The Accidental Family

by Rowan Coleman

  “That is a lovely hat, and normally we would go out for tea,” Sophie began, glancing at Louis. “But Daddy and I have lots of things to discuss, so probably we’d better go home—”

  “But please, please, please!” Izzy begged. “I am starving, I neeeeeed a scone!”

  “You neeeeed some vegetables and fruit and stuff,” Sophie pointed out, hoping that the real mothers still in the playground would overhear and realize that even though she had never given birth, she knew how important it was to get five portions of fruit and vegetables into a child—even if she had no idea how to actually do it.

  “Strawberries are fruit,” Bella pointed out. “Strawberry jam is fruit.”

  “We can go for cake, can’t we?” Louis said, smiling coaxingly as he tucked a strand of Sophie’s hair behind her ear. “I’m glad you’re keen to see Fineston, but the photos can wait awhile. It’s nice us all being together.”

  Sophie tried to picture another hour or two pretending everything was fine, telling Louis about her plans to start her own business, discussing their wedding. She tried to imagine it as it would have been if only she hadn’t bumped into Wendy. But she couldn’t.

  “No, Louis.” Sophie hesitated for one second, not wanting to say the words that would start the chain of events for which she could not predict a conclusion. “I have to talk to you about something else.” Her serious tone caught him off guard.

  “What?” he asked her warily.

  “Not here,” Sophie began, glancing around at the now nearly empty playground, and uncomfortably conscious of Bella’s gaze.

  “Sophie.” Louis’s tone darkened, his coaxing smile evaporating in an instant. “If it’s not the wedding you’re worried about—then what? Just tell me now please, I’m not in the mood for games.”

  Sophie looked at the girls. Mercifully Izzy had jammed Bella’s hat onto her head and was shrieking with laughter as she tore away from a furious Bella, who raced after her. Perhaps in the middle of a school playground wasn’t the best place, but then, where was the best place to tell Louis that for over twenty years he’d had a child he didn’t know about?

  “I saw Wendy Churchill at the wedding fair,” Sophie said, leaning close to him so that her voice was barely more than a whisper. She paused, breathing in his scent and the heat of his proximity. For some reason she felt it would be harder to be so close to him after she’d told him what she knew. “She was there with her son. She has a twenty-year-old son, Louis.”

  Sophie waited, but Louis’s male brain was not making any connections.

  “She must have got pregnant when she was fifteen.” Sophie looked into Louis’s eyes before pressing her lips against his ear and whispering, “He looks just like you. Louis, he’s your son.”

  Back at home, after Louis had stalked out of the playground, making it clear that a visit to Ye Olde Tea Shoppe was most definitely not in the cards, Sophie made the girls tea while Louis stood in the garden staring very hard at his decaying flower beds. Her culinary skills had come a long way since the first tea she’d made them, which had been two microwavable meals mixed together to avoid argument. Now she was able to grill sausages and mash potatoes without having to concentrate much at all, although admittedly that was because the girls rather obligingly liked her lumpy, or as Sophie preferred to call them “textured,” mashed potatoes.

  Louis had not said a word to her since the playground, leaving Izzy to fill in the gaps with her usual endless stream of consciousness punctuated occasionally by Bella’s sage asides like “Fairies live in dells not groves, idiot” and “No, the tooth fairy doesn’t collect toenail clippings. The toenail-clipping fairy does that, obviously.” Sophie had not pressed Louis to talk. She had no idea what he was thinking or feeling or if he’d really understood what she had just told him. Now she watched him through her own reflection in the kitchen window as he stood in the twilight, perfectly still, just standing there, staring into the soil as the sky dimmed.

  “Sophie, when you and Daddy are married, where will you sleep?” Bella asked her suddenly, dragging Sophie’s attention away from the window.

  “In a bed, hopefully!” she said brightly even though she knew Bella would never be satisfied with such a straightforward answer. For a seven-year-old Bella had a particularly effective questioning technique and the dogged determination to gather as much information as she could about whatever might touch her life in some way. Sophie had been expecting these questions, but she had rather hoped not to have to answer them today.

