They wouldn’t let him see her at first. Intellectually he had realised it was serious, but emotionally it was too much to take in. The night before they had cooked a meal, put Jacob to bed, drunk a bottle of wine. It didn’t seem possible that she could suddenly be desperately ill. Even when the doctor came to tell him that she was on a life support machine, and that they had done everything they could, Ben couldn’t accept what was happening. It was only when he saw her lying still and unconscious in the hospital bed, with her head shaved and her face bruised and pale, that he understood she was dying.
The machines had kept her alive for three days. When they turned them off on the fourth, Ben had sat holding her hand, talking to her until she stopped breathing with a lack of fuss that was almost an anticlimax.
Maggie and Colin had taken him home. He’d known Colin since university, drunkenly tried to warn him out of marrying Maggie, reluctantly been best man at their wedding.
But now neither he nor Maggie seemed completely real. They had waited with him until Jacob arrived back from school, and then left for Ben to try to explain to the boy that his mother was dead. Jacob had kept his eyes averted. Only the fact of him rocking backwards and forwards gave any indication that the news might, after all, have reached him. Ben could have envied his stepson’s autism right then.
He cried himself out and set the clothes gently on the bed before returning to the wardrobe for another armful.
There were a lot of them. Sarah had been a hoarder, never throwing away anything unless she absolutely had to. He had often ribbed her about it, calling her a magpie. She countered by accusing him of having a consumer mentality.
The memory brought a short-lived smile. “Don’t worry, Oxfam won’t throw them out either,” he said out loud, but the joking tone rang hollow.
It was a battered old strongbox. The black paint was chipped and faded to reveal the dull patina of brass. He couldn’t remember seeing it before, but Sarah had been a compulsive wanderer of antique fairs and flea markets. He’d lost track of half of the things she’d bought. Even so, he thought, it was odd that it had been hidden.
There was a faint rustling from inside when he tilted it, but the lid was locked. He looked in the drawers for a key.
There wasn’t one. He thought for a moment, then went to the antique tea caddy where she’d kept her jewellery. She had been buried in her wedding and engagement rings, but there were other pieces, none particularly valuable in themselves, that he couldn’t see himself casually discarding. He tried not to think about that as he poked among them for a key.
He found one under a nest of thin gold chains.
It fitted the lock of the strongbox. There was a click and the lid sprang open against the sudden lack of resistance. Ben laid it back against its hinges.
Inside was a cluster of yellowed newspaper cuttings, folded and paper-clipped together. A larger piece of paper lay at the bottom. Jacob’s birth certificate, he saw when he took it out.
Except for that the box was empty. He put the certificate down and unfolded the pieces of newspaper.
The headline of the top one was “BABY STEVEN’S MOTHER IN TV APPEAL”. He looked to see what was on the other side, but there was only part of an advert.
He flicked quickly through the rest. They weren’t in any chronological order, but were all concerned with the same story, a baby abducted from a maternity hospital. All seemed to be from the Daily Mail, which surprised him a little because the only papers he’d known Sarah to read were the Guardian or the Evening Standard.
The thought I’ll ask her why she kept them was followed by the gut punch of remembering that he couldn’t. He put them down, his curiosity suddenly soured. They were just another loose end that would now never be tidied up. He would have left them on the dressing table, ready to be thrown out, except for a nagging feeling that he had missed something.
He picked them up again. There were five of them, decreasing in size from the banner-headlined “BABY STOLEN FROM MATERNITY UNIT” to a single-column filler as the story sank without development beneath the weight of fresher news.
Only the one from the front page had a date on it, but as far as he could tell they spanned about a week, all from March, six years earlier. Something about that hovered, waiting to be recognised. He looked at Jacob’s birth certificate, then at the date on the first cutting.
March the third. Jacob’s birthday.
A sense of unease was building up in him like a trapped gas bubble. He read the reports again, paying more attention now.
They dealt with the search for a newborn baby that had been taken from its hospital cot in central London. Its parents were a John and Jeanette Kale. The names didn’t ring any bells.
Kale was a Royal Engineer corporal, serving in Northern Ireland and described as a ‘veteran’ of the Gulf War. It was their first child, a boy, and there was editorial indignation that someone should have abducted the son of a soldier who was ‘serving his country’.
There were the predictable police appeals, both for witnesses and to whoever had taken the baby. One of the cuttings showed a photograph of the parents. It was a poor picture of the father, a youngish man with a cropped, military haircut, head half turned away as he emerged from the hospital. Next to him his wife looked older than her given age of twenty-three.
But who wouldn’t? Ben supposed, feeling uncharitable as he took in the anguish the shot had frozen.
The unease was expanding. All at once the touch of the desiccated scraps of paper repulsed him. He dropped them back on the dressing table, rubbing his hands on his jeans as he turned away. The sight of Sarah’s heaped clothes on the bed struck him like a crack on the face. It shattered the last of his restraint. He rushed out of the bedroom, almost falling downstairs, and stood in the hallway at the bottom, gasping for breath. He felt himself beginning to hyperventilate and tried to fight the growing panic. Stop it.
He went into the kitchen and splashed cold water over his face, spilling it down his throat and chest The shock was calming. He turned off the tap and braced his arms on the sink.
Water dripped from his nose and chin as he looked out through the window. On the other side of the glass the street appeared the same as always. The houses were hard-edged in the bright afternoon sun. Parked cars lined both sides of the road, parallel lines facing in opposite directions. A man walked a dog, pausing to let it urinate against a lamppost before continuing beyond the edge of the window frame.
Normal.
Ben let his head hang, feeling limp with reaction. What in Christ’s name was he thinking of? He felt ashamed of the suspicions that even now he couldn’t fully acknowledge. Jacob was Sarah’s son, for God’s sake. He held on to that thought, building it up and strengthening it until the fear he’d felt in the bedroom seemed unreal and irrational.
Then he thought about the date on the newspaper cutting and a ghost of it returned.
Pushing himself away from both the sink and the fear, he dried his face and looked at his watch. It would soon be time for him to collect Jacob from school. He didn’t want to have Sarah’s clothes lying about in piles when he got home.
He went back upstairs to finish packing them away.