“How about your job?” I asked her over breakfast.
I knew that she had taken a week’s holiday from her position as a local radio producer in Guildford, but her week was up.
“A few days more won’t worry them,” she said.
I made no fuss, even though I didn’t consider that her continued presence was really necessary. Maybe I could stand it for a few days more. But I was beginning to yearn for the time when Sophie had been in the hospital, when I didn’t have to make the bed every morning or put my dirty coffee cup immediately in the dishwasher, when I could walk around the house in my underwear and lie down flat on the sofa to watch football on the television, and when I could leave the seat up in the lavatory and burp and fart whenever I wanted to. In five months, I had got quite used to living on my own.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want Sophie at home. Of course I did, and I loved it. I just wasn’t so sure about her sister being here too. Alice was becoming not so much a domestic goddess, more of a domestic nightmare.
“How long is she coming back for?” I asked Sophie as we waved Alice away.
“Just a little bit longer, I think,” she replied. “Alice likes to feel that she’s in charge, and she thinks I still need a little more of her care. To be honest, though, I would be quite happy if she didn’t come back tonight.”
So would I, I thought. But Alice’s presence had at least made me feel a little better as Sophie had not been alone in the house when I’d been at work. I think Sophie herself felt the same way, and she had not objected much when Alice had announced her intention to come back.
We closed the front door and went back into the kitchen.
“I can’t believe I’ve been home a week already,” she said. “It seems like only yesterday I left the hospital.”
I thought it felt like a month, but I didn’t say so.
I went up to my office while Sophie puttered around in the kitchen, relishing being able to do things without Alice constantly offering help and advice.
I logged on to the Racing Post website and checked the declarations for Bangor-on-Dee races for Monday. It was good news. The short-priced favorite in the two-mile hurdle race for maidens was still running. As were the others I wanted.
Sophie came into my office with a cup of coffee for me.
“Thank you, my darling,” I said.
She stood behind me, stroking my shoulders and playing with my hair.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Just checking the runners for tomorrow,” I said.
“Can I come with you to the races?” she said.
“Of course,” I said, pleased. “We’re going to Bangor tomorrow. It’s quite a long way, but you can come if you like. We’re at Southwell for the evening meeting on Tuesday and then the July Festival at Newmarket on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.”
“Are you staying in Newmarket?” she asked with slight concern.
“No chance,” I said. “Not at the prices the hotels charge during July week. The bloodstock sales are on too, don’t forget. The town is bursting with people. I’ll come home each night.”
She was relieved.“Good,” she said.“Maybe I’ll come to Southwell on Tuesday if the weather’s nice. I find there are too many people at Newmarket.”
“That would be lovely,” I said, meaning it. I shut down my computer. “Why don’t we go out to lunch?”
“What, now?” she said.
“Yes. Right now.”
“Great idea.” She smiled.
We went to the pub in the village of Avon Dassett where their specialty was sixty-four different ways to have pie. Sophie and I, however, opted not to go for a pie but for the Sunday roast lamb, which was delicious.
After lunch I drove the few miles to the Burton Dassett Hills Country Park, where I stopped the car on a ridge with a view all the way to Coventry and beyond.
And there we sat in the car while I told Sophie about my father.
I had lain awake for much of the night going over and over in my mind the secrets I had gleaned from my grandmother and weighing up whether I should tell Sophie anything just yet. It was true that she had been very well during her first week home from the hospital and hadn’t once accused me of drinking or being drunk, which, I knew from experience, was always the first sign that things weren’t quite right.
I had watched her carefully every morning to check that she swallowed her medication, but I was also painfully aware of how easily in the past her behavior had begun to change for the worse at times of stress or anxiety, and I desperately didn’t want to cause her either unnecessarily.
However, there was a real need in me for her to know the truth. I realized that I was bottling up my pain and my anger. I feared they would overwhelm me and cause an explosion in my head, the outcome of which in the long run might be more damaging both to Sophie and to me. I needed, perhaps selfishly, to share the knowledge in order to talk it through and ease the burden. Maybe I should have sought out one of the hospital psychiatrists to give me some therapy and treatment, but Sophie was the one I really wanted to provide me with the help I needed.
I started by telling her about my father’s sudden appearance at Ascot and the shock of finding that he hadn’t died in a car crash all those years ago as we had thought.
“That’s great,” she said. “You always wanted a father.”
But then I told her about him being stabbed in the racetrack parking lot and about him dying at the hospital. She was upset and deeply saddened, mostly on my behalf.
“But why was he stabbed?” she asked.
“I think it was a robbery that went wrong,” I said.
I considered that it was still prudent not to mention anything about microcoders, false passports or blue-plastic-wrapped bundles of cash. Best also, I thought, not to refer to my father’s black-and-red rucksack discovered by me in a seedy hotel in Paddington and subsequently collected from our home by his murderer.
“But you could have been killed,” she said, clearly shocked.
“I would have given the thief the money,” I said. “But my father told him to go to hell and kicked him in the balls. I think that’s why he was stabbed.”
She was a little reassured, but not much.
“But why didn’t you tell me about it straightaway?” she implored.
“I didn’t want to upset you just before the assessment,” I said in my defense. And she could see the sense in that. “But that’s not all, my love. Far from it.”
I told her about my mother and the fact that she hadn’t died in a car accident either. As gently as I could, I told her about Paignton Pier and how my mother had been found murdered on the beach beneath it.
“Oh, Ned,” she said, choking back the tears.
“I was only a toddler,” I said, trying to comfort her. “I have no memory of any of it. In fact, I don’t remember a single thing about my mother.” And, of course, Sophie had never known her.
“How did you find out?” she asked.
“The police told me,” I said. “They did a DNA check on him. It seems that everyone at the time thought my father had been responsible and that’s why he ran away, and also why Nanna and Grandpa made up the story of the car crash.”
“How dreadful for them,” she said.
“Yes, but it wasn’t actually that simple,” I said.
I went on to tell her about my mother’s pregnancy, and, eventually and carefully, I told her the whole story about the baby being my grandfather’s child and how it had been he who had strangled my mother to prevent anyone from finding out.
She went very silent for some time, as I held her hand across the car handbrake.
“But why, then, did your father go away?” she asked finally.
“He was told to,” I said.
“Who by?”
Sophie had once loved my grandparents as if they had been her own. Now I laid bare the awful story that my grandmother, our darling Nanna, had orchestrated the whole affair. She certainly had been responsible for me having had no father to grow up with and quite likely had been instrumental in my mother’s demise as well.