‘He’s critical: he’s suffered a massive failure of the aortic valve, and he needs replacement surgery or he won’t survive.’
‘What brought it on?’
‘Nothing. We think it’s a congenital thing, a defect; the consultant who saw him described it as a time-bomb that could have gone off years ago.’
‘When was he transferred?’
‘Two hours ago. He could be in surgery in Edinburgh already.’
‘How long will the procedure take?’
‘Four hours, minimum. At least, that’s what I recall from medical-school lectures. I’ve never seen one done.’
I ruffled Ellie’s hair and gave her a hug. He was critical, but he was alive, and they don’t make them tougher than Mac Blackstone. ‘Come on, sis,’ I murmured. ‘Let’s get down there. We’ll get him some bacon rolls on the way; if I know him he’ll be hungry when he wakes up.’
8
We didn’t burn any rubber on the road to Edinburgh Royal Infirmary; there was no need for we knew he’d be in theatre longer than it would take us to drive there. Before we left, Dr Oliphant phoned and found a colleague there, advising her that we were on our way. She promised to contact her media-relations people. It was necessary: when we rejoined Conrad and Mary we discovered that a Grampian Television crew was camped outside.
We gave them the slip. . I’m an expert at that, when I want to be. . and headed off in Ellie’s Peugeot towards Perth and the M90.
Conrad drove, with my sister navigating: I chose to sit in the back with Mary.
‘I should have known,’ she muttered, as we cruised along the A914. ‘I should have seen the warning signs.’
I looked at her in profile. It was night, but in Scotland there’s always a lighter blue glow in the north at that time of year, so I could see her clearly. ‘No, you shouldn’t,’ I reassured her, ‘because there weren’t any warning signs. The boy Oliphant said that a consultant cardiologist wouldn’t have spotted this before it happened, unless Dad had been hooked up to an ECG machine.’
‘I should still have known. I’m his wife.’
‘And Ellie’s his daughter: she saw him last weekend and she didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.’
‘Still.’
‘Mary,’ I said firmly, ‘stop blaming yourself. There might have been things in life you should have dealt with better, but not this.’
I don’t know what made me say that. Stress, I suppose: it can make your tongue do things you don’t mean it to, and I sure as hell didn’t want to get into that, not there, not then. I saw her frown, her profile sharp in the gloaming that passes for night in high-summer Scotland, and I looked forward. ‘See if you can find some local radio, Ellie,’ I called out quickly. ‘If someone at the hospital tipped off the telly, they could have it too.’
We had missed the eleven o’clock bulletin on Kingdom Radio by about ten minutes, but we caught up with Radio Forth at midnight as we drove along the Edinburgh bypass. Sure enough, there was a piece at the top of the news, read by a harsh-voiced woman, about ‘Scots movie star Oz Blackstone in mercy dash to the bedside of his sick father’.
They were waiting for us at the entrance to the hospital, three television crews, three radio reporters, and the rest of the pack, more than I cared to count. Conrad and I flanked Mary and Ellie, shielding them as best we could. They were reasonably polite and I knew that they were only doing their jobs. It was my fault that they were there, nobody else’s. There’s a price of fame, but it’s not just the famous who have to pay it. Ask the wee boys Beckham if you doubt me.
‘How is he, Oz?’ one of them called out.
‘That’s what we’re going to find out. I called ahead ten minutes ago and they said that he’s still in theatre.’ We reached the hospital doors. ‘Keep in touch with the PR people,’ I told them. ‘I’ll talk to you again when I have something positive to say, but don’t look for it to be tonight.’
The hospital press officer, who introduced herself as Sydney Wavell, met us as soon as we stepped inside: no doubt the poor woman had been summoned from a peaceful evening at home. She took charge of us and led us through several corridors into a small sitting room in what appeared to be the hospital’s office area, where we were given coffee and chocolate biscuits. At first I was embarrassed: genuinely, I never feel like a celebrity in Scotland, especially not in Edinburgh, and I try to avoid acting the part, yet here I was getting the full treatment. Still, Ellie and Mary were reaping the benefit, and that was good.
