The Love of My Life(86)

But of course I hadn’t remembered. I couldn’t remember. You could have told me I’d robbed a bank and murdered all the cashiers, and I’d have believed you. I’d have created that memory, just like I created the memory of a smothering, because when you’re that lost, your only anchors are the things people tell you.

After Charlie and Jeremy are gone, we sit in silence.

Yet again the world has shifted. My entire adult life has been nothing more than a story – and not even mine.

The story of a woman called Janice. A woman who allowed me to believe I had tried to smother my baby, because she wanted him for herself. A woman who took a restraining order out against me when I started following him.

She’d have had me sent to prison if she could. She had me sacked from my presenting job, knowing the humiliation it would bring; the financial loss. But worse than anything else, far worse, she stole my baby.

Leo shifts over, silently, to hold my hand, as I cry for all that could have been. For my baby Charlie, that smiling infant with his soft blonde hair, his simple, boundless trust in me. For his whole life, spent with someone else.

John falls asleep in his bed; Leo turns out the lights and sits with me in darkness, as the rain pelts our tiny old house.

I gave up my baby for a lie.





Chapter Sixty


LEO


Minutes – or maybe hours – after I fall asleep in the shed, Emma comes in and stands next to the sofa. ‘Leo,’ she whispers.

Silently, I shuffle up to make space. John Keats, who was excited about a night in the shed, is asleep under the duvet. God knows how he’s breathing. I poke him with a foot and he moves around a bit, grumbling, but refuses to budge. Emma has to perch on the edge of the sofa.

‘Leo . . .’ she whispers again, and in that moment I just want to whisper, ‘Hi!’ and kiss her. I want us to laugh about our last meeting in here, when all we had to worry about was whether or not her chemo had worked and how awful my dairy-free chocolate was. I want to take our clothes off, not for sex, but for the pleasure of her night-warm skin on mine.

‘I was going to tell you,’ she says, in the darkness.

I turn on the lamp and look at her. She’s still in her clothes, with a dressing gown on top. There are grey circles around her eyes and her skin is pale: she looks like she used to during chemo.

‘I was going to tell you,’ she repeats. ‘You have to know that, Leo. I was going to tell you. The weekend we went up to Hitchin to meet your parents: I was going to talk to you when we got back to London. We’d been together a few weeks, it felt right.’

‘And?’

‘And you found out you’d been adopted. It blew everything apart, Leo, it took months for you to come back to yourself.’

‘But when I did?’

‘I knew you wouldn’t be able to take it,’ she says, after a pause. ‘I held you through that time, Leo. I heard every word you said about your birth mother. About adoption, about people lying to you. It would have been like a bomb blowing your legs off, just after you’d learned to walk again.’

‘But – but that was nearly ten years ago. Surely—’

She interrupts. ‘If there had been one day in those ten years – one single day – where I’d believed I could share it without harming you, I would have done.’

I stare at her. ‘So it’s my fault?’

‘No . . . I just . . .’ She tries to take my hand but I can’t do it. I can’t sit here, holding hands with her.

‘It’s not your fault, Leo, no. But the truth is that if you’d had a different past, I would have told you.’

When I don’t respond, she says, ‘Put yourself in my shoes. Imagine you were me, with a past so awful you changed your name. Would you really, truly, have told your partner? When it fed directly into every traumatic thing that had ever happened to him? Would you really have done that?’

‘Yes,’ I say, without a moment’s hesitation.

She sighs. ‘It’s easy for you to sit here now, saying that. But I was there, Leo. I knew better than anyone else what you could and couldn’t cope with.’

‘Seriously? We’re doing that again? You know me better than I know myself?’

‘That’s not what I meant! I—’

‘Emma, listen to me. Listen.’ She looks at me. ‘There isn’t anything I haven’t told you about myself. Nothing. I tell you everything, and I always have, because if we aren’t honest with each other, what’s the point?’

Neither of us says anything for a while.

‘You didn’t tell me you’d found all the papers I hid,’ Emma says, eventually. ‘I still don’t know what else you’ve found out, or who you spoke to. You did all of that in secret.’

I sit up. ‘You want to know who I spoke to? Robbie Rosen, for starters. And then Mags Tenterden. Over the weekend I was at Sheila’s, who, it turns out, knows far more about our marriage than I did. And then I spent the evening at Jeremy Rothschild’s, before finally tracking you down at Jill’s.’

Emma balks. ‘You went to see Robbie? Oh, God, Leo. And Mags, I . . .’

‘While we’re on the subject of our marriage. Is it legal?’

She looks away, and, after a while, shakes her head. ‘Possibly not.’