Dad started coughing. Choking, almost. He gasped for air, as though something had gone down the wrong hole.
He swigged his coffee and the coughs became less vigorous and less frequent. He was flushed red from the neck up.
‘What are you talking about, Diane?’ he said. ‘We were never told their name. Never.’
Mum stroked her knee, as though she was rubbing something off. She didn’t make eye contact with either of us.
‘That time the care-worker came to see us,’ she said, ‘when she told us we shouldn’t tell Chris she was adopted, she brought a folder with her. Can you remember it?’
Dad shook his head.
‘She had already been with us for quite a while,’ Mum said. ‘We were all in the living-room and she needed the loo. Because of what she had just told us, that we couldn’t tell Christine about the adoption, you said you needed a drink of water. You had both left the room and she had left the folder on the table.
‘I told myself I shouldn’t. But I felt hurt that we couldn’t follow our original plans. It wasn’t her fault, I knew that, but I wondered why she had been so insistent.’
Dad shook his head slowly, before bowing it. He gripped the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger.
‘I knew I didn’t have long. I heard the tap running in the kitchen, and the loo hadn’t yet been flushed. So I looked.’
Mum raised her eyes to mine, then to Dad, his head still bowed. He mumbled her name.
‘I know it was a risk,’ she said. ‘But I had to know.’
‘What did it say?’ I said.
‘There were several sheets of paper, but I only had time to really just scan the top sheet. Besides, I didn’t want to disturb the pages too much in case she noticed when she came back in.
‘There was lots of writing, most of it typed, but some of it written in ink. There were several signatures too. But two names were in bold. I thought, at first, that they were just the names of some of the officials that needed to sign these things. You know, to say that everything is OK. You usually need lots of people to approve things. But it dawned on me that two of the surnames were the same. Well, I thought that would be too much of a coincidence, having two officials with the same name. So I assumed they were the names of your mother and father.
‘I didn’t have time to read any of the other stuff that was written there, so I was no closer to finding out why she wanted us to keep your adoption from you, but I remembered the names. That much I did get.’
She lowered her gaze again and went back to rubbing her knee.
I waited for her to continue, but she said nothing.
‘Mum?’
‘I’m just thinking, dear,’ she said. ‘I want to make sure I get it right.’
I looked at Dad. He had looked up and seemed to be holding his breath.
‘Lapton was your family name. L-a-p-t-o-n. And then there were two names. The man’s name, presumably your father, was easy to see. It was Richard. But your mother’s name, that was difficult to read. It was something like Amelia — but it wasn’t quite that. I think it was spelt differently. Like A-m-e-l-i-e. So Amelia but with an “e” on the end instead of an “a”.
‘I don’t know if it was a spelling mistake or not. It was more difficult to correct on a typewriter if you made a mistake. But the surname was definitely Lapton.’
I played around with it in my head. Christine Lapton. It sounded slightly off, like it wasn’t quite right. Lapton sounded odd to me. Lapton, Lapton, Lapton.
‘Richard and Amelia?’ I said.
‘Definitely Richard,’ Mum said. ‘And I think Amelia — but possibly with an “e”.’
‘Diane,’ Dad said.
‘I’m sorry, dear,’ she said. ‘I would have told you, but I felt so guilty. And if I had made a mistake after all, and they really were just officials, what would have been the point of giving you the names? You would have been guilty too. At least this way it was only me who would have been in trouble if it had ever come out.’
‘But after all these years?’ he said. ‘You never said anything.’
‘When would I have, Roy? When would have been the right time? There was no point. Not until now.’
‘Are you sure it was Lapton?’ I said.
She nodded. ‘Definitely. I knew I wouldn’t ever forget the name.’
I wanted to say Christine Lapton out loud, just to hear what it sounded like in the open. But I was conscious of how it might make Mum and Dad feel. It carried so much more with it than just a name.
‘Did you see anything else?’ I said. ‘Anything at all? Anything about their state of health, any mental illnesses, anything?’
Mum shook her head.
‘As I said, I only had just a short amount of time. I had no time to read anything else at all. Just the names.’
Richard and Amelia or Amelie Lapton.
‘Do you know where in the country I came from?’
Dad shuffled in his chair.
‘We picked you up from a large building in London,’ he said. ‘You were brought to us there. But you could have come from anywhere in the country.’
‘There was nothing on the sheet I saw,’ Mum said. ‘Only the London address of that building.’
I wondered where the mad Laptons came from. What was my heritage?
‘There must have been mental illness in the family,’ I said. ‘That was why they asked you not to say anything, so that I’d never find out. And that must have been why I was taken for adoption in the first place. They must have taken me away from them, because they were mentally unstable. They weren’t suitable to look after me.’
My mobile phone rang. I grabbed it out of my handbag. It was Neil. I wanted to tell him everything. Blurt it all out. About the adoption, about the mental illness and about my real name. But I couldn’t even put it together in my own mind yet. I sent the call to voicemail.
‘It was just Neil,’ I said. ‘I’ll talk to him tomorrow.’
Dad climbed to his feet and stretched his arms above his head. The stretching made him cough.
‘So what do you want to do, Chris?’ he said. ‘What do you want us to do? We’ll help you in whatever way we can.’
‘I wish you had the Internet here,’ I said. ‘I suppose I would start by looking up the name Lapton and see what it came up with. Then I could also look to see if there are any organisations that help adopted children to locate their natural parents. That’s assuming they’re both alive of course.’
‘There’s no reason to think they might not be,’ said Mum. ‘Your dad and I are pretty fit and healthy and we were relatively old when we had you.’
‘You weren’t old,’ I said. ‘But if they had a mental illness — maybe that affects your health in other ways too. Maybe they had a shortened life because of it.’
Dad started pacing.
‘Do you want to go home?’ he said. ‘So that you’ve got the Internet? And Neil, of course.’
‘I think I’d like to stay here tonight. If that’s still OK with you?’
Dad stopped pacing.
‘And I’m really hungry too,’ I said. ‘Have we got anything to eat?’
Mum stood up.
‘We always have something,’ she said.
We ate in the kitchen. If Neil had walked in on the conversation over the lasagne he would have known nothing of the day’s events and revelations.
No matter how old I got, I always felt like I was a small child when I sat down to eat with Mum and Dad. Presumably it was the same for everyone. Their parents were always going to be parents no matter how old the children got.
I had opened the kitchen window, and a gentle breeze blew in from the night. Even in the darkness there was life outside. Occasionally a bird would call. Something would rustle through the leaves on the lawn. Dad’s face had regained some of its natural colour, Mum’s eyes wider now that some of the puffiness had left them.
But we all looked tired. Like we’d spent the day travelling. I just wa
nted my bed. I was sure I had only enough energy to finish eating and stumble up the stairs. The continual whirring in my mind was on pause. If I never had another thought, I would be happy.
‘Do you still go fishing, Dad?’ I said.
He wiped some sauce from his bottom lip.
‘Every now and then,’ he said. ‘Although I don’t really have anyone to go with anymore.’
I looked over at Mum.
‘Could we all go?’ I said. ‘Sometime soon?’
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