by Rebecca Lang
'No, not particularly,' he said. He filled the ensuing silence by taking a swallow of beer. That's when I fell in love with you, but didn't really know it then, he wanted to say. 'More likely, I thought you a sweet little thing. You looked so vulnerable and wounded at that moment that I wanted to give that nurse hell.'
Nell laughed again, remembering how embarrassed she had felt. She also remembered asking herself why she had told two lies like that about herself. It had come home to her fast that once you had told one such lie, you had to tell other lies in order to maintain that first one. What she had told him about herself had, in fact, been her sister Lottie's story.
It turned out that those lies, part of an interwoven matrix of deceit, had been the harbingers of all that had happened after...
CHAPTER THREE
'Will you have dinner with me tonight?' Joel asked, as they left the pub to walk back through the park. 'If it isn't too short notice.'
'Um... yes ...I'd like to,' Nell replied.
'You don't sound too sure,' he said, smiling at her as they entered the park and began to walk briskly towards the far side.
'Oh, I am sure,' she said. 'I'd really like to.' For the umpteenth time, she mulled over the question of how she was going to tell him about Alec. The enormity of the problem engendered a sense of panic. The moment had to be just right...
'You'll have to choose the restaurant,' he said. 'I'm somewhat out of touch with the food scene in Gresham. I could pick you up, if you like,' he said. 'About half past seven?'
'No! Um...no...it's all right,' she said quickly. 'I'd rather meet you at the restaurant. I...know a good place. I'll just write down the address for you and we'll meet there.'
'Fine,' he said, looking at her sideways, noting her flushed cheeks. Steering her over to a park bench, he sat down. 'I'll give you the address of my apartment, and the phone number. Perhaps I could have your address.'
'Yes,' she said, feeling the panic rising in her, not finding a reason to deny him her address. He wasn't likely to turn up there unannounced, she told herself. At some point, he and Alec would have to meet, but not before she had paved the way very carefully. Up to now, it had all been hypothetical. Now the reality of the task was beginning to take on the. semblance of something nearly insurmountable, because there had been no time for her to prepare.
On pieces of paper torn from a notebook, they exchanged addresses.
'Here's the name of a restaurant I know pretty well,' she said, writing on another piece of paper, handing it to him. It would be necessary to call her mother to ask if she could stay with Alec while she herself went out to dinner. Or he could stay at her parents' place for the night, as he often did. She seldom went out in the evenings during the week, preferring to spend the time with her son.
'Could we make it six-thirty, if that's not too early for you?' she asked. That would give her time to make supper for Alec and relieve her mother from babysitting at a reasonable hour. 'Since it's a weekday. I'll be starving by then. I'll make a reservation.'
'That's fine,' he said.
As Joel took the piece of paper, their hands touched.
'Nell, Nell...' He murmured her name, and in a moment they were in each other's arms, oblivious to the few passers-by in the park. On the uncomfortable park bench he held her tightly against him and kissed her.
Nell pulled away and put her head on his shoulder, trembling. Too much was happening in too short a time. 'I can't take all this in,' she said falteringly. 'I tried to find you...then I gave up and assumed that I would probably never see you again. There were...things I wanted to tell you. Now you tell me that you're coming to work at Gresham General.'
Joel stroked her hair. 'It's all right,' he said. 'We'll talk this evening.'
'Yes,' she whispered. 'Now I've got to get back to that symposium. John might ask me what I've learned, and I want to be in a position to give some intelligent answers.'
'Right,' he said.
Back at the conference centre they parted, Nell having a winded feeling as she walked away from Joel, going through the motions as though in a dream. Some people were breaking for lunch now, while she was booked into a second workshop that was to extend over the first lunch period. As it was, in her present state she couldn't possibly eat anything.
'Hey, where have you been, stranger?' Trixie accosted Nell as she entered the workshop room. 'I trust you made contact with the long-lost one.'
'I did,' Nell said as they both searched for the table where their names would be displayed.
