Tangled Lives

by Hilary Boyd

  ‘It’s hard to think like that.’

  ‘I’m not trying to put a dampener on things.’ Marjory eased herself out of the chair and stood still for a moment to steady herself with her stick before moving slowly across to the sink. ‘I just think it’s important not to have too many expectations.’

  Annie felt a surge of anxiety at Marjory’s words and realised she couldn’t think beyond this first meeting. I don’t have any expectations, she thought, beyond actually setting eyes on my firstborn child again.

  ‘We’d better clear up a bit.’ Marjory bent stiffly to open the dishwasher, and Annie began collecting the glasses.

  ‘I asked Mrs B. for one of her Victoria sponges. Men always like cake.’

  The thought of the sponge cake brought sudden tears to Annie’s eyes. Every day when she was pregnant, gathered round this same table, Aunt Best would insist on the ritual of tea. Whoever was in the house, and anyone else sensible enough to drop by at three thirty, was encouraged to join in. It was a time for conversation, for catching up with the day, for laughter, for sharing worries.

  Back then Marjory baked too: flapjacks, banana bread, lemon cupcakes – nothing fancy. Her baking was enthusiastic rather than consistent, and there was much merriment at the failures. But Mrs Blundell had the magic touch. Her cakes were creamy, light and melting, always utterly delicious. It was memories of Joan Blundell’s Victoria sponge that had set Annie on the path, many years later, to Delancey Bakes.

  She went up behind Marjory and put her arms round her thin shoulders.

  ‘That was the dearest thing to do,’ she said. Nothing bad can happen to me, she thought, under the auspices of Aunt Best, and Joan Blundell’s Victoria sponge.

  There was a sudden clatter of feet on the flagstones in the hall, and Jamie burst into the kitchen.

  ‘He’s here! Quick, he’s just getting out of the car. And tell you what, he’s absolutely GORgeous!’

  Annie closed her eyes for a moment and took a steadying breath.

  ‘Let’s do it!’ Marjory’s authoritative voice urged Annie forward, through the kitchen, into the hall, towards the open front door and her reunion with her son, Daniel Gray.

  Jamie’s right, he is beautiful, was her first thought. Really stunning. And the spitting image of Uncle Terence.

  ‘How do you do. I’m Marjory Best.’ Marjory was shaking the man firmly by the hand. ‘Please, do come in.’ The afternoon was still overcast and drizzling; a typical April day.

  ‘Hi, I’m Daniel.’ He introduced himself, his voice surprisingly strong and confident. He glanced quickly between Jamie and Annie, his gaze settling on Annie. She tried to speak, but no words came out, so she just held out her hand to him. The glaring genetic connection was so startling that it was almost like a physical blow.

  Daniel was tall with broad shoulders, his thick wavy hair a dark auburn and falling just below his ears. He had her own grey-blue eyes, strong, sculpted features – more beautiful than handsome – dominated by her father’s nose, but otherwise Terence Sinclair seemed incarnate in front of her. Her flesh and blood, no question. And not a trace of Charles Carnegie, she thought with a twinge of childish satisfaction.

  ‘Annie Delancey,’ she said eventually.

  For a moment they clasped hands in silence. The others were moving off towards the kitchen, but she and Daniel continued to stare at each other. Just as she had when he was a baby, she wanted to gaze at him forever.

  ‘Come through,’ she heard Marjory call.

  Daniel waited, gesturing politely to her to go first.

  Marjory filled the kettle and put it on the Raeburn. Jamie took down the cake tin from the dresser and carefully lifted the sponge onto a white plate with a blue rim. It looked perfect, cream and jam poking temptingly from between the golden sponge layers, icing sugar dusting the top like a light fall of snow. Annie hovered, hardly daring to look at the man.

  ‘Do take your coat off,’ Marjory urged him. ‘There are hooks just outside the door to the right.’

  Daniel obediently removed his battered black leather jacket and disappeared to hang it up.

  ‘OK?’ Jamie mouthed at Annie, smiling encouragingly.

