‘Hetty, I’m sorry but—’
Hester grabs her arm. ‘Hang on. Down there. Look.’
For a moment she thinks Harriet is going to resist. Then, awkwardly, she pushes her glasses back on with shaky hands, turns back to the window and peers out into the darkened garden.
‘Where?’
‘Over there? See? Far side of the terrace.’
Harriet just manages to make out a distant, blurred silhouette. Testily, the nausea resurfacing now she is on her feet, she asks, ‘Who the hell is it?’
An infinitesimal pause: Hester’s last chance to stop the avalanche she set in motion all those weeks before when the letter arrived. They are standing at a crossroads, she knowingly and her sister unwittingly. After tonight, their lives will change forever.
‘Your son,’ she says.
CHAPTER 16
‘So?’
‘Waddja mean, so?’
‘You got me into this,’ Ben snarls. ‘You better be there . . .’
‘I told you! My dad—’
‘Speak to your mum, then! Jesus!’
Ben shovels the heel of the French stick into his mouth for want of anything better to do. He’s beside himself with rage and anxiety. The crust is hard, the piece overlarge. Too angry to chew, he attempts to swallow it whole; it sticks in his throat and he starts coughing, then thumping his chest furiously to dislodge the wedge, to no avail. The blood starts singing in his ears; tears spring into his eyes. He gesticulates wildly to Jez to do something, but Jez, lost in misery as the promise of the impending party evaporates and his own shortcomings and powerlessness are laid bare, has his gaze fixed on his own plate.
Ben, choking and now beetroot-red, yanks at Jez’s arm and his friend finally cottons on to the emergency. He leaps up from his stool and starts dancing around the kitchen in panic. ‘Shit! Shit! What the fuck’s wrong with you?’
Ben is pointing desperately at his back, trying to indicate that Jez should try hitting him there, when Deirdre Nairstrom sails in through the garden door laden with several designer carriers, karate-chops Ben smartly between his shoulder blades and frees the obstruction, which shoots out of his mouth and skitters into the island sink.
‘Honestly, Jez,’ she says, barely breaking her stride, ‘you are worse than useless in a crisis. You okay, Ben?’
He nods weakly, tears streaming from his eyes.
‘The pair of you couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery.’ And she disappears into the hall, calling to her son, ‘I’ve just bought you a new shirt for Friday night.’
‘See?’ says Jez in despair. ‘It’s hopeless.’
‘Maybe,’ rasps Ben, clutching at straws and his throat, ‘we could ask Louisa if she’s got any bright ideas?’
And, of course, she has.
‘Chill, babes,’ she purrs down the phone. ‘Ask Jez what time his village hall crap is due to end, yeah?’
Midnight.
‘Okay, so you gotta be back at your crib by then, and Jez takes over from you for a bit till you can sneak out again. No probs! And don’t forget, I’ll be there.’
Ben knows. Oh God, he knows.
‘Okay, so, like, me and Kat and Els will be there from the off and, trust me, babes, we won’t stand for any shit.’
He bets they won’t.
‘Yeah? So, like, you don’t need to worry. It’s all good.’
It’s so good, in fact, that Ben risks telling her about Milo. Jez’s eyebrows shoot up.
‘A baby!’ squeals Louisa. ‘This is, like, that Russian bird’s rugrat? Mint.’
‘Belarusian, but yeah. Still . . . maybe I shouldn’t bring him. You know, the noise and that? And, like, if his mum found out—’
‘Yeah but, babes, she won’t, will she? Oh! No, hang on a minute!’ Ben waits for Louisa to reveal her next brilliant idea. ‘Tell you what! Nats could sit instead.’
‘Gnats?’
‘Nats, my sister Nats. She sits for, like, everyone. Babies love her.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Sorted! I’ll get Nats to, like, look after the baby while you party. Am I a genius or what?’
You, thinks Ben, are not only a genius, you are the most wonderful, beautiful, glorious creature who ever lived.
‘Totally,’ he says.
‘What about me, though?’ whines Jez as Ben ends the call. ‘How’m I gonna get out of doing this fucking barn-dance thing?’
