Together

by Julie Cohen

  ‘I have to check whether my mother is all right, and find out what’s going on.’

  Robbie nodded. He reached over and touched the ring she wore with his index finger. ‘Whatever’s wrong, we’ll get through it together. That’s the deal.’

  She swallowed, and tried not to picture a situation where she would have to choose between her mother and Robbie. Having to make a decision between the woman who’d given her life and the man she’d known only for a few hours, but whom she loved.

  Surely that wouldn’t happen. This was strange, but there must be an explanation. Her family weren’t given to histrionics. Aside from Polly’s enthusiasm over pop music and romance, no one in their house ever raised their voice. Her mother usually showed disapproval with criticism or with withdrawal, not with shouting.

  It would all be a misunderstanding. She wouldn’t have to choose between her mother and Robbie. That was the sort of thing that happened in Greek tragedies or soap operas, not in real life. Not in a village like Blickley, with locals chatting happily in the pub, with the most dramatic event being a narrowly avoided burst appendix.

  But if she had to choose . . .

  She would have to choose Robbie, wouldn’t she? Wasn’t that what she had agreed when she promised to marry him?

  And if it wasn’t, what had she promised? Had she been as foolish, as impulsive, as her mother had accused her of being?

  ‘Emily?’

  She’d been staring at the ring, and Robbie’s finger touching the clasped hands. She looked up, startled.

  ‘We’ll get through it together,’ he repeated. ‘Whatever happens. This is meant to be, the two of us.’

  She nodded. Two days, she’d known him for. Two days and two nights. And then all those months of letters, longing written in every line. And this ring: so real on her finger.

  He squeezed her hand. ‘I need another drink. Do you want one?’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  He went to the bar and she felt the glances of the other customers. They could be a normal couple, out for a drink before dinner with her happy, normal family. There was no reason to suppose that anyone could tell that anything was wrong.

  Robbie returned with another pint, which he immediately took a long draught from.

  ‘You’re not . . .’ she began.

  He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘I’m not what?’

  ‘I’ve got to leave you here. You’re not going to drink lots, are you? I might need you.’

  He frowned. ‘I don’t plan on getting plastered, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘That just seems to be going down rather quickly.’

  ‘It’s been a strange afternoon. I can use a drink. I’m not my father, Emily. I’m not a drunk.’

  ‘I wasn’t saying you were. I don’t even know your father. I was just saying . . .’

  ‘This will be my last beer.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘I’ll wait for you. Ring the pub and I’ll meet you.’

  He leaned over the table and kissed her cheek, and Emily blushed, knowing they were being watched.

  The house was silent. In the kitchen, the pot of potatoes still sat on the cooker, cool now. ‘Mum?’ called Emily. ‘Daddy?’

  ‘Here, Emily.’

  Emily followed her father’s voice to the sitting room, where both her parents were on the sofa. They were holding hands. Their faces were grim, and Emily felt a heavy weight of dread in her stomach. She twisted her ring around on her finger.

  ‘Where’s Poll?’ she asked.

  ‘She’s gone to Margaret’s house,’ said her father. ‘She doesn’t need to be part of any of this.’

  ‘Part of what?’

  They didn’t answer, only exchanged a long glance.

  ‘Part of what?’ she repeated. ‘Mum, you kicked Robbie out of the house for no reason. He’s at the Royal Oak wondering what on earth he did wrong. I understand that you didn’t want me to get engaged to him, but this is . . . inexplicable. You don’t even know him.’

  ‘I do,’ said her mother, quietly. ‘I do know him.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Emily, you’d better sit down,’ said her father.

  She perched on the chintz armchair. For the first time, she noticed that her mother held a long white envelope. Emily stared at it.

  Whatever was about to happen, whatever the explanation, that envelope held it.

  All at once Emily felt sick. Heart beating fast, gorge rising. She wished she could go backwards in time, back to the lane and the raindrops and the mud, back to the wet railway platform. Back to Lowestoft and to Cambridge and to the first time she had seen Robbie, dark eyes and denim jacket.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked, though she didn’t want to. Didn’t want to move forward in any way.

  ‘Emily,’ said her father, ‘you know that I love you very much. Both your mother and I do. And we are so proud of you. I couldn’t have asked for a better daughter than you are.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said automatically. This praise made her even more anxious.

  ‘But,’ said Mum, ‘James isn’t your real father.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He’s not your father. He’s your stepfather.’

  ‘You were a year old when Charlotte and I married,’ said Daddy.

  ‘A year old? But I don’t . . .’

  ‘James took us both on. An unmarried woman with a daughter. There weren’t many men who would have done that.’

  ‘And I have always, always considered you my own daughter, just as much as Polly is.’

  ‘But . . .’ She looked from her mother to her father. She took after her father. She got her medical brain from him, her interest in science, her meticulousness, her care. Everyone in the family said it over and over again: Emily looked like her mother, but in personality and mind she was the spit of James.

  She had never wanted anything but to be just like him.

  ‘But – but if you’re not my father, who is?’