  The ritual of tea and cake took up the next half-hour. Conversation was light and mostly conducted by Marjory and Jamie, who adopted a breezy normality that wasn’t matched by the other two. It was Jamie who asked the questions: Had he found the house all right? Did he know the area? Where had he come from? What shocking spring weather they were having. Yes, Marjory was an artist. No, Annie didn’t live round here, but in north London.

  Annie listened and watched. This was basic information, but it was daunting, reminding her how much she didn’t yet know about her own son. Apparently he lived in north London too. In a rented flat in Finsbury Park – no distance from her at all. I could have bumped into him anytime on the street, in the supermarket, and never known, she thought.

  He’d been brought up in Brighton, had only passed through Kent on his way to the ferry at Folkestone, so no, he didn’t know the area. He wrote plays. So far he’d had short ones put on in pub theatres and the like. He’d been to Cambridge, started as a copywriter in advertising, then made the leap to theatre – his one true love. He seemed shining and confident to Annie, articulate as he took the grilling with good grace. How can he not be nervous? she asked herself, in awe.

  When Jamie got up to fill the teapot, Marjory turned to Annie.

  ‘Why don’t you two go through to the sitting room? It’ll have warmed up by now, and it’s more private.’

  Annie felt suddenly panicky at being alone with him.

  ‘Daniel?’

  He nodded, but she could see in his uncertain smile the first sign that this meeting was hard for him too.

  The sitting room was warm and quiet, the furniture soft and yielding with age. They sat opposite each other in worn chintz armchairs, the fire between them making the air sharp with wood smoke. The gold carriage clock ticked like a sentinel on the mantelpiece. Neither of them knew where to look. Where there had been too little intimacy in the kitchen, now there was almost too much.

  ‘This is so strange.’ Daniel was the first to speak.

  She nodded. ‘I’ve imagined it a million times since …’ She couldn’t say it. But her heart suddenly soared with happiness. This is Tom. This is him. This is my son.

  ‘Am I as you imagined?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘I only knew you for a few days,’ she paused, ‘I can only remember you as you were then. A baby.’

  ‘So not quite as you thought then,’ he joked, his confidence returning.

  ‘You’re the spit of my uncle – your great-uncle – Terence.’

  She saw him waiting expectantly.

  ‘My father died when I was young, and Uncle Terence sort of took over. He was a gorgeous, flamboyant character, a life-enhancer in every way. I loved him very much. He was my mother’s brother.’ How much could she fairly say about Mother, the pivotal figure in both their histories …? ‘I don’t know … for some reason I never expected such a strong family resemblance. I suppose I hadn’t dared think about it … about you … as part of my family.’ She knew she was babbling, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself.

  ‘It’s odd,’ he replied, ‘because you know every bit of my genetic history, and I know absolutely none. Was my father … was he important in your life?’

  She gave a small sigh. ‘Your father was … not really important, no.’ She wouldn’t utter the words ‘one-night stand’.

  Daniel looked at her, waiting for her to continue, but she didn’t know what to say.

  ‘So you weren’t in a relationship with him when I was born?’

  ‘No. No, I wasn’t,’ she said quickly. He mustn’t think there was a perfectly good couple who’d chosen to give him away. She looked her son straight in the eye. ‘We were never in a relationship. It was one night. He wasn’t interested after that.’

  Daniel glanced away. ‘But you
… liked him? At the time?’

  ‘At the time, yes, I suppose I did.’ She didn’t want to say that she had quickly made up her mind that Charles was an arrogant prat – good-looking and rich, the perfect profile of the man her mother had brought her up to desire. She had been naïve and inexperienced; he had taken advantage. That’s what she had told herself. But she had to admit that it hadn’t been entirely one-sided.

  ‘Are you in touch now?’

  She shook her head. ‘We never spoke again.’ How bleak to have this as the beginning of your life. No love, no friendship, no connection at all. Just a hasty, fumbled lust.

  ‘So he really didn’t want anything to do with me?’

  ‘No, it wasn’t like that. I never told him. He doesn’t know about you to this day. Almost no one does.’

  Daniel turned away from her, but not before Annie had caught the surprise on his face.

  ‘Wow! That bad. So he might not even be alive.’