When we were settled in, Ms Wavell left us, returning a few minutes with a doctor. His name was Singh, and he exuded competence and reassurance. He didn’t give us any soft soap, but his approach was informed and up-beat. He told us he had just checked with the theatre and that although the operation was in its early stages, Dad was stable and his signs were good. He offered to talk us through the procedure, but I reckoned that was the last thing the girls needed to hear; I didn’t fancy it much myself.
We settled to our vigil. Conrad decided that he was going to sit in the corridor outside to guard the door, in case an over-zealous reporter sneaked inside in search of an exclusive. I thought he was suffering from an excess of zeal, until I realised something. He knew my dad, he had played golf with the two of us, and he liked him. He was anxious too, and was simply looking for something to take his mind off it, for a job on which he could focus. So I let him do as he wished.
Behind the closed and guarded door, Ellie curled up in an armchair and took refuge in sleep. She’s always been able to do that in a crisis. When our mother was in her last illness, I’d often go into her room at the hospice and find her awake and reading, or listening to music through her headphones, with Ellen counting Zs in a chair by her bedside. Indeed, when I broke my arm as a kid, and they put me under to set it, the first sight I remember as I came to was the top of my sister’s head slumped forward on her chest, and the first thing I heard was gentle snoring.
Mary and I aren’t blessed in that way. We sat side by side on a small sofa in the glow of the only table-lamp we had left on, staring out of the window towards the city, watching it as it settled down for the night. We sat in silence, and yet both of us knew that there was something occupying the space between us.
I tried to doze off, but there was no hope of that. Instead I tried to occupy myself by thinking of the day that had ended; it had begun as just another summer sunrise, but it had ended with my life changed, profoundly. Mike Dylan’s return from his secret exile might have been seen as a shock, but no more than that. I had certainly tried to play it that way, but I couldn’t kid myself.
Susie and I had got together in the aftermath of his supposed death; she’d been the emotional equivalent of a sack full of psychotic monkeys, consumed by a cocktail of bereavement, loneliness and betrayal. Me, I’d been easy pickings; in truth, I’d always fancied her and, to be honest, Jan’s death had fucked my head up far, far more than I’ve ever admitted, even to you. Susie might have made the first move, but I made the second, no question about that.
All that apart, though, our relationship, the burgeoning thing we discovered to be love, and finally our marriage had been founded on the premise, in Susie’s mind at least, that Dylan was a goner, and that he had indeed died in that shooting in Amsterdam. Now she knew different; she knew what I had known since just after Janet’s birth, the truth I had kept from her. We still had to deal with that aspect of it between the two of us: she’d made nothing of it earlier, but I knew it would fester.
Beyond that?
You know me, and you know that if there is one thing the man Oz doesn’t suffer from, it’s a lack of self-belief. And yet when I thought of the way things had been with Susie and Dylan, how strong and vibrant their relationship had seemed, I found myself worrying about how she’d react to his return, in the longer term, whether she’d look at me differently, whether what she felt would change. There, in the dark, Alanis Morrisette’s blistering line came into my head: ‘Are you t
hinking of me when you fuck her?’ It stayed there for a while, too, because it touched a nerve and made me face up to another inner truth: after all the years that had gone, sometimes, when I’m with Susie, I think of Jan.
And then there was Primavera. If you really turned up the voltage I’d have to admit that sometimes I think of her too. What she and I had wasn’t love, not in the conventional sense: it was pure animal attraction, backed up by two minds that were very far from the norm, and by two generously proportioned egos. When you add mutual self-indulgence to that list, you’ve got the whole picture of the two of us together. Dylan once said to me that he really belonged with Prim and Susie with me, because they were basically bent, in the non-sexual sense of the word, and we were basically straight. He was right about Susie, but. .
