right from the point when Mark had that first bouquet delivered to the house.

  ‘It won’t last,’ Ava said.

  ‘I don’t care. I’m going to keep it as long as I can,’ Ellie said. She hesitated. ‘You won’t be long, will you?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so.’

  ‘See you later, then.’ She glowered at Ava and shot me a look of faint but resigned desperation, picked up her beach bag and went out.

  I touched the coffee-pot on Ava’s tray. Still warm. ‘Do you want any of this?’

  ‘You should go,’ Ava said.

  I peeled the lid off the container of orange juice, poured it into a glass and brought it over to set down on her bedside table.

  ‘I don’t want to go until I’ve apologised,’ I said.

  I sat down on the bed next to hers. That familiar face, defiant still, wanting to lock me out. Wanting to and needing not to at the same time.

  ‘I never meant to hurt you, Ava,’ I said. ‘You’re my daughter. I love you. I would walk over hot coals for you. I’m sorry for making such a mess of everything.’

  ‘You didn’t make a mess of everything.’ Her voice sounded slightly strangulated, and her eyes were suddenly awash with tears.

  I shook my head. ‘I should have told you the truth years ago. The only reason I didn’t was that I was afraid of what you would say.’

  The next minute she was crying and I had my arms around her. It was the first time I’d held her like that for years – the first time for years that she’d let me. She felt so small and delicate, as light-boned and fragile as a bird.

  It took me right back to holding her as a newborn. That little bundle of restless life, the sleepy face contorting in sudden dismay and the tiny hands feeling for something to hold onto, and the shock of knowing it was down to me to protect her.

  Twelve

  Paula

  I had to work very, very hard at not hating Mark after that conversation about IVF. I had to work very hard at not hating any woman with a bump, or a pushchair or a child walking along with her, holding her hand.

  People had been asking when, or if, we were going to have babies for as long as we’d been married. Sometimes they were direct about it, sometimes they were more tactful, but they always seemed to want to know. Since we’d been trying for a baby the questions had stopped being merely embarrassing and intrusive. By this stage, they really hurt me.

  There was the pregnant neighbour who said, ‘It’ll be your turn next…’ and the proud new mum, a former colleague who came back into work to show off her baby, openly eyeing me up as I held her offspring, as if she was speculating about why I didn’t yet have one of my own.

  Thankfully, her baby started crying a minute later, and I was able to hand it back. But still, I was furious with her, and my feelings were hard to hide. We were all standing around her in an admiring circle, and everybody noticed. Nobody said anything, but I caught them looking at me askance.

  Worst of all, there was my mother. I’d bitten her head off once or twice when she mentioned the subject directly. She probably thought she was doing a good job of avoiding it. But tact was not her strong point, and every now and then she’d remark on how some acquaintance or other barely had a life of her own now that she kept on getting called upon to babysit her grandchildren. Or she’d ask me how work was going, and then say something like: ‘It must be so liberating, being able to forge ahead without being held back by worrying about childcare.’

  I wasn’t really forging ahead at all – I’d been in the same job for years; it was hard to summon up ambition, or the energy for a change of direction, when all I really wanted was to sail off on maternity leave. I was stuck. Impotent. Humiliated. Somehow I carried on going through the motions, getting up and going to work, being married. But I had no idea how much longer I was going to be able to bear it.

  Then the miracle happened.

  Four weeks after that wedding anniversary trip to the hotel in Oxford, I did a pregnancy test and there it was: the sign I’d been wishing for so hard it seemed impossible that I could be so lucky.

  I did another test and there it was again. Unambiguously positive. No ifs or buts or maybes.

  Finally, our baby was on the way.

  Mark’s initial reaction was one of pure shock. When it had sunk in, he was pleased as punch: ‘Well then, my sperm obviously does work after all!’ For a little while he was wildly overprotective: was I overdoing it, carryin
g on working? What was I thinking of, standing on a chair to change a lightbulb – what if I fell? Wasn’t bagged salad potentially bad for the baby? OK, so I’d rinsed it, but was I sure I’d really washed it thoroughly, because if not there might still be some traces of contaminant? Then the novelty began to wear off. He stopped being quite so conscious of the host of threats I might inadvertently allow to damage our child, and, on the whole, went back to expecting me to take things in my stride.