Ben, still glowing from his conversation with Louisa, is utterly devoid of sympathy. ‘Best get your shit sorted then, bro,’ he crows, ‘or you’re gonna miss all the fun, n’cha?’ The party that had loomed ahead of him as a potential Titanic-proportioned disaster has now assumed the aura of a paradisiacal dream. With Louisa Jellinek on his team, why worry? He can’t wait for Friday. Piss-up in a brewery? He is so going to prove Mrs Nairstrom wrong.
All that remains to complete the master plan is effect his escape from the weekend in Bakewell. He wishes he’d asked Louisa for some suggestions.
Then he has a brainwave of his own.
‘Saturday?’ says George doubtfully. ‘Although with your exam on Monday . . .’
‘I know,’ says Ben, nodding furiously. ‘Goes back to uni on Sunday. I mean, it’s dead good of him to give up his last day with his rents.’
‘Rents?’
‘Parents.’ Ben watches his father closely, can see him weakening. Then, casually, as though it has only just occurred to him, ‘Plus, you and Mum can have a weekend on your own. Which you deserve, no question. And I mean, it’s not like Auntie Lynn will mind if I don’t go, not really, not when it’s my future at stake. I’ll be revising most of the time anyway.’
Has he overcooked that one? Apparently not, because George is nodding, albeit with knitted brows.
‘Top of which, I bet I get more out of a couple of hours with Ralph than a whole term in class. I mean, it’ll be quality.’
He stops. Experience has taught him not to overegg his arguments. George considers the proposition, chewing his cheek absent-mindedly. Ben can hardly breathe.
‘The only thing that worries me,’ says George eventually, sending Ben’s hopes into a nosedive, ‘aside from Auntie Lynn being disappointed, is we’d be leaving you alone in the house over the weekend. I don’t think your mother would be too happy about that.’
Ben frowns, as if acknowledging a valid parental concern, then says with disarming reticence, ‘Thing is, Dad, wasn’t gonna mention it, but I was asked if I could, like, help out Daria and Artem this weekend.’
‘Oh?’
‘’Course, I explained we were going away . . .’
‘Help out? How?’
Ben smothers an incipient grin. If there’s one thing George—and indeed Isabelle—cannot resist, it’s the opportunity to render help whenever and wherever it’s needed. And even whenever and wherever it isn’t.
Careful! Ben cautions himself, heart hammering. ‘Oh . . . some event in the village they were invited to on Friday evening. I mean, they don’t get out much, what with the baby and that, plus all the worry about their asylum applications . . .’
George assumes a sympathetic expression, as Ben had anticipated. Despite his initial reservations when the events over Christmas had been laid bare in all their danger, coupled with his patent disappointment that Hester and Harriet had failed to seek his help from the beginning, George had quickly assumed his habitual championing of the underdog. No-one could have been more assiduous since in researching how and where support for Daria and Artem might be found.
Ben, buoyed by his success so far but ultra-sensitive to the workings of his father’s mind, swiftly pre-empts a possible further reservation. ‘’Course, Daria won’t leave him with, like, anybody, I mean, a random babysitter or whatever. . . understandably . . .’
George understands.
Ben presses home his advantage. ‘But me, I’m different, ’cos Milo knows me and she can totally trust me with him.’
George acknowledges his son’s surp
rising facility with the infant with a further serious nod.
‘So Daria suggested, like—I mean, this was before I told her I couldn’t—that I could stay over at theirs and look after Milo. You know, while they were out having a bit of a break. Probably let me stay Saturday night, too, if I asked . . .’
For a moment, things hang in the balance, George’s lingering doubts about his son’s integrity warring with his unquenchable goodness of heart and, frankly, his desperation to see Ben succeed in his studies.
‘I must admit, the chance of one-to-one tuition with Ralph Pickerlees does seem too good an opportunity to miss. A masterclass, almost. And far be it from me to deny a little pleasure to poor Daria and Artem—God knows they’ve been through the mill these past few months, bless them. I’ll just need to check with your mother . . .’
