‘Why didn’t you tell me before now?’ she asked. ‘And why did you choose today of all days to bring me up to speed on your horrible, horrible secret?’
‘I didn’t know how to tell you,’ confessed Jenny. ‘There were loads of times when I thought about it and almost did, but …’ She shrugged helplessly.
‘So we go to the trouble of having an enormous party, and instead of managing to go along with it for one more day, you tell everyone about your fake marriage instead!’ cried Steffie. ‘And then you drag me up here to break my heart.’
‘Steffie, darling, I don’t want to break your heart.’ Jenny was anguished. ‘I never wanted to hurt you. Ever. But from the moment we walked in the door and saw you all, I simply couldn’t stay quiet any more. I couldn’t keep listening to everyone saying what good examples we were to them. I couldn’t let people keep believing a lie. And once I’d confessed to that, I couldn’t not tell you about … about Gregory either.’
‘You should’ve told me years ago. You should have made it your business to tell me.’ Steffie was shaking, but she didn’t know if it was from rage or because she was in shock.
‘I know,’ said Jenny. ‘But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I didn’t want to cause trouble.’
‘You didn’t want to cause trouble!’ cried Steffie. ‘It wouldn’t have caused any trouble at all if you’d been truthful before now.’
‘I’m a coward,’ admitted Jenny. ‘I always have been. I’ve always looked for the easy way out. It’s my biggest failing. I worked hard to overcome it, but for this … for this I couldn’t. Believe me when I tell you how sorry I am.’
‘For what?’ asked Steffie. ‘For being beyond self-centred? For getting pregnant with Roisin? For not getting married? For having an affair? For having me?’
‘I’ll never be sorry about having you,’ said Jenny. ‘I love you. I always have and I always will.’
Steffie exhaled sharply. ‘And Dad? I mean, Pascal? Do you love him? Does he love you?’
‘I love Pascal more than I can say,’ Jenny told her. ‘And he loves me too, even if I let him down.’
‘I suppose he must,’ said Steffie. ‘After all, you had an affair and you got pregnant and he didn’t throw you out. Or …’ she stared white-faced at Jenny, ‘or doesn’t he know? You’re saying the dates were wrong, but you could have lied to him too, the way you’ve lied to everyone.’
‘Of course he knows,’ Jenny said. ‘I couldn’t keep that a secret. But Pascal … when we talked about it, when we were deciding what to do … we stayed together and we raised you as our child. Because we both love you. I love you so much, Steffie, and your dad – Pascal – he adores you. You know he does.’
Steffie couldn’t speak. She swallowed hard, over and over, as she continued to process what her mother was telling her.
‘And my biological father?’ she said at last. ‘The nude model sheep farmer person? What about him? What does he know?’
‘I didn’t have any forwarding address or phone number for him,’ said Jenny. ‘I had to let him go. If I’d had a way of communicating with him … well, maybe I would have felt obliged to tell him about you, and who knows how things would have turned out. It was important to make a break. He never came looking for me either. Not that I expected him to.’
Although for a while she had. Whenever she drove past the farm, she wondered if he’d be there, waiting for her. Every time the phone rang, she jumped to answer it, her heart pounding in anticipation. And when she saw Johnny Macken, she had to stop herself from asking if he’d heard anything from the nude model.
‘So basically you’re saying that the man you had an affair with, the man who fathered me, doesn’t know I exist. And the man I call my dad has no blood ties to me at all and has only looked after me all these years out of the goodness of his heart.’ Steffie’s trembling voice broke the silence between them.
‘It’s not really like that,’ said Jenny.
‘Seems to me it’s exactly like that.’
‘Those are the facts,’ agreed Jenny. ‘The emotions, how people felt, why they did what they did – those are all very different.’
Jenny didn’t know she was pregnant when Pascal came home from Brussels. It was the week before the children started back at school and the family had returned to Dublin. She was afraid that her guilt over the affair was written all over her face, but he didn’t seem to notice anything amiss. He kissed her and told her that he’d missed her, then hugged the children and told them he’d missed them even more.
‘I didn’t realise how much I love being with you,’ he told her on his first night back. ‘And I’d forgotten how important it was for us to have fun together.’
The next day he brought her for a meal in the best restaurant in town, and kissed her in the street afterwards. Quite suddenly she saw him again as the man who’d taken her to Rome. They’d both been passionate people then, although when they’d had to face up to her pregnancy Pascal had gone from being passionate to practical in the blink of an eye. And even though she’d been grateful to him for the way he’d suddenly become a responsible adult, she’d often wished that they’d had more time together with the carefree side of their natures.
That was what she’d rediscovered with Gregory. The Jenny she’d once been. The Jenny she thought she still was. But she could rediscover it with Pascal too, couldn’t she? After all, she truly loved him. It was just that their feelings had somehow become secondary to simply getting on with their lives. But not any more. She’d make sure of it. And she’d make it up to Pascal too. Gregory had been an aberration. A mistake. Someone her husband never needed to know about. It suddenly seemed to Jenny as if everything that had happened while Pascal had been away had happened to another person. Gregory had become someone insubstantial to her, conjured up from her imagination. Someone to forget as quickly as possible.