'That accounts for the punch-drunk look,' Trixie commented.
'You may have to cover up for me, Trixie,' Nell said. 'I'm going to have a serious concentration problem.'
'Will do,' Trixie said, looking at her curiously.. 'That will make up for the times you've covered up for me in the operating room when I hardly knew a scalpel from the dissecting forceps.'
The day seemed to go by with great speed, during which Nell took a lot of notes, forcing herself to concentrate, so that later she would have a record of what she had heard and participated in, instead of thinking that most of it had gone in one ear and out the other.
When the conference was over at four o'clock she drove to her parents' house, close to her own, to pick up Alec, who went there after school. They lived in an old, established residential neighbourhood near the centre of the city, very convenient for downtown and the teaching hospitals. For the umpteenth time Nell acknowledged her good fortune in having such loving parents who had stood by her in all her vicissitudes. Without them, she could not be training for a very demanding profession, doing post-grad work as she was now, as they had always helped her raise her son.
They had also been able and willing to educate her well, together with her two sisters, to help her now to pay for a house by lending her the down-payment. One day she would be in a position to pay them back.
'Mum!' Alec was in the front garden of her parents' big old red-brick house as she pulled into the circular gravel driveway and he ran towards her as she got out. 'Guess what?'
Nell opened her arms to her nine-year-old son and then hugged him as he ran into them, a poignant sense of love, mingled with undefinable emotions, swamping her. 'I couldn't possibly guess,' she said, smiling.
'Especially since my brain's scrambled from a day of lectures.'
'My English teacher told me today that I'm going to get the English prize for the year,' Alec said, his grey eyes alight with something like wonder. 'It was what I was hoping for. He said he liked my poems and all my other work. I'm supposed to keep it secret for now. Will you be coming to the prize-giving, Mum?'
'When have I ever missed it?' She smiled down at him. 'Congratulations. I'm very, very proud of you. I have something to tell you as well, but not yet. I'll tell you on the weekend.'
'Something nice?' Alec squinted up at her.
How like his father he looked, Nell thought again, with his dark hair and eyebrows a contrast against the pale skin of his face. Anyone who saw them together would know. So far, no one ever had. There seemed little of her in Alec, except sometimes in his expressions and gestures.
'I think you'll find it nice,' she said, relieved that she could put it off for a few days until she had thought things through, decided how she was going to go about it.
'Granny's coming over to our place later on when you go out,' Alec said, 'because I want to do my homework over there.'
'That's great,' Nell said. 'Get in the car, then I'll just see Granny for a few minutes.'
'Hello, dear,' her mother said, giving her a kiss on the cheek. 'I'll come over just before you want to leave.'
'Thanks, Mum.' Her mother was an older version of herself, her grey hair streaked with a becoming honey blonde, with fair skin and blue eyes. She had been a nurse, still worked occasionally. She had been a second mother to Alec, while Nell's father, a GP, had played the father role to Alec as best he could. 'I'll give him supper and make sure he starts on his homework.'
In the car for the short drive to their own house, Alec seemed to pick up some vibes from her as he looked at her with more than the usual perspicacity. 'Who are you going out to dinner with?' he asked.
'A...um...former colleague, whom I haven't seen for a long time.' She replied evenly, keeping her eyes on the road. 'We met unexpectedly at the conference I attended today, the one I told you about.'
'Oh,' he said.
In the house, a smaller version of her parents' old mellow red-brick home, they were greeted ecstatically by their two Dalmatians, Runty and Cherry, who were mother and daughter respectively.
'Hello, darlings,' Nell greeted them, patting each one in turn. 'You must be desperate to get out.'
Having let the dogs out to the back garden, Nell rushed around in the kitchen preparing supper for Alec, while he sat in their family room off the kitchen making a start on his homework. There was a rule that he could not watch television or do anything else until he had finished the homework.
