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The Stepmother

Page 25

by Carrie Adams


  “Pull what? Come on, Tessa, let’s start again. I’m sorry.”

  “You’re just saying that because you don’t like where this is going.”

  “Christ, a man can’t win.”

  I scowled for half a mile. James stared out of the window.

  “Why can’t we have a normal conversation about this? All I did was ask you a simple question—”

  “No, you asked me an impossible question.”

  “You don’t know why you and Bea split up?”

  James didn’t reply. Instead he shook his head despairingly and looked out of the window again. Blood. Out. Of. Stone. Just like Amber. I counted to ten and started again, determined, if anything, to reverse this escalation. “James, I know this is difficult for you, and I know and love that you just want everyone to be happy, but I think something is going on with Amber—”

  “You should speak to that godson of yours. She was fine until he came along. Now she barely speaks.”

  “So you have noticed it?”

  “Of course I’ve noticed it.”

  “So why didn’t you talk to me about it?”

  “Well, you’re quite blinkered when it comes to Caspar—”

  “I’m blinkered!”

  “Tessa, he’s seventeen, Amber’s fourteen. She’s the one who needs protecting. Bea and I just…” James patted his jacket pocket and checked his passport. “Could you pick up my—”

  “Bea and you just what?”

  James chewed the inside of his lip. “Thought it better if…She’s very young and…Look at your face! No wonder I haven’t spoken to you about this.”

  “You and Bea what?”

  James took a deep breath. “Decided it would be better if they didn’t see each other.”

  I was furious. I clenched my fists around the steering wheel and locked my jaw.

  “That’s why I didn’t say anything, I didn’t want to upset you.”

  “Well, you failed.”

  James placed his hand on my leg and spoke in a placatory voice: “I’m sure you’re right and it was just an accident, but Amber was very shaken. She barely spoke to Bea and she won’t say anything to me—”

  I couldn’t take any more. “Why do you think I’m upset?”

  “Admitting that Caspar is capable—”

  “No, James. I would be happy to sit and discuss what happened that night. With you, with him, with Amber, with Bea too. If Caspar got carried away, I personally would prefer to know, so that we can make sure it never happens again, with Amber or anyone else. If Caspar doesn’t know his own strength, or doesn’t hear ‘No,’ Jesus, James, I want to know that! But, no, you and Bea decided between yourselves not to talk to me. Worse than that, you haven’t even tried to get to the bottom of this, and I tell you, not only does that make me feel like shit”—I could feel the tears and was damned if I was going to let them out—“it makes me mistrust you both.”

  “I’m sorry. Please let’s not fight about the children again.”

  “Don’t fool yourself, James. We’re not fighting about the children.”

  “Amber and I would never—”

  I lost it and shouted so loudly I shocked myself: “I’m not talking about you and Amber!”

  I stopped the car at the barrier of the short-term parking lot. I took the ticket that the Dalek spat at me and watched the metal arm lift. I would have preferred to throw him out at Departures without slowing down, but I had been told by someone never to go to sleep on an argument. Boarding a plane was worse. James was going away for a week, and I didn’t want this knot of anger to turn malignant.

  The air darkened as I aimed the car up the narrow corkscrew hollow and we drove up in silence, past floors packed with row upon row of boxy cars, until we reached the roof. For a fraction of a second, I had a terrible urge to put my foot to the floor and Thelma and Louise it over the edge. The impact of something concrete would feel like a relief after all this uncertainty. I slipped the car into an empty space and turned off the engine. Counting to ten wasn’t working. I felt panic rip through me. Panic that I was losing James. I brushed away the tear and forced myself to look at him.

  “What aren’t you telling me?” I asked.

  He shook his head.

  “James, please…How can I understand anything if I don’t know what’s going on? People fear what they don’t understand. It makes them suspicious, nervous, insecure. If you hide things from me, this isn’t going to work.”

  James clamped his hands together. “I feel incredibly disloyal having this conversation.”

  “I’m supposedly going to be your wife. Don’t I deserve a little loyalty too?”

  He looked at me seriously, then nodded reluctantly. “She had an abortion.”

