Atlantic Shift

by Emily Barr

‘Because I may be unobservant sometimes, I may be a complete mug, but I think I might have noticed if you’d had this girl’s brother’s baby while we were married.’

  ‘You never noticed a thing, did you? So gullible. Of course that’s crap. It’s a very long story, but it turns out that she was the one who wrote me all those letters.’

  ‘Are you going to sue her arse off?’

  ‘I doubt it. I’ll tell you the whole story. It’ll surprise you, I’m afraid.’ I pause. ‘How’s Sexy Sophia?’ I use her tabloid moniker. ‘I hear congratulations are in order.’

  He sighs. ‘Yes. She’s fine. I told her not to go to the papers, but she’s kind of angry with you on my behalf.’

  ‘I don’t blame her.’

  ‘And she wanted to raise her profile. It was a good opportunity for her.’ He sounds weary. I pity Jack, caught between two ambitious women.

  ‘Right. I’m sorry about Central Park, Jack. I was a bitch. All along, really. I know it and I’m sorry and . . .’ I draw a deep breath and force myself to be nice. ‘I hope you and Sophia will be very happy together.’

  He is brusque. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘I suppose we’re getting divorced, then, if you’re getting married?’

  He sounds embarrassed. He even gives a little cough before he answers. ‘You know this is not what I would ever have chosen, but yes, it’s clear that our relationship has no future, so we’d better get divorced. I know where I am with Sophia. My solicitor says it’s best if you divorce me for adultery. Then everything can happen within months. Is that OK?’

  I’m divorcing him for adultery. That doesn’t sound in the least bit fair.

  ‘It’s sad, Jack. It’s very, very sad. I’m sorry I instigated it. God.’ I am surprised at how desolate I feel. I know this is inevitable, and yet I am not prepared for it. ‘We were happy, weren’t we?’

  ‘You tell me. I thought we were happy. Why, Evie? Why did you walk away from me like that? I was . . .’ His voice tails off. ‘Gutted, I suppose you could say.’

  ‘You’re much better off this way.’

  ‘I know. I think I’m someone who’s only really happy in a stable relationship.’

  ‘I think you are too. Good luck.’

  ‘Whatever. So it was a woman writing to you all along. Not an old pervert in a dirty mac. She’s an old school friend, is that right?’

  ‘She’s an old school enemy. Jack, I’m afraid I’m going to have to tell you something. I never told you this for the whole of our marriage.’

  ‘We’re still married.’

  ‘I’ve never told anyone except the people who knew about it at the time.’ And Ron Thomas, I add mentally. ‘But unfortunately I now have to tell the press before they crucify me still further.’

  I tell him about Elizabeth, but I leave out everything about her becoming Darcey. I am dying to finish the story, to tell him that I met her a week ago, and I wouldn’t hesitate to fill him in on everything, but for the fact that he would tell Sophia and she would tell the press. He is shocked that I had so huge a secret. By the time I finish, he is definitely feeling better about forcing the divorce upon me.

  ‘And Jack?’ I say, before hanging up.

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘Tell your fiancée that it would have been more dignified to maintain a wall of silence.’

  ‘Yeah. I know. She’s just got a part in The Bill so she thought it would be good.’

  I laugh. ‘Sophia’s in The Bill? Are you a serial minor-celeb monogamist?’

  He hangs up on me, and I don’t blame him.

  The moment the phone is back on its cradle, I burst into tears. Mum looks as if she’s about to ask me what’s wrong, but wisely thinks better of it, and hugs me instead.

  ‘You can’t let it all catch up with you now,’ she warns. ‘You need to sort this out so at least they know to leave Tessa out of it.’

  I sniff and nod. ‘Mum, there’s something else. The most amazing thing. I met her.’

  ‘You met. . .’

  ‘She’s called Darcey now. She looks like me. She’s my baby and I met her.’

  Mum smiles, but warily. ‘How did you . . .? But never mind that now. Does it make you feel better?’

