Letting You Go

by Anouska Knight

  Finn stepped out of the house doing his best to look comfortable in a suit and a part of the sadness inside Alex lifted.

  ‘Hey.’

  Finn set a hand on Alex’s hip and kissed her head. ‘Hey yourself.’

  ‘Still feel like a penguin?’

  ‘These slacks are still biting into my bits if that’s what you mean, Foster?’

  Finn gave her a lopsided smile. Alex loved his normal messy ruggedness, but she could get used to this temporary, sleeker version just fine if she had to. ‘I had a root around under the stairs but no tennis racquet I’m afraid.’ He was going to play lawn tennis with Alfie. Help Mal occupy him while the adults did the adult thing. ‘Is there a ball or anything here he can play with? What about Norma’s stash?’

  Alex held her to him for a few seconds and closed her eyes. Over the lavender, her mum’s garden smelled of honey and butter, just as it always had. ‘Finn? Do you think a person can die of a mended heart?’ Blythe’s heart had just stopped beating. Everything had been as it should, she’d come home to a house full of warmth and people and laughter. She’d gone to sleep contentedly next to her husband while Alex and Jem had stayed up embarrassing each other, sharing stories of childhood with George and Finn.

  Finn rested his chin on top of Alex’s head, she felt the warmth in her hair as he breathed against her. ‘Let’s hope not, Foster. Or some of us might be toast.’ Alex felt the rhythm of his breathing for a few moments. ‘Alex?’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘There’s something I wanted to tell you, the day after the boat race.’ There was an uncertainness in Finn’s voice. ‘But I didn’t want to rock the boat. And then your mum came home and—’

  ‘What is it, Finn?’

  Finn swallowed and looked down across the lawns to Ted, observing the tractors Alfie was pointing out to him.

  ‘Leonard McQueen.’

  ‘Who?’

  Finn squeezed her and exhaled deeply. ‘When Alfie ran into the road. The guy. In the other car. With the blood. I didn’t recognise him, I couldn’t. You saw how covered he was.’

  ‘Finn, you’re not making any sense.’

  ‘He was my customer. He was the guy I was supposed to be meeting with the painting, of the black Lab.’

  Alex watched something strain in Finn’s features. ‘I remember. The painting that looked like the Lab puppy you wanted when you were little. Finn, what’s worrying you so much?’

  ‘I don’t want to mess things up with your dad, Alex.’

  ‘You won’t,’ Alex said certainly. She wasn’t going to let them fall apart ever again. ‘Finn, tell me … what is it?’

  ‘I went back to the hospital, Al. To check my customer was OK. They’d cleaned him up, but it still took me a few seconds to recognise him.’ Finn dipped his head. ‘It had been a long time, Foster. A long time hoping he might come by one day, just to see how I’m doing. He’d given me a false name, in case I wouldn’t give him any time.’

  ‘Who, Finn? Who is he?’

  Finn chewed agitatedly at his top lip. ‘He’s my father, Alex. My dad came back.’

  Alex watched a few red petals begin to flitter across the lawns where the poppies were bowing to the next season. She was stunned. The only thing left of Martin Finn in the Falls was a bad legacy and a scare-story for would-be gambling addicts.

  ‘Be careful, Finn.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Is he still in the Falls?’

  ‘No. He didn’t want to put any pressure on me. I haven’t even said anything to my mum.’

  ‘And what will you say?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. He’s sorted himself out. He has a decent job, lives a decent life. But he has a lot of ground to cover, Foster. A lot of time to make up.’

  Alex watched her dad across the gardens talking Alfie through the mechanics of the tree-swing. Wasn’t that what they were all doing? Making up for lost time?

  ‘He’s your dad, Finn. We all deserve to be happy so try not to worry too much about anyone else. Just do what you feel’s the right thing. Life’s too short not to.’

  Finn’s hand moved to the back of Alex’s head. He kissed her slowly and softly, then laid a chaste kiss on her nose. ‘I love you, Foster.’

  ‘I love you too.’

  An Aston Martin was just cautiously navigating its way up to the house past all of the cars parked along the track. Finn’s head turned to follow it. Alex stiffened. Her dad was still talking to Alfie down by the tree-swing. He finished setting Alfie up for a push and spotted Louisa pulling up outside the garden fencing. Louisa was getting out of her car. Jem was already walking purposefully over towards the gate from where she’d been topping up the Reverend’s glass again, but Malcolm had beaten her there.