  She kicked herself for her insensitivity. Did he really have to know that his very existence was like a dirty secret? He must now be wondering if things would have been different if she’d chosen to tell his father – a question she’d asked herself endlessly.

  ‘I think my mother would have heard via the grapevine if something had happened to him,’ she told him. ‘His family knew my mother quite well, not friends exactly …’ She paused. ‘My mother ran a finishing school for girls in Knightsbridge: the Westbury Academy. His sister was one of her pupils. He came with her to the end-of-year dance and that’s where I met him.’ For a moment she had a flash of what had been, for her, a magical night. But her past seemed so shallow and redundant in the telling. A finishing school? Knightsbridge? Hardly the profile of a disadvantaged single mother driven by economic circumstances to give her baby away.

  ‘What was his name?’ Even Daniel spoke about him in the past, as if he no longer existed.

  The name stuck in her throat. ‘Charles Carnegie.’

  There was a knock at the door and Marjory peered in.

  ‘All OK in here?’

  Annie turned. Her face felt flushed by the heat of the fire. ‘Yes … yes, fine, thank you. We won’t be long.’

  Marjory waved her hands expansively. ‘Take as long as you like.’ She eyed the fire, then Daniel. ‘Put another log on, would you, dear? I don’t want it going out now it’s lit.’

  Daniel jumped up immediately and took a couple of logs from the wicker basket by the fire, riddling the glowing ashes with the poker before efficiently tenting the two pieces of wood for maximum draw.

  ‘I was thinking a glass of wine might be appropriate?’ Marjory suggested, nodding her approval at Daniel’s work.

  Annie longed for one, but Daniel hesitated. ‘I’ve got to drive, but perhaps a small one.’ He grinned at Marjory.

  ‘Right, well, I’ll leave you to it. Come through when you’re ready.’ The door closed quietly behind her.

  Annie wanted to say something personal, acknowledge him somehow as her son, but she didn’t know how.

  ‘Why did you choose to find me now?’ she asked instead.

  Daniel shifted awkwardly in his chair at the question. ‘My mother died, a couple of years ago.’

  His mother. Annie felt her heart contract. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  ‘It was sudden, a stroke. She lived for twenty-four hours, then … I wouldn’t have looked for you while Mum was alive. It might have upset her.’

  ‘She was a good mother, then?’ Her emotions as she spoke were too complicated for her to analyse. How conflicted would I be if he said, No, she was a terrible mother, I had a hellish childhood?

  Daniel nodded. ‘Wonderful.’

  ‘And your father?’

  ‘Dad? He’s a … how would I describe him?’ He gave a short, almost cynical laugh. ‘“Complex” sort of covers it.’

  ‘But you see him? You’re still in touch?’

  ‘Hardly. We haven’t been close since Mum died. He was a teacher at Brighton College, physics and chemistry. Now retired. He – well, from what Mum said, Dad didn’t particularly want me. It was Mum who pushed for the adoption, apparently. Dad’s just not a child person, not at all, even though he taught children.’ He shrugged. ‘And I was rubbish at science.’

  He joked, but Annie could hear the hurt. Was he looking for a replacement father in Charles, she wondered. Because unless some Damascene conversion had taken place in Carnegie’s life – which was highly unlikely, because he’d have been too stupid to recognise it – the man would make a dismal excuse for a father. She wished she could protect Daniel from finding this out.

  ‘Me too! I was rubbish at most things at school.’ She paused, fiddling with a rough bit of skin on her thumb as she mustered her courage.

  ‘Daniel … it means so much to me … you finding me. All these years, I never stopped thinking of you. You were always there, in the back of my mind. I was desperate to know what your adoptive parents were like, whether they were looking after you properly, loving you … as much as I would have done.’ She paused, making a huge effort to stem the incipient tears. The relief that the wondering was over for her was tempered by renewed shame that she had given him away in the first place, making her suddenly hot and uncomfortable. ‘It was so hard, thinking you were out there somewhere, and that I had given up the right to know you. Every birthday I thought of what I might have bought you, I calculated how you might have grown, wondered what you were good at, at school. I’m so sorry.’ Her vision blurred with tears.

