by Tamar Cohen
I didn’t do it! Felix grabbing my hand in the headmaster’s office, willing me to believe him. He’s lying. You know he is.
At the time I separated these incidents off from each other, refusing to see a pattern, although occasionally Simon would express doubts. Felix can be highly strung, I told him, we all know that. And sometimes we had to walk on eggshells around him, when he was in one of his moods. But he was so funny, as well, and so clever and so loving. I remember waking up one morning when he’d only just made the transition from cot to bed, and finding him standing by me, his forehead pressed tightly up against mine as if he wanted to push his way right into my skull. “Wake up, Mummy!” he demanded. “Wake up and be with me and not with you.”
The memories mass around me, blocking my nostrils and mouth, making it hard to breathe.
“Please tell me it wasn’t you who attacked Greg. He could have died, for God’s sake.”
That note on my windscreen. He isn’t worth it. Of course.
But Felix doesn’t want to talk about Greg.
“I knew, you know,” he says suddenly, conversationally. “About Dad and Lottie.”
I force myself up to a sitting position to stare at him, the words of the policeman echoing in my head.
“Yes, I found out when I was about fourteen. He had a photograph on his computer of the three of them lying on a beach, with a picnic. The little girl was eating a red ice lolly, and it looked like her mouth was bleeding.”
“Felix, you should have—”
“Told you? What would I have said, Madre mia?”
With a sudden violent motion, Felix jumps out of bed and begins pacing around the room, picking up objects randomly and studying them in the thin moonlight without really looking at them, and then discarding them.
“So you never confronted him?”
“Not then, no. I realized pretty quickly that a secret is a valuable commodity. And you know how much Dad liked valuable things. Almost as much, it turned out, as he liked secrets.”
I’m looking at my son, but I’m not seeing him. This isn’t him. It’s someone else. His eyes are wide and staring, not like Felix’s eyes.
“You blackmailed him?”
I realize I’m hoping that he’ll be appalled, that this will be one accusation too far. But Felix continues as if he hasn’t noticed the subject matter, as if this is a perfectly normal conversation.
“Not at first. For the first few years I just waited for him to stop. I waited for him to leave them, but when I realized he wasn’t going to, I wanted to make him pay. By then I had lots more evidence to hold over him—it was so easy to find once you went looking for it. At first I didn’t ask for much, a few hundred here and there, but as I got older, I got greedier. I am my father’s son, after all.”
“And he never knew it was you?”
Felix shakes his head, laughing. As though this is a game.
“I kept upping the ante. Well, I had a lifestyle to support by that stage, films to make. You know how it is.”
I’m still staring at him, the sick feeling corroding me inside like acid.
“He became a criminal because of you,” I say. “You know that, don’t you? Whatever corruption he was involved in over in Dubai—he did that because of you.”
Felix giggles again, an uncontrollable sound that seems to belong to someone else. Only now does it really sink in that my son is completely off his head.
Drugs. That’s what Petra was trying to tell me. “What are you taking?” I ask wildly. “What are you on?” But he doesn’t hear. He wants to continue talking.
“No, Madre,” he says excitedly. “He didn’t do it because of me. He did it because of him. All because of him, because he couldn’t bear to give anything up.”
And now I’m thinking ahead, following the narrative along its natural, inescapable trajectory. “You were with him on the night he died! That was you, on the police camera.”
Felix is nodding and smiling, as if he’s pleased with himself.
“I was bored with it, you see. The secrecy, I mean. I went to meet him, to see how he’d react. He could be so dismissive, you know, Madre. I wanted him to see that I was someone of...consequence.”
I can’t take it in. I won’t take it in.
“He wasn’t alone when I first arrived. He was with the other one. Your boyfriend.” A horrible peal of giggles follows this pronouncement.
Greg. And now I make myself confront what I think I knew all along—that it was Greg with Simon on the CCTV footage of that night. My head is throbbing. So Greg was involved in Simon’s death? But why is Felix calling him my boyfriend? Nothing is making sense.
“I think he assumed the blackmailer was one of the less-than-savory people he’d been doing business with. That’s why he brought loverboy along. Because they were both in it together.”
When he says loverboy, Felix’s mouth twists in distaste.
“They waited awhile, but when they realized no one was going to show, the other one left,” Felix goes on. “Then I stepped up to make myself known to Pa. He was horrified at first. Ashamed, as you would be. We had a few drinks—more than a few drinks, really. He cried a bit, as he always did. But after a while I think he started to convince himself that he was in the right, that he hadn’t done anything terribly wrong. Do you know, Madre, I honestly think he expected me to come round to his way of thinking in the end? I think he thought he could make an ally of me.”
An ally! It makes sense. But...
“He was a textbook narcissist,” adds Felix breezily. “You knew that, surely?”
I’m looking at him, but my head is pounding, my brain thumping against my skull.
“After a while,” Felix continues, “we went out and walked along the river. He was begging, pleading, saying he couldn’t bear to lose either of his two families. Can you imagine him saying that to me? His families? As if we were both equal, as if they were the same as us? That’s when I lost it. Well, anyone would have.”