  Alex dropped Finn’s hand and walked quickly across the lawn to where Louisa was standing gesticulating at Malcolm.

  ‘Mother, just go home and have a cup of sweet tea. I’ll be up to the house later. I’ll bring Alfie.’

  ‘I don’t want my grandson here!’ she rasped. ‘It’s bad enough that you’ve come. You know how I feel about these people!’

  ‘Yes, Mother. I know how you feel. Now please try to understand how I feel.’

  ‘She was an ungodly woman, Malcolm.’ Louisa’s face contorted beneath her expensive makeup and Alex felt something like pity for her.

  Ted was walking up the lawn looking just as uncomfortable in his black trousers and freshly starched shirt as Finn, but Alfie was clinging to his neck and seemed to make Ted look blissfully at ease at the same time.

  Alex felt her heart patter. From here, it was just like looking at her dad carrying Dill up the lawn. Maybe Ted’s fondness for the little boy lay somewhere therein; Alfie and Dill were blood, after all.

  Louisa watched Alex’s dad carry Alfie, her face closing down like she were made of something mechanical. ‘Malcolm, you take my grandson off that man’s shoulders and get him away from this … this … family.’

  ‘Now hold on right there, Louisa. Finn? Would you mind taking young Alfie here up to my son’s bedroom? Let him choose something to play with. Anything he likes.’

  ‘Sure thing.’ Finn said, sitting Alfie onto his shoulders. ‘Come on, little bud.’

  Ted waited for Alfie to leave while the flush crept higher up Louisa’s neck.

  ‘Malcolm?’ Louisa implored.

  ‘This family are mine and Millie’s friends, Mother. And Helen’s. And Alfie’s too.’

  ‘You are not paying any more respects to this woman,’ Louisa snarled under her breath. Alex saw her dad stiffen. Louisa was about to blow it. She was about to publicly wipe Ted’s nose in it, in front of his own children.

  Ted’s shoulders relaxed. He straightened and gave the sky, then the gardens and all the visitors milling around in them a long, easy look. He looked at Mal, then Jem and Alex and finally, Louisa. ‘There’s no more damage to be done here Louisa. Let it go.’

  ‘Let it go? I will not—’

  ‘By all means, stay, join us for a cocktail sausage. But I won’t have you badmouth the mother of my children. My beautiful wife, Blythe.’

  Alex’s heart was thumping. They’d worked so hard not to let this spill out where it would hurt Ted any more. Alex, Jem and Mal had all agreed, Ted would never have to suffer the indignity of knowing that they all knew. Dillon wasn’t his biological son, but it didn’t matter. They could pretend. They could all pretend, and Mal would keep his new brother quietly and safely in his heart, that was the only way forwards for them all and now Louisa was going to ruin it.

  ‘She was an ungodly woman,’ Louisa repeated slowly. Louisa was going to blow it all out in the open whatever they did.

  Ted shook his head at the lawn. ‘Louisa, you’d better get your stuck up ass back in that car of yours and go on your way, before you get hurt.’

  ‘Ted,’ Mal interjected.

  ‘You’re going to assault me then, Ted Foster? In front of all of these people?’

  Ted
shook his head again and laughed quietly to himself. ‘No, Louisa. I’m going to tell you how much I loved that woman. How easy it was to love her, how lucky I was to share my life with somebody who was the absolute opposite of a woman like you. How easy it was for the mayor to love her too, and how I can’t blame your husband one bit for doing so.’

  Louisa’s mouth hung open as if she were about to regurgitate something nasty. Her own sword had been used against her. Jem looked ashen. Alex could feel a tightness in her chest. But Ted, Ted was as calm as the Old Girl on a lazy morning.

  Malcolm looked away over the fence. Jem squeezed his arm. ‘Go home, Mum. It’s time we all learned to move on.’

  ‘I’m sorry, son,’ Ted said to Malcolm. ‘It wasn’t my intention to bring any of this up in front of you kids.’

  Mal nodded. ‘It wasn’t my intention to cause my mother to turn up here, Mr Foster. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Sorry?’ Louisa spat. ‘Malcolm, how can you choose these people?’ Jem moved towards Louisa but Alex shot out a hand to stop her.

