by Clare Boyd
His father spoke in a low, rumbling voice: ‘A couple of weeks before Robert died, he came to me. He was very distressed. He’d been to the doctor about a urinary issue of some sort, and the hospital had run some general tests. The tests had turned out to be negative, except one. They had discovered that Robert had a congenital bilateral absence of the vas deferens.’
‘Stop talking Latin, Patrick, and explain what the hell that means.’
Francesca swung around to face them. Tears were falling down her cheeks. ‘John,’ she began, leaving his name hanging in the air.
Patrick finished, ‘It means that Robert was born infertile.’
John’s whole body began to judder. His teeth chattered as he tried to talk, ‘But how is that possible? What about Alice?’
Francesca opened her mouth to explain, but Patrick flew in with his own answer. ‘Two weeks before he took his own life, he had found out that Alice could not possibly be his. Isn’t that a coincidence?’
‘Alice isn’t Robert’s?’ Camilla whispered hoarsely, as though testing out the words might help them to make sense.
Francesca turned on Patrick. ‘If you knew all this time, why didn’t you say anything to anyone?’
‘Robert made me swear I wouldn’t. He said he loved you – for his sins – and, with no mention of the biological father, he guessed you wanted to stay with him. He described it as a blessing because he couldn’t have his own. But I guess he couldn’t find a way to live with it in the end.’
Francesca let out a strangled cry and clutched her throat.
Camilla was shaking her head. ‘I’m sorry, I’m finding this hard to take in. Are you saying that Alice isn’t our real grandchild?’
‘Yes, darling, I’m afraid I am. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry,’ Patrick said, his eyes reddening with tears. ‘I warned Robert that the real father could appear at any point, but he said he would deal with it when and if it ever arose.’
John was listening, but the words seemed to be floating up to him from a distant stage. Why wasn’t Francesca denying any of it?
Francesca spoke up. ‘Alice is your real grandchild. Can’t you see it in her features?’
‘I don’t understand,’ Camilla said.
Patrick blew out a frustrated burst of air. ‘I saw the letter from the Whittington, with my own eyes, Francesca. There is no point in lying to us now.’
John feared his heart would beat its way out of his chest. ‘Fran. Why are they saying these things?’
Francesca’s whole face contorted into a grimace of pain. ‘Alice is yours, John,’ she said, and she turned from them and ran out of the house.
There was a long pause in the room.
It was unfathomable. Alice could not be his. He had stopped in time, that night, that one time. When Francesca had declared her pregnancy three months afterwards, a little part of him had wished that the baby was his, but he had known that it was a coincidence, that she had taken the morning-after pill, and his brother was sleeping with Francesca, too, of course. They had been trying for a baby. There was no way Alice was his, no way.
Suddenly, his mother shot up from her chair. ‘You slept with that lying, cheating little bitch?’ she hissed.
John blocked out his mother’s vitriol and tore from the kitchen, catching up with Francesca outside on the driveway. He grabbed her arm before she opened her car door.
‘You told me you’d taken the morning-after pill!’ he shouted.
‘I did!’
John dropped her arm.
‘So how?’
‘We were the unlucky five per cent.’
‘But if Robert had zero sperm count, you must have known—’
‘I didn’t know! He kept it from me! I swear to God, I didn’t know he was infertile until after he was dead – I swear it, John. I truly believed that Alice was Robert’s, you have to believe me. They even look alike. But when I was clearing out his things, I found the letter from the doctor stuffed behind a stack of old scripts in the back of a drawer.’
The revelation was blazing in his mind, a fire that licked and flared, intoxicating his thoughts, choking his airways with black smoke. ‘Two years. Two years you’ve known.’
Francesca was crying. ‘Robert didn’t know Alice was yours, John. Robert never knew about us. I swear it.’
John staggered back, and then Francesca’s face fell. She was looking over his shoulder.
‘Get out of here! Leave my son alone, you whore!’ Camilla screeched, charging at Francesca. ‘You murdered Robert with your lies! MURDERER!’
Francesca shrank back, fumbling with her keys to get into her car. Once inside, she pressed the locks down and scrabbled into gear.
