‘How much of that does Jamie know?’
‘Not much. Even I thought it wasn’t fair to taint their relationship from the start, although I made it clear to her that I didn’t want Jamie anywhere near Greg. Jamie used to think we all don’t get on, but he may have put two and two together. He has met Greg once, at a wedding that my mother persuaded him to go to. He met David as well, but he didn’t take to either of them — David’s a chip off the old block by the sound of it. My mother says they don’t want to see me and the feeling is entirely mutual.’
She looked at her watch and although my head was brimming with questions I pushed on to what I needed to know. ‘So are you going to tell me? About how she found you?’
She glanced down, pressing her lips tight.
‘Come on, Alex. Don’t I deserve to know?’
‘All right,’ she said. ‘But you won’t like it.’
A sudden cold dread took hold of me. ‘Not Fitz?’
‘No.’ When she spoke it was as though she was dragging it out of herself. ‘It was you.’ I felt the blood drain from my face and Alex softened her voice. ‘You were writing to Fitz,’ she went on, ‘those two weeks you were at home. And then you sent him a parcel of books. You bumped into my mother, the day you posted it. Remember?’ I nodded, mutely. ‘Well, she saw it and smelt a rat. She had a friend who worked behind the counter at the post office. She waited till you’d gone and then went in and persuaded her to show her the address. It was against all the rules but the woman knew the situation and did as she was asked.’
My chest felt heavy, as though a great stone had lodged there.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘That’s why I didn’t want to tell you. Although in the end I don’t suppose it made much difference. We were already falling out, weren’t we?’ She leaned over, squeezed my arm. ‘Don’t worry. It doesn’t matter now.’
‘But it does,’ I said, in an anguished voice. ‘I mean, it did. If you hadn’t run off that night—’
‘What? You might have persuaded me to go back home?’ She shook her head. ‘No. I wouldn’t have done that, ever. And then what else could I do?’
‘But I would have known where you were. And you might have come to me when things were going wrong.’
‘I don’t think so, Beth. I was too jealous of you.’ She saw my surprise and pushed away her cold coffee, picked up her bag. ‘I’ve got to go.’
I grabbed her arm. ‘Not yet, Alex. Sit down. Please.’
She stood firm. ‘I don’t think this is doing either of us any good. I’m sorry it was so awful for you, Beth. I know I behaved badly but at the time I was desperate. I can’t let all this stuff in now. I’m not Alex Day any more.’
She turned on her heel and left. For a long time I stared vacantly out of the window, at the place on the opposite side of the street where I’d last caught a glimpse of her. A man on a bus peered in, our eyes connected briefly. Then it was just people passing, and passing. A girl cleared the table. She looked at me, seemed about to say something, thought better of it. After she’d gone, trying to bring myself back, I had the sense that I was falling, down and down, holding my breath for the crash of landing.
You bumped into my mother…remember?…I’m going to Cornwall this evening
…
I was too jealous of you
…
The risk would be mine as much as yours
.
And then I heard my father’s voice, as though he were there beside me. It was what he’d said after Empire Road, once he knew the whole story, his gruff voice tinged with disbelief.
‘What were you thinking of, Beth? What were you thinking of?’
*
23
rd
June 2013
For the third time in one evening I climbed the attic stairs to Sean’s room, where I could lean against the skylight and look down on the mosaic of roofs and gardens below, absorbing the quiet warmth of this space under the eaves. The only sounds up here were those of birds’ feet scratching in the guttering and the ticking of contracting wood, but somehow these served to calm the ticking, scratching thoughts in my head. Like the edges of the now darkening landscape they softened and blurred.
When Sean leaves home, I was thinking, I’ll claim this room for my own. It will enfold me like a womb, with its sloping beams and red walls and door at the bottom of the stairs. This is where I’ll come to lick my wounds. I’ll play loud music and read books and curl up in bed with Love Film. I’ll write letters I never send and bad poems that I’ll keep in a folder at the back of a cupboard. I’ll take up photography and blues guitar, I’ll eat cheap chocolate and expensive olives, I’ll drink white wine and sometimes gin, and generally just do whatever comes into my head. There will at least be that consolation when all this goes down the pan. Being free to do what I want.