  Occasionally he’d ask if I’d read any of the parenting books he’d bought in the first rush of enthusiasm, and I’d make soothing noises about how there was still plenty of time and that seemed to satisfy him. A more persistent question was whether we could tell people yet. I knew he was longing to share the news. ‘I think it’ll seem more real, once it’s out in the open,’ he said once, as plaintively as if I was withholding a treat from him.

  My instinct was to keep it to ourselves for as long as possible. Being secretive was a way of making the most out of my victory, of raising a middle finger to everyone who’d ever asked. I was certainly in no particular rush to tell my mother. But Mark was desperate to tell his, which was odd because out of all the people we knew, she was the only one who had never gone near the subject of babies. ‘She’ll be delighted, I promise you,’ he said. ‘I know you two haven’t always seen eye to eye, but this is going to be a game-changer.’ I wasn’t so sure: even if she was thrilled to bits, I didn’t think she’d show it, and I was already steeling myself for criticism of my parenting skills

  Still, we couldn’t put off telling our families forever, and for both of us, our mothers were pretty much all the family we had. Once I was safely past the three-month mark we made a pact that I would visit Mum and get it over and done with, and then we’d go and see Mark’s mother and break the news to her.

  At the time Mum was living in a houseboat moored near Vauxhall with a boyfriend who was in his forties, a couple of decades her junior. He specialised in making sculptures of feet; there were usually a couple of works in progress lying around in the bow. He was out when I showed up, not that it made much difference because he always removed himself when I was present, either retreating to the cabin they used as their bedroom or going outside to attend to the various chores that came with living on the river.

  It was a fine autumn day, but chilly, and we decided to stay below deck. Mum made us peppermint tea and we settled in a pair of slightly uncomfortable cane chairs in the big, curved-walled room that was the houseboat’s main living space. It was dim, with diffuse light coming in through the row of portholes high on either side, and it was never quite still: the current was too gentle for the movement to feel like rocking, but there was a sense of instability, of slight but constant motion. It made me queasy. Visiting my mother was actually worse for me than morning sickness.

  Mum was wearing long jade earrings and a vivid green dress, and had a yellow silk scarf tied round her curly red hair; she was the only person I knew who still used henna, and she smelled of it, very faintly – a sort of muddy undertone, overlaid by incense and patchouli. I tried to imagine her holding a baby in her arms. It was a lot easier to imagine her putting it down and getting on with something else.

  She said, ‘So have you got any holidays planned? I know how Mark loves to travel.’

  ‘We haven’t at the moment, actually.’

  ‘Well, you must at least have a few ideas.’

  ‘Not really. We’ve put all that on the back burner for the moment.’

  ‘Oh. Well, don’t leave it too long. You’re in such a privileged position, having plenty of money and no ties. You really should make the most of it.’

  ‘You mean, while we don’t have any children,’ I said. ‘But you can keep on going on holiday once you have them, you know. Lots of people do.’

  ‘I know people try, but it’s just not the same, is it? You’re so much freer to see the sights when it’s just the two of you. Babies come with so much kit, and they do limit your options. Not that I ever went anywhere much with your father, before or after I had you – but at least I’ve had plenty of chances to make up for lost time.’

  I was going to have to tell Dad about the baby too, sooner rather than later; maybe that evening, if I had the energy. Our phone conversations were invariably short, but were still oddly demanding; he wasn’t much of a talker. Since he’d retired, he seemed happy to live the life of a recluse.

  Poor Dad. In the end, he’d been faced with unavoidable evidence of Mum’s infidelities – he had quite literally come home and found her with the milkman, a story she had made much of since. He had startled her by insisting on a divorce, and had fled to a small house in a pebbledashed terrace in south Wales, which he could comfortably afford with his share of the value of the family home and his salary as a signalman on the railways. He’d lived a quiet existence there ever since, and had never, to my knowledge, risked falling in love again.

  ‘It may be that our options will be a bit more limited in the near future,’ I said. ‘Mark and I are having a baby. I’m due in the spring.’

  ‘Oh! I did wonder.’ She got to her feet and came over and draped her arms lightly around me, embraced me, then detached herself and withdrew to her seat. ‘I thought you looked a little tired. Have you been very sick?’