  I wipe my eyes on the proffered handkerchief. ‘So much better. Better for seeing her, and, now, very, very glad that she has no idea who I am. She has a lovely life. It’s amazing. I would have chosen that family for her, out of everybody in America. I’m going to write to her mother and tell her who I am, once all this has died down.’ I look at Mum, still teary. ‘When I saw her I thought I was going to die. I’ve never had to control myself like that. But now I feel OK. She’s better off there than she is here right now. If she does want to contact me when she’s older, at least her mother will know where to find me.’

  It is an effort to say all this, because in spite of everything I wish Darcey was with me now. I would give anything to have her by my side.

  ‘Brave girl,’ says Mum, stroking my arm.

  We are interrupted by a frantic banging on the back door. Taylor lopes past us and stations himself firmly in the doorway before he opens it. Megan and Josie rush in, laughing. I don’t think I’ve seen Josie smile before. She has always been tense. Now she looks relaxed.

  Megan stands still when she sees me. ‘Evie!’ she screams, holding her arms wide. ‘You’re back! Welcome to the madhouse.’ She turns to Mum. ‘No offence. It’s not the house that’s mad, you know that.’

  Megan looks lovely. Her hair is pulled back into a ponytail, and she’s dressed casually, without make-up. She looks happier than I have ever seen her before.

  ‘Of course I do,’ Mum assures her. ‘You both seem a little hyper. Were you chased?’

  ‘Not by the press. Some woman saw us climbing over the back wall and started yelling.’

  Josie joins in. ‘We should have stopped to explain to her, but we were halfway over by then, so we just laughed and carried on. I imagine she’s called the police.’

  I smile, and Josie smiles back, briefly, before looking away. She seems uncomfortable with me, as ever. Last time we met she was with an abusive husband, living the life of a well-to-do Somerset woman, and I was fleeing Louise’s letters. Both of us were terrified, in different ways. Now she is my mother’s lodger, and I have the press encamped outside.

  ‘Nice to see you, Josie,’ I tell her.

  She smiles shyly, and perhaps slightly mockingly. ‘You too.’

  I ask Taylor to call the Daily Mail, and I grit my teeth and prepare myself to sell out. I’ll give the money to charity. He manages to tempt Jane to the phone, eventually, by saying, mysteriously, ‘someone she really, really wants to talk to’ every time he is asked who is calling, and by refusing to leave a message. I knew she wouldn’t resist it if he said that enough times.

  ‘That Jane, then?’ he says eventually, and my heart starts pounding. ‘Would you like to speak to Evie?’

  He nods and holds out the phone to me.

  I draw a deep breath and screw my eyes tight shut.

  ‘Jane?’ I say, in my professional, fake voice. ‘I don’t suppose you’d be interested in an interview?’

  I know, by now, that I hold all the cards, that she wants what I have more than I want to give it to her, so I make her come to Bristol to see me. She is sugary and sympathetic and tries to entice me to London by offering lunch at the Savoy, ‘or anywhere else you’d really, really love to go. Sketch? Really, Evie, you name it.’ I nearly laugh as I explain to her that I am not in the mood to relish the sampling of new gastronomic delights. She must think I am terribly shallow if she calculated that glitzy restaurants were the way to get me to agree to save her the drive.

  ‘Come to my mum’s house,’ I instruct her firmly. ‘I’ll give you the address.’

  ‘No need,’ she assures me breezily. ‘Got it. Thank you, Evie. You are doing the right thing.’

  I’m doing the only thing I can think of. I take her to the upstairs sitting room, and sit
her down with a glass of wine and a plate of biscuits. I carefully drink a cup of peppermint tea, because I cannot afford to misplace a single word. Jane has clearly come straight from the office without having time to preen herself. Her hair is less helmet-like than before, and she has obviously applied a new coat of fuchsia lipstick hurriedly, probably just before getting out of her car, because when she drinks her wine, she leaves imprints of the creases of her lips around the glass. I wonder whether to tell her she has lipstick on her teeth. She is wearing a pair of wide black trousers and a grey top, and I know that if she’d had time to go home and change, she would have dressed up. I think she looks nicer like this, apart from the stray lipstick.

  ‘So, Evie,’ she says softly, as she places her tape recorder on the coffee table and turns it on. ‘You’re used to these, I know. This must be a terribly hard time for you and I do sympathise with what you’re going through.’

