by Pamela Fudge
Breakfast the following morning would have been another silent and uncomfortable affair, had it not been for William’s bright chatter forcing us to respond. It was while he was upstairs searching for a book he particularly wanted to show his class tutor that Jon suddenly spoke to me and I was so shocked that I actually jumped.
‘I’ll take Will to school today – and then I will be coming home,’ he said, ‘to talk.’
‘Oh.’ I thought about the ten o’clock appointment with Gareth Montgomery that I wouldn’t be able to keep. I thought about telling Jon it wasn’t a good time for me because I had already made prior arrangements. However, I knew with absolute certainty that I had no rights at all in this matter, and could only think myself lucky that Jon was willing to give me any time of any day.
Eventually, when I’d assembled my thoughts into some sort of order, I realised I could ring the school and ask them to pass on a message. Realising Jon could be back at any moment, I was shaking with nerves before I’d even picked up the receiver and misdialled twice.
‘Come on, come on,’ I urged myself, and then I heard the familiar voice of the receptionist. I cut across her spiel, saying briefly, ‘Please can you make sure a message gets to Mr Montgomery that Mrs H can’t make her ten o’clock appointment. Thank you so much,’ before I cut the call.
I dropped the receiver as if it was red hot just as Jon’s key turned in the lock and the front door opened.
We stood face to face in silence, and then I said, ‘Can I get you anything? Tea? Coffee?’
Jon’s face twisted, ‘The only thing I want from you, Wendy,’ he said, ‘is the truth.’
We went into the kitchen – the wonderful kitchen of my dreams that had immediately become the hub of a wonderful home. The kitchen that Jon had built especially for me when we moved into the house with our brand new baby – remembering, I was appalled all over again at what I had done.
My hands trembled as I filled a glass with water from the tap. I wasn’t much of a drinker, but at that moment I wished more than anything that the glass was holding gin or something of that ilk.
I sat down at the table with the glass of water in front of me and Jon remained standing, leaning against the worktop with his arms folded across his chest, his expression was grim.
‘I don’t know where to start,’ I admitted, and he practically snarled, ‘You could try at the beginning.’
‘It was when we were having problems conceiving,’ I watched Jon’s lip curl and hurried on before he could interrupt. ‘We’d just been told you had a low sperm count, but you chose to ignore that and to blame the fact I wasn’t getting pregnant on my weight.’
‘So, this is all my fault, is it?’
‘Well, as I tried to say at the time, it wasn’t anybody’s fault. Some people do have problems conceiving.’
‘But you found a novel way of solving that problem, didn’t you? Didn’t you?’ he fumed savagely when I didn’t immediately reply.
I knew he was hurting, but I’d still had enough. ‘Shut up, Jon,’ I said harshly, standing up to face him with my hands flat on the table. ‘Shut up and listen. You’ve asked for the truth and that’s what I’m giving you – then you can do what you like with it.’
Jon pressed his lips together in a hard, straight line. I could see that he was desperate to speak, but mercifully he remained silent.
I sat down again. ‘I knew you were hurting and were probably embarrassed by the doctor’s verdict, and that was why I didn’t argue with you. You said I was to blame for our fertility problems and I let you believe that I accepted that I was. I didn’t at all, not really, and so resentment against you was building up over quite a long period of time.’
Jon looked uncomfortable for a moment and I knew I had hit a nerve, but that he wasn’t going to give an inch was proved as he quickly recovered and roared, ‘That was no excuse – none at all - for you to go running off and finding someone else to do the bloody deed.’
‘But that wasn’t all there was to it.’ I kept my own tone low, little more than a whisper.
Jon looked taken aback, and he stared at me, before asking more quietly, ‘What do you mean?’
‘Do you remember – at around the same time - when you were going off on that weekend work conference with Kerry?’
He shrugged, and answered, ‘Yes, I do vaguely, but what has that to do with anything?’
‘You left your mobile phone at home,’ I reminded him. ‘You came back for it – but not before I had read the text that came through. It was one that Kerry sent you. You may or may not remember, but I do, word for word. This is what it said, and I quote, “I’m going to give you a weekend to remember. Kerry” and it was finished off with a kiss.’
‘Yes, Tina told me at the time you’d thought I was having an affair. So, you jumped to entirely the wrong conclusion and decided to go off and get your own back.’
‘If you’d really listened to her, you would have understood why,’ I said sadly. ‘You had been belittling me for months, Jon, and you can’t deny that, so I suppose I was vulnerable. You were also working very closely with Kerry at that time. So reading a text like that was all it took to tip me over the edge and jump to a completely wrong conclusion. The wording, as far as I was concerned, confirmed there was something going on between you and Kerry - a woman who was even larger than I was.’
‘But...,’
‘I know what you’re going to say, that I was wrong, and I know that now,’ I shrugged, ‘the thing was that I didn’t know it then and, yes, I was angry and hurt and, yes, I did want to get my own back. The only thing I could think was - two can play at that game.’
Jon groaned, ‘But I wasn’t having an affair.’
‘It doesn’t alter the fact that I thought you were and I acted – or re-acted – accordingly.’
‘It was that weekend, wasn’t it?’
