“Sounds glamorous.”
“About as glamorous as the music business.” He fingered his swollen eye and they both laughed.
When the taxi stopped outside her flat he couldn’t believe the journey had passed so quickly. As she climbed out of the cab he felt an urgency come over him he hadn’t felt since he was a teenager.
“Look,” he said, hurriedly, “if you aren’t doing anything later this week, perhaps we could go for a drink some time?”
She smiled, bending to the open door. “I can’t really. It was difficult enough finding someone to baby-sit tonight. But thanks for asking.”
Leave it at that. Don’t get involved, she’s got a kid. She was straightening, beginning to close the door. “How about lunch?” he asked.
She looked at him. Her smile had become quizzical, as though this wasn’t what she’d expected either. “Call me at work,” she said.
Two years later they were married. And two years after that a vein burst in her head and killed her.
Jacob sat on the settee in the crook of Ben’s arm, watching The Lion King on video. It was one of his favourites, which for Jacob meant that he could watch it through to the end, then go back and watch the whole thing again straightaway. He’d learned how to work the video machine when he was four, but never bothered rewinding if a tape was halfway through. He just watched it from whatever point it started. The narrative never interested him, only the visuals.
He yawned now as he watched the cartoon. Ben knew that he should really put him to bed.
They had a strict routine — Jacob would wash his hands when he arrived home from school, watch children’s TV for half an hour, eat his tea, spend some time playing or watching more TV with them, then have a bath and go to bed. Routines for Jacob meant safety and security, and any departure could upset him. Ben had already helped him assemble a rudimentary car from Lego bricks, and now they were running into his bath time. But he hadn’t seemed to notice, and Ben was loath to put him to bed just yet. He needed the contact as much as Jacob did. More, perhaps, right then.
The phone had been ringing all night, various people wanting to see how he was. He was touched by their concern, but was glad when the calls had finally stopped. Most of ‘their’ friends were really Sarah’s, parents of children who either went to Jacob’s school or that she had met through autistic contact groups. Ben didn’t feel he had much in common with them, and the conversations only made him more aware then ever that Sarah wasn’t there. Only Jacob.
And he couldn’t look at Jacob any more without thinking about the newspaper cuttings.
He’d been tempted to tell Colin about them when he’d phoned, but in the end he hadn’t. He wanted to think it through first, satisfy himself that he wasn’t being paranoid.
One moment he would be convinced of the worst, the next certain that there was a mundane explanation. Sometimes a conviction that the entire thing was ludicrous would blow away his suspicions like a spring wind. He had seen photographs of Sarah when she was pregnant, for one thing, talked with her parents about the birth of their grandson. He knew that she had been seeing a bastard called Miles, who dropped her when she became pregnant — there was the usual surge of jealousy-tipped anger at the thought — and that she had moved in with her friend Jessica afterwards. Ben had dubbed her The Awful Jessica because in his opinion she was, although Sarah didn’t like him poking fun. But, awful or not, she had been a trainee midwife, and when Jacob had been born prematurely and suddenly it had been Jessica who had delivered him in the middle of the night.
That was the truth as he had known it. He would remember it and feel relieved, but then, imperceptibly, his certainty would slip through his fingers and the whole process of argument and counter-argument would begin again.
Jacob gave another yawn and rubbed his eyes. Ben smiled despite himself as he watched him struggling to stay awake.
“Come on. Time for bed.” He gave him the expected piggyback upstairs and ran the bath. The boy was so tired he was yawning continuously, but he still followed the routine detailed in the little pictograms on the bathroom door. Sarah had drawn them herself, basing them on the Rebus symbols used at the school. They were simple drawings showing matchstick figures flushing the toilet, washing their hands and brushing their teeth. Some had a sun added to them to show they were for the daytime, others a crescent moon, and Jacob stuck to the sequences religiously. Ben had once made the mistake of trying to remove them, thinking they were no longer needed, but Jacob had made such a fuss he’d quickly put them back. Needed or not, the pictograms themselves had become part of the comforting order.
Ben kissed him goodnight and stood back as he pulled the quilt up to his chin, turned over and fell asleep instantly. He felt guilty for keeping him up so long. The boy had given no outward indication of being aware of his mother’s death but it must have affected him. Ben was sure that, on some level at least, he knew something was wrong. He didn’t expect Jacob to understand what a funeral was — an ordinary day was full of confusion enough for him — but during the service he had stared at the coffin and rocked, which he only did when he was disturbed. Maggie, with her usual subtlety, had tried to persuade Ben not to take him, arguing that nothing would be gained by it and that he’d only cause a fuss. But Sarah would have wanted him there. She had always believed in treating Jacob as much like a normal child as possible, giving no more concessions to his autism than she had to.
“He’s a bright boy,” he had said. “I’m not going to patronise him because he’s autistic. He isn’t retarded.”
For a time they’d thought he might be. At least Ben had.
He had never said as much to Sarah, even though he was sure it must have occurred to her. As a baby, Jacob had been slow first to crawl, then to walk. When he was three he still hadn’t spoken so much as a word, and the excuse that he was a ‘slow starter’ no longer held any conviction. But it was his lack of response that convinced Ben there was something wrong. It seemed to make no difference to Jacob if he was being cuddled or left in a room by himself. He rarely smiled, and when he looked at anyone, even Sarah, it was with no more recognition than he would give a piece of furniture. For a long time Ben found his indifferent stare eerie, though that was something else he never mentioned.
Eventually, even Sarah couldn’t deny that there was a problem. She had taken Jacob to have his hearing tested, and Ben got the impression that she hoped he actually was deaf, that the problem was a straightforward physical one. He didn’t believe it himself. Jacob didn’t seem to understand anything that was said to him or recognise his name, but there were some sounds he unmistakably reacted to. He would look towards the door of whatever room he was in when the doorbell sounded, and once when Sarah was out Ben had experimented by standing behind him and opening a packet of sweets. The little boy had twisted around immediately, a look of anticipation replacing his usual remote expression.
He had been nearly four when he had been diagnosed as autistic. Not long after that Ben went to Antigua on a shoot.
The second night one of the models had come on to him after a group of them went to a bar together. She had a fa bull ous body, a golden tan, and he knew no word of it would ever get back to Sarah. He had seen the promise of suntanned and easy sex smiling in front of him and thought back over the strain of the previous few months. Taking Jacob to see specialists. Waiting for test results. Vainly trying to comfort Sarah as she cried, for the first time since he’d known her, when they were told. Did he really want to tie himself down to a woman with an autistic child that wasn’t even his? The answer hadn’t really surprised him.