Every so often in the following weeks she would feel faint and light-headed as she thought of how near she’d been to catastrophe. She wondered what had happened to her, why she’d allowed herself to cheat on someone who had never cheated on her. Who wouldn’t ever dream of cheating on her because he was a good man. A man who’d stood by her. A man she could trust.
I will never, ever put myself in that position again, she told herself one night as she lay sleepless in the bed beside him. From now on I’ll be the perfect wife.
But a perfect wife didn’t suddenly realise that she needed to buy another pregnancy test. Nor did she know before she bought it that her husband wasn’t the father of her baby. And she didn’t have to stand in front of him and confess that she was carrying another man’s child.
Pascal was sitting beside Davey in the kitchen. He was listening to his son saying that this was a big fuss about nothing, that it didn’t matter that he and Jenny weren’t married because as far as everyone was concerned they were. Marriage was just a piece of paper, said Davey, who then glanced involuntarily at Camilla and hoped she hadn’t heard him. But his girlfriend was engrossed in a conversation with Bernice and fortunately wasn’t listening to him.
Pascal hardly heard him either. He was remembering when Jenny had told him about her pregnancy. He was remembering how surprised he’d been. And how pleased. And then, when she told him the truth about the baby’s conception, how betrayed he’d felt.
The betrayal was like a punch in the stomach. He’d put her before everything and this was her thanks to him. The sole excuse he could make for her (and he couldn’t believe he was making one at all) was that she’d been lonely while he was away. That she’d been the one left looking after the children and running the house while he was drinking Stella Artois in the bars around the Grand Place and having expenses-paid dinners in the sort of restaurants they normally wouldn’t have been able to afford.
But there were no excuses. He himself could have fallen into the arms of the beautiful Amelie Lascelles, a raven-haired beauty from Paris, who’d leaned her head against his shoulder in a b
ar one night and murmured that she was fed up with being separated from her boyfriend. Or the pretty and vivacious Chiara Benedetti from Naples, who’d played footsie with him under the table at one of the formal dinners he’d attended. But he hadn’t even considered it. Because as far as he was concerned, he was Jenny’s husband. The fact that they weren’t actually married made no difference to him whatsoever.
He was a fool, he thought. He’d had all these notions about doing the right thing by her, and then at the first opportunity she’d made a mockery of him. He didn’t care that she was sobbing her eyes out in front of him, telling him that she was an awful person after everything he’d done for her. He knew that already. She was an ungrateful cheating bitch and he shouldn’t stay another minute in the house with her.
But leaving her would be leaving everything he’d ever wanted. Because he’d always wanted her. From the minute he’d first seen her striding across the open-plan office in her tartan dress and platform boots he’d been captivated, and he still loved her, even though he was currently so angry that he could hardly be in the same room as her.
He loved that she was different, that she wasn’t part of that set of chattering women who seemed to have no conversation other than their husbands and their children and their domestic lives. He loved that she could spend a whole evening marvelling at the iridescence of the oil patch in the driveway or caught up in trying to capture the beauty of a flower petal. He cut her some slack because, unlike him, a plodder, she was artistic. But this was an unbelievable amount of slack to cut. This was something that nobody could be expected to forgive and forget – not that he’d be able to forget anyway, when the evidence of her betrayal would be a living, breathing person. He knew that if he told anyone at all, their advice would be to leave her. But he couldn’t. And yet he couldn’t be with her either.
In the end it was Jenny who said that she’d go. She told him she couldn’t expect him to take on the responsibility for her mistake. She said she understood how badly she’d hurt him and she told him that she would regret forever the fact that she’d cheated on him when he’d always been a rock to her. And then she said that he was lucky he’d never married her, because now he was free.
‘Where will you go?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know yet.’
‘What about the children?’
‘I hoped we could work that out,’ she said. ‘Joint parenting, isn’t that the buzz phrase at the moment?’
‘Did you ever love me?’ he asked.
‘I loved and I still love your kindness,’ she said. ‘And how you look after me and care for me. I’ve never had anyone care for me the way you do. I love that about you and I love you too, Pascal. I didn’t appreciate you enough, that’s all.’
‘And him? What more did he give you?’
‘He was a fantasy,’ she said. ‘My romantic fantasy.’
‘I was never that,’ agreed Pascal.
‘I let myself get caught up in something because it was secret and exciting and made me feel good about myself,’ said Jenny. ‘I was totally in the wrong and I couldn’t be more sorry.’
‘Sorry for it happening or sorry for having to admit it to me? Because somehow I don’t think you’d have said anything at all if it wasn’t for the fact that you’re … you’re …’ He couldn’t say it. It was too much.
‘Both,’ she told him. ‘I thought I’d got away with it. For a little while I thought I could keep getting away with it. But you’re not a fool. You’d have figured it out.’
‘I am a fool,’ said Pascal. ‘I let it happen.’
‘I made it happen,’ Jenny corrected him. ‘Don’t try to blame yourself.’
‘I don’t know if I want you to go.’
She looked startled.
‘I mean, right now I’m so angry with you, you need to go. But we’ve always worked things out, you and me.’