  Mal shook his head. He moved to Louisa and held her softly by the arms. ‘I choose them, Mum, because they take their knocks and they stick together. They fight against the current to be who they are.’ Ted squinted and nodded at his shoes. ‘Go home, Mum.’ Mal said. ‘Go and sit in the garden and enjoy this beautiful afternoon.’

  Louisa seemed dazed as she hobbled back to the car. But she hobbled back nonetheless. Even Jem’s hostility had morphed into something more compassionate as Louisa rolled away.

  Ted kissed Jem and put a reassuring hand on Alex’s back, patting her like he had at the Tower House Theatre when she was little. ‘Mal?’

  ‘Yeah, Ted?’ Mal said quietly.

  ‘See if you can catch up with your boy. There’s a fine set of bow and arrows in Dillon’s bedroom that could do with a fine young lad to try them out, if you’re happy for him to? I could set him up a target right down there next to the tree-swing. Do you think he’d like that?’

  Alex watched her mother’s wake fall into something else, something warmer than just the saying of goodbyes. The September sun bathed the last dwindling numbers of them in evening warmth while the stories they shared grew long like the shadows.

  Jem had just seen the last cousins on Blythe’s side into their car when she came skipping back.

  ‘Hey, what have you got there?’ Alex asked, looking at the case in Jem’s hands.

  ‘I don’t know, Aunty Carol said she’d found it at Granny Ros’s house, after they cleared it all out years back. It was in that pink kiddy music recorder we used to play with at her house, remember the one with the big plastic purple microphone and the fruit pastille stuck in the battery bit?’

  Alex looked at the CD in Jem’s hands. ‘Bloody hell, Jem, can you imagine what’s on there?’

  ‘Celine Dion!’ they said in unison.

  Jem giggled. ‘That was a big number, Gran said we’d killed Titanic for her, do you remember?’

  ‘Let’s have a listen,’ Alex said.

  Jem smiled and turned towards the porch where Ted was playing another game of backgammon with Finn. ‘Whip Dad’s Phil Collins out of that CD player, Finn. We’ve got something here that’ll really make your ears bleed.’

  Alex could already feel the squeamishness kicking in. Finn was about to taste the Jem and Alex experience, circa 1998 when their recording careers were going full bore thanks to the marvels of a Fisher Price karaoke recorder with playback function.

  Alex sat next to Jem on the porch steps and cringed while the CD whizzed to start.

  It hadn’t even occurred to them, Aunty Carol had given no warning.

  The recording started. Her voice was like cut glass. Pure, strong, arresting to ears that could recognise it anywhere. Blythe’s effortless melody rang out from that stereo while they all sat, unmoving, Blythe’s faultless voice filling the air around them. They listened as Jem’s seven-year-old voice interrupted her mother’s.

  ‘Can you sing something else, Mummy? Me and Alex like the Titanic song.’

  ‘That was really good, Mum. I think you can even sing better than Celine can,’ Alex heard herself say earnestly.

  Another voice cut in over Alex’s. ‘Mummy, Mummy, Mummy!’ Alex watched her dad take a sharp intake of breath. Jem began softly crying beside her on the steps.

  ‘Uh-oh,’ Alex heard her mum say, ‘I think someone’s baby brother wants to have a turn, what would you like to sing, Dill?’

  Alex felt a few tears fall over her cheek and flicked them away. Finn was watching her. She tried to smile at him and more spilled over her eyes.

  ‘I don’t want to sing, Mummy.’ Dill’s words sounded rounded and pudgy, like his little body had been back then.

  ‘You don’t?’ Blythe said disappointedly. ‘Well, do you think you could maybe say something instead? Into the microphone look, Dill. Then we can play it to Daddy when he comes to pick us up from Grandma’s.’ Heavy breathing crackled from the speakers.

  ‘Not so close, Dill!’

  ‘Muuum, he’s getting dribble on my microphone!’ Jem whined.

  ‘Go on, Dill. Say something good,’ Alex encouraged. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Dillon … Edward … Foster,’ Dill managed, selfconsciously. ‘Edward like my daddy’s name.’

  ‘How old are you?’ Jem asked.

  ‘I’m free!’

  Jem cackled. ‘You’re three silly. Not free.’

  ‘What else?’ their mother encouraged. ‘What do you like, darling?’

  ‘I like my daddy’s truck.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Yes, I love my daddy’s truck and … and … I love my daddy too.’

