by Debbie Rix
‘I spoke to the clinic yesterday,’ he said.
‘Really?’
‘Yes… I told them that – if you’re agreeable, I’d like to go ahead with a third round. I’ll pay for it.’
Sophie looked at him, intently. ‘It’s not a bargaining chip, Hamish.’
‘I know… that’s not what I meant by it.’
‘I don’t know how you expect me to respond.’
‘Just say what you think. Look… Living without you has demonstrated something very important – that I love you and I want to be with you more than anyone in the world. If having a child is the thing that will make you happy, then I want to give you that child. That’s the best thing I can do for you – isn’t it? It’s the best way I can show you how much I love you. Better than a new house, or great holiday. You want a child – so I want a child with you.’
He poured himself another glass of wine but didn’t drink it.
‘Can I have a little of that?’ Sophie asked.
He poured her a glass and she sipped the wine, thoughtfully.
‘Do you really mean this?’
‘I do.’
‘I’ve been thinking too. I… I think I was guilty of something. The baby… issue… became so huge in my mind, so all-consuming, that I excluded you. I… didn’t show my love for you, perhaps, quite as much as I should.’
‘Oh Sophie,’ Hamish said, taking her hand, and kissing it, ‘you’ve done nothing wrong. Nothing…’
That afternoon they drove back to the house in tandem. They kissed as they entered the hall and Sophie took Hamish by the hand and led him upstairs, where they made love. They lay in one another’s arms for the rest of the afternoon. As Sophie rested her head on his chest, she was surprised at how safe he made her feel. It just felt right.
‘Hamish…’ she said, looking intently at him. ‘I can’t believe you’re back; and I can’t believe how much I missed you. I’m still angry about what you did… I don’t think I’ll ever quite get over that. But one thing I know now… it’s not worth losing you over. These last few weeks have been so strange. I tried to pretend I could do without you. Not just because of having a baby – not that at all. But I tried so hard to visualise a life without you. And I couldn’t. Not if I was honest. All the time you were away I just mentally put you in a box marked “away for a bit” – not gone forever. I realised, I couldn’t bear to lose you.’
‘You haven’t lost me,’ he whispered into her hair. ‘You never could have. And I know I’ve hurt you badly and I promise I will never hurt you again. I will look after you forever.’
‘And whatever happens with babies,’ she whispered back, ‘I will learn to be content. What will be, will be.’
Part IV
‘No legacy is so rich as honesty’
William Shakespeare
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Hampstead
August 1978
In the summer of ’78, a few months after Tom’s eighteenth birthday, Rachael found herself quite alone at Willow Road. Angela was travelling through Europe with her boyfriend Alex and would not be back until the end of August. Tom had recently moved down to Dorset to work for a boat builder. The yard was not doing well, financially, and the owner was keen to sell it. If Tom made a success of the job, and could demonstrate enough ability, Rachael planned to buy the yard for him. No one wanted old yards anymore, and it wasn’t expensive. Besides, dear kind, thoughtful Chuck, had left a small fund of money to be settled on Tom when he reached twenty-one. There should be enough to buy the yard and give her son a relatively secure future.
Sitting alone at her bureau, listening to the scratching of the branches against the attic window, the rustle of the wind through the trees on the heath, and the purring of her ginger cat, who lay stretched out on the patchwork quilt, Rachael opened the central cupboard and took out the photograph. It had become a little ragged around the edges. Lying next to it in the envelope was the little byssus bracelet Tommaso had given to her that final day. Had it brought either of them luck? On the face of it, Rachael’s life had been filled with sadness. She had lost so many people she had loved – her mother, her father, two husbands. And yet… she had also been blessed. Her children were, without doubt, the greatest gift and had brought her so much happiness. But she also had financial security thanks not just to the generosity of both Chuck and Mrs Roper, but also her determination to finally get a career.