There was a flicker of hope in her eyes. ‘You’d forgive me? For this?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I need some space. For a few weeks at least.’
‘I could go to Aranbeg,’ she said.
‘No.’ He spoke quickly. ‘Not there. Not without me or the children.’
‘There’s a three-week residential painting course in Edinburgh starting next month. Before … before this I was thinking about it but I thought it would be too long to be away. Not painting nudes,’ she added. ‘Landscapes. I could go there and come home when it’s over and we can decide then if you want me or not.’
He looked at her thoughtfully for a while and then he nodded. And the flicker of hope was there again.
When Roisin and Davey heard she was going away painting, their main concern was who would make the dinner every night. They didn’t cry when she left, which made her think that she hadn’t been a good enough mother to them, because surely your children should be upset when you went away. She wondered if she’d be any better with the new baby. And if she’d still have a family in which to raise it. Or if this time she was going to be the single mother she could have been twelve years earlier.
Chapter 21
‘So you had an affair, got pregnant and then disappeared off to paint?’ Steffie looked at her mother in disbelief. ‘Leaving Dad … leaving Pascal to look after Roisin and Davey?’
‘You’re making it sound like I was going off to have fun. I wasn’t. I was devastated. I didn’t want to go but I knew I had to, and at least painting kept me sane.’
‘I’m surprised he agreed to it at all, given what happened the last time you took painting classes!’
‘Steffie, sweetheart, it was really difficult. This was the solution we came up with. We both needed time to think.’
‘And in the end you came home and he lived with what you’d done? Without ever giving you a hard time?’
‘I’ve always said I didn’t deserve your dad,’ said Jenny.
‘You don’t. You don’t deserve him or us! And what about me?’ Steffie’s eyes were bright with tears. ‘I’m talking about him as though he’s my dad, but he isn’t!’
‘Of course he is.’
‘No he’s not,’ said Steffie. ‘I’ll always think of him as Dad, you know I will, but I’m not … I can’t believe you never told me any of this before. I can’t believe you’re telling me now. And I really and truly can’t believe I’m not his daughter.’
‘As far as he’s concerned you are.’
‘I understand all this stuff about your parents being the people who’ve raised you and nurtured you and loved you, and I accept that. But the thing is, Mum, you’ve lied to me for twenty-seven years. About you and Dad. And about me. And he might be a forgiving sort of person, but I’m not.’
She got up and walked out of the room. She slammed the door behind her and ran down the stairs. Pascal was standing in the hallway.
‘Are you OK, sweetheart?’ he asked.
‘Thank you for everything you did.’ Steffie grabbed the nearest jacket. ‘You’re an amazing person. I love you and I always will. But you should have told me. You should have made her tell me. And I can’t stay in the same house as her any more.’
Then she opened the hall door and walked out into the rain.
‘What on earth is going on?’ demanded Roisin as she looked out of the window and saw Steffie’s car speed down the driveway. ‘Where’s she going?’
‘It’s complicated,’ said Pascal.
‘What could Mum have said to make her rush off like that?’
Pascal hesitated.
‘What?’ asked Roisin. ‘What’s going on, Dad?’
‘There’s stuff we need to talk about,’ Pascal said. ‘But I don’t think this is the right time.’
‘How come it was the right time for Steffie, in that case?’
‘Because it concerns her the most.’
Roisin ran her fingers through her hair in despair. She’d planned for just about every eventuality as far as this party was concerned. Yet somehow it had completely slipped out of he
r control. And she had no idea why.
When Jenny came downstairs, all the adults, who’d gathered in the living room, turned towards her. She flinched beneath their scrutiny and stood beside Pascal, who put his arm around her.
‘Where’s Steffie?’ she asked.
‘She drove off,’ said Roisin. ‘Like the proverbial bat out of hell.’
‘Where?’
‘I don’t know,’ replied Roisin. ‘How would I? I don’t even know why she’d head off like that.’
‘She’s not thinking straight,’ said Jenny. ‘She’s distressed.’
‘It’s not good that she’s driving in the rain in that case,’ said Roisin. ‘And she had champagne earlier.’
‘Oh God.’ Jenny’s voice was agonised. ‘What if … what …’
‘For heaven’s sake, Mum,’ said Davey. ‘Tell us what’s upset her so much. There’s not much left, is there? You’ve already done the “actually kids we’re not actually married” stuff. The only thing that could be worse is that none of us are really your children at all!’
Jenny covered her mouth with her hand.
‘It’s not that, is it?’ asked Davey, his eyes widening. ‘I mean, I was joking, right?’
‘Of course not,’ Jenny replied. ‘But …’
‘Tell us,’ said Roisin. ‘You can’t keep secrets from us for ever. We need to know. We’re entitled to know.’
‘And I need to know Steffie’s all right,’ said Jenny.
‘You started it all today,’ Pascal said to her. ‘And now you can finish it by telling everyone else.’
Jenny shot her husband an agonised glance, but Pascal’s face was grim and set.
So even though she hated having to repeat the story, especially while Steffie wasn’t there, Jenny told it again.
There was a shocked silence when she’d finished.
My Mother's Secret Page 17
