The Child(63)

I swipe away his words with my hand. “Not your baby, Paul. Mine.”

“Why are you saying this? You’ve never mentioned this before,” he says, searching for the truth in my eyes. I am frightening him. I know I must sound mad.

“I didn’t want you to know,” I say. “No one knows.”

“Not Jude?” he asks.

“No,” I say, and I can see the disbelief creeping across his face.

“You’re upset,” he says. “I’ll get your pills.”





FIFTY-ONE


    Jude


FRIDAY, APRIL 13, 2012

She hadn’t recognized his voice when she picked up the phone, and for one wonderful moment, she thought it might be Will. But it was Paul. Emma’s Paul.

What does he want? she thought crossly.

“Hello, Jude,” he said. Well, at least he’s dropped the Judith thing, she thought.

“Hello, Paul. This is a surprise.”

“Look, I’m sorry to ring out of the blue, but I’m worried about Emma.”

Jude sat down and gripped the receiver. “What’s happened?”

Her son-in-law hesitated, searching for the right words. “Em is getting herself upset about the discovery of a baby in Woolwich.”

“The baby in Howard Street?” Jude said. “Yes, she told me about it. It’s the road where we used to live.”

“Yes, I know,” Paul said and stopped again.

“You are obviously trying to tell me something. Just spit it out,” Jude said. She hadn’t meant to be so brusque, but he was unnerving her with these long, ominous silences.

“Sorry, yes, well. Emma says she thinks it is her baby.”

Jude gave a bark of astonishment. “Her baby? What a lot of nonsense! It’s been named as Alice Irving.”

“No, that’s right, but the police have issued new information—saying she was buried in the 1980s—and it seems to have sent Emma into a panic.”

That stopped Jude dead. But only for a second.

“Have they? I hadn’t heard that. But it’s still nonsense. Look, Paul, you haven’t known her as long as I have. My daughter has always had a tenuous relationship with the truth.”

“You think she is making it up?”

“Obviously. To be frank, she used to make up a lot of things when she was younger. Silly lies about her dad and my boyfriend. We don’t need to go into that, but perhaps she’s upset at the moment because we talked about the old days—the bad old days, in our case—when she came for lunch the other week.”

“She didn’t tell me that,” Paul said.

“Didn’t she? No, well, she probably doesn’t want you to know what a nightmare she was when she was younger. You know we had to ask her to leave home in the end?”

There was silence at the other end of the line.

“Paul?” Jude asked.

“Yes, I’m here. Poor Emma. I didn’t know that. She’s never talked about her childhood, really. But you said ‘we.’ I thought it was just you and Emma. She said she didn’t know who her father was. Who else was there?”

“My boyfriend. Will. Emma must have mentioned him.”

“No, I don’t think so,” Paul said.

“How strange. Well, anyway, it wasn’t poor Emma, it was poor us. You can’t imagine what it was like,” Jude said. The case for the defense.

“Why don’t you get Emma to ring me?” she went on. “I’ll have a chat with her about things. Maybe I can calm her down.”

“I might suggest it, Judith. Good-bye.”

? ? ?

Jude got up and picked up a photo of Emma from her mantelpiece. She’d been two when it was taken, dressed in a little kilt Jude’s mother had brought home from a holiday in Scotland, and she was beaming up at the camera. That little face.

When she’d dreamed of having a baby, Jude had never really thought beyond the cradle stage to the impact of having another person in her life. She’d concentrated on the image of herself as Madonna with child until the issue was forced by Emma growing out of her arms and becoming herself.

There’d been a hint of things to come with the terrible twos—a brief, hellish period of daily tantrums while they were still living with her parents—followed by the continuous questions of the frighteningly bright five-year-old Emma and the pleasure of helping her discover the world of books.

Jude thought she knew her daughter, but the mercurial change in her when she hit her teens was a revelation. Emma blossomed and grew thorns in what felt like a matter of weeks. All at the worst time, with Jude’s affair with Will in its infancy.

He’d been great about it when there was that awful business with Darrell Moore. That had knocked Jude sideways. Em was still thirteen, just a child.

She’d wanted to tell the police about Darrell. “He’s practically a pedophile,” she’d told Will, but he had counseled against it, claiming it would be too much for Emma. Always thinking of Emma.

And she knew there would be too many questions. And once questions started . . .

Anyway, she’d found out about it before Emma could ruin her life with that sleazebag.

Will was a godsend that summer of 1984, Jude thought. Those were the good times. Brief, but good. Emma really came out of her shell.