by Jane Corry
25
Lily
‘No. NO! You have moved my shoes. Now I can’t wear them. Why did you do that? WHY?’
Breathe, I tell myself. Breathe. Don’t shout. Don’t snap. Don’t try to reason. None of it works. It only serves to make me feel temporarily better, and then the guilt will set in. Guilt that I’m leaving all this – yes! – in ten minutes to get the London train. Guilt that I’m leaving Tom with Mum to escape back to my job and my home with my husband. Guilt at the thought that perhaps we shouldn’t have had him in the first place …
No. That’s not right. Of course I love my son. Love him fiercely with every inch of my body. The second I had him I knew I’d never go back. But we didn’t know what we were doing. And it’s hard when your eleven-year-old behaves like a toddler at times and an intellectual, with a reasoning worthy of a genius, at others. It’s why we’ve never had another child.
‘I’ll sort it, darling. Don’t worry.’ Mum’s smooth, reassuring voice cuts in as she rearranges the offending shoes, which had been moved out of line from Tom’s precise positioning of the evening before. It’s one of his ‘little things’, as Ed calls it. A ritual which appears to give our son a security that we’re unable to provide ourselves.
‘I see this sort of thing all the time,’ said the specialist. He gives a little sigh. ‘And no, it’s not your fault. Asperger syndrome has probably always been around, but now we have a label for it. It can be hereditary. But it can also come up right out of the blue without any family history.’ My mouth was dry as he continued. ‘Usually it starts to reveal itself from the age of eight months or so. But some mothers say they suspected from the beginning that something wasn’t quite right.’
I thought back to Tom’s birth. His eyes had darted from side to side as if to say, Where the hell am I? He’d been much quieter than the other babies on the ward. But when he did cry, it had been a shrill, unhappy cry that scared me rigid. Or was that because I was scared myself? Terrified of being a new mother at a time when my career was just taking off. When Ed and I were still clumsily trying to start our marriage over again.
From the minute I had shown my husband the blue line on the pregnancy result kit, it had become an unspoken agreement that we would no longer ‘keep trying’ to make our marriage work. We would make it do so. My mind had gone back to my teenage days when I had overheard my mother accusing my father of having an affair. I had been terrified they would break up, and so relieved when they had stayed together. Many children, it is true, grow up perfectly well in a single parent family. But then Carla and Francesca had flashed into my head. Did I really want to end up like them?
And anyway, Ed was a changed man. ‘A child,’ my husband had said, placing a hand on my belly. His eyes had shone. ‘Our child. It can be our new start.’
‘But how will we manage?’ I’d demanded. My voice had sung with guilt, anger, resentment and downright fear. ‘Everyone wants to use me now after the case. I’ve been promoted. You haven’t even got a job.’
If that sounded cruel, I’m ashamed to say that I intended it that way. I was livid with Ed because I was livid with myself.
‘Then I’ll work from home and look after him at the same time.’
I have to admit it. Ed was a natural. He doted on Tom. My sister-in-law’s words proved true – at least at first. Fatherhood grounded him. He even gave up alcohol for a while, although he now just tries to drink in moderation. Even when our son screamed blue murder as we tried to lift him out of his cot or dress him, my husband showed a patience I had never seen before. Later, when Tom refused to play with the other toddlers in the postnatal group and even bit a little girl when she tried to take his precious blue toy train that went everywhere with him, Ed merely declared he showed ‘character’. ‘He’s much brighter than the others,’ my husband would say proudly. ‘This morning he actually told one of the other kids to “give me space”. Can you believe it? It’s almost as if he’s a mini-adult. And he can count to ten on his fingers. I bet not many two-year-olds can do that. Just imagine what he will be like when he’s older!’
But then Tom’s behaviour began to get more extreme. He asked one of the other mothers why she had a ‘hairy moustache’. (Plain speaking can be another Asperger syndrome trait.) He threw his green plastic beaker at another child, causing a big bruise on his cheek, because it wasn’t the usual yellow colour. Ed was asked to find another playgroup.