  She looks at me with a half-smile, her mouth turned down at the corners so I know she’s not actively happy about my situation. She is, though. She has got the exclusive interview, and she can barely contain her joy.

  ‘Thank you,’ I say, hating her and myself.

  ‘This is a wonderful opportunity for you to put your own side of what happened. Shall we go back to the question of the unwanted baby?’

  I surprise myself with the vehemence of my reaction. ‘She’s not unwanted!’ I say sharply. ‘I would never want her to think that I didn’t love her or that I haven’t thought about her. I was fifteen, Jane. It’s hard to make those decisions when you’re fifteen.’

  She is surprised. ‘You were fifteen?’

  ‘I know. Louise kept that a little bit hazy, didn’t she?’

  ‘I believe she said you were eighteen. How long have you known Louise?’

  I describe what really happened. Although I leave out everything about Ron and about finding Darcey, I tell her all about going to America to give birth, about Louise letting the whole school know what had happened, and about the fact that I’d never told Mark that he had become a father.

  ‘I thought Louise might tell him,’ I explain. ‘Which would have been fine. I didn’t exactly have an ongoing relationship with him. To be honest, I couldn’t even look him in the eye. I never told my family who the father was because he wasn’t a part of my life. And,’ I remember, ‘because I didn’t want to get him into trouble.’

  ‘You were below the age of consent,’ she says thoughtfully.

  ‘I was. And he was seventeen, I think, at the time.’

  ‘So you were shielding him.’

  I nod, emphatically. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Evie, this is great. It must be horrendous for you to have to relive it now.’

  I shake my head. ‘I’ve always been reliving it. A child, you know, Jane, is not something you can forget about. I hope I might meet her when she’s old enough to trace me. I’ve already filled out a form for the New York Adoption Registry, but I can’t actually register there until she’s eighteen. I plan to do it on her birthday. That way, as soon as she wants to look for me, she’ll be able to find me.’ I don’t mention any of the real story. ‘I hope that she’ll understand why I did what I did. I would love to become a part of her life.’ I blink back tears. For once, I am not being fake.

  Jane nods approvingly. Everything I am saying fits in with her paper’s conservative ethos. This story is a gift to her. ‘So the speculation that Tessa is your daughter . . . ?’ she asks. ‘You understand, I just have to clarify that point, in your own words.’

  ‘Of course. That is not speculation, it is a lie spread by Louise. You can work out the dates. Tessa’s too young.’ I take a piece of paper from the arm of my chair and pass it to her. ‘Here’s her birth certificate. It’s got my mum’s name on it, and Phil’s, because they are her parents. If you really want to, I’m sure that, if I ask her to talk to you, the headmistress of my old school will confirm when it was that I went to America. She knew about it.’

  ‘Thanks, Evie. I would like to speak to her, because the more people we bring in to back you up, the less it looks like your word against Louise’s, and the more it becomes a case of setting the record straight.’

  ‘Right,’ I agree. ‘Fine. Now, there’s something else that we haven’t covered yet. Louise has been writing letters to me. I’ve got some of the recent ones here, and I’ll be taking them all to the police when you’ve seen them. You can copy them if you’d like to. I can run them off for you on the fax machine here.’

  I sit back and watch Jane’s face light up as she reads them. This is it. This is the last time I do something like this. From now on, I withdraw from the public eye. I have finished with insincerity.

  epilogue

  October

  The heat of the day is fading, as we reconvene on the beach for early evening beers. I’m still wearing my bikini and sarong from the day’s sunbathing, but Kate and Megan have changed into proper clothes. Ian is in long shorts and a T-shirt. Kate, Ian and I are just golden enough to feel we are properly on holiday now. We have relaxed. Megan has been travelling for two months, to date, and was tanned and laid-back long before she came to southern Thailand to meet us. In fact, I think coming to meet us made her a little uncomfortable, reminded her of things she had managed to forget, but she has settled down with us now.

  We move a little way away from the bar, and sit down on the sand, the four of us. Then we stare out to sea. There is a soft breeze that blows sand on to us, but it’s gentle, not harsh like it was yesterday.

  ‘I haven’t been on holiday since I left university,’ I realise. ‘This is the first time I’ve been anywhere, except Stowe, without my cello. It even came on honeymoon with us.’

