by Clare Boyd
He wasn’t the only one who was going to have to adjust to Alice’s new status as his daughter. Beatrice and Harry and Olivia had gained a sister. No, they had always had a sister. A sister they hadn’t known about. Anger towards Francesca for holding this back from them for so long burned inside him.
He picked up his mobile and pressed her number, pulling at his hair as he waited for her to pick up. It rang out, cheating him of the opportunity to scream at her, ‘How could you have done it to me? To the kids? To him? Did you ever plan to tell me? Was Alice going to go through her whole life not knowing who her real father was?’
Her lie had undermined every single intimate moment they had ever shared. He thought he had known her, been able to read everything in her eyes, believed her to be the only person he could trust. Meanwhile, she was holding back the biggest secret that could ever be kept, swept along in her blame-game. How had he got her so wrong?
When he imagined confronting Dilys tonight, confessing to her, he anticipated her justified rage and accusations of betrayal, and was frightened of how her fury would fly.
He wanted to run.
* * *
The children were in bed. John had opened a bottle of red wine, not for the purpose of softening Dilys, but for his own fortification. Within the half-hour that he had been waiting for her, he had downed two glasses. He had not experienced the light relief of drunkenness with those first few glasses. Perhaps Francesca’s news had sobered him for the rest of time.
The sound of Dilys’ car arriving on the gravel sent the wine churning in his gut. He swallowed repeatedly as he pushed Dilys’ glass around on the work surface, letting the sound of glass on marble grate on his teeth.
He put the wine and two glasses on a tray, and headed to the door, grabbing two rugs from the blanket box. The kitchen was not the right place to tell her. It was their family space, their safe place. What if the children woke up and overheard? He anticipated Dilys’ distress, the loss of composure, her loss of control. It would be the beginning of the end of his marriage. And, he welcomed it. Regardless of Francesca, he should have left Dilys years ago. With Alice, came the truth. It would be liberating to unchain his secrets. As he looked into the future, he captured a glimpse of freedom. He had wanted it for so long. In this respect, he would have the upper hand for once. This self-possession and certainty gave him a perverse sense of satisfaction. He was not scared of losing Dilys.
He watched as she parked her Mini Cooper in the usual space between John’s vintage Porsche and their Land Rover Discovery. Dilys had chosen the cars, except his Porsche. He loved the Porsche. No wonder it was the car for the mid-lifers; he felt young and free when he drove it.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ she shouted across the drive, seeing him light the lantern candle next to the oak bench. He and Dilys used to smoke joints on this bench together, before they gave up. Now, dinner-party guests smoked cigarettes on it and stubbed out their butts in the soil of the potted bay tree.
‘I need to talk to you.’
She stopped in her tracks, and held her tote bag in front of her like a shield. ‘Can’t we go inside? It’s freezing out here.’
‘Bea’s not asleep yet and I don’t want to risk her overhearing.’ John’s voice sounded odd to his own ear, unusually low and serious. It reminded him of Robert.
‘What’s happened?’
‘Here, wrap yourself in this.’ He offered the blanket and then poured her some wine.
‘You’re so weird, John,’ she mumbled.
She sat down and pulled the scratchy tartan rug over the shoulders of her camel coat. Her nose was pink at the tip and John noted, unemotionally, how beautiful she looked. In the candlelight, her features were softened and the blue of her eyes was less intense.
‘For a long time, neither of us has been happy,’ John began, expecting her to disagree. Instead, she took a slow sip of wine.
John began to talk around the subject, about Robert’s illness and his mother’s affairs, but he got the impression that Dilys was neither surprised nor interested in these details. Dilys didn’t like details. Perhaps she sensed he was procrastinating, terrified of uttering the words out loud, nervous about her hysteria.
‘For Christ’s sake, John, just cut to the chase, will you? You’re doing my head in.’
John stood up and looked up to the black sky, seeking out the star formations to give him courage. It seemed easier to tell the universe somehow. ‘I did a terrible thing to you and to Robert.’
‘You’re going to tell me you fucked Francesca, aren’t you?’ Dilys sighed.
John spun round to face her. She was looking up at him with a smirk in one corner of her lips. ‘Well? Is this the big news?’ She might as well have yawned.
‘You knew?’
‘It doesn’t take a bloody genius to work it out.’ She knocked back half a glass of wine, leaving two smudged Joker-like curls at the edges of her lips. ‘Can I go in now?’
‘No. I’m not finished.’
‘Look, John,’ she said, standing up and shrugging off the rug, ‘I decided a long time ago to accept that you and Francesca have this special little bond, and, to be frank, it makes me want to hurl, but I’m your wife, and she will always be your brother’s wife, and one dirty little fuck won’t change that.’
‘But it changed everything.’
Dilys blinked, a tiny moment of uncertainty. ‘What? You want to run off into the sunset together now, do you?’
‘Today, I found out that Alice is mine.’