When Rachael moved back to London in 1960, the family had decided to remain at Willow Road. Although Rachael sometimes yearned for a house of her own, the big house on the heath felt like home. Mrs Roper was so much more than a landlady. She had become a friend – an unofficial grandmother to the children, a support to Rachael, a companion of sorts to George. As the children grew and started school, Rachael acquired some qualifications and after considering several options, decided to train as a book keeper. She had always found lists of figures strangely comforting. She thought, from time to time, of becoming an accountant, but it would have involved further training and she was reluctant to spend too much of time away from the children. Book-keeping wasn’t a glamourous occupation, but she could do it from home, it provided a steady income, and gave her a sense of her own self-worth. ‘You see, father,’ she told him on the day she passed her book keeping certificate, ‘I’m not completely useless and I can do more than baking…’
He smiled and kissed her. ‘I have never thought you were useless, my darling girl.’
Life was good, the children were strong and healthy and George was content in his work. But one afternoon, nearly eight years after she moved back to Hampstead, Rachael heard a curious muffled cry from the hall. She ran down several flights of stairs and found Mrs Roper unconscious on the tiled floor. The children were both at school, and George was at work, so, alone and scared for her friend, Rachael frantically called the emergency services. She travelled with Mrs Roper in the back of the ambulance, but when they arrived at the hospital, the old lady was already dead. She had suffered a massive heart attack. Rachael and George were enormously saddened by her death and took charge of her funeral. They were surprised to discover that she had no relatives and when Rachael received a lawyer’s letter a few weeks after Mrs Roper’s death she learnt that Willow Road and all its contents had been left to her in Mrs Roper’s will.
When the legalities had all been finalised, and the other paying guests had finally left, Rachael wandered around the house, thinking of all the years they had spent with Mrs Roper providing a kind of safety net for their lives. Not quite a mother, nor a grandmother, but a friend – as stalwart and loving a friend as you could hope to have. Standing in Mrs Roper’s bedroom, infused with its scent of Yardley’s ‘English Lavender’, Rachael ran her finger over the glass top of the dressing table arranged, as always, with Mrs Roper’s silver backed hair brush, the bottle of perfume, the crystal dish filled with face powder. She remembered how thoughtful and generous the older woman had been to her the day Angela had been born, fussing over her like a mother would have done. But it was in the kitchen that most of her happy memories were triggered. Standing together round the big pine table, making mince pies and gingerbread men, teaching Angela to cook.
For several months she felt unable to make any changes to the house, but gradually she set about turning it into the family home she had always wanted. The most urgent task was to give each of the children a room of their own. They had been sharing the tiny attic room since they had returned from America, and had long outgrown it.
‘I think they should have a room each on the first floor,’ she suggested to George.
‘Why not have those rooms yourself?’ he asked. ‘The children could sleep on the other side of the landing and I could go upstairs to the attic.’
‘No…’ she said. ‘I feel at home in the attic – I’ll stay there. I could turn the children’s old room into a little bathroom for myself. You stay on the first floor, Papa; and we could turn the bedroom next to yours into
a nice big study – wouldn’t you like that? The children can sleep on the other side of the landing, as you suggest.’
Initially, she felt guilty, removing the belongings of her old landlady. But there seemed no point in keeping Mrs Roper’s bedroom furniture, or her dusky pink bedspread. She kept the silver and crystal dressing set though – putting it upstairs in her own room. It meant she could simply open the crystal powder compartment and inhale the scent of the face powder, to be reminded instantly of her beloved benefactor. Once the dark furniture had been removed, she transformed Mrs Roper’s bedroom into a playroom for the children. With the doors leading out to the garden, it was the perfect space and the children were delighted with it. Over time, it became a haven of rocking horses and ‘tent’ houses. The wooden floors were a jumble of toys and books. Two old sofas, covered in ethnic throws, became a place to lie on a winter’s day and lose themselves in a book. The large dining room, running the full length of the house, became the family’s drawing room; a space where they could gather together and entertain. The old parlour became a formal dining room, but they rarely used it, preferring to eat in the basement kitchen. Rachael painted the kitchen walls bright red and acquired some orange casserole dishes that added a touch of zingy colour.