  Daniel cleared his throat. ‘Please … it’s just great that we’ve met at last.’

  She let out a long, slow breath. ‘I was young. I didn’t realise the implications at the time … how much I would regret what I did. But at the time I felt I had no choice.

  My mother was horrified, she refused to support me … And I was so unworldly.’

  Daniel didn’t reply at first. His head was turned towards the fire and she had no idea what he was thinking. Should she tell him the details of his adoption now, or wait until he asked? she wondered.

  ‘I can’t imagine what it was like for you,’ he said, finally looking across at her.

  There was an awkward silence.

  ‘There’s so much I want to tell you, if we can keep in touch?’ Her question was tentative. She heard Richard’s words ringing in her ears: no connection beyond their DNA.

  ‘I’d like that, if you’re up for it.’

  ‘I could bring the albums next time. You must want to put faces to some of your ancestors.’

  ‘That’d be great.’

  As they got up to leave the room, Daniel stopped her, laying his hand lightly on her arm.

  ‘One thing I haven’t asked –’ he frowned slightly ‘– along with a thousand other things of course.’

  She waited.

  ‘I wondered … do you have a family?’

  She tried to look him in the eye, but failed. In that moment, her lovely life with her husband and three other children seemed the ultimate betrayal.

  ‘Yes … yes, I have a husband, Richard, and three children. A son and two daughters.’

  Daniel nodded slowly.

  ‘Do they know about me?’

  ‘Richard knows. But there never seemed a good time to tell the others. I should have. And of course I will now. I hope you’ll meet them.’

  ‘Big secret. But then I guess everything’s easy with hindsight,’ Daniel replied, his voice hardly more than a whisper.

  It was getting dark by the time Annie and Jamie began the journey home. They waved a final time to Marjory’s upright figure standing in the doorway, backlit by the light from the small chandelier in the hall.

  ‘I hate leaving her alone in that huge house,’ Annie said, as the car crunched over the gravel.

  ‘She wouldn’t be happy anywhere else.’

  ‘I know, but what if she has a fall or something?’

  ‘Marjory would shoot herself if she had to hang out with so
me dodgy carer referring to her as ‘we’ all the time … Do we need a little nap now? You know the sort of thing.’

  She nodded, but her thoughts were elsewhere as she negotiated the lanes to the main road and she didn’t answer.

  ‘Well, he’s definitely the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in decades,’ she heard Jamie say. ‘Fancy waiting thirty-five years and then finding a son so handsome and clever. I mean he could have been a dog.’

  ‘You’re so shallow! Although he was beautiful, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Gorgeous!’ Jamie repeated, and she realised he was probably a little drunk. ‘So, come on. What did it feel like?’

  ‘It was …’ She stopped, unable to find the words to describe what had happened.

  ‘Did he seem like your son? I mean, did you sense a link to the baby? Or was it like being with some random stranger?’

  ‘He looked so like Uncle Terence that I couldn’t help feeling the family connection. But it was hard to believe after all this time that he was really Tom.’

  She drove in silence for a while, the headlights of the oncoming cars almost hypnotic in the gathering dusk.

  ‘Did he ask the dreaded question?’

  ‘Why I’d given him away?’

  Jamie nodded.

  ‘No, but I half told him anyway. Not the details – he didn’t ask. He wanted to know if I had other children. And he asked a lot about his father, which of course I couldn’t tell him. I suppose I can tell him next time.’

  ‘Maybe he didn’t want to face the rejection thing,’ Jamie suggested.

  ‘Maybe. But it wasn’t personal.’

  Jamie snorted. ‘I’d say it was highly personal!’

  ‘No, you’ve missed my point. It wasn’t personal enough. At the time, although I couldn’t help loving him, I don’t think I allowed myself to think of him as a real person, as my son. I only thought about him as something getting in the way of the life that had been prescribed for me. Seeing him today, so obviously my flesh and blood, brought it home to me that we’ve been separate his whole life because I refused to properly acknowledge him. I could only see him as Mother did: a problem that needed sweeping under the carpet.’ She paused. ‘Of course it hit me later, but by then it was way too late.’