The Love of My Life(24)

Everyone, even Ruby, is silent. Oskar watches his father with fascination.

After a weighted pause, Olly nods. ‘You’re right,’ he says. I can’t believe what I’m hearing.

He turns to me. ‘Sorry, mate. That was out of order.’

‘Apologies,’ Emma whispers, a few minutes later, when Olly and Tink are talking to their boys. ‘You’re more than capable of fighting your own battles. I didn’t mean to belittle you.’

I study her face. ‘What would you have done if he hadn’t backed down? Were you going to swing a right hook?’

She shrugs. ‘If I’d had to. I won’t allow Olly or anyone else to treat you like that.’

At this I laugh. Emma has always been ferociously defensive of me; comically so at times. I put my arm around her, as the looped fairy lights begin to glow and the audience begins to chant for Sir Tom.

‘You are the best person I know,’ I tell my wife, and I mean it.

Ruby lies across our laps and tells us it’s time for a sleep.

I choose to believe what Emma’s said about her graduation photo. I choose to believe there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for her removal of her papers to the dining room, and that the confusing things I found were confusing only because I wasn’t seeing them in context.

My wife is everything I have always believed her to be. She loves me, I love her, and to allow myself to go searching for dark corners would be to betray all that is good in the life we have created together.





Chapter Twelve


EMMA


‘Time for ice cream,’ Ruby calls, as I root around amongst whorls of hair and dust under a trampoline. I took her to the gymnastics club for the morning, but mostly it’s been me bouncing up and down while she shouts feedback. Now Duck has been posted through some trampoline springs.

‘OK,’ I call. Above me, an enormous dad jumps onto the trampoline and I have to flatten myself against the floor. Quickly, I get Duck and commando-roll out. ‘OK. Ice cream.’

Ruby grabs Duck and kisses his velvety beak hard.

Unbidden, the whispers about Leo rise inside me again, as I lead my daughter over to the shoe rack. I’m not sure he believed my story about the academic gowns, but I was too blindsided to think of anything better.

What tipped him off?

For a terrible moment I thought he’d found my paperwork in the dining room, so I improvised something about ‘nearly-but-not-quite’ leaving St Andrews. But Leo is honourable, almost pathologically so – it’s one of many things I admire about him – and even if he had somehow found that pile of papers, he wouldn’t read them.

Ruby sticks out her feet so I can put her shoes on, and I find myself too tired to insist she has a go at doing it herself.

It was always my intention to tell Leo. That first night we spent together in my friend Casey’s yurt, I was desperate to tell him. But I held back, as I lay with him afterwards. I held back, and promised myself I’d leave it a few weeks.

Then Leo discovered that his parents had adopted him. A few days later, during a furious phone call with them, it got worse: Jane admitted that Leo’s birth mother had in fact died of heart disease two years ago. He couldn’t even meet her.

As I held him through the dark knots of that time, it became clear that I couldn’t tell him about my past. Not then, when he was already contending with so much – and, perhaps, not ever. I started seeing a therapist, who, to this day, remains the only person other than Jill who knows everything, and she encouraged me to review the situation once things had calmed down in Leo’s own life. We agreed that the end of the year felt about right.

And so nine months later, I looked sincerely at my boyfriend – by then my fiancé – and I knew, with crystalline certainty, that I could not tell him. Not because too much time had passed, but because I knew him well enough by then to know he wouldn’t be able to cope with it, no matter how hard he tried. Not just my revelations, but the fact I’d kept the truth from him in the first place. That, for Leo, in the aftermath of his parents’ dishonesty, would be the ultimate betrayal.

I crashed out of St Andrews University in the autumn term of 2000, aged twenty, and didn’t resume study until I was twenty-three. I chose the Open University second time around. They didn’t teach marine biology, but I was happy to make do with straight biology – it would be enough to get me into a master’s somewhere. I hadn’t the stomach for the things I’d loved first time round: freshers’ week, halls of residence, earnest late-night pigeon politics with someone wailing Jeff Buckley in the corner.

I hadn’t the stomach for any human company, beyond that of my grandmother. I studied alone, either in the British Library or in bed, and when I was done I booked a graduation ceremony in Birmingham, because Granny had said she hadn’t been there in ages and would love to go for a night. When my graduation day rolled around, though, she was ill, so I graduated alone. But I still scanned the congregation when I stepped down from the stage with my certificate, like a solo traveller in the arrivals hall of an airport: that absurd hope we hold, as humans, that we’re not alone, even when all the evidence tells us we are.

For a split second I actually thought I saw him – Dad – a head of close-cropped hair in one of the side tiers, a face in shadow. But it was someone else’s father, sitting next to someone else’s mother, clapping someone that wasn’t me.