by Jan Jones
“He and Rob are staying at Ellie’s tonight," I said. "They can't get down for very long, so he promised Oliver and Sasha he'd maximise the time spent with them in the morning. We don’t need to say anything today about me moving out, Blake. It would spoil the housewarming.”
“Well, you’ll have to live here while I’m away climbing. I’m not having the house empty. It’s an open invitation to burglars.”
Again, I clamped down on a scream. “I can do that. I can pack the rest of my stuff at the same time.”
Unbelievably, he returned to the newspaper, as if I was a piece of business that he'd needed to clear out of the way while he thought of it. “You realise people will talk.”
I shook my head. “Not these days. Couples often grow apart, especially once the family has left home. There's no shame in it, Blake. Hardly any of our friends are still with their original partners. It won’t even be a nine days wonder.”
Mark stared at me, appalled. “Blake only married you to be Skye’s father?”
I shakily poured myself another mug of tea. We were in the office. I’d thrown clothes, photos, letters and shoes into the car more or less at random and driven straight to Camden Town. I hadn’t even realised I’d rung Mark until I heard his voice answering the phone. He'd come in straight away.
A memory surfaced. Blake's voice, gently bracing. It’s tragic, Caro, but you have to concentrate on Skye now. He's the important one. Had he even then been planning, calculating, preparing to ensnare me? Yes, yes of course he had.
“All these years he's kept it hidden," I said. "He's kept up the pretence. He courted me, charmed my family to get them on side, fooled me into caring and married me - all in order to be Skye's father in the eyes of the law. He lied, all that time. He did it to bring Skye up, to have constant access to him, to... to own him. He’s convinced himself he's Skye’s natural father. He must have decided to marry me the moment he found me crying in the BBC canteen and I told him Skye was Jilly's little boy." I dashed a hand across my eyes. "I’ve been so stupid, Mark. To hear him talk this morning, you'd think he never loved me at all. Everything has always been for Skye. Do you remember when he came down so hard against us doing the documentary on Alessandro’s commune that time? I bet even that wasn’t to save me from bad memories, it was to protect Skye. Maybe he was jealous at the thought that Alessandro might want to do more godfathering. They take those duties a lot more seriously in Italy."
Mark wrapped my hand in both his in silent sympathy.
I laughed miserably. "I'll be okay. A lot of this is the blow to my self-esteem. I feel so used. I've stayed with him out of duty all these bloody years... and for what? Probably the real reason he bought the blasted house in Finchley was simply to get the kids away from Mum and the family - and properly under his control.”
"Speaking selfishly, I'm glad he did," said Mark. "We might never have reconnected otherwise. Do the dates work? Could he actually be Sky’s father?”
I shook my head. “No. I know Jilly wasn't pregnant before she left, because she took all the tampons with her. I remember going to the cupboard where they were kept and finding nothing. That's when it sunk in that she'd really gone and the flat was mine."
"She might have been pregnant without realising."
"I honestly don't think so. She knew who Skye's father was, and he didn't sound like Blake from the letters I found later. Also, she never even mentioned him to me in any romantic context. Did she to you?"
Mark shook his head.
"I suppose the timing is just possible," I went on, "only just, but it’s really unlikely in any case. Blake’s been firing blanks ever since I’ve known him.”
The words fell out as I spoke my thoughts aloud, unguarded for the first time since I'd walked down the aisle to the altar. A deadly silence rose from the place where they lay stranded. Too late, I heard what I’d said. I covered my face with my hands. Oh, well done, Caroline. Today of all days.
"Caro?" said Mark quietly.
I took a shallow breath and met his eyes. “I didn’t mean to say that. I certainly never meant to say it that badly. Oh God, I’m sorry, Mark. There's no easy way to tell you this. Ellie isn’t Blake’s daughter." I took another breath. "She’s yours."
There was more shock on his face then than I have ever seen on anyone. "I'm sorry," I repeated wretchedly. "I know I should have said something years ago. The thing is, I didn’t even think about possible consequences that night. Jilly was dead and you were there. Both of us needed comfort. I wasn’t on the Pill."
