The Other Child (31 page)

‘You liked being him.’

‘No, I didn’t like anything. I just worked. I called myself Greg and I worked harder than I’d ever worked at anything, ever.’

‘And at what point did you realize he wasn’t coming back?’

‘I don’t know, after a year maybe? On a gut level, I probably knew far sooner, but it took me a while to accept it and even then, for years after he went, I’d see his face in the street, you know – I’d catch a glimpse of him in the market, or going down the escalator into the subway and I’d run after him and tap him on the shoulder and he’d turn and . . .’ His face grows even more sunken-looking.

‘So you think he did kill himself?’

He nods. ‘I’m sure of it. It was an act of kindness to do it that way. I think he wanted to die but he knew what I’d been through already and didn’t want me to have to deal with that, on top of everything. He wanted to protect me from having to find his body and hold a funeral and mourn and bury him. He was the kindest, sweetest person, Tess. You’d have loved him. I loved him.’

‘Do you think he knew what you’d do?’

He shrugs. ‘I’ve asked myself that a lot and I’ll never know, but sometimes I think he knew me better than I knew myself.’

‘So you just stayed? You just carried on the lie?’

‘I graduated top of the class,’ he says. ‘They were throwing money at me. For the first time in my life I felt I had a future.’

She looks at the rink again. Some people waddle, toeing the ice cautiously; some cling to the barrier, afraid to let go – while others push out, alone, too fast, then crash down.

‘But you could have turned yourself in.’

‘I could have, but I didn’t want to go to jail, it was that simple. So I shut down my old self and I focused on being the best doctor I could possibly be. It might sound inflated, but I also wanted to do some good in the world.’

‘But then you met me. You weren’t doing good to me, or to Joe – and to Lily? Would you have lied to Lily forever about who she is? Because this isn’t just your identity anymore – it’s hers too. Your daughter might not ever have known her real name. How could you do that to her?’

He rubs a hand through his hair. ‘This is the reason I was so afraid of being a father. I came so close to telling you, that time when you were pressing me about not wanting to have a baby. I almost just told you but it seemed like such a terrible thing to do to you – you were pregnant, you’d abandoned a whole life to be with me, you’d trusted me. And I was too much of a coward. I knew you’d walk away if you knew the truth; my God, who wouldn’t? I kept telling myself I’d find a way to tell you when the time was right.’

‘My God.’ She closes her eyes, needing to shut him out.

‘I love you. I never wanted to lie to you. If you hadn’t got pregnant, I would have told you. I was fully intending to, I was trying to work out how to do it – I mean, it’s not the sort of thing you can blurt out on a first date – but then out of the blue you were pregnant and that changed everything. I felt like it would ruin your life if I told you.’

‘Do you have any idea how warped that is?’

‘I know it is. But I couldn’t imagine living my life without you. I couldn’t lose you.’

‘Well, you have. You’ve lost me. We can’t be together now. How could this possibly work? It can’t – it can’t ever work.’ Her voice shakes and she feels a physical pain spreading through her chest, as if her ribs are cracking open.

He turns to face her.

‘All I can tell you is I’ve lived this way for so long now it doesn’t feel like a lie anymore. It feels like the truth. This is who I am now.’ He rests his hand flat on his chest. ‘This is just me.’

‘But it’s not just you! It’s you and me, and Lily and Joe – and it’s all built on a monumental lie.’

‘But the important bit is true – I love you. When I met you, that very first time, when you came to take my picture, I knew right away that this was going to be bigger than anything I’d felt for anyone. My first impulse was to walk away. But instead I got in my car and I drove down to see you in your studio. I couldn’t walk away from you then, and I can’t now.’

She shakes her head. ‘But I can.’ She steps back. ‘I can walk away from you. I have to.’

She turns, hunches her body against the bitter air and walks, head down, fast, away from him, back across Boston Common, that frozen, windswept patch of land hemmed in by skyscrapers. And with every step her harsh breaths echo around her head and she understands that something inside her has ruptured and will never heal.

The French windows are open to the overgrown back garden. It has been a fine June day and the sun is easing behind the Downs, bathing the slopes in deep golden light, making the trees glow as if they have been dipped in honey.