  “What? Caspar—”

  “Not Amber! She’s a child, for heaven’s sake. Bea.”

  “You mean Bea had an abortion?”

  “Yes. Now you know.”

  I waited for the penny to drop. It didn’t. “Sorry, James, I don’t understand. Why did Bea have an abortion? When?”

  “I can’t believe you thought it was Amber.”

  “We were talking about her.”

  “I thought you wanted to know why we split up? What was going on between us? Well, now you do. I talk to Bea about the girls because she is their mother. I’m sorry that makes you feel left out, but you can’t let it. Though that isn’t up to me, it’s up to you. I’ve told you a million times how I feel about you, but it’s not enough, is it?”

  “Blind faith is hard when you feel like you’re being kept in the dark,” I said, and I still was. Women have abortions all the time. “Why was that the end of your marriage?”

  “Nothing I tell you will undo the fact that I was married and had three children. Don’t you see that?” James sounded cross.

  “I don’t want to undo that fact, I want to understand. I need to be able to.”

  James was quiet for a moment or two. Finally, focused somewhere I couldn’t see, he started to speak. “A couple of years after Maddy was born. It was quite late in the…um…pregnancy.” He was visibly uncomfortable. Oh no, poor James. Poor Bea.

  “Was there something wrong with the baby?” I probed gently. Did James make Bea have an abortion against her will? Was that the thing he didn’t want to tell me? He’d bullied her into it—

  “No,” he replied quietly. “It was a perfect, healthy little boy.”

  Oh no, worse. A mistake. A bad scan. Incorrect findings—

  “Except that it wasn’t mine.”

  “What?”

  “The baby wasn’t mine,” he said again.

  I was stunned. Of all the permutations, of all the possibilities, Bea’s fidelity to James I had never questioned. Why not? Because I couldn’t imagine being unfaithful to this man. I couldn’t imagine needing to. Bea had an affair. The perfect ex-wife had slept around and got pregnant. Poor, poor James. I reached out to him. I watched a range of emotions cross his face. Shock, disbelief, anger, then shock all over again. “How did you find out?”

  “It was one of those extraordinary things. I shouldn’t know to this day. I wish I didn’t. But Bea was away with the girls over half-term. I was at home. We had a flood, a leak—can’t even remember now. It was the middle of the night and I had no idea who we were insured with. Bea did all of that. You probably think that’s pathetic—”

  “Pretty usual, I imagine.”

  “I had to go searching through her desk. I couldn’t find it but, as Bea always told me, I can’t find most things that are in front of my nose. It was the name I noticed. Sophie Guest. I don’t even know why I looked at it. It was a medical report, a fetal autopsy, if you like. It told me in bold print that the eighteen-week fetus that had been removed was a normal specimen, male. I’ve had three children. I’ve seen them, their perfectly formed selves, on a screen at twelve weeks. Fingernails, toes, eyelashes, fully formed babies. At twelve weeks, Tessa, they are perfect.”

  I knew that. Cla
udia’s baby had floated happily in her mother’s amniotic fluid, sucking her thumb, at twelve weeks. On a black-and-white lunar photo, I’d felt a presence I could not ignore. A couple of weeks later, I saw that same perfect form, still. Lifeless. The minuscule heart had inexplicably stopped beating.

  “Sophie is Bea’s middle name,” said James, running his hands through his hair. “Guest is her mother’s maiden name. But that wasn’t what made me click. I assumed it was a wrong address and Bea was planning to post it back to the sender, some discreet address in Islington. I thought how very sad for poor Sophie Guest, blood type O. Then I saw the date of birth and literally froze. Sophie Guest was not Sophie Guest, she was my wife, and the boy that had been ‘removed’ was my son. Or so I thought that night.”

  “What did you do?”

  He sighed. “Tried to forgive her.” He was staring into his lap. “I think I was in shock, actually. I wanted it to be someone else’s.”

  I understood that.

  “But she swore she hadn’t been with anyone else. I didn’t know what was worse. Either way, the trust was broken. I couldn’t believe she’d got rid of our child without talking to me. It was awful. We stopped speaking, we stopped…well, everything died between us. It was always there in the room. The awful…truth.”