While he was eating his supper, Nell had a quick shower and changed into a lightweight cotton skirt and blouse, then started to blow-dry her hair, keeping a close eye on the time. As soon as her mother came, she would leave for the restaurant.
'Mum, there's someone at the door,' Alec bawled up the stairs, while their two dogs barked furiously.
'Can you see who it is, please?' she called back. 'I'm not quite ready.'
Above the sound of the hairdryer she could hear voices in the front hall, Alec telling the dogs to be quiet, then Alec clomping up the stairs.
'Mum, it's a man,' Alec said, standing in the doorway of the bathroom. 'He said he's the one you're going out to dinner with and he's lost the piece of paper you gave him with the name of the restaurant on it so he came round here.'
Nell stared at her son, her face blank with shock, almost dropping the hairdryer. Alec looked tousled and vulnerable standing there, still dressed in his somewhat crumpled school uniform of grey trousers, white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a loosely knotted striped tie. The black Oxfords that he wore were dusty.
Carefully she switched off the hairdryer, feeling a strange urge to sweep her son into her arms and squeeze him very, very tightly. 'Thank you,' she said. 'Show him into the sitting room, would you? And tell him that I'll be down in a few minutes, please.'
'Do I know him?' Alec asked quietly, frowning. 'He looks like someone I've seen before, but I can't remember.'
'You've never met him,' Nell said.
When he had gone, Nell stared at herself in the mirror, seeing her large, frightened eyes staring back at her, her face a new shade of pale. Everything had come together with such frightening speed that she didn't know how she was to cope. And she had thought that afternoon that Joel was not likely to turn up unannounced at her home. Famous last words.
There was no way out of this—she had to walk down the stairs and give some sort of explanation to Joel.
'How are you getting on with the homework?' she said to Alec a few minutes later, having come quietly down the stairs and into the family room.
'OK,' he said. 'I've got a proposal to write up for a science project. Granny said she would help me with that.'
'Good,' Nell said, feeling a poignant regret that she would not be the one to help him. She didn't do his homework for him, just helped him to get it organized. 'I...I'll just go and speak to my guest while we wait for Granny.' Her mother would let herself in with her own key.
Alec gave her a strange look, but said nothing. One could not fool children, she thought. Alec sensed that the stranger in the sitting room was someone other than an ordinary colleague whom she had not seen for a long time. There were photographs of the young Joel in the house, yet now he looked sufficiently different that it might take her son some time to make the connection. She did not doubt that he would eventually make it.
Guiltily, she left him, wishing that she could just blurt out the truth to him in a rush but knowing that she had better go carefully. Her desire to protect her son from any sort of hurt was uppermost in her mind.
Joel was standing at the large bay window of the sitting room, his hands in his trouser pockets, staring out at the front garden that was mellow in the early evening sun, where everything was very lush and green. As she shut the door carefully, he turned slowly to look at her. A few moments of silence ticked by, emotional and fraught.
'You have a child?' he asked carefully, at last.
'Yes,' she said, standing by the door, holding herself tensely. 'I...thought I would tell you later on this evening, but you seem to have pre-empted me.'
'Yes, I'm sorry to have turned up unexpectedly like this,' he said. 'I mislaid the piece of paper with the name of the restaurant on it.'
'Perhaps it's just as well,' Nell said resignedly, feeling slightly sick with nerves.
'Why didn't you tell me earlier?' he asked quietly. 'You said you'd never been married.'
'I haven't,' she said. 'Telling you...when I hadn't expected to see you before today...was not easy, so I put it off.'
Just then there was the sound of the front door being unlocked, her mother having walked over, and the delighted barking once again of the Dalmatians. Saved from further explanation, Nell opened the sitting-room door.
'Come out to meet my mother,' Nell said, relieved beyond measure.
As her mother greeted the dogs in the hallway, Nell managed to gain a measure of composure. 'Mum,' she said, 'this is Dr Matheson. We have to rush because we have a reservation.' The name, that should have meant something also to her mother, was mumbled, half-lost in the barking of the dogs.