At home, it was just as difficult. ‘No,’ snapped our son when I tried to make him put on a soft blue velour jumper which Ross, his godfather, had sent him for Christmas. ‘I don’t like the feel on my skin.’
Even Ed began to worry. ‘What’s the matter with him?’ he asked when Tom refused to go to bed because his duvet had been washed in a new soap powder and smelled ‘wrong’. ‘The mothers at the new playgroup are giving me the cold shoulder now. They seem to think it’s my fault.’
My parents had once been accused of poor parenting too.
‘There has to be an answer,’ Ed insisted.
Through our GP, we found a specialist who eventually gave his opinion. Asperger’s. An autism spectrum disorder, as well as obsessive behaviour. ‘Very little that one can do,’ the specialist said. ‘Could try cutting out certain foods … these children are usually very bright … see it as a different mindset …’
Tom, I told myself in my darkest moments, was my punishment for something so terrible that I could barely admit it to myself, let alone anyone else.
As Ed wept in my lap (‘I’m trying, Lily, I really am’), I wanted to tell him this. Yet how could I? He would surely leave if he knew what I had done. A child like Tom needed two parents. We were bound together now, just as my parents had been.
‘Let us help,’ my mother finally said when she had come up to London for her usual monthly visit. By then, Ed and I had moved to a three-bedroom Victorian terraced house in Notting Hill, thanks to his grandfather’s death, which had released the trust fund money. Meanwhile, my healthy salary had meant that Ed could be a stay-at-home dad while trying to make it as a freelance artist. That was great in theory, but in practice it was proving impossible for Ed to work while looking after a child who could do complicated long-division sums in his head one minute and then jump up and down screaming that his hands were ‘dirty’ from play clay the next.
‘We could look after Tom during the week,’ Mum added, looking round at the untidy sitting room, strewn with toys and half-finished sketches, where Ed had clearly been trying to work while saving Tom from himself. (A few days earlier he had trapped his finger in the window after undoing the knot in the sash cord ‘to see how it worked’.)
‘It will give you some time to yourselves.’
Mum was always a bit nosy when she came round. In the years after Daniel she’d become more interfering, as if his absence had left a hole which she needed to fill by playing a more active role in my life. But it became more intense when Tom was born. Had she noticed the telltale signs in the spare room? The book under the bed. Ed’s clothes in the pine chest of drawers. The half-empty bottle of wine in the bottom of the wardrobe. (Not mine – I’d given up drinking as soon as I was pregnant.) All clues that this was the room that my husband usually occupied at night.
‘It’s easier for my back,’ he had said when first suggesting separate bedrooms. I was hurt initially. But the more Tom yelled when I tried to brush his hair (‘It hurts my head’) or when someone moved his ‘special cup’ (‘Where is it, where is it?’), the more irritated Ed and I became with each other. Sometimes it developed into full-blown rows.
‘I can’t cope with two kids having tantrums,’ I snapped during one particularly nasty argument when Ed had told Tom to ‘get a grip’.
Tom’s face had creased into confusion. ‘But where do I find one?’ he had demanded. Language had to be crystal clear. ‘Pipe down’ got confused with my father’s pipe at home. ‘Having your head in the clouds’ meant, in Tom’s book, that you had somehow flown
up into heaven and got stuck in the sky. ‘Can you go to bed’ meant ‘Are you capable of getting into bed?’ A question, rather than an instruction.
Anger or tears on our part did nothing. Tom seemed to have a problem recognizing other people’s emotions. ‘Why are they crying?’ he asked one day when seeing a stream of refugees on television.
‘Because they don’t have homes any more,’ I explained.
‘So why don’t they just get some new ones?’
Some of these questions might be normal in a very young child. But as Tom grew older, they became increasingly inappropriate.
It was exhausting. Almost like the bad old days at the beginning of our marriage when we had nearly split. But Mum’s suggestion saved us. Tom moved to Mum and Dad’s in Devon by the sea. There was a school down the road where my brother and I had gone. They’d had more ‘special children’ like him since then, the head told us brightly. We mustn’t worry. And Ed and I would come down every weekend to see him. There was no doubting what the move would do for my parents. Since Tom had been born, my mother no longer had spells when she thought Daniel was still alive. She had another mission now: her grandson.