John stood staring at her disappearing car. When he turned to his mother, he saw his father leading her back inside. Her sobs could be heard echoing through the trees.
Collapsing onto the doorstep, incapable of facing his mother’s disgust, he was lost.
The thought of Alice’s innocent little face brought tears to his eyes. He could not believe that she was his daughter. He really could not believe it. He wanted to go to her school now, to see her and to hold her in front of him, to inspect her features, to see echoes of his own in hers.
He felt the chill of the stone underneath him and a cold ache edged up his spine. Robert may have been dead, but John could feel him there with him, forcefully, as though he were alive again. But his spirit was malevolent and vengeful. Not only had John taken his brother’s wife, he had now taken his daughter. Robert’s dead fingers were around his throat, and he felt panicky, beginning to choke and cough.
When he heard his mother call for him, ‘John? Are you still here?’ in a tearful, concerned voice, he lunged from the step and stumbled to his car.
Chapter Forty-Three
Francesca
I was too stunned to cry. I clutched the steering wheel, but my reaction to the sharp bends was slow, as though I had forgotten how to turn, as though the deviation from straight ahead, into a tree, into a sign, into a ditch, was written into my code. The lanes seemed to swerve and contort around me as my car wove through an obstacle course, while inside my head, thoughts of my own treachery span.
I was a whore. I was a murderer. It was no surprise that Camilla had reacted that way. If it had been my son, I would have felt the same.
His mother had finally discovered why her son was dead. She had found me out. I had wanted to believe she was lying. I had forced John to believe it, too. I had corrupted him. I was corrupted. I was a shell of my former self. I had become as messed up as the Tennants were. Worse than them, in fact.
I had betrayed Robert, knowing how dangerous it would be, knowing what it could do to him if he found out. My love for John had been insidious, creeping under the skin of our marriage, and it had produced a child. A child that Robert could never have. Another man’s child. A most heinous loss. A loss that he couldn’t live with.
Drunk and high, he had smashed his body into a ragged, bloody mess, leaving the rest of us to pick up the pieces of his sorrow. He had left the fight, leaving me trapped with the legacy of my own selfishness, stained from head to toe in his blood, however many times I might try to scrub it away.
On the final bend, before emerging onto Letworth’s green, I tried to swerve around a fallen branch, but I must have hit something else. The steering wheel jerked and fought with me, turning the car the wrong way. The wheels were out of control. I lurched into a hedge. Twigs cracked, the metal crunched and brakes screeched. My head flew forward and back into the headrest aggressively. In the silence that followed I sat there, the hedge pressing up against the windscreen, my heart racing, wondering what had just happened.
Aside from a slight jarring in my neck, I was unhurt, but when I tried to back out of the hedge, the car made a loud whirring sound and then died. I climbed out to see the damage. The right-hand side of the bonnet was crunched and bent, and the underside of the engine seemed to be stuck on a log.
; The small prang seemed relatively uninteresting, a non-event in comparison to the morning at Byworth End. I abandoned the car and walked home, wondering what would happen to me next, but too numb to be able to think beyond putting one foot in front of another. It was like sleepwalking through a thunderstorm, waiting for the next lightning bolt to strike.
Back at my cottage, I smelt the comfort of home, and I was engulfed with sadness. We would not be able to live here much longer. All of the upheaval that Alice had been through had been for nothing. I would have to uproot her again, take her away from her cousins – her siblings – with whom she had formed real bonds, and settle her in a new home, a new school, far, far away. It was what I should have done originally.
The Tennants’ promises of love and support had swayed me. I had been in denial about the long-term effects of my own deception. How could I have made a life here while keeping such a terrible secret from them? Why had I convinced myself this was possible?
I dragged my fatigued body up the stairs to have a bath. I sat on the edge and ran the tap, and remembered how excited I had been to own a bathroom with a view of trees. But I did not own it. The Tennants owned it. While I lived in this cottage, they owned me, and they owned Alice.
Before the bath was full, the doorbell rang. At first, I didn’t know what to do. Could I hide? Had someone seen me come in? Did it matter? Then I realised it might be John, and I ran downstairs, rebuttoning my shirt.
My hands were shaking with anticipation, hopeful that he had come over to talk, to hear my side of the story.