"Caro..."
"Jilly wasn’t on the Pill either, come to that. I found a box of condoms in the bedside table after I moved in, but they’d all perished. Little holes in the ends. I threw them away.”
He wasn’t deflected. “Caro, why the hell didn’t you let me know?”
My voice rose. “I was going to. Of course I was going to. But when I came back from Italy, you were on your way to Margate with Jean and the girls. Where you caught mumps, if you remember, and were then off work for weeks. Meanwhile I’d missed a period, been fired, got reinstated, changed departments, Blake was making this enormous, flattering, play for me, there was pressure from the family and Skye wouldn’t let me out of his sight. My life was upside down, Mark. I was panicking so hard and I didn't know what to do. You were ill and I couldn’t phone you or write to you and even if I had, it wouldn’t have been fair on Jean...” I stopped. “Not getting in touch with you then was the most difficult thing I had ever done in my life. I was twenty years old, overwhelmed, inexperienced and very, very scared. You were out of reach and besides, it would have been wrong. Blake said he wanted to take care of me. He didn't know about the baby of course, but if I was quick..." I shut my eyes, then opened them again, meeting Mark's honest, painful gaze. "Yes, you're right. It was a poor, hasty, frightened decision which has haunted me ever since. That's why I've stayed with him this long, really, because I thought I owed it to him. But you tell me, Mark - back then, coming from our sort of background, with Jilly and her illegitimate baby on everyone's lips - what the hell else was I supposed to do?”
Mark was so pale, so shocked, so... betrayed. He looked far worse than he did the day Jean left him. “I had a right to know about Ellie," he said stubbornly. "You could have told me later.”
I lifted my hand and let it fall, helpless. “When? On your first day back at work when you told me Jean was expecting again? When Lydia got meningitis and you were in hospital with her night and day? When you were made redundant and we both borrowed more money than we could afford so we could start up on our own? There was never going to be a right time. I did what I could, Mark. With Ellie and Tori joined at the hip, you almost did bring her up.”
He stumbled to his feet, hurt and betrayal emanating from him like wounds. “That's not the same and you know it. You’re my best friend, Caro. You’ve always been my best friend. We’ve talked through good times and bad times. I’ve trusted you completely and absolutely for two thirds of my life. What’s Ellie now, thirty six? Thirty six years you’ve deprived me of the right to worry and care about my daughter. I need to walk this off. Don’t phone. Don’t text. I have to think. I need to just be for a while.”
And suddenly there was a space where he wasn't. He was gone and I hadn’t expected it. This was worse than awful. It was like a ripped hole in my heart. I curled forward, wrapping my arms around my body, lanced a hundredfold by his pain. Compared to this, my marriage breaking up was an atom of insignificance in the vastness of the universe. Every part of me screamed with loss. This, this, was the worst thing in the history of forever.
How was I going to bear the rest of my life if I’d alienated Mark for all time?
The ringing of my phone interrupted the dreary cycle of fetching stuff from the car and putting it away whilst going over and over my litany of self-recrimination. Mark, I thought, my heart leaping. I reached for the phone with shaking fingers.
It wasn't Mark. "Are you going to b
e long, Mum?" said Ellie's voice in an only-just-holding-it-together tone. "Only Dad's been here for half-an-hour and he's put Duncan's back up already by loudly timing every single train and reminding all the kids to be careful when they're running around outside. We've told him we're getting new double glazing and that Duncan's father reinforced the wire netting only yesterday, but he's not listening."
Ellie's housewarming! I shot an aghast look at my ravaged reflection in the mirror. "Sorry, darling," I said. "I'm just finishing up in the office. I'll be there as soon as I can." I added that Blake was probably tetchy because of his proposed mini-series being turned down yesterday.
"Well, if he wrote something more cheerful and less twisted, he might get accepted more often," snapped Ellie. "D'you know, I'm embarrassed sometimes to let people know my father wrote whatever it is they're all discussing in the playground. That police thing where the serial killer ripped up his victims' clothing, for instance. That was horrible."