I nodded.
‘Was it someone we knew?’
I shook my head. ‘No.’
‘Was he better in bed than me?’
Well, I wasn’t expecting that; though perhaps I should have been. What was I supposed to say, yes, he had the stamina and the endurance of the athlete he was, and we made love time after time, after time?
I shook my head emphatically, looked Jon straight in the eye and told him, ‘No, he was not.’
‘Are you still seeing him?’
The truthful, and totally unacceptable, answer was that I should have been seeing him right at that moment, but I stuck to a version of the truth that wouldn’t make matters any worse than they already were. ‘No. It wasn’t ever an affair. It was just the one time.’ I decided it wouldn’t have helped anything at all to have added that it was a one time that had lasted all night.
‘And I’m supposed to believe that?’
‘I shrugged. ‘It’s the truth.’
‘And then you discovered you were pregnant – with his baby obviously – and you thought you would pass the child off as mine. That’s about the size of it, isn’t it, Wendy?’
‘I thought it far more likely that the child was yours.’
‘You thought it more likely that it was mine,’ Jon stared at me in disbelief, ‘despite the fact we had been trying for months with no luck at all. You thought it was sheer coincidence that you should suddenly become pregnant immediately after you have an affair, and it didn’t even cross your mind once that the baby probably wasn’t mine.’
‘I didn’t know what to believe or what to do, Jon,’ I confessed. ‘With all my heart I wanted to believe that the baby I was carrying was ours, yours and mine. We had waited for so long and, finally, I was pregnant. Don’t you remember how happy we were?’
‘Were, Wendy, and our happiness was built on a lie. Didn’t you ever, not even once, feel tempted to make a clean breast of things?’
I decided that honesty was the best policy in this case, and said, ‘Yes, I did many times at the beginning, but in the end I couldn’t take the chance that you wou
ld insist I abort the baby and end my dreams of becoming a mother - even though in the early days I contemplated abortion myself.’
Jon was silent, and I could tell he was trying to take in my words.
‘You wouldn’t have done that for me?’ he asked in the end, though he must have known what the answer would be.
‘I couldn’t have done that even for you, Jon, no matter how much I loved you. However the baby was conceived, it wasn’t the child’s fault but I didn’t want to lose you, either, didn’t want to lose what we had, and so I’ve lived with the guilt all these years. At times, I have to confess that it was buried so deep I’ve almost forgotten there was any question mark over Will’s paternity.’
‘So why now?’
‘Why now - what?’ I stared at him, not understanding at all what he was getting at.
‘After seven years, why are you suddenly convinced that William is not my son?’
Oh, God, I should have been prepared for this but, again, I wasn’t. I couldn’t – wouldn’t - bring the Adonis into the equation or all hell was going to break loose and another family was going to be torn apart.
Trying to stick as closely to the facts as I was able, I explained, ‘It’s been the disappointment over our attempts to conceive again that have brought it all back. I was pinning my hopes on getting pregnant because, as far as I was concerned, that would prove to me that – low sperm count or not – it was highly likely you were Will’s father. In any case, Jon, aren’t you Will’s father? Aren’t you his father in every single way that counts?’
‘Yes,’ he said, without hesitation. ‘Yes, I am.’
I blinked up at him and then his shoulders slumped and he sat down across the table from me, and he looked at me – really looked at me.
‘You don’t understand, do you?’ he looked defeated. ‘Of course I love William, I love him with all my heart, but I have to confess that I’ve always suspected he may not be mine.’
‘What?’
He shrugged. ‘You’ve said it all, Wendy. We’d been trying for a baby for months, years even, with no success. We’d been told I had a low sperm count for which I felt extremely guilty – to the point I tried to blame you – and then suddenly, completely out of the blue you become pregnant. It didn’t take a lot to make me doubt I had a hand in the conception of that child, but like you did, I accepted this was going to be my one chance to become a parent and I really didn’t want to lose that – or you.’
‘Oh, Jon,’ I reached out and took his hand, and for the first time I really believed that everything was going to be all right – but it soon became apparent that my relief was premature.
Jon shook off my hand as if touching me might contaminate him. ‘You don’t understand, do you? You really don’t understand. The fact that I suspected that Will wasn’t my son – well, it was only a suspicion and I could actually live with that and even come close to ignoring it – but now that it’s out in the open, that changes everything for me.’
‘But you love Will. He’s your son,’ I cried.
‘Yes, he is and he always will be. That will never change, but what has changed is us. How are we going to be able to face each other every day for the rest of our lives with this truth always there between us?’
‘Please,’ I whispered, ‘please don’t do this. We can work it out.’
‘I wish that were true,’ Jon grimaced, ‘but if the last few hours are anything to go by, it’s going to be purgatory for both of us. In the end that will affect Will – better by far that we call it a day now, while he’s still young enough to come to terms with it. He’ll come to understand that it’s for the best.’
‘How?’ I cried, tears streaming down my face. ‘How will he understand when I know that I never will?’
Chapter 17
Jon stared at me, apparently unmoved by my tears.
