“He’s in quite a state,” Mabel whispered, on taking my hat. I should have known better than to call on him for a relaxing drink and sandwich. Where he got this sister nonsense I couldn’t think, but he was nothing if not entertaining, though I reflected on going in what a cross it was to have a novelist for your father.
He wore neat sharply creased twill trousers, an open-necked white shirt, a pearl buttoned wine-dark waistcoat, and shoes with as well polished a shine as Mabel could make. Seated on the vast leather settee, he had a long arm proprietorially around the shoulder of …
I was never one for shouting at the onset of shock, and sharing it with the rest of the world. Not me. Quick moves were my style, smart reactions for self-preservation, giving thought only sufficient time for me to decide what the emergency was about before battling in. And yet, and yet, as this encounter proved, I could be essentially inert when it suited me least. Why didn’t I turn and run? What man of action was I? A few peaceful days at Upper Mayhem had unthreaded me.
“This is the greatest day for me since — I don’t know when. Since Victory in Europe, perhaps. God knows where I was at the time. Probably throwing up in Piccadilly Circus. But I don’t see how it can’t turn out as good a day for you as for me, Michael. But come right in, and have a glass of champagne. Opening a bottle of the best is the least I can do on such a unique occasion.”
I could only surmise that Sophie had tracked me down from the evidence I had given her on the train. She had phoned Blaskin, who talked her into calling at the flat, and told her she would find me here, though he had done so only with the idea of luring her into his lascivious clutches, unable to know she had long since fallen into mine. Not that it would make any difference to him, because they were already drooling over each other so disgustingly that I felt mad with jealousy.
His rubbery lips nuzzled her to an extent that told me he must have thought up the father and daughter gag to make them more lecherous for going to bed, which accounted for the grief on poor Mabel’s face.
I put both hands on a chairback to keep me upright, but my astonishment was as nothing compared to Sophie’s. She needed, though I couldn’t think why, time to recognise me, and when Blaskin said: “This is Michael, your brother,” she gave a short throat-wobbling scream and fell back senseless.
“What the hell’s going on?” I shouted. “What’s all this brother and sister lark? If it’s your idea of drumming up a plot for a novel you can go and inseminate yourself.”
Genuine obscenities were ready for launching, and I held them back, because though Sophie lay in a half-fainting state, eyelashes flickering like those of a Ukrainian doll, I couldn’t be sure she wouldn’t overhear and think badly of me. Mabel came from the kitchen to draw a cold wet flannel across Sophie’s forehead, while Blaskin, mumbling his distress, pressed Sophie’s hands to his lips.
Even now I couldn’t tell whether his expression was of undying malice, or tender concern for her condition, though if the latter this was the first time I had witnessed it. “Michael, she’s my long-lost daughter. She wrote a couple of weeks ago, and gave incontrovertible proof of the fact this morning.”
He regained his usual poise behind the settee, stood with hands in the armholes of his waistcoat, an attitude of pride he had never shown for me. On kneeling to kiss her forehead he looked up: “How dashed clever I must have been to pump a specimen of the female species into the world, but how sad not to know till now, when there’s so little life left to enjoy! Still, mustn’t get sentimental. That would be death for a novelist.”
Sophie beamed her lovely dark eyes on me as I drew the chair close to stop myself falling, hoping she’d deny any blood connection between us. “Tell me it isn’t true,” I croaked.
“Oh Michael, it is. He’s my father.” She looked stunned, as if like me she was close to a nervous crack-up, lips tight, and eyes uncertain about what or who to settle on, still unable to believe that she had come to meet her father, and then had a putative brother wheeled in. I sympathised, though not sufficiently for it to be mistaken for a sign of loving kinship. “When Gilbert — my father — told me I had a brother,” she said, “I didn’t know what to expect or think.”
When she began to cry, and Blaskin all but licked up her tears, I prayed for a twenty-two carat bijou gem of a nightmare from which I could at least wake up. She looked around with what I hoped was panic and disbelief, put a finger to her lips, as if pleading with me to say nothing concerning our previous meetings. For one irresponsible moment I was tempted to let Blaskin know, in revenge for foisting this situation on me, that I had already committed incest, and that it was his fault for not having used french letters in his feckless youth. I wanted to kill him as well for omitting to don condoms with my mother, because if he had taken care neither Sophie nor I would have been locked by such come-to-bed eyes as happened now. The Wagon-Lits couplings between Boulogne and Milan came back with intense clarity, and a sudden slide of the tongue between Sophie’s lips told me she was re-running the scene as well.
Blaskin turned to me. “You don’t seem to have quite taken in what I said, Michael. I present you with a beautiful sister, and there hasn’t been a word of joy or welcome. How can it be? Your presence certainly had a profound effect on her, to the extent that she hasn’t been able to say anything. But you might show some response.”
“I’m overwhelmed with happiness,” was the best I could do.
“Give her a kiss, then.”
Her recovery was quicker than mine, perhaps because she was a woman, and had known of the connection longer. I held one of the hands that had previously roamed my naked body, and leaned forward to kiss her lips. “I love you, Michael,” she said, for Blaskin to hear. “It’s love at first sight, dear brother.”
“And I love you. I’ve never had a sister. It’s going to be tremendous. What times we’ll have. It’s the most stunning thing that’s ever happened to me.”
When the contact went on too long, for decency’s sake we drew apart. Blaskin’s expression was — I can’t find a more accurate word — mawkish. Someone who hadn’t known him for long would have found him unrecognisable. Such simpering pride and irredeemable self-love had never before come out of a novelist. “I’m sure you’ll both have a lot to talk about.” He turned to Mabel, and became himself again: “Don’t just stand there. Bring us some coffee. Then you can think of what to cook for lunch. We’ll be hungry by then.”
Nothing in this situation could be real. It was all a piece of theatre, Blaskin suddenly taken with the notion of writing for the stage. Either that or he had got to know Sophie a few days ago — maybe in a club or pub, or even a post office queue — and they had devised this scenario between them as a bit of cruel S and M to send me crazy. I was having none of it.
And yet, when coffee came, and Sophie talked — on Blaskin urging her to — she related how he had made her mother pregnant, then left her, as he had mine. It was impossible either to doubt or to argue, because every detail slotted in. I speculated as to whether or not in too long he would lumber me with a brother, or brothers, probably twins, with more sisters thrown in. At least Sophie and I hadn’t come with the same mother, which was one good outcome of Blaskin’s scattergun philandering, and I suppose the fact that we weren’t full brother and sister accounted for the lechery I felt for Sophie as she proved that we were indeed so closely related.
“Well, my boy”—he couldn’t ask often enough — “how do you feel now?”
“I won’t know for a few months, except it’s as if I’ve won the lottery. It’s a surprise, which I’m sure even a novelist like you can understand.”