19 August
As the months passed and the parasite in her belly grew, I resented it as much as the vehicle carrying it. I daydreamed about watching her fall down the stairs and miscarry, or of Dr Willows confirming the baby had died in her womb.
Yet despite everything I despised about her and how ghastly she made me feel, I wasn’t able to confront her or pack up my things and leave.
All I’d ever wanted was a family of my own and I wasn’t ready to leave my children like my mother had. Living with them all, I was miserable. If I walked out, I would be Doreen. Staying, at least for the time being, was the lesser of two evils.
So I played along with her charade.
25 November
She lay fast asleep in our bed, exhausted by a labour that had ravaged and contorted her body for much of the day and night.
I sat on the tatty green armchair in the bedroom cradling her son in a white shawl she’d knitted especially for his arrival. The midwife packed up her equipment and let herself out. She’d named him William after her late grandfather, and he was deep in slumber and only an hour old. His skin was still sticky and sweet-smelling, and covered in a fine, white, downy fur.
Once he’d been placed into my arms, I tried with all my might to imagine him as one of my own brood. But I wasn’t able to press my lips to his delicate ear and whisper to him like I had the others.
I couldn’t tell that little boy that I’d always be there for him and would never let him down. Because he was not my son and never would be. Even the product of an untruth didn’t deserve a lie – I knew that better than most.
Weeks passed and I spent hours watching him, identifying traces of the father I’d killed in his smiles and frowns. He was the spitting image of Dougie, even down to his few strands of auburn hair.
He’d never experience a male role model who’d love him unconditionally, or a mother who’d be completely honest with him about his origins. So soon into his life, he was weighed down like an anchor by his conception.
However, my steely facade had begun to melt a little when I witnessed Catherine giving birth. In her vulnerability I saw pieces of the woman I’d loved, who’d already blessed me with three children of my own.
And for the first time in months, I’d even allowed myself to wonder if we could get through this. But while Billy was in our lives – a constant reminder of her transgression – I couldn’t forgive her, I couldn’t heal and we could never move forward.
His fragile existence meant nothing would ever be the same again.
Northampton, today
8.00 p.m.
He struggled to draw breath.
His bleak, lethargic pupils fluttered to life like a loose-fitting lightbulb, then collapsed back into the murkiness of his irises.
On the surface he continued to offer little reaction to what she’d told him, but inside, he was fractured. Her disclosures had forced all one hundred billion neurons scattered about his ailing brain to shoot their electrical impulses in unison, rendering him disabled.
When he finally flickered back to life, his eyes bored deeply into hers, observing her from all angles with microscopic detail. He desperately searched her face for evidence that she was lying, but all he could see was the truth. What he’d too readily believed he had heard behind the bedroom door had created a chain of events that had changed and ended lives. Now he considered whether, deep down, he’d been waiting their entire life together to catch her out, and that had been the excuse he was looking for.
She had just demolished the framework of twenty-eight years’ worth of assumptions. He could no longer blame his actions on her. It was Dougie’s fault. It was Kenneth’s fault. It was Doreen’s fault. It isn’t my fault, it isn’t my fault, he kept telling himself.
So much distress and sorrow could have been avoided if only he’d turned the door handle another forty degrees. He could have protected her like a husband was supposed to protect his wife.
She had been a victim of the unresolved issues between two best friends and the parents who’d shaped them. And it broke the charred remnants of his heart when she explained how she’d sacrificed a justice she’d deserved for his sake. She’d even been willing to love a baby sired by hate just so she wouldn’t upset him. He couldn’t understand how someone could be that selfless.
‘I – I . . .’ he began to whisper but couldn’t finish.
She remembered a time when words from this man mattered. Now they meant nothing.
Finally, the question that had harangued her for so long had been answered. A thousand times she’d asked herself what she’d done to make him cast her aside, and now she knew.
Nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
If the roles had been reversed, she’d have opened that door. She’d never have doubted him until she’d seen it with her own eyes. She also knew she’d have been a better person had she forgiven Dougie. And she had tried, so very, very hard. But it had been impossible, and now she knew he was dead, she felt gratitude, even if it had only happened as a result of misplaced pride.
But that gratitude was short-lived. She could never forget Paula’s murder, the life of abandon he’d lived and the children he’d left behind. They’d all been dreadful things to hear. And nothing shocked her more than the depth of his dislike for a child he’d quietly rejected as his own.
‘How could you have hated something so innocent?’ she asked, determined to gain an insight into his thinking. ‘You treated Billy like you treated your other children. I saw you with him. I watched you love him.’
‘I didn’t,’ he replied. ‘It was a lie because I knew he wasn’t mine. I’m so, so sorry for what happened to you, but you have to remember, I thought you were having an affair. I was crushed.’
‘Why didn’t you open the door? Why didn’t you open the bloody door?’
‘I was scared of what I’d find.’
‘You mean you thought you’d find Doreen. How dare you, Simon. How bloody dare you. That’s what you always believed, wasn’t it? That I’d turn out to be like her, because you think all women are like that. You even compared your daughter in Italy to Doreen. Your own daughter! You only see in people what you see in yourself – damaged goods.’
‘I’m sorry.’
She wasn’t interested in his apology. ‘I don’t know what’s worse: that you thought I could cheat on you, or that you pretended to love your son.’
‘That’s the point, Catherine. Billy could never, ever have been my son, no matter how much I pretended. And if I’d have known how he was conceived, I’d have hated him all the more.’
‘You and I created him!’ she stressed, increasingly exasperated. ‘He was your flesh and blood.’