Joe and the twins are wrestling on the trampoline, yelping, and Lily is on a rug at their feet. She is wearing striped tights and a knitted jumper, surrounded by cushions, gnawing on a rice cake. Her dark hair curls around her face and her eyes are huge, wide and curious, a deep Italian brown, like her father’s. She has just learned to sit up and her solid body wobbles as she turns her head, as if the weight of it might be prove too much for her tender spine.

Tess pours them both a glass of wine and they stretch out their legs.

‘God I’m glad you’re back,’ Nell says. ‘I used to go round the long way, so I wouldn’t see the Dutch people coming out of this house.’

‘I felt bad turning them out; they were expecting at least two years here.’

‘I know, but it’s your house. You bought it, you earned every brick in this place. They’re fine, anyway. Apparently they’re buying a place just up the road, so you’ll be neighbours. You can all be friends.’

‘I think I’ve had enough friendly neighbours to last me a lifetime.’

They both gulp their wine and Tess glances behind her, into the kitchen. Joe’s pictures are back on the fridge, the cupboard door still needs fixing, a Dutch child has crayoned on the side of one cabinet, there are the remains of fishfingers and beans all over the counter, and the smell of a baking chocolate cake wafts through the air. The floor needs a good clean. It has never felt more like home.

‘So, when are you going to see him again?’ Nell puts her glass down.

‘He’s coming to London for a conference next month.’

There is a pause. They look at each other, both struck, yet again, by the awfulness of what has happened.

‘How can you bear it, Tess? You must be so angry all the time.’

She looks down at Lily, and then at the hills. ‘I was, at first,’ she says. ‘In those horrible weeks after I found out, I felt so much rage – I almost turned him in.’

‘I know you did.’

‘I actually stood on the doorstep of the Police Department, with Lily in the sling, but I couldn’t do it.’

‘That was the right decision. I mean, what would it have achieved?’

They have had this conversation many times before, but they keep on having it, in different forms, because neither of them can quite get a grip on the implications, the enormity of his deceit.

‘Well, I didn’t hold back to protect him. I did it for Lily and Joe, and probably for myself too. It could only harm us all if he went to jail.’

‘But do you feel like he’s a criminal, really?’

‘I know he must be because he’s stolen an identity, he’s broken the law, but it’s hard to really feel it because, at the same time, he’s Greg, and he hasn’t harmed anyone; in fact, quite the opposite – he’s saving children’s lives, all the time.’

‘He harmed you.’

She looks up at the spreading pinks of the sky. ‘I think probably the good he does in the world outweighs that, in the grand scheme of things.’

Nell shakes her head and picks up her wine again. ‘Well, I couldn’t be that magnanimous if it was me he’d done this to.’

Lily squawks. They both look down at her and she looks back at them and gives a messy grin. Tess slides off the chair and bends to pick her up, feeling the solid, reassuring weight of her. Lily’s small hands cling around her neck and her sticky face presses against her cheek. Tess kisses the stickiness and settles Lily on her lap, wiping her face with one shirt cuff. This is Greg’s punishment. This is what he is missing out on – the daily closeness with Lily and Joe, these small moments of pure, physical love. He must remember Claudia every time he holds Lily, not least because Lily looks so much like her aunt. He knows what he is missing. It must be torture for him.

She thinks about him as a teenage boy, desperately trying to hold his precarious little family together, waking in the night to feed and change his baby sister, trying to protect her and his mother, struggling to keep them all together, but ultimately failing. When she thinks about Greg’s past like this, she aches for the boy he was. It explains why, later, he did what he did. It also explains the connection she felt to the hurt part of him and why she recognized it, instantly and intuitively: they both know what it is like to be raised by a mother who could not be saved.

‘I get why you didn’t turn him in,’ Nell interrupts her thoughts, ‘but it’s quite odd that Alex didn’t go to the police, isn’t it?’

She stiffens. She still does not like thinking about Alex. ‘Oh, I expect he did.’

‘Do you, why?’

‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he? I mean, he needed to feel he wasn’t the victim. He needed validation for all those memories and he needed to feel he was pinning something down, making someone pay. But I’d imagine the police were faced with a man in a midlife crisis, making wild accusations about an eminent Harvard paediatric heart surgeon, and even if they got as far as checking up on Greg they’d find this godlike being, with references and a solid paper trail. I mean, on paper, Greg’s exactly who he says he is. They’d believe him, every time.’