  “And where will the bed be?” Bella asked her intently.

  “Well, I’ll sleep here, in this house with you,” Sophie hedged, suddenly wishing she’d delayed her bombshell until after the girls were in bed so that Louis might be here to help her field these questions.

  “Which room will you sleep in?” Bella asked her slowly. “Because I don’t want to share with Izzy again, she is a very restless sleeper.”

  “I am not,” Izzy said through a mouthful of sausage. “That’s not me, that’s Tango. He is a very restless sleeper, especially when you cuddle him up.”

  “No, I’ll sleep with …I mean, I’ll sleep in the same room as your daddy when we’re married. That’s what normal married people do. They sleep together in the same room,” Sophie said. She withstood Bella’s searching gaze for a second more before springing up to cool her cheeks in the freezer while she looked for the blackcurrant sorbet the girls had recently become obsessed with.

  “Will you do kissing when you’re married?” Izzy asked her, giggling through her gravy-stained fingers. Bella rolled her eyes.

  “They already do kissing,” she told her little sister. “That’s allowed because they are in love.” Sophie paused as she took two bowls off the drain. Louis was still there, still in exactly the same spot. She had gone about this in the wrong way. She shouldn’t have just blurted it out on the playground like that. What was she thinking? Yes, Seth did look remarkably like Louis, but she didn’t have any proof that he was Louis’s son, only her own expectations and Wendy’s word. And there was something about Wendy that Sophie didn’t trust. She was self-aware enough to know she didn’t like her because she was yet another part of Louis’s past she would never have access to, a part so clearly precious and important to him. But it wasn’t just that that made her mistrust Wendy. Something about the way she’d looked at Louis that first time they’d met in the pub had made her uneasy. There was something destructive about her.

  “Sophie?” Bella said again, that same persistent tone Sophie had learned signaled that the child had something on her mind and wouldn’t rest until she’d resolved it.

  “Yes?” Sophie steeled herself, scooping the sorbet out into bowls, one eye still on the garden.

  “Will you and Daddy have babies?” Bella asked her. “Will we have a brother or a sister? Well, really a half brother or a half sister.”

  Sophie sat down and slid the bowls to each girl.

  “Well …” She and Louis had never discussed having their own children. Sophie supposed in the back of her mind that perhaps one day they would have a baby, although, rather like being properly married to Louis, until recently she hadn’t been able to picture it as a concrete event. But whether or not he wanted more children was another matter. Especially as he was just getting used to the idea of his twenty-year-old son. “I don’t really know, Bella.”

  “Because if you had a baby with Daddy, it would call you Mummy, wouldn’t it?” Bella asked her carefully, taking the smallest spoonful of her sorbet so as to make it last longer.

  “Well yes, if I did have a baby with your daddy, when it was big enough to talk it would call me Mummy.”

  “And it would call Daddy Daddy?”

  “Yes,” Sophie said.

  “But we’d still call you Aunty Sophie,” Bella said. “Because even though you’d be married to our daddy and living here and we’d have a half sister or a half brother who called you Mummy you’d still be our aunty Sophie and not o
ur mummy.”

  “That’s right….,” Sophie said slowly, trying to work out exactly what it was that Bella was worrying about. “You know that I would never ever try to take the place of your mummy. I couldn’t do that and I don’t want to.”

  Bella looked at her for a long time with her dark, grave eyes. She had come a long way from the quiet, self-contained child Sophie had met less than a year ago, the little girl who was struggling to grow up because she felt there was nobody left in the world to look after her or her baby sister. Before Sophie’s eyes Bella had blossomed into an inquisitive child, funny, with an infectious giggle and a surprisingly dry wit for one so young. According to her father and her grandmother, she was almost the same as she had been before her mother was suddenly taken from her. But sometimes Bella would still get that look in her eyes that told Sophie she knew the world could hurt you when you least expected it. That was a lost innocence that could not be recovered.