When I saw Paul, I wanted to slam the door, as though my disappointment was his fault.
‘Hi,’ he said, launching in for a kiss. I turned my head and his lips hit my cheek.
‘Sorry, bad time?’
‘Kind of, I was just about to…’ I trailed off. ‘Can I call you later?’
‘Sure, it’s just I was driving through and saw your car. Want me to sort it out for you?’
‘Oh, no! The car!’
‘Forgotten that you’d driven it into Mrs Crowley’s hedge, did you?’
‘Oh, dear. Of all the hedges—!’
‘Of all the hedges in all the world…’
A smile began at my lips, but the dark forces of my morning overrode it.
‘That’s kind, but I’m calling AA.’
‘I’ll have a look at it and pop back in a minute.’
‘No, no, Paul, don’t, please, you must be busy, it’s…’
As I blustered on, he plucked my car keys from the wall hook and strode across the green towards my car. Then I remembered I had left the bath running and I charged upstairs to turn it off.
I slammed the loo seat down and sat down on it. The water was lapping at the edges of the porcelain. Water was gurgling down the overflow pipe. If I climbed in, the water would slop over the floor. If I didn’t, it would go cold. The colder it got, the worse it would be to plunge my arm in to pull the plug. I hated pulling the plug in cold bath water.
When Paul was at the door again, I had done nothing but sit and stare at the water level for half an hour.
‘I’ve parked it outside. You’ll need to fix the front, but it’s working, at least.’
Usually, I would have been grateful, but I did not have the energy. ‘Thanks. I appreciate it,’ I replied flatly.
‘Are you okay?’
‘Fine. Just a bit tired.’
‘Want me to make you a cup of tea?’
I was about to say no, but then I remembered the bath upstairs.
‘Come in.’
When I followed him into my own kitchen, I admired his broad, strong shoulders, which had carried children through smoke and flames. He was a good guy, a good, honest guy, who was too good for me. Might he be able to forgive me for being weaker than him?
I insisted I make the tea. ‘It’s the least I can do. When you hear what I have to tell you, you’re going to wish you had never knocked on my door.’
His hairline receded further when he raised his brow at me. ‘Oh?’ He looked vulnerable. I hated what I was about to do to him.
The story became too long. The details seemed important. I imagined him thinking ‘Cut to the chase’, but he didn’t hurry me along. He sat patiently, listening, waiting for the punch line. In the end, I simply stopped rambling and told him what I should have told him right at the start.
‘I slept with John four years ago. Alice is his.’
He didn’t react immediately. ‘Right,’ he said calmly. ‘Have you been sleeping with him while we’ve been seeing each other?’
Tears sprung into my eyes. I squeezed them back. I wasn’t the one who should be crying. I was the aggressor here. I was the one who had cheated him of the truth. ‘Once, yes.’ I hung my head. ‘I’m so sorry, Paul.’
I heard the chair scrape back from the table. When I looked up, he was gone. The whole cottage rattled with the force of the front door slamming.
* * *
‘Slow down, Fran. You’ve had a fight with Paul? Or John?’
The sobs would not abate long enough for me to talk to Lucy. My body and mind were being tumbled over and over by the rolling power of a huge wave of self-loathing. ‘I can’t. I can’t. I can’t breathe. I don’t know what to do. I’m…’ I gasped, unable to get the words out. When I tried to breathe in, the air seemed to catch at my throat. My lungs were crying out for more oxygen. ‘I’m… I’m losing it.’
‘Stop it now,’ Lucy shouted. ‘You have to calm the hell down.’
The shock of her anger jolted me out of my panic long enough for me to take a big breath of air.
‘Good. Okay. Now, I’m going to come and get you. Stay at home. Don’t answer the door or go out or call anyone. I’ll be there in an hour and a half. About three-ish. Okay? Can you cope on your own until then?’
‘Yes.’ Breathe. ‘Yes.’ Breathe. ‘Yes.’
After I had ended the call, I lay my head down on the sofa cushion, pulled the blanket over my chilled body and passed out into a deep sleep.
I heard the doorbell in my dreams, ringing, ringing. A vague sense of panic washed over me, knowing that Lucy had told me not to open the door while she was gone. As I came to, I checked the time. I bolted upright. It was ten past three already. I ran to open the door.