"Don't tell him that, for goodness sake."
Ellie muttered something under her breath. "He'd better stop irritating Duncan, then," she said aloud. "I can do without him being in a mood too."
I repeated I'd be there as fast as the legal limit would allow. I repaired my make-up at lightning speed and hoped people would be too involved with eating and drinking and thinking up encouraging things to say about the house to notice how dreadful I looked. As I drove off, it occurred to me with annoyance that Blake would put my blotchy eyes down to him and the revelations of the breakfast table. What a difference a single sentence makes. The truth was I no longer cared enough about him to cry.
When I walked into the lounge, Blake nodded at me just as if we hadn’t split up irrevocably this morning. I realised with a rueful shock that even that was normal. The marriage had been over for years without my realising it. Why had I stayed? How stupid can one person get?
The house filled with family, neighbours and Ellie and Duncan’s friends. The noise level swelled to a cheerful, throbbing crescendo, before dying away again as with the nibbles demolished, the Pimms a memory and the borrowed PTA urn dry, people left to get ready for the concert or their own evening's entertainment. With only the family remaining, we could hear ourselves talk again.
I was sitting on the settee, letting Oliver show me his new iPad. On the other side of the room, Blake seemed to have finished carping about the house and was instead discussing the finer points of free climbing with Duncan’s father.
“You can do anything with this, Granny. Anything.”
“I should hope so, the money it cost.”
“Look, I’ll show you. Where’s Grandad going climbing?”
“I don’t know, darling. The Dolomites, wherever they are. He goes there every July.”
Oliver tapped intently on his iPad. “They’re here, Granny. In Italy. Look.” He expanded the map to show all the little wrinkles and contours, with the blue of a lake at the bottom of the screen. He swiped the lake upwards. “It tells you everything, Granny. That’s Lake Garda and the next one is...”
Lake Garda.
By chance, there had been a lull in the conversation at the precise moment Oliver spoke. Ellie threw her son a fond glance, clearly congratulating him on entertaining Granny so nicely. Duncan was equally clearly gratified his son was doing something educational rather than explaining at length his current favourite computer game.
Amid the approval I was aware of a brief moment of chill, focused interest from the far side of the room. The conversations started up again. “You found that just with a name?” I said, as if I hadn't notice anything. “You are very clever, Oliver. We’ll have to get you doing work experience with Mark as a researcher.”
Lake Garda. Lake Garda. Lake Garda.
“Oh! Where is Mark?” asked Ellie, looking around. “I asked him especially. I thought he’d come with Tori, but she said he rang telling her he had stuff to do and would be along later. She thought it sounded like an excuse. Is he still uncomfortable about Jean, Mum? She must be mad, don’t you think? Going away with a man half her age, just for sex. Poor Mark.”
“He’s probably working,” I said, feeling the devastating stab of loss twisting again in my chest. “And Fernando is only eight years younger than Jean, not half her age at all. Shouldn’t you be getting off to the concert? I’ll put everything in the dishwasher and hang on for Skye and Rob. You can video Sasha for me.”
Ellie gave a little scream. “Look at the time! I’m sorry, everyone, but...”
The room cleared. There were debates about coats and money-for-the-raffle and who was sharing a lift with whom. Cars drove away. In the distance, a train hurried past. Silence descended.
I remained on the sofa, harnessing the energy to clear up. Oliver’s map was still clear and bright in my mind’s eye.
The Dolomites, just to the north of Lake Garda.
CHAPTER NINE
The Dolomites, just to the north of Lake Garda.
I don't know how long I sat there. My mind had gone numb. Blake went to the Dolomites every year. Every year. Even if he spent ninety percent of his time climbing, he couldn't fail to be familiar with the region, with the towns and the lakes. He'd know Lake Garda, where Jilly had lived. He'd know the little town at the top of the lake where Skye's godfather still lived today. Never once, never once in all these years had he mentioned it.
Why?
