“It’d mean a lot of digging around.” Colin sucked air through his teeth as he considered, making a tiny whistling noise. “It’d probably be best to hire someone to do it for you. It’ll cost, but it’d be faster and less trouble.”
“Do you know anyone?”
“Not personally, but I could ask around. We sometimes have to use private detectives at work.” He gave a dry smile. “You’d be surprised the sort of messes musicians can get themselves into.”
Not only musicians, Ben thought. “How soon can you let me know?”
“Tomorrow, probably.” Colin looked uncomfortable. “Look, this might be jumping the gun a bit, but depending what the detective finds, perhaps you should start thinking about consulting a lawyer who specialises in family law. My field’s entertainment. I haven’t a clue what the custody situation would be if... well, if the worst came to the worst.”
Ben nodded.
Colin looked across at him. “I’m assuming you’d want Jacob to stay with you?”
Ben studied his beer can. “Let’s wait and see what the detective turns up.”
The traffic seemed even heavier than usual, or himself less patient, as he drove Jacob to school the next morning. The car sat in the meandering lines of vehicles as they crept forward, snarling into knots at junctions. Early as it was, the June sun was already baking down, indistinct through the purpling haze of smog.
He made no attempt to talk to Jacob. He’d hardly spoken to him at all the night before, even when he’d bathed him and put him to bed. Whenever he looked at him he felt such a turmoil of emotions it was impossible to see past them. He knew he wasn’t being fair, knew that whatever had happened wasn’t the boy’s fault. But telling himself that nothing had really changed didn’t help. Everything had changed.
The traffic thinned out as he neared the school. It was in Islington, and getting there and back twice a day, five times a week, was often a nightmare. There was a special-needs school closer to where they lived in Camden, but it catered for children with a variety of learning difficulties, not just autism. The Islington school was one of the few that was only for autistic children. He and Sarah had decided that the benefits of Jacob being given specialist education and treatment outweighed any inconvenience of transport. Sarah had even insisted on taking and collecting him themselves, an arrangement Jacob soon regarded as inviolable. He could stretch his acceptance to include Maggie, but not to the local authority’s minibus, with its roundabout route as it collected other children.
They had been lucky to get him into the school at all.
Jacob had been almost school age before he had finally been diagnosed, and it had taken letters, pleas and numerous phone calls to the educational services to enrol him in time for the next term. But if nothing else it had given Sarah — and Ben as well, he remembered — something to do to help ease the shock of the doctor’s verdict.
The memory of the afternoon in the specialist’s office had, until now, ranked along with his mother’s death as being one of the worst moments of Ben’s life. He had held Sarah’s hand as the man had explained that, while Jacob wasn’t mentally retarded, he had a disability which prevented him from communicating or relating to the people and world around him in the usual way. There were, he had said, wide-ranging degrees of severity in autism, and, while Jacob didn’t exhibit as extreme signs as some, he would still need special education and care. They had listened, numb, as he told them about the behavioural problems they could expect, from an obsession with apparently senseless, repetitive activity to the fact that Jacob would find it difficult to understand normal human interactions, or even fully recognise how to use language to communicate. Ben had asked if there was a cure.
No, the doctor had said. Autism could be helped, improved, yes, but not cured.
Sarah had looked over at where Jacob was playing with a toy abacus on the floor, sliding the beads around on it as though he knew exactly what he was doing.
“What causes it?” she had asked.
The doctor had spoken at length about brain development before, during and after birth, about genetic traits and childhood illnesses, and in the end shrugged his shoulders and confessed that no one really knew. And Sarah had stared at Jacob with a look in her eyes that Ben hadn’t been able to fathom, but which now, he thought, he was beginning to understand. That night, as they lay sleepless in bed, she had stared up at the ceiling and said, “It’s a judgment.”
“Oh, come on!” Ben had been disturbed by the way she had withdrawn into herself since leaving the specialist’s office.
She kept her gaze on the ceiling. “It is. It’s my fault.” The matter-of-fact way she said it had frightened him.
“How is it your fault?” She didn’t answer. “Thinking like that isn’t going to help,” he persisted. “I know it’s hard, but it’s just something we’re going to have to come to terms with. It’s no good blaming yourself.”
For a long moment she didn’t reply. Then tears had run out of her eyes, trickling sideways towards her ears as she lay on her back, and she had turned to him and sobbed until, at some point, they had both drifted into an exhausted sleep.
Next morning Sarah had begun determinedly telephoning around autistic schools. She had never mentioned judgment or responsibility again.
Ben thought about what she had said as he parked the dusty VW Golf outside the school gates. He turned to where Jacob was belted into the back seat. The little boy had one hand close to his face, moving it from side to side as he stared out of the window through his spread fingers.
“We’re here, Jacob. Are you going to undo the seat belt, or shall I?” There was a momentary hiatus in the swinging hand, then Jacob carried on as before. Suppressing his anger, Ben climbed out of the car and opened the back door. Jacob peered up at him through his fingers, and continued to do so as Ben unbuckled him from the seat belt. Holding his free hand, Ben led him towards the school gates, and it wasn’t until Jacob gave a grunt and began tugging at him that he realised he had forgotten the routine.
“Okay, okay, I’m sorry.” Ben let the boy pull him towards an old postbox set low in the wall surrounding the school.
He waited while Jacob stood on tiptoe and inserted both hands, first his right, then his left, into its slot. Jacob had seen someone posting a letter in the box not long after he started at the school, and since then insisted on performing the ceremony every morning before he went in. Not when he came out, though; when school had finished he had to walk down the length of the car, top to bottom, brushing his left hand against it. Ben had learned from experience that, no matter how much of a rush he was in, it was better to let Jacob complete his rituals than try to interrupt them.
The formalities completed, Jacob took Ben’s hand again and they went through the gates.
The Renishaw School was set in the grounds of an old vicarage. The vicarage itself had been demolished long since, but most of its garden remained, except a small area that had been asphalted to serve as a carpark. Tucked behind the chest-high stone wall, it formed a small oasis of shrubs, trees and lawn in the surrounding desert of brick and concrete.
Someone had cut the grass, and the rich scent of it masked the petrol fumes from the road and hit Ben like an essence of childhood. The nostalgia eased past his defences and deepened without warning into the poignancy of loss. Angrily refuting it, he took Jacob over to the prefabricated units that stood on the site of the old house and went into the second one.
At first glance it seemed like any classroom; childish paintings on the wall competing with colourful posters full of bold lettering. But it was a much smaller group than a normal class, only eight other children in it besides Jacob, and only two of them girls. The other thing that set it apart was that there was less chatter than usual. Unless they were encouraged, the children tended to play by themselves instead of with each other, and when Ben had first taken Jacob there the classroom’s relative quiet had struck him as eerie. Now he barely noticed.