  ‘I love Dad too,’ Alex added.

  ‘And me! I love my whole family!’ declared Jem.

  ‘That’s so nice, guys,’ Blythe said. ‘We all love each other, don’t we? And it doesn’t matter where we are, or what we’re doing … or how long we might be apart from each other, does it? Because we all, always, know that, don’t we?’

  Ted was crying silently behind them where he sat.

  ‘Mummy?’

  ‘Yes, Jem?’

  ‘Please can we sing the Titanic song now?’ Jem burst into song anyway. ‘Every night in my dreams … I see you, I feeeeeel youuuuu …’

  They all listened, captivated as Jem and Alex’s crooning pulled them back from sadder thoughts to tears of embarrassed hysterics as, verse by verse, Alex and Jem tried to out-Celine each other.

  It was a good day. Dill was everywhere now. Not just at the river, but here, in the home they’d shared. He was in the creak of the garden swing, Norma’s mischief, Alfie’s tiredness as he fell asleep on Ted’s shoulder, exhausted from all the discoveries he’d made in another little boy’s bedroom. Dill was in the way Ted had watched over them all, not just Alfie but Jem, Alex, Mal and Finn too, while they’d played with his arrows on the lawns as the night crept in around them. And when Alex caught the tail end of another story Jem was telling about their brother, at last nobody remembered to feel sadness or regret for things left unsaid. They were too busy laughing.

  EPILOGUE

  Mayor Alfred Sinclair had a habit of jumping to conclusions.

  That he might be the descendant of a great and noble Viking. That the searing pain behind his eyes was his wife’s incessant nagging rather than the tumour that would unexpectedly kill him. That the little boy who looked so much like his boy Malcolm, and whose mother he had loved so intensely, must surely be his son too.

  Had Louisa Sinclair have taken more of an interest in her husband’s genealogical hobby, or just have been gracious enough to have accepted Blythe Foster’s gift and embarked on a climb up through her own family tree, Louisa might have not only helped her husband to discover that he probably wasn’t descended from King Cnut as he’d hoped, but that several generations back there had been a crossover between two of the oldest families in Eilidh Falls that would go on to strike like a lightning bol
t in the same place twice.

  Perhaps if the mayor had ventured far enough through the boughs of his family tree, he might have learned of the fate of his great-great grandmother’s sister, Elizabeth Sinclair who, after a dalliance with a blue-eyed William Foster, died bringing their illegitimate son into the world.

  If William Foster hadn’t taken the child back for his wife Alice to raise alongside their other legitimate children, the Sinclair dimple might not have found its way silently through the bloodlines of two families in the Falls, eventually arriving like a band of marauding Vikings at the cheeks of both Dillon Foster, and his distant cousin, Malcolm Sinclair.

  Had Dillon lived to reach his teens, his mother Blythe would’ve seen that while her son did indeed resemble the younger, blonder, Malcolm Sinclair who had once come to play over with her daughters and whose father she had so briefly shared herself, unlike Malcolm, Dillon’s blond hair would not have darkened through his youth.

  It would have remained as light and fair as his father’s.

  Ted Foster.

  Acknowledgements

  Blimey, book number three in the can … madness!

  As ever, I couldn’t have done it without my favourite hoodlums, Jim, Rad and Loch, the gruesome dream team. Thanks for putting up with me, fellas. And for getting on with it without so much as a batted eyelid while I disappeared into my room for months on end to write. You all put such brave faces on, the back-to-back football and WWE must have been horrendous for you. I’m going to reward you all with Downton Abbey and decent bedtimes aplenty.

  A huge thanks going out to Sammia Hamer, my long-suffering, deadline-flexing editor. Never work with children or animals? Got to be easier than hormonal pregnant women, right? Sammia, thank you for letting me go at my own pace, mostly on hideously swollen ankles. Your encouragement and support was invaluable. Thanks also to Donna ‘The Don’ Hillyer. Always good to have you in the wings, missus. I’m going to miss yoouuu!

  A hefty thanks to my mum, The Baby Whisperer. Hooray for newly retired grandmothers, Gertie! Couldn’t have got this novel to the finish line without all you’ve done for Jesse Boy, who I should also thank for being such a chilled out, supercool kid while I was doing crazy hours at my laptop. (Would’ve been nice if you’d have eased up on the night-feeds though, son.)