A shadow darkened the patio door. “That fence,” said Blake, coming in from the garden wiping rust marks off his hands, “is not safe at all. The staples have all been ripped from one end. Thieves, I imagine, casing the joint, working out when the house will be empty. I did warn Ellie and Duncan. I told them several times. This whole place is a security breach waiting to happen.”
He was still here. He hadn't gone with everyone else to the concert. A slight tremor went through me. “Ellie told me Duncan's father had reinforced the fence. He must have missed a bit. It'll be easily fixed. Don’t you want to see the concert?” The Dolomites, just to the north of Lake Garda.
In the silence, I heard the creak of the old house settling. Somewhere outside a car door banged. The wind found a gap in a window frame and sent a tiny summer draught around my legs.
Blake's gaze rested on me. He said, in a conversational tone, “Your lack of geographical knowledge has always astounded me, Caro. Jilly was just the same. Useful though, as it turned out.”
My heart thumped. “Family trait,” I said. "We had a dreadful geography teacher at school. She put us both off."
Still he stood there. Looking down at me. “Funny, isn’t it?” he said. “All these years. I’d begun to think you would never find out.”
Chill swept through me. A memory. Blake's voice, comforting at the time. She wouldn’t have felt anything, falling from height on that sort of terrain.
Why hadn’t I noticed the phrasing? Why had I never brought it to mind since? He'd been to the area. He'd known the road where Jilly had died. Why hadn't he told me? There could only be one answer, one answer, one answer...
Peppermint panic rose in my throat. “What are you saying, Blake? You couldn’t have known Jilly was living at the Castello Acqua di Fonte.”
Whatever he was going to tell me, I didn't want to know.
“I didn’t. I'd never heard of the place until you told me about Skye's godfather. I didn't even know Jilly was in Italy. No, it was simpler than that. Such a beautiful simplicity, it must have been meant. I thought so at the time."
I couldn't move, couldn't stop up my ears, couldn't look away.
Blake continued. "There was a festival on the lake. It’s held every year. The other chaps wanted to go. I’d rather have been climbing, but I thought there might be local colour that would come in handy some time. Everything is useful to a writer. So we went and... and there was Jilly, in the middle of the crowd, laughing and vibrant, enjoying herself.” His voice went on, clinically dispassionate. “She was so beautiful, Caro. I’d thought I was over her, but it t
urned out not. Strange.”
Blake. Blake was why Jilly had run away. Blake was the stalker. He’d done that trick of getting an idea in his head and then not letting go. Jilly had probably just been being friendly and not even realised he had fallen for her until it was too late. Oh God.
“She said she was with a group. I thought she meant on holiday, not living there. I didn’t want to sit at that big table with her friends. I wanted her to myself. I said I was getting local colour and asked if she wanted to walk around with me so we could have a catch-up. She said she’d better not, it would look rude. Then there was a burst of noise from her table with children shouting and wailing and she suddenly changed her mind and said okay, just a short walk then. I steered her away from the festival, towards the outskirts where it was quieter. I told her I’d missed her. I wanted to know why she left, what she’d been doing, why she hadn’t contacted me. I wanted to know everything. It was as if I was starving. I wanted to drink her in.”
I sat frozen, unable to believe what I was hearing. In another burst of sickening memory, I remembered the only drama of his I'd ever watched all the way through. The one about obsession. The one about obsession and the stalker and the woman he idolised.
It's only dancing, Caro.
Oh God. Oh God. Oh God.
Blake continued, almost reminiscently now. “Jilly said she’d felt stifled in England and had had to get away. She said she hadn’t told me because she hadn’t thought we were in a serious relationship. She’d thought we were just friends, no more than that, sorry if she’d misunderstood. She said she was nowhere near ready to go back home yet. She liked travelling. She liked new experiences. She liked being a rolling stone and said there was far too much of the rest of the world to see before she returned. Then she said it had been nice to chat and started walking up the road." His voice hardened. "Walking away from me. Again.”
No, don’t tell me. Please don’t tell me. It’s not true.
“I was quite calm. I’d brought her in this direction because I'd left my car here. I thought we might sit in it to talk if there was nowhere else. As she walked away, she passed it by the side of the road."