Thumping, thumping in my head. This isn’t happening. It isn’t real.
“You didn’t...?” I try. Then again, “Tell me you didn’t...?”
Felix is off again, moving jerkily around the room.
“The thing is, though, Madre, I didn’t mean to do it. That’s what’s so funny about it. I’d climbed up to sit on the railings by the river, just to be by myself. We were drunk, I told you. And then, of course, Dad had to climb up, too, just to prove he still could.”
I can imagine it so clearly—Simon still thinking he could win his son around, just like he did everyone else, refusing to be left behind on the ground like some old man.
“When he said that thing about losing his families, he tried to put his arm around me and I hit out,” says Felix chattily. “I just wanted to stop him touching me, that’s all. But he was drunk. He overbalanced. It was an accident.”
I’m looking at him as if I don’t believe him, yet at the same time, I see it as if it’s happening right in front of my eyes.
“And you did all that for money, Felix?”
Now he looks at me as if I’m the one who’s crazy.
“Not for money, Madre. For you. Didn’t I pay off Pa’s baby-mother’s mortgage so you wouldn’t lose your house?”
“You paid Lottie’s mortgage?”
“Of course. And I’m buying back the house in Tuscany.”
Shock makes my mouth slack. “The buyer is you?”
Felix nods vigorously.
“You see now?” he says. “How it’s all been for you? I thought I’d set you free. I thought you’d finally find yourself. But instead you found Greg Ronaldson.”
He is looking right at me, but not seeing me. He is sniffing, and wiping the underneath of his nose with his hand.
“After eve
rything I did for you, Madre. You did that!”
Oh, dear God, he’s a monster. But he’s not a monster. He’s my son. And what he’s done, he’s done for me. And now it comes to me, clear and stark: it’s all my fault.
And again, there comes into my mind that scene on the terrace in Tuscany, the vines overhead sagging grotesquely with swollen, overripe fruit and throwing dappled shadows over Simon’s face as he looked at me. His expression for once serious and fiercely intent as he put his wineglass down on the table.
“I’ve got something to tell you,” he said, and I knew right then, right there, that I didn’t want to hear it, whatever it was, that I wanted to seize the cork from the corkscrew on the table and stopper him right up so he couldn’t say what he was going to say.
“I’ve met someone,” he said.
My insides disintegrating in the Italian heat.
“I’d do anything not to hurt you,” he continued, “but I can’t live a lie. We’ve had a good marriage, Sel.” His voice sagged with sincerity like the vine above our heads.
“We’ve produced two wonderful children. I thought that’s what happiness was until I met her. But now that I have—met her, I mean—what we have just isn’t enough anymore. I know now that happiness isn’t about sipping fine chianti while the sun sets over the hills. It’s something else, something visceral.” He pointed to a spot in his gut, and I felt my own stomach twist in misery.
“That isn’t love,” I shouted at him, when I was finally able to speak. “That’s infatuation. It’s teenage stuff. It’ll blow itself out in weeks. You can’t give up your family for that!”
And his expression, almost zealous, as he tried to make me see what he was seeing. “You’re wrong,” he said. “I can’t explain. I feel known by her. I feel like me.”
“And you don’t feel like that with me?”
“No.”
“You’re saying I stop you being who you are?”
“Sel...”
“You’re wrong!” My voice was sharp and ugly in the soft amber light of the afternoon sun. “I give you the stability to go off into the world and be who you are. Stability is the thing—not love.”
“Selina, I don’t expect you to understand.”
“That’s big of you.”
“But I am leaving you.”
The words fell hard as stones on the terra-cotta tiles between us.
“You can’t.”
“I’ll make sure you’re well provided for. Your lifestyle won’t change. You can keep the house, this villa. We can be the most tremendous friends, Sel, I know we can. Better than lovers. You can—”
“You can’t, because I’m pregnant!”
That shut him up. He was quiet then, shocked, his mouth opening and closing without a sound like a silent movie.
“Pregnant?” he repeated at length.
“Yes.” My voice was steady now. Sure of itself. “So you can’t leave me.”
He stayed looking at me for a long time, while I tried not to see the regret that fell over him like a net.
“No,” he said at length. “Of course not.”
He came over to me then to hold me in his arms. Oh, the relief! Knowing it would be all right, after all.
But now, looking at my oldest child’s wild face, I realize what I’ve done, what I set into motion with that split second of deception. Because it was, all of it, a lie. I wasn’t pregnant then, when I watched his desperation to do the right thing shrivel up and die under the glare of the Tuscan sun.
Perhaps it happened later that night when he held me in bed and cried and said he was sorry, and I turned to him and wrapped my leg around him like one of the terrace vines and told him not to mention it again. Or perhaps anytime during the rest of that holiday, where I allowed him to treat me like someone made from eggshells and tried not to mind when he spent long afternoons lying on his own in one of the spare bedrooms, the shutters drawn against the intrusive light of day.