‘Who wouldn’t?’

They look at each other, and exchange a weak smile.

‘What he did,’ Tess strokes Lily’s hair back off her forehead, ‘was catastrophically misguided but I don’t actually want him to suffer anymore. I think he’s suffered enough.’

‘Has he?’ Nell says, smiling at Lily. She pulls out a tissue, and reaches across the table to wipe Lily’s mouth again. ‘Has he really?’

‘I think he’s been suffering his whole life. His career has been an attempt to make amends. He might have eventually coped with losing his aunt and uncle but he could never get over Claudia being in the house.’

‘Did you ever tell him about Sally’s email? I mean, does he even know that Julianna probably started the fire, so it wasn’t his fault?’

Tess nods.

‘How did he react? It must have been huge for him. He’s blamed himself for Claudia’s death for over thirty years.’

‘I don’t know what he felt, I wasn’t going to talk to him about it. I just forwarded all Sally’s emails to him. But to be honest, I don’t know how helpful it will be. I’m not sure if it’s any better to know that your own mother was to blame.’

The boys are running up the lawn towards them. She sees Joe’s bright face between the twins, relaxed and happy again, back where he belongs. He was never going to settle in Boston because their home was built on cracked foundations, it was all wrong. And perhaps he was picking up on that, though of course he could never have articulated it that way.

‘We’re going to do Xbox,’ he yells as the boys run past, shoving each other to get through the French windows, their feet slapping on the kitchen floor and down the hall. Lily watches them go, eyes popping, then shouts, ‘Dah! Dah!’ waving her arms, lurching to follow.

There is birdsong and the distant hollering of the boys. Lily wobbles and wriggles, desperate to join them. To distract her, Tess blows into her neck, making her chuckle crazily.

‘Do you think you’ll ever be able to forgive him?’ Nell says.

‘Oh God, I don’t know.’ She reaches out for her wine, takes another mouthful and closes her eyes. ‘But Lily needs him. We’ve agreed that when she’s old enough he’ll tell her the truth so she can make up her own mind about what he did. I just hope it won’t shake her sense of who she is. That’s why I went through all that business of changing her name. Lily needs to be a Harding.’

As she says this she suddenly understands why Julianna replaced her children’s birth surname with her own. There is a power in naming, something men have always known. Giovanni could take Claudia physically, but she was still a Novak, still Julianna’s child. She might never know the truth about Julianna; that probably died with Sally. She might never know whether Julianna was the victim of a terrible injustice or whether she really was unable to mother her children. All she really knows for sure is that Julianna was a woman who married the wrong man, and lived in the wrong place, but had a friend who loved her, and cared.

She and Nell sit in silence, watching shadows lengthen and deepen over the Downs as the sun sinks.

‘You’ll meet someone else one day,’ Nell says, eventually.

‘I don’t want to meet anyone else. I only wanted Greg, I don’t want anyone else.’

‘Then maybe there’s a chance that you two will somehow get past this . . . I mean, maybe you’ll find some way to move on, one day, and make it work?’

‘We could never do that.’

‘But—’

‘I’ll always love him but I’ll never trust him again.’

‘Oh God, I wish I could make this better for you.’

‘It’s better already. Waiting for Lily’s passport was the worst bit, but I already feel stronger just being back in my own house again. We’re doing OK, the three of us. David’s being nice, and I’ll pick up work again, and Greg at least is good about money. I mean, I know it’s not going to be easy, but I want it this way. My plan is to keep my life extremely simple from now on.’

‘You’ll be OK.’

‘I’ll be more than OK. This is
me
. I actually like being on my own. I always have.’

Their eyes meet over Lily’s head, and in the kitchen behind them the timer begins to ping, a high frantic urgent sound.

‘It’s a sign!’ Nell says.

‘Of what?’

‘I don’t know. That it’s time for chocolate cake?’

They stand up. Nell goes in to deal with the cake, and Tess rests her face on Lily’s fat cheek for a second. She is deep-down tired, a part of her is wrecked and maybe always will be, but she can feel her own resilience forming itself around this new, damaged area, containing it, sealing it off. She closes her eyes and breathes in Lily’s sweet baby smell. Then she steps back into her house.