The Love of My Life(73)
Here he is. Here’s Jeremy Rothschild.
He walks calmly to the kitchen door. ‘It’s time for you to leave,’ he says. ‘My wife has had a breakdown and disappeared. I’m desperate with worry. And yet, in you come, wondering if she might have popped back to London to mete out some pathetic revenge on Emma. It’s tasteless, Leo. Tasteless and really very poor.’
‘Jeremy. Please. I apologise, I really didn’t—’
‘Oh, just get out,’ he says, suddenly tired. ‘Fuck off. Go.’
This is not how he ends his radio takedowns.
He stands by the kitchen door, not looking at my face, and seconds later I am standing on Highbury Place.
When I return to my car it has a parking fine stuck to the windscreen. After borrowing money from Jeremy to pay for the meter, it seems I failed to actually display the ticket.
Arsenal fans stream past me, singing, chanting, laughing. Sounds as though it was a home win tonight.
Chapter Forty-Nine
LEO
I pull out onto Highbury Corner. Rothschild had been so happy to spill the beans about Emma, her catastrophes and deceit, the harm she had caused. But it was a different story altogether when I asked one bloody question about Janice.
And then he just went for me, as if I were a lying politician. It was a humiliation I didn’t need – the man had just put my entire marriage through the shredder, for fuck’s sake.
‘Fuck you,’ I mutter, as I speed up Upper Street. (Why am I going this way? I don’t even live in this direction. I turn right onto Islington Park Street, to cut through Barnsbury.)
‘Fuck off,’ I say, loudly, to nobody.
I hit a speed bump I hadn’t even seen. ‘Fuck!’ I shout.
Tears are forming in the corners of my eyes now. Emma has disappeared. Emma doesn’t even exist.
‘FUCK!’ I yell, and I hit another speed bump. This time the bottom of the car scrapes the bump, and a pedestrian turns to look at this stupid driver, this speeding fool, destroying his car.
‘FUCK OFF,’ I yell, at the pedestrian, but the tears are falling now.
I drive, crying, until I nearly hit a third speed bump and realise I must pull over. Briefly, before I crumple over the steering wheel to sob and swear and scream and thump my wrist, I see the pedestrian turn around and run back down the street, away from my car.
Ten minutes later, I set off again. The rage at Jeremy has already subsided: he’s no more than the messenger; I know that. It’s my wife I am angry with. My wife, the woman who doesn’t exist.
I would have understood, is what I keep thinking. Emma could have told me any of what Jeremy’s just related to me, and I’d have accepted it all. How could I blame her for what happened when she was knee-deep in a psychiatric emergency? How could I judge her for watching her child in a park when the pain of missing him overtook reason? Wouldn’t anyone make a clandestine visit, if they knew where their adopted child lived? I would.
She wouldn’t have wanted to tell me she gave away her child: I understand that. God knows, she’s seen me struggle enough with my own adoption. But I would have taken it without judgement. I was in love with her; I’d have kept my own past out of it.
(Wouldn’t I?)
And I could have helped her forgive herself for the suffocation, piece by piece, or at least softened the edges of her guilt. You were ill, I’d have told her, day after day, year after year, until she was able to believe it.
(Wouldn’t I?)
I accelerate up past Pentonville prison, floodlit and eerie.
The ugly truth is that there is a part of me that’s horrified. A part of me that is frightened; a part that has even briefly wondered if Ruby is safe with her mother.
And that is precisely why she didn’t tell me. Why she appears to have told nobody, other than her oldest friend – because she knows that these same thoughts would cross almost anyone’s mind. Is she a violent person, underneath it all? Does she still think about harming her child? Harming anyone else?
I bang my fist on the steering wheel again, raging at Emma, raging at myself for thinking exactly what she predicted I would.
I turn off Agar Grove into the noise and filth of Camden at nighttime. The streets are full of young people drinking, laughing.
As I inch my way north towards Chalk Farm and Belsize Park I allow myself to sift through the stuffed pocketbook of lies Emma must have told me. The trips to Northumberland – all those fucking trips she took, all the times I waved her off so she could have some time alone, looking for crabs, when she was just trying to stalk the Rothschilds.
The day Ruby was born; the sympathy the maternity team must have felt for me as I held my baby for the first time, dizzy with joy, oblivious to the fact that this was Emma’s second child.
And, talking of precious days, what about our marriage? Is it legal, if Emma failed to tell the officials she’d changed her name? She said nothing about it when we gave notice at the town hall. And yet, a few months later, she stood opposite me at the registry office and said she knew of no legal reason why she, Emma Merry Bigelow, should not marry me, Leo Jack Philber.
Her criminal record. The stalking of the Rothschilds, even when we were together. The ‘dinners’ with Jill when she must have been doing God knows what; her refusal to come to any industry parties, presumably because she was avoiding a public meeting with Jeremy.