Lucy wrapped her arms around me and I began to cry again. ‘Oh, lovely. Tell me what happened.’
‘I’m not lovely. I’m far from lovely,’ I replied, leading her into the sitting room, where I curled up on the sofa again. Lucy sat down, lifted my head and put it onto her lap, and began stroking my hair.
‘Okay, then. Tell me why you’re not lovely.’
After I had told her why, she simply said, ‘Wow.’
And it made me laugh.
Then she added, ‘I always suspected you fancied him.’
‘It’s more than that, Luce. I think I’ve always been in love with him.’
Lucy sighed. ‘Not helped by Robert treating you badly.’
‘Hmm.’ I couldn’t be bothered to deny it, but it was a reductive way of looking at it. At least Lucy wasn’t storming out or telling me I was a whore or a murderer.
‘He controlled everything you did. And if he didn’t like it, he used emotional blackmail to get what he wanted. Just like his mother.’
‘I wanted to believe that Camilla was to blame for everything. I so wanted to believe it.’
Lucy stopped stroking my hair. ‘You have to stop thinking about that woman, and think about what you’re going to do next.’
Questions shot through my mind at high speed: should I try to contact John? Should I wait for him to call? How was he going to tell Dilys? Would they tell their children about their new sister? How would I tell Alice? How would I tell my parents?
‘God knows.’
The pain that I was going to unlock was immeasurable. When John and I had first slept together, we had not considered our loved ones, we had not considered anything but our greedy desire. How would I
ever look any of them in the eye again? Would they, too, view me as a whore and a murderer?
‘You’ll have to tell Alice at some point.’
‘At some point. Not until I’ve spoken to John.’
‘Why don’t you come and stay with us for a few days? Just while things settle down. The boys will love having Alice.’
I threw my arms around Lucy and squeezed her as tightly as I could without suffocating her. ‘Thank you. That is the best idea ever.’
‘Come on then, pack a bag. Let’s fetch Alice and head off before the traffic gets bad.’
Ready to run upstairs, I stopped in the doorway. ‘I should talk to John first.’
‘You can call him from my place.’
‘I feel like I’ve dropped this bombshell and now I’m abandoning him.’
‘A few days away won’t hurt. It’ll give him time for it to sink in. And, believe me, you won’t want to be anywhere near Dilys when she finds out.’
My stomach lurched. Not for myself, but for John. I knew what Dilys was capable of when John had done nothing to deserve it.
Chapter Forty-Four
John
John clicked through one photograph of Alice after another. He had dozens on his computer from the summer. Zooming in on her face, her brown eyes stared back at him. Her eyes were Francesca’s. Her hair was Francesca’s. The shape of her face was squarer than his own, her hairline and jaw were more like Robert’s and his mother’s.
He couldn’t find his features in hers. Maybe he needed to pull up a photograph of himself on screen to make the comparison. Somewhere in his archives, he had a scanned photograph of himself as a child. He double-clicked on that and lined it up next to one of Alice. Finally, the resemblance became clearer. For some reason, he had a truer perspective of his features when he saw himself as a boy.
His heart swelled when he noted that Alice had the same straight nose as his, and the same hard-to-catch smile, brief but genuine, and the same sense of intensity in her eyes. When he thought of her sensitive temperament, so susceptible to the strong-willed Beatrice, it dawned on him that she might have inherited that character trait from him. How many moments had he missed over the last two years, while Francesca had kept this from him? While he had blamed himself for their betrayal? While he had avoided Francesca as much as possible? The lost day-to-day moments, the lost baby years. How many special milestones had he missed, while he was concentrating on his other three children? The weight of his love had been skewed in their favour, obviously. Now that balance had shifted, scooting Alice onto the scales with the others, weighing his heart down with so much love he thought he would never be able to stand again. How strange it was to recalibrate his feelings for her, from uncle to father, from niece to daughter. He had always loved Alice, almost as much as his own children. He had assumed all uncles felt this strongly for their siblings’ children. He’d had nothing to compare it with. Alice had been his first and only niece or nephew, and she had come along only four months after Beatrice.