  “Bella, darling.” Sophie picked up her hand. “Do you mind me marrying your dad and living here?”

  “No,” Bella said, shaking her head. “I want you to marry Daddy and live here. I’m just not sure about what will happen when you’ve got a baby who calls you Mummy and we aren’t calling you Mummy …will we be split in two? Will you prefer your baby to us?”

  “Will you?” asked Izzy, who up until that point had been rather physically involved with her sorbet, to the point that she was wearing most of it like a beard. She paused, mid-spoonful, her eyes suddenly brimming with tears.

  “No …no, of course not. That could never ever happen, I’ll always love you exactly the same amount that I do now, which is gigantic,” Sophie told her, trying not to be distracted by the sound of Louis coming in the back door.

  “Is that as much as a proper baby?” Izzy asked her.

  “She means your own baby,” Bella said.

  “I think it would be impossible for me to love anyone alive on this planet more than I love you two,” Sophie said. “I mean, yes, I love your dad, but you two—you made me happy again when I didn’t even realize I was sad.”

  “Will you love the baby as much as you love us then?” Bella asked.

  “Baby?” Louis snapped as he sat down at the table. “Good god, please tell me there’s nothing else you want to tell me, is there, Sophie?”

  Sophie could see by the angles of his shoulders that he was tightly wound. When he was angry he almost seemed to fold in on himself, armored against any assault of reason or affection. She took a breath before she spoke, concentrating on keeping her tone light, as if it were a perfectly normal day and she hadn’t just told Louis about his secret love child, hopeful that if she kept on acting as if everything was okay soon he would relax and unfurl and again be the man she could talk to.

  “We’re just talking about what would happen if we had a baby after we’re married,” Sophie said lightly, keen for him to tune in to how sensitive the girls were feeling.

  “Oh, you don’t have to worry about that.” Louis’s laugh was harsh. “I think I’ve got more than enough children to last me a lifetime. We won’t be having any more kids.”

  Sophie dropped her gaze to the tabletop, aware that Bella was watching her closely, surprised by the sting of tears in her eyes. She felt as if Louis had physically hit her, the pain of his bombshell was so sudden and unexpected. He was angry and confused about Seth, and his instinct was to shock and hurt her as much as she had him, but she still found discovering his opinion on any future children hard to brush off. They had never talked about having children. It was one of the many things she didn’t know about the man she wanted to marry, one of the things she had so confidently told her mother and Cal and anyone else who would listen that she’d find out about him after they were married, part of the big adventure of life with him. But if he was serious? If he really didn’t want more children, what then? Sophie didn’t even know if she wanted children, but the thought of someone telling her she wasn’t going to have any made her feel cornered.

  “Sophie?” Izzy piped up, her face sodden with sorbet. “I would call you Mummy if it wasn’t for Mummy, because I do love you a lot.”

  Sophie blinked back the threat of tears and made herself smile before she looked up, resting the back of her hand against Izzy’s fruity, wet cheek.

  “That’s a lovely thing to say,” Sophie said gently. “Thank you, Izzy.”

  “And now,” Louis said, picking Izzy up out of her chair and hoisting her under his arm, “it’s bath time. Bella, run upstairs and get out your jammies and find some towels, we need to get this monster scrubbed clean!”

  Izzy shrieked with giggles as Louis tickled her and Sophie worried about the imminent reemergence of the sorbet as he dangled her upside down by her ankles and swung her like a pendulum before setting her down and letting her scramble off upstairs.

  “Are you okay?” Sophie asked him.

  He looked at her for a long moment in the unrelenting glare of the kitchen’s strip lighting.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t think I am.”

  • •

  Sophie watched Louis pace up and down the living room, stepping over Tango, who was stretched out on his back in front of the fire, warming his belly after making off with two sausages that had been left on the grill. Artemis, who was perched on top of the bookshelf, watched Louis fixedly, her head following his journey back and forth as if at any minute she might pounce on him and attempt to wrestle him to the ground, something Sophie wouldn’t entirely put past a cat that still hadn’t gotten over missing out on sausages.

