A Stranger in the Family (9 page)

‘First of all, he’s done something that Isla condemns. We must be careful, Isla is far from being an unbiassed witness.’

‘Agreed.’

‘Still, I compared it in my mind with your encounter with your father, which you wrote me a nice full account of. Do you see what I’m getting at?’

‘I think so.’

‘He refused to acknowledge you. That could mean at least two things. One is that he doesn’t think you are the three-year-old son that was abducted.’

‘Yes. Though if so he never spelt it out.’

‘Secondly, it could mean that he never acknowledged that that member of the family was his child. You’re “not any kind of son” was how he put it. That’s pretty comprehensive, isn’t it? What he may have been saying is that you were Isla’s son, but not by him. Maybe that he tried to make the situation work back in your early childhood, but found he never could accept you.’

‘Yes. I haven’t had much time to think that over, but that was one of the possibilities that occurred to me. It makes one feel a bit more sympathetic to the man.’

‘It makes you feel that way. But you’re a nice lad and you try to make the best of people, no
doubt as you were taught to do by your also nice parents. But would you say that the rest of the interview you had with your father suggested he was the sort of man who would try to make the best of a situation like that for the sake of his wife, and to keep the family together?’

Kit thought hard.

‘No … But of course, this is twenty years after the event. He could have changed.’

‘Have you heard anything about how he treated his acknowledged family after the separation or divorce?’

‘Divorce. He paid very little attention to them.’

‘That seems to chime in with the impression he made on you.’

‘Yes.’

‘Did he virtually cast them off right from the time of the split-up?’

‘Not quite, but not long afterwards.’

‘And they are his real children – no question about that. Since you’ve come back I suppose that’s what you’ve naturally assumed yourself to be too. Legally it’s what you are. But if Novello wiped his own children out of his life, how much more is he likely to want to wipe you out of the historical record if he believes, rightly or wrongly, that you’re not his? And there’s another thing—’

‘If I’m not his, whose am I?’ said Kit.

‘Spot on. And is the identity of your father an added grievance that made it even more impossible for Frank Novello to form any bond with you?’

Kit held up his hand, palm outward.

‘Wait. Let’s not go further.’

‘You’ve got to face facts, lad.’

‘Facts yes. But we’re not at the moment in the realm of facts, but in the realm of conjecture. If we’re going to stay in the realm of conjecture we ought to sit down and examine some of the other possible conjectures.’

‘Like?’

‘That I was his favourite son, and the marriage collapsed after he lost me.’

Hargreaves considered this.

‘Possible. I’d have expected a lawyer to make a tremendous fuss if he lost his own child in a kidnap.’

‘Fuss with whom? Police? Press?’

‘Either. Both probably, and politicians as well, but principally police. I don’t get any sense from the records that he did anything much other than keep in touch through the British police with what was going on in Sicily.’

‘Where the police were doing bugger all.’

‘Exactly.’

‘The question is, what do I do next?’

‘Yes … I’d say you’ve got to face up to your
father’s part in all this. Not by talking to him again, because you’d most likely get exactly the same result: stonewalling and sadistic games.’

‘Sadistic games,’ mused Kit. ‘I sometimes wonder whether the whole abduction wasn’t part of a sadistic game.’

‘Good point. At the expense of your birth mother, perhaps. Perhaps one should say that the whole business has Frank Novello’s thumbprint on it.’

‘I could talk to Micky,’ said Kit. ‘He needs to think a bit more about his father, to think what in general makes Frank tick. Did the family ever notice – the younger ones – any aversion to me as a child? I ought to try to get him to be honest, to really examine his memories.’

‘And there’s one more person you have to talk to,’ said Hargreaves.

‘Who’s that?’

‘Isla Novello. She knows most of all. Perhaps she knows everything. You have to get her to be honest too. She lost a child. Why didn’t she react more strongly at the time?’

Kit groaned. It was something he had known since his return, and had tried not to face up to.

‘We’ve tried,’ he said, then amended it to: ‘We’ve skirted the surface.’

‘But even if you learn all she knows,’ said
Hargreaves, ever the practical man in the street, ‘you’ll still be only through the first stage, and have hardly dipped a toe into the second.’

‘Which is?’

‘How you came to land up in Glasgow, Scotland, as the child of Jürgen and Genevieve Philipson.’

The voice came down the telephone: ‘Mother?’

Kit was standing beside Isla at the phone, where they had been discussing what he would like for dinner. He recognised the voice as that of Micky’s wife, Pat, but he recalled her at the party as always referring to Isla as ‘Mum’. The tone of voice and the more formal word made him wonder if a new ice age was in preparation.