I knew I should have remained calm and tried to reason with him, but all of a sudden I completely lost it and, forgetting for a moment that all of this was my fault, I shrieked, ‘Fine. If that’s the way you want it, throw away everything we have and break a little boy’s heart.’
Anticipating that Jon would walk out of the house, I determined to beat him to it. Snatching my coat from the peg and the keys from the hall table, I marched through the front door and slammed it behind me with as much force as I could muster.
It felt as if hours had passed during the altercation with Jon, but the Brankstone church clock striking ten proved that the whole exchange had actually taken less than one.
It wasn’t until I was a stone’s throw from the school that I suddenly remembered the meeting I had cancelled in such a rush earlier and I immediately headed in that direction – just on the off chance that my message hadn’t been passed on. My instinct proved right, because as I turned the corner there was Gareth Montgomery pacing at the school gate and frequently pulling back his cuff to check his watch.
‘We said ten o’clock,’ he began irritably the minute he set eyes on me, then taking in the set expression on my face he obviously thought better of continuing to berate me for keeping him waiting and shut up.
We automatically walked quickly away from the school with the strong possibility of interested eyes noting our rendez vous and perhaps wondering at the reason for it.
‘So,’ he said when enough distance had been covered and we stood facing each other in an unfamiliar side-street, ‘what’s this all about?’
‘It’s about a brief affair we had, you and I, little more than a one night stand really, around seven years ago.’ When he just looked at me without commenting, I continued. ‘It obviously meant nothing to you and it would have had a similar lack of impact on my life but...,’
He interrupted me then, obviously wondering what this had to do with him all these years on, but too impatient to let me tell him. ‘So why are you here now, bringing up something that should have been long forgotten?’
He glanced at his watch, it was a rude gesture, obviously making the point that I was wasting his valuable time, and I glared at him.
‘Just shut up and listen,’ I advised, ‘the sooner we get this over with the better, I can assure you. The reason I’m here is that I bumped into you – literally – a few weeks ago in a store in Southampton. I recognised you just and you appeared to recognise me, because you asked if you knew me.’ He shrugged and shook his head. I ploughed on. ‘It might have been coincidence, but suddenly I kept seeing you wherever I went and gained the impression that you were following me.’
Now I had said it out loud, it all sounded ridiculous, like something out of the realms of fantasy. He was staring at me as if I was quite mad, and I couldn’t really blame him.
‘Why the hell,’ he said, ‘would I want to do that?’
‘I thought you were interested in my child,’ I admitted and my tone was flat and hard.
‘I already have four children of my own.’
‘Yes, I know you do, but yours are all girls and mine is a boy. I convinced myself, rightly or wrongly, that being a sportsman, you might have a yearning for a son.’
He was still staring at me, uncomprehending, and then slowly like a bulb on a dimmer switch, his expression lightened. ‘You think he’s mine?’ he said incredulously.
‘I think it’s possible, yes.’
‘Are you here to blackmail me?’ The question was so preposterous that I was momentarily stunned.
‘What?’
‘You heard me.’
‘No, you moron, I am not here to blackmail you. All I want is your absence from my life. I’m here to warn you that you have suddenly become too close for comfort in my life. My husband already knows - about the affair, that is, not that it was with you,’ I added hastily, correctly interpreting the sudden nervous look on his face, ‘but if you hang around there is every possibility that the truth will come out – as the truth has a nasty habit of doing.’
He was briefly lost for words and then he exploded. ‘Are you for real? I can’t
just up sticks and leave a job I’ve been in for all of five minutes. What am I supposed to tell the school? What will my wife think?’
‘Never mind the school - what will your wife think if she discovers you were romping in a hotel room with a woman you’d only just met, either while she was heavily pregnant or when she had just given birth to your youngest daughter?’ He looked startled and I knew that he was finally taking me seriously. ‘Oh, yes, and I know all this because your wife came to my house, Mr Montgomery, to order a cake for your bloody birthday, and while she was there she told me practically your whole family history.’
By this time he was looking so shocked that I think if I’d put a finger in the middle of his chest and pushed, he would have fallen straight over and landed flat on his back.
‘Obviously there were some gaps in her knowledge because she seemed to be under the impression that you were the perfect husband. Now,’ I pushed my face closer to his, ‘do you see what I mean about you being too close for comfort? We are sitting on a time bomb, and it’s already ticking.’
He was silent for what seemed like a long time, though it was probably just seconds, and, feeling I’d said exactly what I had come to say, I started walking away.
‘Mrs Hammond,’ he called after me suddenly, and the formality of my full title sounded pretty ridiculous when I acknowledged the intimacy of our one and only meeting. I paused long enough to hear him say. ‘You’re mistaken. The child is not mine,’ and then I walked on. I didn’t need to remind myself that he would say that, wouldn’t he?
The house was silent when I walked into it, so I assumed either Jon had gone to work, or he had packed his things and actually left the family home. I refused to go upstairs and check his wardrobe because I really didn’t want to know, not yet, and instead went straight to my work-room, where I set to work and made an enormous batch of marzipan. I always made my own, but then I made everything I used from scratch, that way I could be quite sure that it was fresh and made from the best ingredients, and I gained a lot of satisfaction from that.