Much as I hate to admit it, Tom’s absence also gave Ed and me a chance to be a couple again. There was time to talk over meals. To lie on the sofa in the evenings, my legs wrapped round his in companionable silence. To rediscover each other’s bodies in one bedroom. I can’t say it was – or is – wildly passionate. But it’s comfortable. Loving.
Meanwhile, Ed was still trying to make a name for himself. We’d both hoped it would happen sooner, especially after coming third in that award. But the market was slow, or so he was told. Every now and then he persuaded a gallery to let him display some of his work. But it was hard going until an anonymous buyer bought The Italian Girl. Finally Ed got enough money to achieve his dream – to start his own gallery.
Ironically, my career has blossomed since Tom’s birth. To my delight, I was made a partner on the back of my continued success after the Joe Thomas case, which led to a cluster of settlements throughout the country and a change in the law on health and safety. Our contribution has gone down in the law reports. I’ve made a name for myself.
Just as important, in my mind, has been the fact that Davina is now safely married to a Yorkshire landowner. We declined the wedding invitation. Ed swore blind that he had never been unfaithful to me with her, but I still felt awkward in her presence.
Still, Ed and I have become much stronger as a couple. They say that when you have an ill child or one who presents certain challenges, you either grow apart or together. Surprisingly we have done the latter.
‘MY SHOES! I can’t wear them now you’ve touched them!’
My son’s anger brings me sharply back to the present. If I don’t catch the early morning train to Waterloo, I’ll miss my meeting.
‘I’ll sort it,’ says Mum firmly. At times, I’m convinced she’s taken Tom on in order to get it right this time. She failed with Daniel, or so she thinks, but she won’t do the same with her grandson. ‘Here. I almost forgot. This letter came for you during the week.’
And so I go, coward that I am. I leap into the car where Dad is waiting, and I lean back, closing my eyes with relief.
‘Ed meeting you at the other end?’ he asks.
I shake my head. Unusually, my husband hasn’t come down with me this time. He was invited to attend a Sunday showing in an elite gallery off Covent Garden which is displaying a copy of The Italian Girl. There is something about that painting – the vibrant, almost harsh, colours, and the half-knowing, half-innocent look – that unsettles me every time I see it. Or is it just because I still feel irritated about Francesca using us as babysitters so that she could be with Tony Gordon? Or rather Larry. How could someone live two lives?
Now, as the train jolts through Sherborne, I turn over the envelope in my hand. I’m not going to let Joe Thomas touch me. Not even mentally. I’m not going to allow myself to think about my part in helping a guilty man to walk free. If I do that, I won’t be able to live with myself.
And that’s why, as soon as I get to London, I’m going to tear up this envelope, with my former client’s distinctive capital-letter writing on it, and drop it in the nearest bin.
When I reach my office, there’s the usual urgent, steady, controlled panic. I love every minute. Adult panic. Adult battle of wills. Adult adulation.
It’s not just my career that’s on the up. It’s my body too. Some women age badly, like Davina – I can’t stifle my grin of triumph – whose picture in Tatler’s Bystander column the other month showed her looking decidedly heavy jowled. Others, like me, appear to improve. Or so I’ve been told. ‘Middle age suits you,’ Ed told me the other morning as he gazed down at my flat stomach and slim thighs.
I’d tickled him with mock indignation. ‘Middle age? Forty is the new thirty, I’ll have you know. Or thirty-eight at the very least.’
The ironic thing is, after Tom was born, I was too busy to comfort-eat. My baby weight quickly disappeared (breastfeeding helped) and continued to do so as he grew older. The more my son smeared food on the wall, or – at times – something far worse, the less I felt able to eat. My inability to deal with a child who insisted on everything being in its place, yet at the same time was equally insistent on creating chaos, was far more effective than any diet. I also began to run before work. Just puffing once round the block at first, but then further. Running, especially at 6 a.m. when the world was just waking, helped me to escape the demons of my dreams.