Now Primavera was back, rehabilitated, evidently remorseful for what she had tried to do to me the previous year, and with a legitimate excuse to claim a permanent role in my life. I wasn’t in any doubt that I’d be able to keep her at arm’s length, yet she could still throw my switches. It might have seemed weird to you when I told you about the three of us, my wife, my ex-wife and me in the swimming-pool, all of us almost naked, but that didn’t do anything to me, especially with the kids around. Yet when I’d seen her earlier, in the Columbus, changed from the more formal dress into her casuals, almost exactly the way she was dressed the first time we ever met, I will admit now that it gave me an instant boner. . and she had known it.
My dad would live. The longer we sat there the more confident of that I became, the more my faith in Mac Blackstone’s immortality restored itself. I had a feeling that I might need him too, most of all for the moral kick up the arse which only he can give me.
I smiled at the thought, and at all the day’s drama and ironies. I smiled too because what should have been righteous anger at Dylan’s deception and return had been muted by the fact that I actually liked the guy; I’d missed him too.
There were all those things going through my head, but there was something else, something much bigger, something that had been with me for a year. Part of me wanted to let it lie dormant, to push it out of my mind and get on with my life. The trouble was that, however hard I pushed, it wouldn’t go away. Maybe I wouldn’t have confronted it, but that wasn’t my decision alone.
After a while, quite a long while, I glanced at my watch. Being rich, I have a few, but my favourite is a titanium Breitling Aerospace, very light and with a black face and hands and numbers so luminous that they can glow even in daylight. It showed ten past three.
Ellie was still snoozing, slightly audibly, in her chair. I glanced at Mary, just at the moment she turned to look at me. Our eyes met. ‘It’s taking a long time,’ she whispered.
‘It’s bound to,’ I told her. ‘They explained all that. This sort of surgery is usually planned, but Dad’s in a critical condition. If it takes all night and all day, so be it, as long as it’s effective.’
‘I suppose so. It’s hard, though, the waiting.’
‘Tom Petty,’ I murmured.
‘What?’
‘ “The Waiting Is The Hardest Part.” It’s a song by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers; great band, great lyric.’
‘You can be flippant about everything, can’t you?’
There was an edge to her voice. Neither of us had ever admitted it, but there had always been a certain tension between Mary and me. It went all the way back to my childhood, when Jan and I were kids together, or, more specifically, to our teenage years. It wasn’t that I felt she disliked me, but there was something in the way she looked at me, a wariness that I didn’t understand then, and that hurt me a little. It wasn’t mutual, that’s for sure. For my part, I liked Mary. That frisson had carried on into adulthood; then it altered a bit. After Alex More, Mary’s husband, left her, and after my mother died, when she and my father grew close, I suppose there was a little private resentment on my part. Yet it didn’t overlap the other thing; that was still there, until Prim appeared on the scene.
Mary was pleased. My self-esteem didn’t let me deal with it at the time, but she was pleased that somebody had come between me and Jan.
Her pleasure was short-lived, though, for what was between the two of us was too strong; in fact, it was stronger than either of us understood. In the end we simply accepted it and gave in happily to the inevitable. If Mary had been as happy, it would have made my day, but she wasn’t. It only showed itself to me, though. As far as I knew, Jan never had a clue.
‘A joke? Where’s the joke? I don’t understand that.’
‘You’ve always been flip, Oz. Your first reaction has always been a throwaway line, a pitch for a quick laugh.’
I felt my eyes narrow. ‘Mary, if you think I find anything laughable about my dad lying on that operating slab, you don’t know me in the slightest. But you’ve never really known me, have you?’
‘Now it’s my turn not to understand,’ she shot back. ‘What do you mean?’
I gazed at her, rather coldly, I suspect. ‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘We’re both tired and under great stress, saying things we’d never normally say. Let’s strike everything that’s just been said from the record, okay?’
‘What did you mean, back in the car, about things I should have handled better?’
‘Mary,’ I murmured, ‘I really don’t want to get into this.’
‘What did you mean?’ she hissed.
