Jessica raised her shoulders, listlessly. “I don’t know. She might have, at some level. I’d cut out the reports from the newspaper and saved them in a drawer, but when I looked after she’d gone back with her parents they’d gone. She never said she’d taken them, and I never asked her.”
“You never spoke to her about it?”
She shook her head, but for the first time there was something subtly defensive about her. Ben thought he understood why Jessica had kept the cuttings. And why Sarah had been uneasy discussing their relationship. The woman had wanted to tie Sarah to her.
He didn’t bother to keep the disgust from his voice. “Didn’t you worry that someone might have found out?”
“Who was going to find out? I was nearly a qualified midwife, no one would doubt what I said. The doctor hardly even examined her when we called him out the next day. If I’d been based at the hospital the baby had been taken from somebody might have wondered, but I wasn’t. There wasn’t any risk.”
“No risk? She’d taken somebody else’s baby! All right, she was ill, she didn’t know what she was doing. But you’re supposed to be a... a fucking midwife, for God’s sake! How could you do it?”
“Because it was for Sarah.” Jessica stared back at him, defiant and serene. “I’d have done anything if I thought it would help her.”
“Help her! That wasn’t helping her! You were just letting her hide from what happened! And what about its real parents? Didn’t you care about what they must have gone through?”
“Why should I?” she flashed. “Some pathetic squaddie and his stupid breeding-cow? Why should I care more about them than Sarah? I see their kind every day, squeezing out one brat after another! They’ve probably got three or four by now. They’d get over it, but Sarah wouldn’t have! Care about them? I’d have taken it myself if she’d asked!” Her eyes were bright and moist. “Have I shocked you?” she sneered. “Didn’t you think plain old Jessica was capable of something like that? God, you make me sick. You married her, you fucked her, but you never loved her. You don’t know what love is.”
Ben couldn’t bear to stay there any longer. The small kitchen was suddenly airless, dense with the possibility of violence. He stood up, startling himself with the sound of the chair legs scraping across the lino-covered floor.
“I don’t know what you’d call what you did,” he said, thickly, “but it wasn’t love.” He got as far as the door, then stopped. “I can’t pretend I don’t know about this. I can’t just ignore it.”
Jessica didn’t look up. “Do what you like,” she said, dully. “I don’t care any more.” She was still staring at nothing when he went out.
Chapter four
Jacob selected a piece of jigsaw puzzle, held it in his hand for a second, then exchanged it for another and pressed it neatly into place. The puzzle, a scene from Star Wars, was nearly half completed. The box for it lay open close by, but Jacob never so much as glanced at the picture of the finished jigsaw on the lid. It wouldn’t have helped if he did, because he was assembling it face down. He would sit through the whole of the Star Wars trilogy time and time again, entranced by the fast-moving images and sounds coming from the TV screen, but a static photograph from it held no interest for him.
Ben was pretty sure that he recognised what it was, could make the association between one and the other, although he wasn’t entirely certain. It was more likely that he simply regarded the picture itself as incidental. It was fitting together the little cardboard shapes which engrossed him, not what was on them when he had finished. He could assemble them with the picture upside down or sideways with equal dexterity. It seemed to be all the same to him.
Ben watched from the other side of the lounge as he broke off from the puzzle and gazed at something out of the window, perhaps at the window itself. Ben couldn’t see what had caught his eye, but he could guess. Jacob would scrutinise a cracked windowpane, a broken piece of glass, the chipped rim of a milk bottle in the sun; anything that refracted light and split it into an unexpected jewel of colour. They had realised what he was doing only after they saw him squinting into the spray of a lawn sprinkler, moving his head about to catch sight of an indistinct rainbow in the haze. Sometimes, generally after a joint, Ben wondered if he saw something in the refractions invisible to a less fractured mind.
Whatever he’d seen now failed to hold his attention, though. Jacob went back to the jigsaw. He gave no sign of being aware of either Ben’s scrutiny or his presence. Normally he would have tried to encourage the boy to talk, asked him about school, anything to steer him towards some sort of communication. Now he couldn’t find it in himself to make the effort.
Jacob didn’t mind. Jacob was locked in his own world, as usual. Sometimes Ben wondered if he wasn’t happier there than when he was forced to acknowledge an exterior one that made little sense to him. What am I going to do?
Jacob’s elbow brushed the pile of unassembled pieces and knocked several to the floor. His face creased up as they pattered to the carpet. He looked down at where they’d landed, his breathing growing faster as he became more agitated, but made no attempt to pick them up.
Sometimes it was difficult to know what would upset him, or see why it should. Jacob was generally placid, but if he became frightened or disturbed it could take a long time to calm him down. Once, when Sarah had misguidedly taken him to another little boy’s birthday party, he’d become hysterical when a balloon burst behind him, rocking and screeching so violently with his hands clasped to his ears that he had set all the other children crying as well. That had been the last party she’d insisted he go to.
He stopped himself from thinking about Sarah. Jacob had begun banging himself about in the chair in frustration. Ben went over and picked up the fallen pieces of jigsaw. Jacob subsided as he dropped them back on the table, gathering them back into the pile as if nothing had happened. Ben stared down at the back of his head as he bowed over the puzzle. Normally he would have ruffled his hair, made some sort of contact. This time he didn’t touch him. He went back to where he’d been sitting without a word.
What the fuck am I going to do?
Jacob’s head shot up as the doorbell rang. He looked in the direction of the hallway. “Mummy?”
Oh, Christ.
“No, Jacob,” Ben said. He felt full of ashes. “It isn’t Mummy.”
“Mummy.”
It isn’t bloody Mummy!
“No. It’s someone else.”
Jacob remained in the same attitude for a second or two, then went back to his jigsaw. When the doorbell rang again he took no notice. He didn’t so much as glance up as Ben left the room to answer it.
Colin stood on the steps. He had obviously come straight from work, although the slightly loosened tie indicated that he was now officially in his own time. “Sorry I’m late. Last-minute crisis.” He broke off, gawping at Ben. “What’s happened to your hair?”
Ben resisted the urge to touch the stubble on his scalp. He’d stopped off at the barber’s on the way back from seeing Jessica. He’d remembered Sarah running her fingers through it as he told the man to take it off. “I’ve had it cut.”
“I can see that,” Colin tore his eyes from it, looking at him with concern. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” Ben closed the door. “Did Maggie mind you coming?”
“Naw, she’s used to me being late. So long as I get back before it’s time for Scott and Andrew to go to bed there’s no problem.”