As the weight fell off and my cheekbones began to perk up, I found myself able to slip into size twelves and then tens. I went to an expensive hairdresser in Mayfair and had my long blonde hair cut into a ‘take me seriously’ bob. People watch me now as I stride purposefully through the office in my new red stilettos. Power shoes. Clients do a double-take, as if one isn’t capable of winning a case and looking good. Once, in court, the opposing lawyer slipped me a note, asking if I’d like dinner that night. I turned him down. But I was flattered.
Court. That reminds me. I need to be there in precisely one hour. Ever since ‘that case’, I’ve specialized in serious cases like murder and manslaughter. Watching Tony Gordon strut across the floor all those years ago lit something inside me. Solicitors can take an extra qualification known as the Higher Rights of Audience in order to take on cases in court that would normally be handled by a barrister. It is another string to your bow and it increases your earning power considerably. So that’s what I did.
However, I will only take on cases if convinced of my client’s innocence. Any qualm on my part and I will pass him or her to someone else, claiming that I am ‘too busy’. I have no doubts about this afternoon’s case. A teenage girl. Knocked off her bike by a lorry driver. Justice has to be done.
‘Ready?’ I glance impatiently at our latest intern: a young boy fresh out of Oxford whose father is a friend of one of the other partners. I don’t like it, but what can you do? Nepotism flourishes when it comes to law. The boy is still fiddling with his Old Etonian tie as we stride along. ‘Aren’t we going to get a taxi?’ he whines.
‘No.’ My stride is long and measured. Walking is another way I continue to stay slim. And besides, the fresh autumnal air helps me to think as I run over the details of the case.
‘Do you get nervous in court?’ The boy looks up at me and I feel a touch of compassion. Good education and a privileged upbringing are no security blanket when it comes to baring yourself in front of a row of jurors and a judge – the latter don’t suffer fools kindly.
‘I don’t allow myself to be.’ We swing up the stone steps and into the court. It’s not as big as the Old Bailey but it’s imposing enough, with its grey stone pillars and clusters of black gowns, flapping as they walk. Unfair as it is, men still outnumber the women and yet …
‘Lily?’
I stop as a grey-faced, grey-haired man pauses beside me. Swiftly, I search my memory. I
know him, I’m certain, yet his name eludes me.
‘You don’t recognize me.’ This was said in a rasping tone that was a statement rather than a question. ‘Tony. Tony Gordon.’
I’m shocked. I haven’t seen him for months, and then only in passing; just a small nod in recognition, as if we never spent all those hours together, heads close, poring over papers which would eventually result in a grave injustice. I’ve tried as hard as I can to forget those hours ever happened.
‘How are you, Lily?’ As he speaks – and as the shock dissipates – he touches his throat. And then I see it. An unmistakable lump rising from above the top of his collar. ‘Throat cancer,’ he rasps again. ‘They’ve done what they can, but …’
His words are almost swallowed by the busy, echoing voices around us. Beside me, my Oxford intern is shuffling from one foot to the other in embarrassment.
‘I saw your name on the list and wanted to catch you.’ Tony’s eyes – one of the few things that hasn’t changed about him – fall on my companion.
‘Can you wait over there, please?’ I tell the young man firmly.
My old colleague’s mouth twists as if in amusement. ‘You’re different. But I knew that already. Your reputation is spreading.’
I ignore the compliment. ‘How can I help you?’
‘Joe Thomas.’
My mouth dries. My body freezes. The sounds around us fade.
‘What about him?’
My mind goes back to the conversation I had with Tony all those years ago. The panicky phone call I made after Joe Thomas had proudly admitted his guilt. ‘What do we do?’ I begged.
‘Nothing,’ Tony replied. ‘He’s free and that’s it.’ His lack of surprise was all too clear.
‘You knew he was guilty?’
‘Suspected it. But I wasn’t sure. Besides, that doesn’t matter.’
‘Yes it does.’