  ‘I was a fool,’ said her mother, eyes narrowed, teeth gritted. ‘I was twenty years old and I believed every promise he made. There was a war on. I hardly knew him, but I thought I was in love. I thought he loved me. He said he’d come back for me. But he never did.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I was an unmarried mother! I want to forget all about that time in my life. I never want to think about it. He was transferred. I waited for him. And then one day, when you were a few months old, he wrote to me to tell me he was already married and had a child. He’d been married all along, and never told me.’

  ‘Who was he?’ she asked again, touching the clasped hands on her finger, warmed by her skin. An old ring, worn by other fiancées and brides, who knew how many of them, through the years from love to death.

  Her mother swallowed hard, shook her head, and so her father took over.

  ‘He was an American pilot, a volunteer with the RAF. Based at Duxford. It wasn’t . . . there were a lot of war babies at that time. You can’t blame your mother.’

  Emily stared at her mother. She felt more than sick, now. She felt as if she were falling.

  ‘What was his name?’ she asked.

  Her mother held out the envelope.

  As if she were watching herself, Emily took the white envelope. She saw her hands opening it. Taking out a folded piece of paper.

  It was her birth certificate, long and printed with red ink, with the details handwritten in fountain pen. Emily Ann, a girl born on 15 June 1942. Mother’s name: Charlotte Atwell.

  Father’s name: Robert Edward Brandon. Occupation: Pilot.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  When she arrived to pick him up at the pub, she was white-faced, tight-lipped. She would not look him in the eyes.

  Rob
bie had had two more pints after she left, but he was far from drunk. The alcohol had barely touched the sides. He’d been pacing in his room since then, round and round the little bedroom with the slanted walls and the low ceiling and paned glass windows. He’d have found it quaint, if he hadn’t had other things on his mind. When he’d seen her car pulling up below, he didn’t wait for her to come into the pub; he’d run straight down and got into the passenger seat beside her.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked her immediately, and tried to take her hand. But she pulled it away.

  ‘Let’s go somewhere else,’ she said quietly. And didn’t say a word as she drove.

  It had stopped raining, but the trees were still dripping. She drove out of the village and down an empty lane, finally pulling off into a muddy parking lot.

  He’d been rehearsing arguments. Things he could say to convince her that her mother was wrong. That for every example she could come up with of people getting engaged too quickly, he could come up with a better example of love at first sight lasting forever. Or maybe it was that her mother didn’t like Americans. Or people with brown eyes. Or men in general.

  The thing was, he had no idea what he was arguing against, really. He had never seen anyone react so violently to anything as Mrs Greaves had reacted to him. The closest he could think of was his mother’s reaction the time his dad had been brought home by the police, still drunk and with his head split open forehead to ear, but even that had been more resignation than shock.

  Or when he himself had seen Emily for the first time and that bolt of recognition had struck him, the knowledge that he didn’t just want her, but needed her.

  ‘Emily?’ he said, but she just shook her head and got out of the car. He followed her.

  Down a grassy bank, there was a wide, flat river, grey in the grey afternoon, choked with reeds at its margins. Emily walked down to stand beside it. It had a green, muddy smell after the rain, and insects danced up and down on its surface. He realised that she had chosen this spot because there were no other people here to see them or hear them.

  He was more afraid than he’d ever been in his life.

  ‘Emily, you have to tell me what’s going on or I’m going to go crazy.’

  She still didn’t meet his eyes. She reached into the pocket of her coat and pulled out an envelope, which she gave to him.

  He saw it straight away, like how you could instantly recognise a boat you’d worked on yourself, even from a distance. His own name glared up at him from Emily’s birth certificate and yet he didn’t understand the significance of it, and he was about to ask why he was listed as her father when he wanted to be her husband, and then . . .

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Daddy isn’t my real father,’ she said, so quietly he could hardly hear her.

  ‘It’s not true,’ he said. ‘It’s got to be . . . some other . . .’

  ‘He was an American volunteer pilot stationed here, she said. She said . . .’ Emily swallowed hard. ‘She said he looked exactly like you, at your age. She said that when you walked into the kitchen she thought for a minute that he’d come back.’

  He was never the same after he came back from the war, said his mother’s voice in his head, and the truth hit Robbie like a sledgehammer between the shoulder blades. He nearly staggered with it.

  ‘It doesn’t have to matter,’ he heard himself saying. ‘Why does it matter? Why should anybody care?’

  ‘Robbie . . . we’re . . . you’re my brother. We have the same father.’

  She said it with revulsion, and it made him speak more quickly.

  ‘I don’t believe it.’

  ‘It’s on the birth certificate.’

  ‘It’s a lie. Your mother doesn’t like me. She wants to keep us apart.’

  ‘She hasn’t faked this.’ Emily pointed to the paper he still held. ‘It’s evidence, Robbie. It’s the truth.’

  ‘We don’t look alike, at all.’

  ‘I look like my mother. You look like your – like our father.’

  ‘You’re very quick to accept this.’