  ‘Not at all, actually.’

  ‘It must be a boy. Girls make you terribly sick. I felt awful for the first three months when I was carrying you. Then I felt brilliant, and never looked back. How’s Mark coping?’

  ‘He’s absolutely thrilled.’

  She raised one eyebrow. She plucked them very carefully, and then went over them with a pencil the exact same colour as her hair. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, why wouldn’t he be?’

  She wrinkled her nose. ‘Well, because Mark’s Mark, isn’t he? A place for everything, and everything in its place. Does his mother know yet?’

  Mum and Ingrid did not see eye to eye. They had engaged in a spectacular battle of the hats at our wedding: Mum had sported a multicoloured turban adorned with feathers and painted beads, while Ingrid had gone for a brim so wide it had been impossible to stand anywhere near her. They’d had very little contact since. Ingrid always asked politely about Mum, but with an expression that suggested she wouldn’t mind hearing that something unpleasant had happened to her. Mum was downright rude about Ingrid and only just managed to restrain herself if Mark was in earshot.

  ‘No. We’re going to tell her next.’

  Mum looked pleased. ‘I don’t suppose she’ll be very happy about being second. Don’t be surprised if she tries to take over. Women are always funny about their sons. They never seem to be able to let them go. Of course some women are like that with their daughters, too. But I’ve always taken the attitude that the best way to motivate you to make the most of your life is for me to make the most of mine.’

  I could have told her then and there that we’d already decided to sell our garden flat in Stoke Newington and buy a house in Oxford, or as near as we could afford, which would be much closer to Ingrid than it would be to her. But I decided not to. It would keep, and she might as well enjoy feeling that she’d beaten Ingrid for a little bit longer.

  Oxford was where Mark and I had met, when I was working in my first job in publishing and Mark was in the first year of the PhD he’d never finished. It was where we’d fallen in love, where he’d proposed, and where we’d had our registry office wedding. And it was where our baby had been conceived. We’d always wanted to live there, and now that Mark was earning good money and was travelling all over the country for his job, it finally made sense as a base – as long as I didn’t go back to my job in London after maternity leave. But I was ready to move on, anyway. I certainly wasn’t going to gain anything by staying put.

  For the next hour or so Mum talked about the chiropractor she’d been seeing and the next holiday she was going on with the sculptor boyfriend and the politics of the houseboat community, and I managed to avo
id giving away any more about what Mark and I were planning. Then Mum accompanied me up to the gangplank and we said goodbye.

  ‘Be careful, won’t you? Watch your step,’ she called out as I set off towards the riverbank, followed by some other warning I couldn’t quite hear.

  I turned and smiled and waved and said, ‘Don’t worry, I will.’

  It was a relief to get back onto firm dry land. I waved again and set off towards the tube, and it wasn’t until about half an hour later, when I was somewhere in a Northern Line tunnel, that I figured out what she’d said: Don’t let Ingrid bully you. Or Mark, either.

  * * *

  It had always been obvious that Ingrid adored Mark, but she was more the intimidating kind of doting mother than the gushing kind. She tolerated me, but this was strictly conditional. If she ever thought I was letting Mark down, in however trivial a way, I found myself bathed in disapproval.

  When we showed up on her doorstep for Sunday lunch the following weekend, her opening gambit was to embrace Mark, then hold him at arm’s length and look him up and down before pronouncing judgement: ‘You look pale. Isn’t your wife feeding you properly?’

  She released him and turned towards me; I kissed her drily on the cheek. In terms of personal style Ingrid was Mum’s polar opposite, with her pearls and collars and pleats and knife-edge ironed-in creases. But she shared Mum’s uncanny knack for highlighting my shortcomings.

  ‘I don’t think it’s my job to feed him,’ I said. ‘He’s perfectly capable of feeding himself.’

  ‘You modern wives don’t think it’s your job to do anything, but you still expect your husbands to change the light bulbs and put the bins out,’ Ingrid retorted.

  She ushered us in and took our coats and offered us drinks, and Mark and I perched side by side on her overstuffed sofa and made small talk about the weather and the traffic, which she didn’t seem to find any more interesting than we did – though she made less of an effort to pretend otherwise. After a while, with the air of one who is discharging an unpleasant duty, she set about changing the subject.