  “What happened?”

  James straightened up. “Eventually she put me out of my misery and confessed that the child had not been mine. Shortly afterward, she left. She never told me whose child I’d been mourning.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Responses formed in my head. Questions. Accusations. Recriminations. I sprang from shock to disbelief to anger and back to shock again. But words? Well, they failed me. What do you say to that? All I could do was take James’s hand in mine and squeeze it.

  “Meadowlands,” he said, shaking his head from side to side. He looked at me finally, utterly dejected. “The clinic. It was called Meadowlands. It sounded so nice.”

  I leaned over and kissed him softly on the lips. Then again, harder, feeding him love, filling him up again. Trying to make it all better. I clicked out of my seat belt and leaned into him, over him, kept on kissing. I wanted him to wrap himself up in the memory of it when he was in L.A. I wanted him to think about our future, not about the son he had lost and then lost again.

  Fourteen

  Pink Water

  WE PULLED UP OUTSIDE THE NONDESCRIPT BUILDING ON THE OUTSKIRTS of Epsom and I turned to the passenger seat. The poker face Amber had kept up since she’d got into the front of my Mini matched her father’s. But it didn’t bother me so much. In fact, I was beginning to see through it. The poker face itself was a tell. So I acknowledged it and moved on. “I know that was quite a long journey and I’m sorry, but you’ll soon see it was worth it. Come on, the surprise is inside. Now, remember, not a word to Daddy when he rings. This is a surprise for him too.”

  The girls climbed out of the back. I could tell that Maddy and Lulu were excited, because they kept looking about, half-expecting the Seven Dwarfs to jump out from behind a bush. I rang the buzzer and a girl with an impressive array of alloys through her ears and nose let us in. Maddy and Lulu stared, agog. Amber pretended not to notice.

  “You must be Tessa. Carlos is expecting you. Down the corridor, third door on the left.” She turned to the girls and flashed them a metallic smile. “Can I get you ladies some drinks? Juice, Coke, Fanta—we’ve got those Innocent smoothies in cartons. That’s what the Belles drink.”

  “The Bonne Belles?” asked Amber.

  The receptionist nodded. “We’ve had them here all week.” It was Innocent smoothies all around.

  I watched the mask fall from Amber’s face.

  “So you’re the one with the voice,” said the She-Jaws.

  Amber glanced at me for confirmation.

  “Yes,” I said. “But we’ve got a couple of backup singers here too.”

  Maddy and Lulu looked at Amber and they all laughed nervously.

  “What are you called?”

  “Lulu,” said Lulu.

  “I think that name’s taken,” said the girl.

  Lulu frowned.

  “I mean your band’s name, one lead singer and two backup singers, like the Supremes.”

  More frowns. “The Three Degrees.”

  “A little before their time,” I said.

  “Eternal, then?”

  They were laughing now, mostly at the metal woman, because they had no idea what she was talking about.

  “Come on, let’s get you down there and all will be revealed,” I said.

  Their curiosity piqued, they set off at a run. I tapped on the door and pushed it open. Carlos leaned back in his chair, feet on the mixing desk, an unlit cigar in his mouth. “Tessa, come in, come in.”

  But I couldn’t. Three girls stood on the studio threshold and stared. A bank of tiny buttons and slides swung wide in front of them, a crescent moon of magic technology. Beyond that there was a glass wall and a room that looked like an instrument shop. Guitars were propped up, a huge synthesizer, a piano, saxophones, three drum kits…

  “Sorry about the mess. We haven’t had time to clear up from yesterday. But we’re all set.”

  In the middle stood a solitary mic. Amber turned, wide-eyed, to me.

  “I thought,” I said, steering her and the other two into the room, “that you could record your best-man song and we could have a few CDs made for the rest of your family. What do you think?”

  The smile said “I’d love to,” but a line of hesitation was etched between her eyebrows. “I haven’t got the words or the music.”

  “Don’t worry. That’s taken care of. It’s the music to ‘Can’t Help Loving That Man of Mine,’ right?”

  She nodded.