It was Sunday evening, nine o’clock, and next week would be the last of my work in London. After that, we’d be as we were before then, Alex, Fitz and me, living in different cities with just the slenderest thread of connection between us.
Alex, I felt certain, would never contact me, so that all I’d be left with was the new knowledge that it was me after all who brought her mother down to Empire Road, and sent Alex running off to where I couldn’t reach her. What was it Fitz said?
‘You’d have to be prepared for anything. Like it or not.’
And then Fitz. If he and I did speak again I imagined he’d say something like, ‘Beth, I’m sorry, that night was a mistake. Let’s not do anything stupid.’ He’d say, ‘Give me a call next time you’re down — we could have a drink,’ while secretly hoping I wouldn’t. Only one thing seemed to contradict this picture I was painting, and that was the look on his face as we’d made love: a mix of certainty and trepidation. I’d reached up and placed my palm against his cheek, and he’d turned his face into it, his lips brushing my skin as he’d said, ‘This is right, isn’t it?’
When I thought of that a solid pain dragged at my guts.
I went downstairs, pulled a half-finished pot of Greek yoghurt out of the fridge, chopped banana and poured honey into it, and then took this to my laptop with a third glass of wine, deciding that tidying up my emails might keep the dogs at bay. I dealt with my work account first, then went into my Hotmail address and went through the same process with personal stuff, a second round of displacement activity that was nearly displaced itself when I reached Celia’s emails to me. I resisted reopening them, rejected the impulse to
delete
, and finally placed them in the bland
useful info
folder. Despite its name this contained possibly my most useless collection of information — things I knew I should delete but hadn’t quite got round to yet — and seemed appropriate enough.
Celia/Alex. Alex/Celia. It was still so weird, to think that Alex was Celia Beaumont. And her son, which name did he have? I remembered how her eyes wavered when I asked how old he was. Twenty-two, she’d said, which would mean born in 1991. Suppose she was lying? That day she came to the farm:
I’ve got
something to tell you
. I’d seen what I’d thought was excitement in her eyes but brushed off the fleeting idea of her being pregnant, thinking that wouldn’t be a cause for joy. But suppose she had been? She wouldn’t have been the first to think that having your own child would make up for the lack of a loving family.
I went to the laptop and logged into Facebook. Then sat and stared at it for a while. Jamie what? If Pete was the father then I had never known his last name; he preferred to be anonymous. And if he had Alex’s name, which one — Beaumont or Day? Eenie-meenie-miney-mo. I typed Jamie Beaumont into the search box; the drop-down list showed one who lived in Rome. I clicked to go to profile, and found myself staring at an old photo of Fitz. I checked the search box but, no, I was not going mad and I had typed in the right name. I was looking at Jamie Beaumont, born not1991, but 1983.
The truth took a long time to sink in. My mind batted it off, searching for any other reason why Alex’s son should look like Fitz — right down to the curly hair and the thin nose and the loppy smile — and when I finally gave in, when the only logical explanation was staring me in the face, I heard someone shout out loud.
‘How could you be so blind? So stupid?’
It was my voice, cracked and broken.
My head whirled as a series of words and images flashed through it. Fitz:
If it is her, wouldn’t you want to give her some warning? Do you really want to open this all up again?
And Alex:. The shock on her face when she’d seen him in the pub; the little private conversation they’d had later; the cool façade she’d worn to keep me out. They’d been trying to steer me away, put me off the scent, both of them, without appearing to have anything to hide. It was just a mistake, they’d both told me, without bothering to mention that that mistake bore fruit.
I stared at Jamie, horribly fascinated by the sight of those familiar features on a stranger. So you are Fitz’s son… Alex’s son. Oh, yes, I can see her in you now, the dark eyes and cute chin, although they’re not so obvious. What would you have looked like if you’d been mine? Would you have had my fair hair, or my wide-apart eyes? Whose genes would have won out?
Tears were sliding down my face. I wiped them away roughly with the heel of my hand but they flowed steadily on, dripping off my chin and the end of my nose, then down onto my laptop. I fetched tissues and continued to cry, and then began to howl, an unstoppable stream of rage and hurt and despair. In the middle of this storm it began to feel as though I could fall apart totally and that if I did I’d be unable to put myself back together; in fact there was one luxurious moment when this ceased to be a fear and became an intense desire to just let go, to let everything go. But that desire itself scared me. Abruptly I got up from the laptop, found my phone, and called Linda. Twenty minutes later she was sitting on the other end of my sofa, pressing a strong cup of coffee into my hands.