She loved the house. Its size and high ceilings reminded her constantly of both the apartment in Budapest and the old brownstone in New York. She bought a boudoir grand piano at auction and was thrilled when it was delivered and positioned in the bay window of the sitting room. As she sat on the piano stool, she felt she had found her physical place in the world at last. The years of upheaval, of homelessness, were finally at an end.
As the children grew, they developed interests and passions of their own. For Tom, that meant fishing – and the rack of fishing rods that covered one wall of hall were testament to his skill, first perfected while on a family holiday near Winchelsea. Sitting on the stony beach, protected by a windbreak, Rachael had been delighted to see her children running wild on the beach, catching crabs in rock pools and collecting tiny sea creatures in jam jars. She had bought Tom his first rod on that holiday, and it came as no surprise to see how naturally he took to the sport. As she watched him grow through his teenage years, he reminded her constantly of his father.
Rachael often daydreamed about taking Tom to meet his real father in Sardinia. As each birthday came and went, she rehearsed how she would explain this curious development to her son.
‘Tom, there’s something I need to explain to you… I know you thought that Charles was your father, but he’s actually an Italian fisherman named Tommaso…’
Then what would she say?
‘We met, we fell in love, but it wasn’t to be…?’
What sort of explanation was that? How could she explain to her son that Tommaso had been promised elsewhere? Tom would feel his father had betrayed her. That he had led her on. But that would be an inaccurate representation of what had taken place. Or Tom might feel that his mother had been foolish to trust the young Italian and reckless not to have taken precautions. It was so hard for young people in the 1970s to understand what life had been like before the pill. Tom would almost certainly conclude that his mother had been stupid not even to realise, before she left Italy, that she was pregnant. No… that wouldn’t do… either. Somehow each explanation failed at the first hurdle. By telling him the truth she risked everything: Tom would lose respect for her or despise his natural father. And the flimsy ephemeral memories Tom and Angela both had of Chuck could be damaged. He, after all, had been so good to them all; didn’t he deserve to live on in their memories as kind and loving man who had died tragically? The family often looked at photographs of the man Tom believed was his father. The albums from those two brief years were filled with pictures of Chuck beaming proudly at the camera – feeding Tom in his highchair, bathing him, cuddling ‘his son’. How could she take those memories away from Tom? It would seem such a betrayal to both Tom and to Chuck. Her son might even come to hate his own mother, for all the years of deception and for making such a mess of it all. Children, after all, could be the harshest critics.
And so the years came and went. George never revealed her secret either. He took it with him to his grave. He died of pneumonia when Tom was fourteen and his death rocked Rachael to the core. It felt quite different to the earlier loss of her two husbands. Both were young men in the prime of life, and were taken away so suddenly. Their deaths had been shocking. Devastating. But George’s death left her with a vast empty cavern of sadness. George was her link with the past. The one person who knew everything about her life, and his passing left her feeling as if she was in free fall… spinning through space, alone and lost. She clung to the children – not physically, but emotionally. She listened for their key in the lock when they came home from school – just as she had done for so many years waiting for her father to return. And it frightened her. For she knew that her children would move away eventually, find partners and lives of their own. And she would then be totally alone rattling around in the house in Willow Road.
And so, that summer of ’78, a few months after Tom’s eighteenth birthday, finding herself quite alone at Willow Road, she resolved to go back to Sant’Antioco.
‘The children need never know,’ she said to herself, stroking the cat. ‘I shall say that I went to Rome… for a holiday.’
A few days later, Rachael flew to Rome and took the ferry to Sardinia – just as she had done twenty years before. She slept quite well in the little cabin in the bowels of the ship but woke early and was eager to relive her earlier experiences. She pulled on a cardigan and went up on deck to watch the ferry arrive in Cagliari. There were a few more developments along the south-east shore, but the island appeared quite unchanged. As they approached the capital, she observed the same colourful buildings, painted in shades of pink, peach and apricot, rising up from the dark emerald waters.
