Conditional Love (32 page)

Mum slowly opened her eyes and gazed blearily around her. I held the water up to her lips. She sat up gingerly and winced.

‘Haven’t you got any brandy?’

Feeling better then, I thought, as I darted off to the kitchen to pour her a tumbler of Baileys.

‘This is very cosy, isn’t it?’ She eyed Terry warily. ‘I knew this would happen,’ she added under her breath.

Strange, I thought she would rip his head off. Perhaps she was still suffering the effects of her blackout?

‘Terry is over in the UK visiting his son,’ I said, deliberately avoiding the word ‘brother’. ‘Brodie is here at uni. Well, he’s in the pub with Emma at the moment.’

‘So. You started over,’ said Mum quietly, picking at her nails. The cherry red polish was chipped. Wow, she must have been in a bad way to neglect her manicure.

Terry turned to face her, legs apart, arms folded, his face set like granite.

‘Why, Valerie?’ he asked in a monotone voice. ‘Why tell me she wasn’t my baby?’

I gasped and a cold shiver ran along the length of my spine.

What? He wasn’t my dad?

The events of the past few months whirled around in my brain in confusion: the will, our first meeting, the birthday cards… None of it made sense. I shook my head. Ridiculous! He had to be. They were married when I was conceived and I even looked like the man, for pity’s sake!

I gawped at my mum, lying like an invalid under her blanket, willing her to deny she had ever said such a thing. But to my horror, she shrugged weakly and her face crumpled as a fresh batch of tears coursed down her cheeks.

‘I was so angry with you. I felt trapped,’ she sniffed. ‘Getting married was so exciting. But
being
married…’ She shuddered. ‘All you wanted to do was stay at home, do DIY and watch TV. I wanted parties, fun, excitement and I still thought I could be the next Whitney Houston.’ She laughed which turned into a sob and an unsightly bubble of snot billowed from her nostril.

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I handed her a tissue on autopilot.

Terry pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes. I couldn’t read his expression. It might have been pain or fury. Possibly both.

‘Angry?’ he said simply. ‘You stole our baby from me because you were angry? To win a stupid argument?’ He shook his head and stared at her.

He was incredibly controlled. I would have been lunging at her and wringing her chuffin’ neck by now.

‘I suppose it was your Aunt Jane who told you?’ Mum raised her chin to glance at Terry; she was managing to avoid all eye contact with me though, I noticed.

Terry nodded. ‘As soon as she saw your little girl she knew I had to be the father. The likeness between us was too much of a coincidence.’ He smiled at me ruefully, before turning his attention back to Mum.

‘You lied.’ His eyes pierced hers so forcefully that she dropped her gaze to her lap. ‘You deprived me of being a father to Sophie. God, what a mess!’

‘You were pretty quick to believe me though, weren’t you? I might have been a bit of a flirt, but nothing more. I would never have cheated on you. Not that I didn’t have offers.’

His knees sagged and he dropped heavily into the arm chair, covering his face with his hands. ‘When you made me move out of our home, I lost everything. You broke my heart.’

Mum fumbled up her sleeve for another tissue and blew her nose loudly.

‘I was wrong, I admit it. I was selfish. And at first I regretted it. I came looking for you in your old local pub, just before the baby was due. My plan was to tell you the truth and ask you to give us another chance. I saw you across the bar with your head down a barmaid’s cleavage. I thought you’d moved on, didn’t need me anymore. As I watched you, I realised that I was relieved. I was too selfish to be a good wife. I would have driven you crazy.’

Terry narrowed his eyes as if trying to cast his mind back all those years. ‘After we split, I drowned my sorrows non-stop for weeks. I can’t even think who that barmaid might have been, but it would only have been a shoulder to cry on. There was no one else for me until I met my second wife.’

I had been listening to this incredible exchange as if it was a scene in a TV soap. Suddenly, the impact of her actions hit me and I snapped.

‘What about me, Mum? Didn’t I deserve a father? Shouldn’t I have had a say in any of this? Not to mention the fact that all this time you’ve let me believe that it was
him
who abandoned
you
!’

Mum chewed on her lip. The lipstick had worn off long ago, just a shadow of colour remained where it had bled into the fine wrinkles round her mouth. She reached out and placed her hand on my arm.