  The girls had been silent for twenty minutes or so, which usually meant they were properly asleep and not engaged in some impromptu late-night craft activity or staging of a musical. Normally by now Louis would have shooed Tango upstairs where he’d find the warmest spot to cuddle up in and sleep off his food, Artemis would be out in the cool night air disemboweling small mammals with abandon, and Sophie would be in Louis’s arms. They’d be discussing their day in the short punctuation marks between long kisses. But that wasn’t the normal part, Sophie realized as she watched him—this was. Trouble and trauma and working through things together. They had met under stressful circumstances, that was certainly true. It had been grief and loss that had brought them together. But for the last few months, everything had been perfect, absolutely perfect, and it could have stayed that way if she hadn’t bumped into Seth and Wendy at the wedding fair. But she had. This was happening, and now she had to find a way for Louis and herself to work through it together. The trouble was, it seemed like the last thing he wanted to talk to her about. It even felt as if he would prefer it if she wasn’t here at all.

  “Please, Louis, don’t shut me out. Tell me what you’re feeling,” Sophie said, wincing as she said the words.

  “What I’m feeling?” Louis’s laugh was mirthless as he stomped over his prone cat once again. “What am I feeling? Do you know, Sophie, I have no idea. No …no, that’s wrong. I know exactly how I’m feeling. I’m angry, I’m really bloody angry …Sophie, why did you have to tell me then, like that?”

  It came as a shock to Sophie to discover that Louis was angry with her.

  “First of all, keep your voice down, we don’t want to wake the girls. Second, I didn’t want to tell you like that—but you said you wanted to know and …you made it pretty hard for me not to tell you right then, Louis.” Sophie was reproachful.

  “It’s just …I can’t get my head around what you’re telling me. You’re telling me I have a twenty-year-old son? How? I mean how can that be?” Louis asked.

  “Well, presumably when you and Wendy—”

  “Once.” Louis laughed fretfully. “We had sex only once. It was at this kid’s birthday party. Me and Wendy had been going out for a while. I was so, so in love with her. I think I would have married her then and there if we’d been old enough. We decided that the party was going to be ‘the night.’ We were both terrified, so we got really drunk on cider and ended
up under the coats, in the parents’ bedroom. I barely remember anything about it except that I wasn’t one hundred percent sure where everything went and it was over very quickly. Wendy cried. It was pretty awful, to be honest, but afterwards …I’d never felt so close to anyone before in my life. I really felt like I’d connected to another human being. We stayed there under the coats holding each other. I stroked her hair until she stopped crying.”

  “But you didn’t use any protection?” Sophie asked him, desperate to block out the image of him ever being sweet and tender with another woman.

  Louis looked at her and shrugged. “I can’t remember, but I was barely sixteen and I was drunk. I’m guessing not.”

  “And then what?” Sophie forced herself to ask him.

  “Then? We saw each other a few more times and then she disappeared.” Louis scowled at Sophie. “I told you all of this. Back then I didn’t think I’d ever love another girl again. But I’ve hardly thought about her in years …not until we bumped into her in the pub, and now I find out she had my kid at the age of fifteen and I never knew anything about it? And she’s been living less than fifty miles away for god knows how long and I’ve never bumped into her before.”

  “If you think about it, you’ve only been back in the country for a little while,” Sophie said, trying hard not to have heard the “hardly” part of what Louis had just said. “And I think she’s only been back in Cornwall for a few months.”

  “Maybe he’s not mine,” Louis said. “Chances are he’s not— aren’t they?”

  “Except that you haven’t seen him,” Sophie said, shaking her head. “Louis, he looks just like you. I mean he has your same mannerisms, your smile—he’s pretty cute actually.” Sophie attempted a smile, but the black look she received in return soon quelled it.