CHAPTER 17
Harriet’s headache has bloomed into an exquisite example of the crawl-up-the-stairs-on-all-fours, kill-me-now variety, every beat of blood sending shafts of agony through her skull. Vision blurred, eye sockets on fire, stomach in revolt, she eases her head back onto the armchair, willing herself not to vomit but to concentrate somehow on the words spewing out of Hester’s mouth. If she could only cross that couple of yards, roll onto, into, under—she doesn’t care which—those white, white sheets, sink her head into the pillow . . . but Hester is firmly ensconced on the edge of the bed and looks in no mood to move or, indeed, go anywhere.
Hester regards her whey-faced sister with little pity, so great is her agitation. All very well for Harriet to plead a headache and fatigue, but what about that poor man outside in the dark? He has been waiting forty-three years for this encounter and Hester is damned if she is going to make him—her nephew!—wait a moment longer than necessary.
It is, she allows, a measure of how poorly Harriet is feeling that she hasn’t said a word since Hester dropped her bombshell. Well, she’s certainly not going to waste the opportunity . . .
The tablets Harriet had taken on her return are starting with agonising slowness to make inroads, nibbling away at the periphery of the pain. Cushioned by the chair, she feels the hawser-like muscles at the back of her neck relaxing ever so slightly; she can now move her head, albeit not very far, without that instant rush of nausea. She finds she can just about control it if she breathes shallowly through her mouth. Across the room, oblivious, Hester continues her diatribe.
‘. . . arrived a couple of months ago. The end of April, in fact. You were out at the shops or somewhere. The post came. A letter addressed to Miss H. Ribbleswell, which was a bit of a shock. Very odd. I thought, old school friend? University? Anyway, I opened it, saw straightaway that it was meant for you.’ She ferrets in her bag, withdraws the crumpled envelope she has been guarding all this time, and thrusts it across the void.
Harriet, unwilling to risk sitting forward, remains where she is.
Exasperated, Hester tosses the envelope into her sister’s lap. ‘Read it.’
Harriet tries to say something, fails, weakly flaps a hand.
Hester huffs noisily. ‘Well, I’ll tell you what it says, then, if you can’t be bothered! I swear to God, Harriet, I would never have believed this of you. I can’t tell you how much I . . . All these years! Did Jim know? I only hope for his sake he didn’t.’
Harriet makes an indecipherable noise that Hester reads as an interruption.
‘Let me finish! So I scanned it—hard not to, really, it’s pretty short—and I couldn’t believe what I was reading. Stephen—that’s his name; I don’t know what name you gave him—had managed to trace you, but—and this shows you how thoughtful he is—he’d deliberately used your maiden name to alert you in case your husband was around when the letter arrived. Of course he didn’t know Jim had . . . Anyway, he thought it was much less likely anyone else would open it that way. That’s the kind of person he is.
‘I’ll let him tell you everything in due course, but the long and short of it is, I decided I would contact him myself. Now, don’t look at me like that!’
Harriet isn’t aware she’s been looking any way at all; she has had her eyes closed most of the time.
‘. . . I know you of old. Anything you don’t want to face up to, you back away. Run away, if you can.’
Do I? thinks Harriet. Do I really? I like to think I’m one of life’s copers . . . Is that what she really thinks of me?
‘. . . always fought your battles for you. No, don’t argue, I have!’ Hester, disconcerted by the unreadable silence from her sister, is feeling ever more aggrieved, an emotion that always brings out the worst in her. Harriet’s lack of denial or explanation is stoking the fires of Hester’s anger. ‘We spoke several times on the phone, and the more we spoke, the more convinced I became that he was genuine, that it was true, that you’d been lying to me, to everyone, for years. Unbelievable. I kept thinking, how did she do it without anyone knowing? Then I checked the dates. I was in France, wasn’t I? That six months at the Sorbonne. And Ma and Pa, of course, were in Germany. How very convenient!
‘I suggested several opportunities for Stephen to come and confr—meet you, but they didn’t work out for one reason or another. If you want my opinion, I think he’s scared. And who can blame him? Mother abandons him, makes no attempt to find him—I assume you didn’t? He must be in knots. Anyway, finally we establish we’re both in Italy the same week—he’s over on business—and he and I agreed that neutral territory might be best. So I arrange everything for tonight and then you get caught up in this wretched accident and start running all over the place after a woman you don’t know from Adam, while your own son is sitting out there in the dark waiting for you to deign to show up!