‘I’m so sorry, Sophie, I’ve been a terrible mother. All the time you were growing up, I dreaded your father getting in touch; I knew how badly I’d behaved. When Jane challenged me about Terry being your father I panicked; I was terrified of losing you.’

I shook my head. Not good enough. Everything I had just heard contradicted what I thought I knew about my parents’ divorce, about my own start in life. It was too much to take in.

‘I haven’t lost you, have I? We had fun, didn’t we? We made a good team?’ she pleaded.

I stayed silent and let my mind wander back through the years of my childhood.

Having a good time had always been high on her agenda. The day Gary Barlow made an appearance at Virgin records sprang to mind. I was in the middle of my GCSEs, but she wrote me a note for school so I could join the crowds and get his autograph. Live for the moment, she had told me. But I had needed more than fun; I’d wanted a family and a proper home. She had denied me both of those.

I looked down at her. Her eyes were drooping and her skin was so pale that she was almost translucent. Despite being furious with her, I could see she was in no fit state to take much more.

I sighed and shook my head in despair. I suggested she climbed into my bed for a nap and she accepted gratefully. Terry put the kettle on while I helped her into my room.

Five minutes later, it was just the two of us again, him on the sofa, me in the chair. This time we both had tea – milky with two sugars. We sipped our drinks in silence. I didn’t know what to say. Terry had definitely been dealt a raw deal by my mum – and by me, come to think of it – but his aunt had bumped into us when I had been about five and he hadn’t exactly fallen over himself to make contact, had he?

Terry seemed like such a supportive parent to Brodie, a real father figure. Having someone like that in my life when I was growing up would have made a massive difference. Why hadn’t he fought for me?

As if reading my mind, Terry groaned and looked me squarely in the eye.

‘We’ve made a right mess of things, me and your mother. I can’t lay all the blame at her feet. I’m sorry for how all this has affected you, duckie.’

Duckie! Thirty years away and he still spoke like a true Nottingham lad.

‘If you had been so looking forward to being a dad, why didn’t you come and challenge Mum as soon as you found out the truth?’

If he wanted to be part of my life, I needed more assurance that I had mattered to him, because right now, he was coming across as weak-willed and pathetic.

Terry started to massage his forehead and to my horror, he began to cry, full-on shoulder-shaking, silent tears.

‘Dad,’ I said, sitting next to him and patting his arm awkwardly. ‘Dad, come on. Talk to me.’ Yep, definitely a bit pathetic, although at least if he was crying, I guessed it must mean he cared.

He sniffed and gave me a watery smile. ‘You called me Dad.’

I had. In that moment, he had somehow become Dad. Not my father. Dad. A warm glow filled my body and I smiled back at him. It felt quite nice to have a dad.

He sighed before he answered. ‘I realise this will sound feeble, but here goes. When Aunt Jane wrote to me to say she’d seen Valerie with a curly-haired, green-eyed beautiful little girl –,’ he paused to smile at me and I felt my face heat up, ‘I’d already been in the Navy for five years. I had a bit of a nomadic lifestyle and it was easy to stay away. I told myself that by sending you a birthday card, I was at least making some effort. Aunt Jane tried to make contact with your mother, but she couldn’t track her down. I kept sending the cards on the off-chance.

‘My aunt was always badgering me to come back to Nottingham and find you, but too much time had gone by. And besides,’ he flicked me a sideways glance, ‘I’ve always been a bit of a bugger for taking the easy way out. I told myself that it would happen one day, we would be reunited at some point in the future.’

I shook my head in annoyance, partly with him, but also because he was reflecting my own character traits back at me.

‘One thing I’ve learned this year,’ I replied, ‘is that you have to go out and make your future, not sit around waiting for it to find you.’

He patted my hand and met my gaze, his expression etched with decades of regret. ‘I know that now. And although it’s of no consolation to you, I vowed when Brodie was born that I would do better the second time around. To my eternal shame, once he was born, I stopped sending the cards. I figured as you weren’t getting them anyway, what was the point?’

A pang of sadness struck at my heart. So he had just pushed me to the back of his head. Filed under ‘daughter: whereabouts unknown’. But with a new wife and a new baby, was it really so difficult to understand?

A thought struck me suddenly. ‘You haven’t told me anything about your second wife?’

He laughed shakily. ‘I think today has been emotional enough without telling you about Maggie. Next time perhaps. There will be a next time?’