The nasty smile fell away, and she wiped the wine stains from her mouth neatly and accurately. It was as though she was looking in a mirror. ‘What? No, no,’ she murmured, smoothing her hands over her head to her ponytail, which she tightened. The hair pulled her eyes into narrow slits.
Earlier, John had wanted to claw back some power, but the flash of pain in her face was ghastly. He hated what he had done to her. ‘I’m so sorry, Dilys.’
And he waited for her outburst, for her tears or her incandescence, but she remained cool. She pulled her car keys out of her tote bag.
‘A drive will clear my head,’ she stated simply.
‘Is that a good idea?’ John trotted after her, towards the cars.
‘I would like a drive, darling,’ she smiled, disconnected.
John’s palms started sweating as he watched her climb into her Mini Cooper.
The headlights blinded him momentarily. The exhaust fired up. The engine began to rev. His eyesight cleared of the hot-white blobs and he stepped out of the way. She was backing up, rather than coming forward out of the space.
‘Careful! You’re backing into the…’ he began loudly, as the rear lights glowed red onto the garage doors, inches away from hitting them. Before he could shout another warning, she accelerated forward and swerved into the left side of his Porsche. The crunching sound of the collision echoed through the countryside.
He ran towards his car, ‘What the hell…?’
She straightened up the Mini Cooper, into its original parking place, which he guessed meant that she had finished with the Porsche. Was she going to go for the Land Rover next, or was she going to drive away?
She did neither. The wheels skidded on the gravel and the car propelled forward towards him. He turned, but before he could run, he felt an explosion of pain in his back. He collapsed and the noise of the car’s engine cut out, and then his brain.
Sometime later, he came to.
Hands were gripping his ankles, and gravel scraped his shoulders as he as pulled along.
Dizzying, unmanageable pain ricocheted through him. He wondered whether he was still alive. He was adrift, untethered to his consciousness; overlapping images of Robert’s face before he jumped swelled and shifted before his eyes. Could he be on the bridge with him again? But then he became aware of savage panting at his feet, and he could just make out the blur of Dilys’ beautiful face, like an angel of death, above him.
* * *
A paramedic asked him to stay still, asked him how much it hurt from one to ten – he groaned a ten – asked him his weight, his age, cannulated him, and administered IV Morphine and Midazolam. He heard Dilys’ voice in the background, replying for him. Blue lights illuminated the trees above him and the metal door of his Porsche was by his head. He closed his eyes and gasped for breath.
‘Francesca,’ he murmured, in his head perhaps. ‘Francesca.’
One paramedic held his head straight while the other fixed a hard collar around his neck. They rolled him on his side, slipped a spinal board underneath him, and rolled him onto his back once again. He experienced a mind-bending shock of pain, radiating through his chest and his neck and into his head. Before they wheeled him into the ambulance, Dilys squeezed his hand and told him, tearfully, that she loved him and that she would follow on to the hospital as soon as she had dropped the children off with his parents.
The children! He was grateful that they could not see him now, in such a mess, yet he was so utterly relieved to still be alive for them. The acute disorientation had made him think of death, and how close it felt, and how much he desired the kind of oblivion that death would provide, some respite from the relentlessness of this mind-bending pain.
The paramedic sat by his head and talked to him. With every bend in the road and every pothole, John moaned and cried out, trying to answer the paramedic’s questions, questions that he heard through the confusion that the agony brought. His body shivered uncontrollably, and the paramedic asked him to take deep breaths as he covered him in a foil blanket.
There was a strange acceptance of his fate as reality slid about on a new axis, his vision swimming and his mind bending. He hoped that the doctors in A&E knew what they were doing, that they were good doctors, that they were not too sleep-deprived or too overworked to save him.
He had not been able to glean whether his injuries were life-threatening, He thought of how easy it would be to slip away to join Robert on the other side.
Chapter Forty-Five
Francesca
Alice and I were hidden away safely behind Lucy’s blue door in her London town house. I was drinking coffee at a vast concrete table, with a view through the bi-fold doors of a patch of fake grass, a sunken trampoline and a high-rise block of flats. Alice was playing dens upstairs with Finn and Mischa. If Robert had stayed alive, we might well have aspired to this London life. As it was now, I wished to see real grass and a forest of trees, but I was unbelievably grateful to be there. We had stayed overnight, and Lucy and Graham had insisted we stay all weekend. My mobile lay face down near my fingertips, just in case – just in case John called to talk about Alice.
‘You’re going to have to try to forgive yourself, somehow, Fran,’ Lucy said, taking a sip of coffee from her over-sized mug. ‘You’re not a bad person. Robert wasn’t necessarily the better half of your relationship. Or the more honest.’
‘His uncle, Ralph, said a weird thing the other day.’
‘Why doesn’t that surprise me?’ She laughed.
‘It was a lucid moment, and he implied that Robert had been the type to cheat.’
