And then there was Primavera. If you really turned up the voltage I’d have to admit that sometimes I think of her too. What she and I had wasn’t love, not in the conventional sense: it was pure animal attraction, backed up by two minds that were very far from the norm, and by two generously proportioned egos. When you add mutual self-indulgence to that list, you’ve got the whole picture of the two of us together. Dylan once said to me that he really belonged with Prim and Susie with me, because they were basically bent, in the non-sexual sense of the word, and we were basically straight. He was right about Susie, but. .
Now Primavera was back, rehabilitated, evidently remorseful for what she had tried to do to me the previous year, and with a legitimate excuse to claim a permanent role in my life. I wasn’t in any doubt that I’d be able to keep her at arm’s length, yet she could still throw my switches. It might have seemed weird to you when I told you about the three of us, my wife, my ex-wife and me in the swimming-pool, all of us almost naked, but that didn’t do anything to me, especially with the kids around. Yet when I’d seen her earlier, in the Columbus, changed from the more formal dress into her casuals, almost exactly the way she was dressed the first time we ever met, I will admit now that it gave me an instant boner. . and she had known it.
My dad would live. The longer we sat there the more confident of that I became, the more my faith in Mac Blackstone’s immortality restored itself. I had a feeling that I might need him too, most of all for the moral kick up the arse which only he can give me.
I smiled at the thought, and at all the day’s drama and ironies. I smiled too because what should have been righteous anger at Dylan’s deception and return had been muted by the fact that I actually liked the guy; I’d missed him too.
There were all those things going through my head, but there was something else, something much bigger, something that had been with me for a year. Part of me wanted to let it lie dormant, to push it out of my mind and get on with my life. The trouble was that, however hard I pushed, it wouldn’t go away. Maybe I wouldn’t have confronted it, but that wasn’t my decision alone.
After a while, quite a long while, I glanced at my watch. Being rich, I have a few, but my favourite is a titanium Breitling Aerospace, very light and with a black face and hands and numbers so luminous that they can glow even in daylight. It showed ten past three.
Ellie was still snoozing, slightly audibly, in her chair. I glanced at Mary, just at the moment she turned to look at me. Our eyes met. ‘It’s taking a long time,’ she whispered.
‘It’s bound to,’ I told her. ‘They explained all that. This sort of surgery is usually planned, but Dad’s in a critical condition. If it takes all night and all day, so be it, as long as it’s effective.’
‘I suppose so. It’s hard, though, the waiting.’
‘Tom Petty,’ I murmured.
‘What?’
‘ “The Waiting Is The Hardest Part.” It’s a song by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers; great band, great lyric.’
‘You can be flippant about everything, can’t you?’
There was an edge to her voice. Neither of us had ever admitted it, but there had always been a certain tension between Mary and me. It went all the way back to my childhood, when Jan and I were kids together, or, more specifically, to our teenage years. It wasn’t that I felt she disliked me, but there was something in the way she looked at me, a wariness that I didn’t understand then, and that hurt me a little. It wasn’t mutual, that’s for sure. For my part, I liked Mary. That frisson had carried on into adulthood; then it altered a bit. After Alex More, Mary’s husband, left her, and after my mother died, when she and my father grew close, I suppose there was a little private resentment on my part. Yet it didn’t overlap the other thing; that was still there, until Prim appeared on the scene.
Mary was pleased. My self-esteem didn’t let me deal with it at the time, but she was pleased that somebody had come between me and Jan.
Her pleasure was short-lived, though, for what was between the two of us was too strong; in fact, it was stronger than either of us understood. In the end we simply accepted it and gave in happily to the inevitable. If Mary had been as happy, it would have made my day, but she wasn’t. It only showed itself to me, though. As far as I knew, Jan never had a clue.
‘A joke? Where’s the joke? I don’t understand that.’
‘You’ve always been flip, Oz. Your first reaction has always been a throwaway line, a pitch for a quick laugh.’
I felt my eyes narrow. ‘Mary, if you think I find anything laughable about my dad lying on that operating slab, you don’t know me in the slightest. But you’ve never really known me, have you?’
‘Now it’s my turn not to understand,’ she shot back. ‘What do you mean?’
I gazed at her, rather coldly, I suspect. ‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘We’re both tired and under great stress, saying things we’d never normally say. Let’s strike everything that’s just been said from the record, okay?’
‘What did you mean, back in the car, about things I should have handled better?’
‘Mary,’ I murmured, ‘I really don’t want to get into this.’
‘What did you mean?’ she hissed.
I took my wallet from my pocket and opened it. I showed her the photo that’s on display there, of Susie and the three kids; the light was good enough for her to see it clearly. Then I slid a finger into the space behind the credit-card slots and drew out another image, of Tom. I’d taken it myself a year earlier, on the day that I’d found him in California, to mark it, but for another reason too.
Before I go any further let me take you back to something I told you in my last confession to you, about the moment in which I saw him for the first time: ‘In an instant, I knew everything: there was no thought process involved, I just knew everything.’ That’s what I said to you then. I’ll bet you thought you knew what I meant; but I’ll bet you also, any odds you like, that you didn’t.
I showed Mary that photograph, and then I showed her another, a snap of another child, taken thirty-five years earlier. The likeness was incredible: they could have been twins.
Her cheeks seemed to collapse into her face as she sucked in her breath; the gasp was so loud I was afraid she’d waken Ellie, but it would take an earthquake to do that.
‘I warned you against this,’ I growled quietly, ‘but you had to insist. So maybe you’ll explain to me why my son, conceived with Primavera and borne by her, should be the living image of my late first wife. . your daughter. How can that be?’
She shook her head, her mouth set in a tight line.
‘It’s out of the box now, Mary,’ I told her grimly. ‘You can’t put it back.’ I glanced at Ellie, and I feared that there might just be an earthquake in that room if we stayed there. ‘Come on,’ I whispered. ‘Let’s take a walk.’
Conrad was sitting in a chair outside the door; he was wide awake. I said we were going for some fresh air, and asked him to sit with Ellie, in case she wakened and our absence made her think the worst.
We couldn’t actually go outside, in case we bumped into the press, so I simply turned left at the end of the corridor and tried the first door I saw. It was locked, but the second wasn’t, so we stepped inside. When I found the light switch I saw we were in a private office, probably belonging to one of the senior staff.
I took the two photos from my wallet once more, and held them in front of my step-mother until eventually she looked at them again.
‘I’m not kidding myself, am I? Those children are almost mirror images. One of them is Tom, and the other’s Jan at the same age. We’re agreed on that, yes?’ I ground the last word out, brutally. She nodded. ‘So where does that take us, Mary?’