The Love of My Life(39)

I didn’t desire further amateur psychoanalysis, so I never brought it up again. When I see men looking at her nowadays, I pretend it’s not happening.

But she’s right: I don’t like it. Just last week, on the way back from the Tom Jones concert, there was a man in a baseball cap staring at her while we waited at a zebra crossing. Just staring, as if she wasn’t quite obviously with her husband and child.

She was looking down the hill and didn’t notice him, but it took everything I had not to walk up and kick him in the balls.

But this business with Jeremy Rothschild: it’s not some freak eyeing her up on the street; it’s real. And I don’t know what to do.

If she can so easily lie about her degree, about Mags Tenterden and the many other things in her folder that made no sense, who’s to say she couldn’t have had an affair with a man she’s never even told me she knows?

I bought three miniature bottles of aeroplane wine and passed out just as we came in to land.

Emma called soon after, but I didn’t pick up. It was still light and the air was warmer than it had been in Glasgow; everyone disembarking the plane seemed happy – perhaps the miracle of a budget airline landing on time. I smiled at them in the baggage queue, as if I was happy too, rather than mildly drunk and miserable. I took a taxi all the way to my parents’ in Hitchin and shared funny stories with the driver about family life. I could see myself in the mirror, looking like a man who had his shit together. Crew neck jumper, recent haircut, stylish luggage which Olly and Tink got me for my fortieth.

Emma texted as we turned into my parents’ road. The sun disappeared after breakfast so we went to Alnwick Castle. Ruby more interested in gift shop. Flight was fine, just landed at Heathrow. Call me! xxxxxx

Everything is OK, I repeat to myself now, even though it’s not. I spot a glorious sunset through the landing window as I follow Mum up to see Dad; orange and blood red layered on tired grey, with streaks of pink straight from an eighties disco. The bell of the local church strikes the hour and somewhere a family is barbecuing.

When I arrive in their room, Dad’s trying to prop himself up in bed. ‘Oh, Leo,’ he says, gesturing in frustration, or perhaps resignation. He refuses analgesia on the grounds that he’d ‘rather know’, but tonight he’s surrounded by painkillers and he looks frayed. ‘I’m seventy-one and I feel like I’m a hundred. To hell with this.’

‘To hell,’ I agree, sitting down. We don’t hug these days. He’s lost weight, I notice, although he did have a fair bit to spare. My father is one of those men who pretends he is extremely proud of his overeating; patting his belly like a friend, boasting that he eats more in one meal than most small families eat in a week. Emma says that Dad’s feelings are stored in his stomach.

Mum hands him a bowl of crumble, which he eats so fast I can’t imagine he’s tasting it. ‘Making up for lost time,’ he says, laughing and coughing. On cue he pats his belly, a still substantial mound under the duvet, and looks at Mum for comment, but she’s hanging up his newly washed dressing gown.

This is my father. He makes jokes, he sidesteps awkward conversation. He wrote to me just once, in the six months of silence after I discovered I was adopted. We were just following the advice of the adoption agency, he had written. They said it would be easier for you not to know. It was a different time, I’m sure you can understand.

I couldn’t, actually, and a few weeks later I had replied with a long list of questions he never answered. Nowadays he gives me a slightly longer pat on the shoulder, as if we have passed into a special understanding.

The room settles to silence. Mum’s looking at a picture of Olly and me on a wintery beach somewhere, as toddlers. Olly, who was not adopted (‘our miracle!’) has his hand tucked into Mum’s pocket, while I stand off at a slight distance, watchful. My skin is darker than my brother’s, my hair dark brown to his white blonde. It had never crossed my mind to question this.

My parents have hundreds of pictures from our childhood, in a large box under the stairs. The first time I came back here, after discovering I’d been adopted, I went through the whole thing: alone, in silence, on the floor of my childhood bedroom. It was as if someone had handed me a photographic archive of my alienation. Everything I’d felt, but never understood, was there. My little brother, with his round face and chunky limbs; me, with my angular jaw and slight frame. How could I never have thought to question this? And it wasn’t just the physical differences; my expression in so many photographs betrayed an outsider’s unconscious longing.

I could have understood why every atom of me felt different, I wrote to my parents. I could have had a counsellor when I was still young. But you took that decision out of my hands.

The next day I do what I came to do: I clean the house, I do a supermarket shop, I put on a couple of loads of laundry, and I let Mum sit on the sofa and complain that I’m not allowing her to do anything.

Dad falls asleep after his lunch, and a few minutes later, Mum goes up to join him, ‘Just for forty winks.’ By 12.45 p. m. the house is quiet.

I check in with Sheila, hoping there might be some crisis involving a famous dead person I can bury myself in, but she says everything is fine and I should enjoy my day off.

So I sit alone in my parents’ sitting room and force myself to contemplate the possibility of my wife having an affair with Jeremy Rothschild.