  She choked on a sob. ‘I haven’t . . . I haven’t accepted it at all. I’m just trying to understand what we’ve done.’

  ‘We’ve fallen in love.’

  She turned her back on him and started walking rapidly down the bank. Robbie followed her. ‘Don’t,’ she said.

  ‘We didn’t know.’

  ‘We know now. My parents know. Your father would know. It’s on my birth certificate.’

  ‘I love you,’ he said desperately. ‘I refuse to believe that this is true.’

  ‘It’s true. We’re related. It’s illegal, it’s immoral.’

  ‘It doesn’t feel immoral. It feels like the best thing I’ve ever known.’

  ‘Robbie,’ she said, ‘don’t you think that’s why we fell so quickly? There have been studies – I’ve read about them. Siblings separated at birth, they encounter each other years later, as adults, and there’s a-an affinity. Suddenly. Like they’re . . .’ She choked, but forced the words out. ‘Like they’re meant to be together.’

  ‘We didn’t know. We’ve done nothing wrong.’

  ‘Yes, we have,’ she whispered.

  ‘We can go somewhere no one will know us. Somewhere far away, just the two of us.’ He reached out to touch her cheek and she stepped back quickly.

  ‘No. We can’t. Maybe it’s not our fault, what happened, but we can’t continue. Not now that we know. It’s wrong.’

  He felt as though he couldn’t breathe. ‘Please, Emily.’

  She shook her head. Deliberately, her mouth firm, she slid the ring he had given her off her hand. She held it out to him.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I gave it to you. I won’t take it back.’

  ‘I can’t wear it.’

  ‘Maybe we can never get married. But we can still be together. We’re – we only have one life. We’re not responsible for where we came from or what our parents did. We have to do what we feel is the right thing, no matter what anyone else says.’

  ‘But this is wrong. Robbie, the shame on my mother’s face . . .’ She sobbed, suddenly, and a tear fell from her eye. ‘If we stay together, that is how we are going to feel. All the time. Even if we go away, even if I give up all of my dreams to be with you, and you give up all of yours to be with me, even if no one knows, we are going to know. It’s going to poison everything we do.’

  ‘It doesn’t have to.’

  ‘Please. Please. Take back your ring.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then I’ll throw it in the river.’ She drew back her hand to throw, and he caught her wrist.

  ‘Don’t do that. I’ll keep it.’ He took the ring from her hand. It felt small and warm in his palm. ‘But I won’t . . . I’ll only be holding it for you. Until you decide you can wear it.’

  She pulled her arm away from him. ‘Robbie, don’t you see? We can’t ever meet again. Not ever. After this conversation, I need to take you to the train station and we need to say goodbye forever.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes. It’s the only thing we can do.’

  ‘I could never, ever feel ashamed of being with you.’

  She only bowed her head. Another tear ran down her cheek and Robbie wanted nothing more, had never wanted anything more, than to wipe it away. To take her in his arms and whisper that everything was going to be all right.

  ‘I don’t care who we are,’ he told her.

  ‘I do,’ she said.

  She drove him to the pub to pick up his bag, and then to the railway station, in silence. Emily was still, every movement deliberate. Tears were in her eyes but very few of them fell. Robbie was restless, hand-clenched furious. The ring he had taken from her was in the pocket of his shirt and he felt it there like a red-hot coal.

  He w
anted to find the words to make this right. He wanted to talk and talk and explain everything away. He wanted to run, to punch something, to jump into water and swim, some sort of physical struggle that he could win.

  He couldn’t do anything. Without meaning to or wanting to, they had become something shameful.

  The car pulled up outside the station. He’d only arrived six hours ago, and he’d felt the happiest he’d ever been in his life. He’d thought he was finally sure of his purpose and his direction. Finally with some sort of meaning to his life other than the passing joy of the moments on the sea.

  ‘There’s a train every half hour,’ she said. Her voice was scratchy with unshed tears. She sat behind the wheel of her father’s big car, gazing down at her bare hands, waiting for him to leave.

  He wanted to run, wanted to swim. Wanted to wrestle the facts into some sort of shape that made sense, harness the wind in a sail, control the uncontrollable, do something that meant that they could be together.

  ‘Emily . . . Will you please kiss me? One last time.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Then look at me, at least.’

  Her eyes, that shade of ocean blue. Troubled and beautiful. He remembered the first time he’d seen her, hurrying across the station in Cambridge. How as soon as he’d seen her, he felt as if he’d known her forever.

  He looked into her eyes for as long as he could, committing them to memory, until she looked away.

  Then he opened the car door, got out, and retrieved his bag from the back. He bent and looked at her one last time. She was fragile and small and much, much stronger than he was.

  ‘I’ll never forget you,’ he said.

  And then he walked away.

  Postscript

  October 2016

  Clyde Bay, Maine

  I often think about the first time we met.

  Sometimes we don’t know the moments that are going to be significant to us, not until later when we look back and reflect. But when I first saw you I knew, even though I didn’t want to, that my life had changed.