I took my wallet from my pocket and opened it. I showed her the photo that’s on display there, of Susie and the three kids; the light was good enough for her to see it clearly. Then I slid a finger into the space behind the credit-card slots and drew out another image, of Tom. I’d taken it myself a year earlier, on the day that I’d found him in California, to mark it, but for another reason too.
Before I go any further let me take you back to something I told you in my last confession to you, about the moment in which I saw him for the first time: ‘In an instant, I knew everything: there was no thought process involved, I just knew everything.’ That’s what I said to you then. I’ll bet you thought you knew what I meant; but I’ll bet you also, any odds you like, that you didn’t.
I showed Mary that photograph, and then I showed her another, a snap of another child, taken thirty-five years earlier. The likeness was incredible: they could have been twins.
Her cheeks seemed to collapse into her face as she sucked in her breath; the gasp was so loud I was afraid she’d waken Ellie, but it would take an earthquake to do that.
‘I warned you against this,’ I growled quietly, ‘but you had to insist. So maybe you’ll explain to me why my son, conceived with Primavera and borne by her, should be the living image of my late first wife. . your daughter. How can that be?’
She shook her head, her mouth set in a tight line.
‘It’s out of the box now, Mary,’ I told her grimly. ‘You can’t put it back.’ I glanced at Ellie, and I feared that there might just be an earthquake in that room if we stayed there. ‘Come on,’ I whispered. ‘Let’s take a walk.’
Conrad was sitting in a chair outside the door; he was wide awake. I said we were going for some fresh air, and asked him to sit with Ellie, in case she wakened and our absence made her think the worst.
We couldn’t actually go outside, in case we bumped into the press, so I simply turned left at the end of the corridor and tried the first door I saw. It was locked, but the second wasn’t, so we stepped inside. When I found the light switch I saw we were in a private office, probably belonging to one of the senior staff.
I took the two photos from my wallet once more, and held them in front of my step-mother until eventually she looked at them again.
‘I’m not kidding myself, am I? Those children are almost mirror images. One of them is Tom, and the other’s Jan at the same age. We’re agreed on that, yes?’ I ground the last word out, brutally. She nodded. ‘So where does that take us, Mary?’
She tried to turn away, but I grabbed her sho
ulders and held her, so that she had to look at me. ‘Where?’ I asked her again, but she stayed silent. I began to wonder whether she had kept her secret for so long that she was unable to give it voice.
So I did it for her. ‘Unless there’s an ancestral link between the Blackstone and the More family, or the Mores and the Phillipses, that none of us knows about, there are only two possibilities. Either Alex More is my father, or Mac Blackstone is Jan’s.’ Actually, the first of those had never entered my head until then, the moment when I confronted the truth that had been doing my head in since I first clapped eyes on Tom. I didn’t believe it for a second but I found I couldn’t avoid it.
‘Either way,’ I began, then drew a breath to calm me down, for I was in danger of exploding. ‘Either way, one thing’s for sure: Jan was my half-sister, wasn’t she? For me to father a child who’s her double, with someone else. . there can be no other explanation.’ And then I found myself voicing the last inevitable question: ‘Or are you going to tell me that you didn’t know either?’
The last twist, the one my mind hadn’t let me consider before, threatened to blow a few circuits in my brain. What if neither Mary nor my dad had known? What if Alex More and my mum. .
Her silence lasted another ten seconds or so. If I’d thought about it, that last question had offered her an escape route, but if she saw it, she didn’t choose to take it. ‘No,’ she whispered. ‘I knew. Alex was sterile. Jan had to be Mac’s daughter.’
This is a terrible thing to admit but, although part of me was horrified, the greater part was relieved. I couldn’t have handled the discovery that My Dad wasn’t really.
It didn’t blow away my anger, though: that fell on her, full force. ‘And you kept that from the two of us. You let us. . Christ, Mary, Jan was pregnant when she died!’
‘Yes, but. . Oz, I couldn’t.’
‘One more thing: does he know? Does my dad know?’
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