  “Well, a good friend of mine provided me with your brilliant words.” I thought for a second it was going to backfire and she would storm off, so I took her hand to keep her with me. “Your dad would so love it and I thought the girls could be backup singers.”

  Immediately, they were jumping up and down, and Carlos, a big softy, gave them enormous handheld microphones. Amber still hesitated.

  “So, how about it, Amber? Do you want to make a record?” asked Carlos.

  “It was supposed to be a surprise,” she said. Maddy and Lulu looked nervous all of a sudden.

  “It will be,” I insisted.

  “How do you know about it?”

  “Fran told me. She says it’s brilliant. She told me how hard you and Caspar worked on it.”

  Amber leaned against the wall. “He should be here.”

  “Would you like him to be?” I asked gently.

  Her face creased. “I’ve been so mean to him.”

  “He didn’t say anything to me,” I said.

  “You mean it? He doesn’t hate me?”

  “No, Amber, far from it.”

  “Really?”

  I was fairly sure of this, since he was hiding in the next room, waiting for my all-clear, desperate to be a legitimate part of her life again. I nodded.

  She looked again, longingly, at the mic. “We shouldn’t do it without him.”

  “Pleeeeeeeease, Amber, can we?” begged Lulu.

  “I’d love to, really I would, but it isn’t right. He did all the hard work.”

  I smiled. “What if I told you he was here?” I opened the door to the corridor. “Caspar!”

  Amber yelped with stunned excitement, then clamped her hand over her mouth.

  “What is it?” I asked. Something was scaring her. Had I got this wrong?

  “What about Mum and Dad?”

  “They’re not here.”

  “Oh, Tessa, I…” She swallowed.

  “Don’t you want to see him?”

  “I do, it’s just…I told a terrible lie. I blamed him for something he didn’t do.”

  “The dress,” I said, as quietly as possible. Amber’s eyes darted over her sisters’ heads. She gave a brief nod. That was all I needed to see an
d hear. I pulled her close and lowered my voice further. “You’re a great girl, Amber, a great girl. I think we’ve all put too much pressure on you recently and I’m sorry for that. I also happen to know that Caspar is a very special person. We’ll work everything else out. Don’t worry. I know we can’t talk here, and you don’t have to tell me anything if you don’t want to, but I’m here for you if you need me.”

  She blinked.

  “So? Are we going to do this?” I asked, straightening up.

  Maddy and Lulu, as ever, looked to their older sister. Suddenly, Amber threw off her jacket and grinned. “You bet.” The other two immediately followed suit.

  Relieved, I called Caspar’s name again.

  “Darlin’,” said Carlos. “You’re going to have to yell louder than that. All the rooms are soundproofed.”

  “Why don’t you go and get him, Amber?” I suggested. “He’s in studio eight.”

  Amber looked fit to burst.

  “Go on. He’s longing to see you.”

  She bit her lip, then suddenly propelled herself out of the room.

  “Young love,” said Carlos. “Bloody liability.”

  Maddy pointed her microphone at him. “That’s a rude word and you’re not allowed to say it. Twenty p, please.”

  Carlos pulled his boots off the desk. “I’m sorry. You’re absolutely right.”

  I grinned. Carlos was known for reducing starlets to tears in order to get a decent note out of them, not handing over coins for an eight-year-old’s swear box.

  When Amber and Caspar rejoined us, I noticed with pleasure that her chin was a little redder than when she’d left. Now, Caspar wasn’t the hirsute type, but neither was he lacking in a bit of facial growth these days. Oh, the joys of snogging and nothing more.

  He and the girls went behind the glass, he took up position with his guitar, and I sneaked a photo on my mobile to send to Fran and Nick, my coconspirators. He looked divine, sitting there tuning up. Amber was watching him with the awe I reserved for Eric Clapton.

  I knew that Carlos was humoring me, until Amber stepped up to the microphone and sang a scale for him. She had an extraordinarily throaty sound for someone so young. The brief look he flashed me halfway through was enough. The girl could sing. It was as simple as that. Now Carlos wanted to know what he could get out of her. Occasionally, I heard a buzz from Amber’s jacket pocket. I told her she had some messages and a few missed calls. She came out of the studio and checked her phone.

 

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