The pause from Lucy was enough to make me curious.
‘You think he was, too?’
‘I have no idea.
‘Has Graham ever said anything?’ I asked her, knowing that Graham had never liked Robert.
‘No. Graham never told me anything. And he would have, believe me.’
‘But you think Robert was the type?’
‘You’re not the type and look at you.’
‘True.’
‘If he had, would you feel better about having cheated on him?’
I was about to deny it, but couldn’t. ‘Kind of,’ I admitted.
‘Has John ever hinted he knew anything about Robert and other women?’
‘No. Never.’
‘Did they hate each other, John and Robert?’
‘What? No!’
‘It’s pretty full-on shitty to sleep with your brother’s wife.’
‘It’s hard to explain. I know it sounds unforgivable. In isolation.’
‘You think?’ Lucy said, sarcastically.
I didn’t care what she thought of John. It was convenient to blame John rather than me, her best friend. She didn’t understand what it was like to be in thrall to someone as powerful as Robert. John had looked up to Robert, but he had been bullied by him. I was John’s rebellion, perhaps.
‘There was rivalry. John told me that Robert went after the girls he knew John liked. And he mostly got them.’
‘Charming.’
‘Robert was Camilla and Patrick’s favourite. He was a go-getter, much more like them. They’re always putting John down. Little digs all the time.’
‘So, he and Robert had issues.’
‘Major issues,’ I said. ‘But they got on well. The three of us had such a laugh together. They confided in each other, too. John was always there for Robert when he was depressed.’
‘There for Robert? Or there for you?’
I paused before I answered. It was hard to explain to anyone else how much Robert’s moods had ruled us both. Not only had they controlled Robert, they had controlled us too. We had been hauled into his drama, and responded conscientiously to his neediness and manipulation, his highs and lows. His addiction had power because we loved Robert.
‘Both of us,’ I said, eventually. ‘The three of us were like a dysfunctional unit. We were too intertwined.’
‘And it all revolved around Robert.’
‘We were his carers, in a way, without knowing it.’
‘I feel bad,’ Lucy said, moving the single sunflower in the centre of the table to the left by two inches.
‘You feel bad? Why?’
‘I should never have persuaded you to move to that bloody village.’
‘You didn’t exactly have all the facts.’
‘Still. You kept telling me it wasn’t a good idea.’
‘And I went ahead anyway. I’m the idiot.’
‘You’re not an idiot.’
‘I called the estate agents yesterday to ask if they’d put it on the market again as soon as possible.’
‘Was that a bit hasty?’
‘Probably. But I need to do something.’
‘Maybe it’s a good thing.’
‘That I’ve estranged Alice from the only family she has?’
‘That they know the truth now.’
I poured myself some more coffee, noticing it was already ten o’clock. Lucy and I had been talking since we had woken up at seven thirty.
‘Where’s Graham?’
‘On a run.’
‘Avoiding me?’
‘Of course not.’
‘You chose well, there,’ I said.
‘He’s not bad.’ It was that familiar smile. The smile that women who love their husbands can muster, even after eight years of marriage and two children. I don’t think I had ever smiled like that about Robert.
I stared at my phone. ‘He won’t call, will he?’
‘He’ll want to be part of Alice’s life, Fran.’
‘But it will be begrudgingly. He’ll hate me.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Which means yes.’
‘And if he didn’t hate you?’
A smile radiated from within, and I wasn’t sure it had moved onto my face, but when I saw Lucy’s despairing and worried frown, I knew without seeing my reflection that the smile had come through.
‘You’re hopeless,’ Lucy said.
And then my mobile phone rang into the silence, and I jumped off the bench. ‘Oh god! I can’t talk to him.’
‘Answer it, you idiot!’ Lucy cried.
The ring continued, loud into the chasm of their kitchen.
Lucy picked up my phone to check the caller. ‘It’s Paul,’ she said, shoving it across the table at me.
I refused to take it. ‘I can’t talk to Paul.’
The phon
e rang out. I slid back onto the bench, trying not to look at Lucy. It lay in the exact same position as it had been in before, but now I saw it differently: before it offered hope; now I realised it was only going to provide more heartache.
We heard Graham’s trainers squeak down the white painted stairs.
When he came in, I tried to plaster a smile onto my face, but there was no hiding the morose atmosphere in the room.
‘Looks like you both need one of my special brunches. Fried or scrambled?’
He squeezed my shoulders affectionately. I had grown to love Graham as much as I loved Lucy. When Lucy had first introduced me to him, she had asked me to guess his job. I had wanted to say ski-bum or mountain climber, judging by his torn down jacket, baseball cap and fleece; his tan was more Mont Blanc than St Tropez. I had said, ‘Car salesman’ to tease her. When she had told me he was a banker, I had thought she was winding me up. Now, he looked more like a banker: the spikes of strawberry-blond hair were short, and his face was gaunt. He was a banker who should never have been a banker.