'How do you do?' her mother said, shaking Joel's hand, while Nell held her breath. So far, the name meant nothing to her mother. Maybe after they had left the house it would trigger a memory.
'Pleased to meet you,' Joel said, while Nell opened the front door, having written the name of the restaurant in a notebook where her mother could call, if necessary.
'I've got my pager, Mum,' she said as they went out. 'Thanks a million.'
Out in the warm evening sunlight, Joel took her arm to slow her down. 'Shall we take my car?' he said, his voice tight. 'No point in taking two. You can direct me.' He steered her over to his car.
'All right,' she said, with her heart pounding, knowing that this was the moment of truth, the time she had thought about over the years, had tried to plan for. Now she felt her mind to be blank with regard to strategy, disarmed and vulnerable. Here she was, with no strategy whatsoever.
Joel's face was without expression as he started the car and drove it quickly out of her driveway. Over on the next street, a wide, leafy residential street with no obvious traffic, he eased the car to the side of the road and stopped. In the ensuing silence, he turned to look at her, his expression stony. 'That boy must be about nine or ten years old,' he said. 'Would that be right?'
Nell nodded, unable to utter a word. Joel continued to look at her as though he were stripping her naked and looking through to her soul as well.
'Is he my son?'
Again she nodded, looking down at her clasped hands in her lap, now aware that she had been wringing her hands, as some of the angst of the past came back to her: It was odd how the past never really died, how it reverberated down the years, sometimes down the generations. 'Yes.' The word came out in a whisper.
Letting out a pent-up breath, Joel leaned back in the seat, putting his head back against the head-rest, a hand over his closed eyes. The silence was more unnerving to Nell than if he had ranted and raved. 'Let me get this straight,' he said at last, without looking at her. 'You must have known you were pregnant when you told me your parents didn't want you to associate with me any more. When you told me you were only sixteen. Before I actually left for Montreal.'
'Yes, Joel, I'm afraid so,' she confessed quietly. 'And I'm sorry. As I said before, I tried to find you after Alec was born, to tell you, because I thought you had a right to know.'
'You let me go away withou
t telling me,' he said incredulously. 'I'm finding that very hard to understand. Why, for God's sake?'
'For one thing I...didn't want you to feel obligated to me in any way,' she said, feeling the urge again to weep, wishing he would look at her, put his arms around her as he had done that morning on the park bench. 'My parents advised me...ordered me, more like it...not to tell you. My father was very angry. I wouldn't tell them who you were. I didn't want them to accuse you in any way. It was only when Alec was three that I told them...because I wanted to tell Alec, to show him photographs of you...' Nell's voice trailed to a halt. How inadequate it seemed, explaining all that now, when ten years had gone by in which Joel could have known that he had a son, Alec could have had a father.
As though it had happened only recently, she recalled again her father's words to her. 'You give him up,' he had said, in a voice that had allowed no alternative.
'Of course, once Alec was born, my parents loved him, were absolutely delighted with him,' she went on quietly, while Joel still sat with his eyes closed, his face shuttered. 'They've been so good to both of us.'
At last Joel opened his eyes and turned to her, his expression uncomprehending, hard. 'I don't mind having a child,' he said slowly, harshly. 'In the circumstances, I like it. But I find it quite incomprehensible that you didn't tell me. We were supposed to love each other, and all that.'
'What circumstances?' she said.
Joel did not answer. Instead he looked at his wrist-watch and then started the car. 'We're late for the restaurant,' he said brusquely. 'We'll talk after we've eaten.'
At first Nell thought that she could not eat anything as they sat in the small, intimate restaurant where she had been many times before with friends. She was glad that she could not see anyone she knew. When she ordered food she realized that she was almost faint with hunger, not having had a proper lunch, so she managed to eat everything that was put in front of her, hardly noticing what it was.
They said little during the meal, forgoing wine. A musician was playing a violin, absolving both of them from having to talk.