‘Drink that,’ she ordered.
There was something different about her. Looking closer, I realised I’d never seen her without make-up; she looked oddly younger.
‘Were you about to go to bed?’
‘Beth, I was in bed. But don’t worry — I’m used to midnight dramas.’ In a gentler voice she said, ‘So what’s up?’
*
I told her everything in a shaky, tear-soaked voice, even the bits I’ve hardly put into words for myself. It took a long time. She leaned back on the cushions, listening hard, tapping her nails on the side of her mug with a little chinking noise.
‘Shit,’ she said.
I managed a feeble smile. ‘Exactly.’
‘But that’s an amazing story, Beth. So let me get this right. You go to London, without your parents knowing, and get together with this Fitz?’ I nodded. ‘Then everything goes belly-up and you’ve never seen him since, or Alex.’ I start to speak but she holds one finger up. ‘Some time after that, Fitz has a fling with Alex.’ She left a pause to let that sink in. ‘He has a child with Alex, which he’s kept hidden from you. He’s now in a relationship with someone else, but he’s willing to fuck you. And you’re thinking you might give up all you’ve got going with Phil to be with him, that is, supposing he wants that too.’
I squirmed. ‘Well, put like that…’
‘What other way is there to put it? Beth, this is such a mess! You stand to lose everything, just for someone who slept with you for old times’ sake?’
‘You can’t say that.’ I felt the need to defend Fitz. ‘It wasn’t that calculated.’
‘No, he didn’t give it that much thought.’
‘I wanted it too, Linda. What about me?’
‘It was him who asked you back,’ she pointed out.
‘But I made it happen,’ I said.
‘Well, whatever.’ She set her coffee cup down on the table, then looked up at me keenly. Her eyes were small without the layers of mascara she wore for the world. ‘If he’s in touch with Jamie, then he knew where Alex was all along. Knew about the name change.’
This thought seeped into me like a stain. ‘I can’t believe that. He looked so amazed when I told him. And why go to such lengths?’
She shrugged. ‘Maybe Alex didn’t want you to know? And then he probably thought you’d give up looking. He wouldn’t know you’d actually go off to Norwich in pursuit of her.’
I shivered, suddenly. It was past midnight and I was tired, chilled.
‘What do you want, Beth? You say Fitz is giving you all these mixed messages.’ She said this with heavy irony. ‘What do
you
want?’
‘I don’t know. Not now.’
‘Come on. You can do better than that.’
I closed my eyes and breathed in. When I opened them I thought I glimpsed pity in hers.
‘Linda, I know what you’re thinking. And you’re right, it doesn’t look good. But it’s a bit like biting on a bad tooth — I’ve come this far and, yes, it hurts, but I’m just getting to the truth and I can’t leave it alone.’
Linda leaned forward and put one hand on my arm.
‘How long were you together? Back then?’
I licked my lips. ‘In total?’ She nodded. ‘Well, if you don’t count the break in the middle…about four weeks.’
‘So. Four weeks. And what, exactly, was so fantastic about those four weeks? I mean, for God’s sake, just a first boyfriend thing, surely? Beth, you’ve got so sucked into something that was over years ago. Only a few weeks ago all you could think about was how you and Phil were going to survive his move to Ireland. Isn’t that more important?’
I stared down, at the ragged bit of tissue wound round one finger. Linda sighed, and said, ‘What’s happened?’
*
When I got back from London yesterday Phil was busy, spending time with the girls and then in the evening at a school play. I was glad of that, because I was in no fit state to face him. Bruised by the encounters with both Fitz and Alex, I’d stared numbly out of the train window all the way home; once there all I could think to do was go to bed and sleep.
This morning Phil rang and said he had just a couple of hours to spare. Although Sue had the girls for the day he’d promised his father some help in the garden and had a load of school reports to write. I watched him walk up the drive, praying he wouldn’t suggest going to bed. Instead he said that Juno was in the car and he was charged with giving her a ‘good, long walk’. Relief flushed through me.