Where do lumps in the throat come from? One minute you’re absolutely fine, chattering away like a parakeet, and then without a word of warning, a lump the size of a tennis ball materialises in your throat and you can’t speak, swallow or breathe.

I nodded.

Then on impulse I put my arms round him and hugged him tight. Tentatively, as if he was unsure whether it was allowed, my dad hugged me back.

‘I’d like that,’ I croaked. ‘Although I’m not sure Brodie will be so keen.’

‘I’ll let you into a secret,’ he said, his eyes twinkling. ‘He’s been boasting about having an English half-sister all his life to his friends.’

‘Really?’ I tried not to look as flattered as I felt.

Dad nodded. ‘He’s just feeling a bit overwhelmed and, I have to say, unnecessarily over-protective.’ His hand moved involuntarily to his chest, a gesture which wasn’t lost on me.

‘Anyway,’ he said, standing up reluctantly. ‘I’ve taken up enough of your time. You’ve got your mum to look after. I’d better round up Brodie and pour him into my hire car.’

We walked out into the hallway and I unhooked his coat from the peg. I was in the middle of giving him directions to the Golden Fleece, our local pub, when we heard a disturbance coming from the stairwell. I grimaced at the terrible wailing, it sounded like an injured animal.

Terry looked at me and frowned. Emma’s voice wafted up to us.

‘You grab her arm,’ she grunted.

‘Jeez, her bag weighs a ton!’ That was Brodie.

I flung the door open and gasped as the two of them fell into the flat, lugging Jess between them.

‘Holy Schmoley!’ I cried. ‘What’s going on?’

Jess’s face was pink and puffy, her mouth stretched in an ugly semi-circle and her mascara had slid down onto her cheeks.

Now call me Inspector Morse, but I had a feeling that Spike might not have fulfilled Jess’s expectations.

‘Come on, lovey,’ said Emma gently. So gently, in fact, that I did a double take. ‘Let’s get you onto the sofa.’ She wrapped an arm round her sister’s waist. Jess allowed herself to be led into the living room.

That sofa was seeing some action today.

Jess collapsed into its saggy cushions ungracefully, her floaty purple dress barely covering her purple gusset, her body still shaking with juddering sobs.

‘Poxy sodding earrings,’ I managed to decipher between her gulping. ‘With the birthstone for May.’

‘But your birthday is in March,’ said Emma, perching on the edge of the sofa to remove Jess’s shoes. This observation produced a fresh set of wails.

Jess nodded. ‘And they’re naff. You could make much better ones, Em.’

Emma couldn’t resist a prim smile. Compliments from her sister were as rare as hens’ teeth.

Dad and Brodie lurked by the doorway. Brodie looked like he was enjoying the drama a little too much. He was grinning. That was a first, in my presence at least. Actually, he was quite cute-looking when he stopped scowling. In a kid brother type way.

Dad’s eyes were darting all over the place and he shifted from foot to foot uncomfortably. I could tell he wanted to make a hasty exit, but I was too worried about Jess to talk to him for the moment.

I knelt on the floor beside her. ‘It’s still early days with Spike,’ I said. ‘Perhaps he doesn’t feel ready for the sort of commitment you were hoping for.’

Jess wiped her nose with the back of her hand. I tried not to stare at the mucous as I handed her my last tissue.

‘He’s dumped me,’ she sobbed.

‘For not liking his crappy earrings?’ cried Emma. ‘The tosser!’

‘No,’ she said, shaking her head vigorously. ‘You don’t understand. He dumped me when I gave him his present. And I thought he would love it.’ She broke down into a fresh round of wailing.

Emma and I exchanged worried glances. Jess had resolutely refused to tell us what she had got Spike for Christmas, which in itself had rung alarm bells; she was the world’s worst secret-keeper.

‘Well, go on then,’ snapped Emma. I knew it wouldn’t be long before her patience started to run out. ‘Tell us what it is!’

‘Pass me my bag,’ whimpered Jess, pushing herself up to sitting.

Brodie stepped forward, dragging Jess’s voluminous handbag. I knew why it was so heavy. She had packed her toiletries just in case they had decided to book into a hotel on the spur of the moment to celebrate their betrothal.

She fished a flat rectangular package out of her bag, still in its torn Christmas wrapping paper. It didn’t look particularly impressive; perhaps he had dumped her out of disappointment, having expected something bigger?