She hired a car and drove along the coast road towards Sant’Antioco. The layout of the roads was remarkably unaltered and she remembered the route without much recourse to the map laid out on the passenger seat. She arrived at the causeway just before one o’clock. As she drove across the narrow strip of land connecting Sardinia to this tiny island, her stomach lurched, not with hunger, but nerves. Her knuckles turned white, as she gripped the steering wheel. ‘What am I doing?’ she asked herself. But she drove on, nevertheless.
The town had developed a little. A few more houses had sprung up around the harbour and market area, but not so much that she didn’t feel a huge wellspring of recognition. She pulled up near the harbour and watched the fishing boats come and go. There was no sign of the blue and white boat. Perhaps she was too late – had he retired? She had a sudden pang of fear. Perhaps, God forbid, he was dead. Maybe her whole trip would be a fiasco – a pointless waste of time.
She had booked herself into a small hotel on the other side of the town and could have driven there via a new ring road that circumvented the town, but decided, instead, to drive through the centre and get her bearings. She looked left and right as she drove up the cobbled streets, anxious to see what she could recall of the place – what was familiar, what could be recognised. The premises of the atelier, Italo Diana, had disappeared. The building appeared now to be a house. There was no sign of the ladies sitting outside in the sunshine carding and spinning.
She pulled up in the square outside the basilica. She was tired and hungry, and so parked the car and wandered across to the cafe where she had first met Tommaso. It seemed quite unchanged. Tables and chairs were still arranged outside and she sat down facing the square, the church on her left. If he was to come, she would certainly see him.
A middle-aged woman came outside and took her order. The waitress looked quizzically at this elegant dark-haired woman with her unusual grey green eyes, who spoke Italian with a slight Sardinian accent.
Rachael recognised her at once as Tommaso’s sister. So, she thought to herself, the family are stil
l here…
She drank her coffee and ate a sandwich, and then wandered around the shops off the square. The little grocery store she remembered so well had survived, but tourist shops had sprung up here and there, displacing the everyday goods that the villagers needed. There was even a little museum telling the story of byssus. She would go there tomorrow, she decided.
She drove out of town, along the coast road. As she approached the turning to the cottage, she slowed down. Her hotel was a few miles further on. She should go there first and register, unpack, get herself settled, take stock. But she couldn’t drive on without taking a look. She pulled over at the side of the road, locked the car and walked gingerly down the lane towards the cottage. After five or six minutes she saw the pale apricot walls and green shutters. It was exactly as she remembered. The garden was still enclosed by the little picket fence, slightly tatty now. She considered turning back. What would she do if he appeared suddenly, or if his wife was there? What would she say if she was recognised? It would be so embarrassing. The whole trip, she now realised, was misconceived; it was a terrible mistake. She had been quite happy in Hampstead. She had so much to be grateful for. What was she doing in this strange land, looking for someone who probably didn’t exist anymore, at least not as she had remembered him. No one stayed the same, we all change, move on, adapt. And yet, she carried on walking, compelled by some force. What was it? Curiosity? Love? Or unfinished business?
By now she was on a level with the cottage and she walked past, heading towards the copse and the cove beyond. She would go first to the beach, and then anyone coming from the house might just think her a tourist, lost, off the beaten track.
It was just as she had remembered it. The cove formed into a perfect arc – like a child’s drawing of a little beach, bookended by large rocks. And at one end, to her surprise, stood Tommaso’s boat – still painted blue and white. She wandered over, noting the rods, lying along the length of the boat, the nets folded carefully, a lobster pot or two, even a discarded pack of smoking tobacco and cigarette papers in the well. It was as if he had just dragged it up onto the shore and gone inside with his catch. She thought back to those happy days when he would bring her seabass for their supper, a cigarette hanging loosely from his lips.