‘And . . . and . . .’
Harriet lifts heavy eyelids and looks across the gloomy room at her sister, who is now tearing a tissue to shreds.
‘And I have been nursing this awful secret for weeks and you just blithely get on with your life as if nothing has . . . playing grandmother for Milo and sounding off about other people’s children and all the while . . . oh!’ Hester raises the last scrap of tissue to her eyes.
The room falls silent but for Hester’s ragged breathing.
Harriet stares in astonishment at her sister. Is Hester crying? Brusque, armour-plated, battle-axe Hester?
‘Hetty . . .’ she starts, but Hester is on her feet, sniffing furiously and pointing at the envelope on her lap.
‘I don’t want to talk to you! But I tell you this: we’ve had our moments over the years, God knows, and there have been times when I could cheerfully have throttled you, but through it all, through everything, I always respected you. But this! This! Now read that bloody letter and then do the decent thing and get down into that garden and meet your son, you selfish, wicked woman!’
And then, with a slam of the door that reverberates viciously through Harriet’s head, she is gone.
Harriet doesn’t read the letter. She sits for a few more minutes staring sightlessly into the dark and then very, very gingerly feels her way into the bathroom, where she is violently sick. She washes her face in cold water and delicately teases a comb through her tangled hair, each pass of the teeth grating against her tender scalp. She can’t bring herself to look in the mirror above the basin. Instead, she gropes her way semi-blind to the bedroom door and, inching it open, slides into the corridor, shielding her eyes from the light. Mercifully, there’s no-one about. Distantly she hears muted chatter from the bar, the chink of glasses. Hugging the walls, grateful for their solidity, she slips towards a side door and out into the garden.
CHAPTER 18
‘Ben? Ben! There’s someone to see you.’
Ben surfaces from the complexities of Ted Hughes’s poetry, head full of hawks and hooked feet. ‘What?’ He glances at the clock on his computer: nine thirty-five pm.
‘Someone to see you,’ repeats his mother, calling up from the foot of the stairs. There is a muffled exchange between her and the visitor on the doorstep—Jez, presuma
bly.
‘Tell him to come up,’ he yells. ‘I’m working.’
‘Ben!’ This time his mother’s voice is tempered with a little steel. ‘Will you come down, please. Right now.’
Ben, irritated, plods to the top of the stairs. ‘What?’ Peering past Isabelle, he sees a diminutive figure, swamped by a voluminous hoodie.
‘This is Natalie,’ says Isabelle, as though she’s not at all convinced by what she has been told. ‘She’d like a word.’ She frowns a question up at Ben, who, equally puzzled, lopes down the stairs. ‘Ta,’ he says to his mother as he passes her, then waits until she retreats to the lounge before turning to the caller. ‘Wotcha.’
The girl throws back her hood to uncover cornrows with bead-threaded braids and extraordinarily large almond-shaped eyes behind outsized glasses. ‘Hiya,’ she says. ‘I’m Nats.’
Ben stares in astonishment.
‘You know—Nats? Lou’s sister?’
‘Oh,’ Ben manages. ‘Right . . .’ Befuddled by hours of relentless revision, he’s unsuccessfully trying to reconcile this tiny black girl with the leggy wonder that is Louisa.
Nats laughs, revealing blindingly white perfect teeth. The laugh has a definite edge to it. ‘I guess Lou never said. She’s such an airhead. I’m adopted. Mum’s a sucker for racial integration, if not miscegenation.’
Ben has no idea what she is talking about, nor can he ask; words, even the most banal, have deserted him.
‘We going to do this all on the doorstep?’ She looks up at Ben combatively. ‘You want me to help you out or not?’
Ben, still mute, steps back and ushers her in. Where to take her? She looks towards the lounge door but he quickly makes for the kitchen, shutting the door smartly behind them. He finds a voice. ‘Want a Coke?’
‘You kidding? Teeth rot. I’ll have a coffee—or a glass of water, if that’s too difficult. You’re the cook, right?’
‘What? Oh, yeah,’ says Ben, caught between the sink (water) and the kettle (coffee).
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