All I know is that the next month, when my period was due, it didn’t arrive, as I knew it wouldn’t.
Only once afterward did we speak of it.
“It is all over now, isn’t it?” I forced myself to ask, as we rode home in a taxi from the airport.
“Yes.” His head turned to look out the window. “It’s over.”
I almost said it then, almost told him, quite spontaneously, that I loved him, but still, I judged it better to hold back, to keep it in reserve. I thought love should be meted out sparingly like sweeties.
Only now, with Felix pacing the room, do I see how much that deception has cost my family. The husband too weak to leave me but too in love to let the other one go. The son who took the weight of his father’s weakness on his own too-narrow shoulders, the daughter who grew up in the shadow of a sister she didn’t even know existed. And Josh, the child I brought into existence to save my relationship, the Elastoplast baby made to plaster over the great big crack down the center of my marriage.
For one fleeting, noble moment in Tuscany, Simon tried to do the right thing and set us all free, but I didn’t let him. How different would all our lives have been if I had?
I turn to my son, whose glassy eyes don’t see me. His jaw is moving, though he’s not saying anything.
“I’m sorry, Felix,” I say.
For a moment, confusion blurs his features, softening them into those of his long-gone boy-self.
He flops down on the bed next to me. “It doesn’t matter, Madre,” he says, and his voice weighs a thousand tons. “None of it matters anymore.”
He puts his hand—such long, elegant fingers—up to my face, gently stroking. Then he wraps his arms around me. Tight, so tight. So hard to breathe.
“It’s all over now,” he says.
Epilogue
Lottie Carling’s first daughter was born in a country where the heat turned your bones to dust, to parents who sealed themselves off in a bubble made from love. Her second daughter arrived seventeen years later, mottled with outrage in a delivery room on the overcrowded labor ward of a grim Victorian teaching hospital on a crisp May London morning, into an amorphous family that spilled messily out of any shape you tried to constrain it in. At just a few hours old, Hope Carling-Busfield already faced a list of disadvantages even longer than her name. Her father was dead, her elder brother criminally insane, and though the press had finally moved their attention onto other scandals, throughout her life, friends’ parents would pause and say, “Busfield? Wasn’t that...?”
So it wasn’t the best of starts.
Yet, sitting up in bed, flanked by her two sisters, who’d been with her throughout the seventeen-hour labor, Hope’s exhausted, elated mother looked down at her new daughter and promised to do everything in her power to keep her safe—a promise that, by and large, she would manage to keep. It helped that the children’s books she’d illustrated had started to take off, leaving her free to quit her job at the hotel and spend her days with her daughters, and her nights drawing at the kitchen table where once she’d sat and watched Chris Griffiths and his wife and reconfigured her ideas about love.
Hope’s older sister, Sadie, was one of the first to hold her, her long dark hair forming a curtain around them both. She’d mellowed slightly since the night of her destructive rampage in Barnes, and though she would always remain somewhat prickly, gently sloping valleys were forming between the spikes, periods where she was able to find peace.
“What do you think?” Lottie asked her, as anxious as if Hope was an impulse gift she wasn’t sure Sadie would like.
“She’s okay,” said Sadie, but when her mother wasn’t looking, she buried her nose in the soft skin of her baby sister’s neck and breathed her in like smelling salts.
The official visiting hour hadn’t long started before a tall figure clutch
ing a large, cuddly, multicolored elephant burst into the ward and stood awkwardly in the doorway, scanning the beds nervously. When his eyes fell on Lottie, relief was a smile that cracked his face right open.
“Let me see,” he said to Sadie, standing behind her so he could peer over her shoulder. They were unselfconscious around each other now, these two, like people who knew one another well.
“Let Josh have a hold,” commanded Lottie from the bed.
“No, I don’t want...”
Josh’s protests trailed off as the small bundle, wrapped in a purple blanket handmade by her Auntie Emma, who’d been taking what she insisted was an ironic evening knitting class, was thrust into his arms. Instantly, he stiffened as if his cargo was made of china, and the slightest movement could break her into a thousand pieces.
“Am I doing it right?” he asked Lottie, half terrified, half enthralled.
“You’re doing it perfectly.”
And now there was another person rushing through the ward, her soft frizz of hair quivering with excitement.
“Joshee! Look at you standing there holding a baby. Oh, it makes me want to cry.”
“You are crying, Flo.”
“Am I? Oh, bugger. But she’s so gorgeous.” Flora had seized the purple-wrapped parcel from her brother and was gazing down into Hope Carling-Busfield’s perfectly round, navy blue eyes. “She’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever, ever seen. A sister. Sadie, we have a sister.”
Sadie winced at that we with its implications of shared ownership, but the wince was more from habit than from any strong feeling.
“How are things?” asked Lottie, who was sitting up in bed, looking around at them all as if they were illustrations she was particularly proud of.
“Oh, you know. Comme ci comme ça.” Flora rocked her head from side to side, setting her frizz once more aquiver.
“Do you miss him? Ryan, I mean?”