  Kate laughs. ‘Can the rest of them manage without you for these two weeks? Won’t you go back and be crap?’

  ‘No, I won’t go back and be crap,’ I tell her indignantly. ‘Well, I probably will, but I’ll get back on form. I’ve barely joined the quartet officially anyway. We haven’t got a concert till the beginning of December.’

  ‘Isn’t it odd for you,’ asks Megan, ‘to be playing the fourth part, after all those years of being the star?’

  I lie back and let the sand go in my hair. ‘It’s bliss,’ I tell her, looking happily at the blue sky. ‘I’m not interested in stardom any more. I was trying to prove myself all those years. I knew I wasn’t a natural. Playing with the quartet is an enormous release. Nobody is pressurising me to make a pop record, which is what I was supposed to be doing next. I’m actually only realising now how unhappy I was before. Working with other people makes it different. You know, I have to turn up on time, work for the same hours as they do, all of that. It’s a bit more like having a proper job.’

  ‘And yet,’ Ian reminds me, ‘it’s not like having a proper job at all.’

  ‘Of course it’s not. You wouldn’t catch the string quartet giving me two weeks off to come to Thailand and adopt a baby.’

  ‘They would,’ he objects.

  ‘Well yes,’ I agree, ‘they would, but they wouldn’t pay me for it. Your work are amazing.’

  Kate stretches out her brown legs. ‘Our companies have been great. We had all that time off when we went to America. And there’s going to be some toing and froing in the coming months, I guess. We’ve been very lucky that they’ve put up with it. I’ll give up work altogether once we’ve got him home.’

  Megan puts her glass down. ‘He is absolutely adorable, you know.’

  Kate laughs. ‘Preaching to the converted.’

  ‘Are you going to give him a new name?’

  This is Kate’s favourite topic. ‘We were completely set on Alfie,’ she says seriously, ‘until we saw him again today, weren’t we?’

  Ian nods. ‘But the name he’s got kind of suits him, don’t you think? Chet. It’s very him. So we might keep that.’

  ‘Chet,’ I tell them, ‘is gorgeous. And it’s his name. You have to keep it. Will you use Alfie as a middle name?’r />
  ‘Probably not,’ says Kate. ‘I don’t think Chet Alfie Dawson sounds right. We might go for something with a bit more substance. Chet Dawson sounds great, though, don’t you think? I can see him as a musician.’

  ‘I’ll teach him the cello,’ I volunteer immediately. Chet is nearly a year old, a tiny little boy with huge brown eyes and an infectious giggle. The adoption is all but finalised now, and bringing him into the UK looks like being the longest piece of bureaucracy in the process. Kate and Ian will be parents in the foreseeable future. For the first time, we can say that with certainty.

  ‘How about you?’ Ian asks, looking at me curiously. ‘Us going on about adoption all the time doesn’t upset you, does it? I’ve got no idea if it’s one of those things we should be super-sensitive about or not.’

  ‘Not,’ I tell him firmly. ‘Definitely not. I’m fine. Now that I know that Darcey’s happy and healthy and secure, and since Carla keeps me vaguely up to date with the occasional email, I don’t have a problem at all. Of course I can’t stop imagining how our lives would have been if I’d kept her, but I don’t necessarily think things would have turned out for the best if I had. God only knows what Louise would have done. Kidnapped her, probably. So all in all, she’s best off where she is.’

  I sit up, and look at them. They are all watching me with concerned expressions.

  ‘I know,’ I tell them. ‘I don’t necessarily mean that completely, but in my head I know it’s right. Can you see me with a fifteen-year-old daughter?’

  ‘You’d be mistaken for sisters the whole time,’ Ian points out.

  ‘You will be,’ Kate says firmly, ‘when she’s eighteen and you start seeing each other regularly. People will be amazed that you’re her mother.’

  ‘I’m amazed that I’m her mother. She will be, too.’

  Megan sips her drink. She is halfway down her glass, while the rest of us have almost finished. ‘At least you’ll be safe from Louise now,’ she says confidently. ‘If she comes anywhere near you, you can get the police to cart her off.’