‘Yes, Pat. Who else?’

‘Mother, what is this about Kit being—?’

‘Kit is standing beside me, Pat.’ Isla said this in her most schoolmistressy voice. She did not mention the fact that he had immediately moved away. There was a nonplussed silence at the other end.

‘Well, I’ve nothing against Kit. Nothing at all. It’s just that—’

‘That what?’

Another silence.

‘We’re coming round.’ The tone of determination suggested that Pat was proposing a family excursion to the South Pole. ‘The children will have to come, but they can play in the garden,’ she went on.

‘That’s as you please, Pat. Kit and I will make sure that we’re here.’

‘I have some phone calls to make. We’ll be there in twenty minutes.’

‘Hmmm,’ said Isla, putting the phone down. ‘She’s a troublemaker, that one, and trouble is what we’ll have.’

When the twenty-minute deadline loomed Kit retreated to the dining room and watched the street outside. Micky Novello drove a three-
year-old
Honda Civic and when it stopped outside the front gate five people scrambled out of it, Micky looking very troubled. They were received at the front door by Isla and were still bundling the children out into the back garden and keeping them quiet with sweets and pop when another car drew up – a car verging on limousine status, though Kit didn’t recognise the make or model, out of which got his sister Maria and her husband Ivan Battersby. Ivan spotted Kit in the
window and raised his hand, and Kit was about to reciprocate friendship in kind (he might need all the friendship he could get) by going out into the melee when yet another car drew up. It said Stanningley Cars on the roof and side, and out of it got the determined but slightly comic figure of Wendy Maclean, and following her – yes, it had to be – his younger brother Dan: smart, besuited, his hair glued up in rough spikes that resembled a rampant bramble growing on moorland. He looked the epitome of a promising footballer up on a charge of rape, affray or dangerous driving.

Kit, without wanting to, felt he had to go out and join the party. The introduction to Dan was as brief and formalised as it could be, and the whole party then gathered in the Seldon Road dining room.

‘What we want to know,’ said Pat, gazing round at what she obviously regarded with satisfaction as a full house, ‘is how come we’ve never been told? How come Isla hasn’t made it clear that the kid who was abducted in Sicily had a different father to the rest of her children, and was in fact illegitimate? Why were we left in the dark?’

There was a single voice that shouted ‘Hear! Hear!’ – at first loudly, but fading away.

A long silence followed.

‘I never told anyone because it’s not true,’ Isla
finally said, quietly. Kit thought with amused approval that Isla was likely to play her hand much more effectively than Pat. He thought, also, that he knew exactly where Pat had obtained her information.

‘You introduced Kit to the family as one of us, and the next stage would have been that he came in for his quarter of the family estate,’ Pat said.

‘He can still do that,’ said Isla, her chin going up a degree or two. ‘There is no “family” estate. My house and my money are mine to do what I like with – mine absolutely. Unfortunately, Kit rejects the whole idea of inheriting his share from me.’

‘I came in for a house and sufficient money from my adoptive parents,’ said Kit, keeping his voice low. ‘That is more than enough for me.’

‘Pull the other one,’ said Pat, her tone becoming broader Yorkshire and harsher as she felt more floundering than victorious. ‘When is money ever enough? And I never heard that you were adopted by billionaires.’

‘I don’t suppose you know anything about my parents,’ said Kit, voice still soft and impersonal.

‘This is really very distasteful,’ said Ivan Battersby suddenly. ‘And futile. Isla leaves her estate as she likes, and if Kit gives his share to Christian Aid or the Dogs Trust, that’s a matter
entirely for him. Bringing it up like this is not only distasteful, it’s shabby.’

‘Who the hell are you to criticise?’ said Dan, an unlovely sneer on his face. ‘You’re not family. It’s we who’ve had someone foisted on us who turns out to have been born on the wrong side of the blanket.’

‘I doubt whether you would know which was the wrong and which was the right side,’ said Ivan contemptuously. ‘I can’t take a footballer’s moral outrage seriously.’

‘Dan,’ said Isla. ‘I have no idea when you came back from Australia, or why you didn’t tell me when you were coming or had come, but you’d be well advised to hold your peace and not mess with things that are well beyond your comprehension and have nothing to do with you.’

‘It’s an outrage – having a cuckoo foisted on us who immediately lines up for his share of the family loot,’ said Dan.

‘I seem to have been misunderstood,’ said Kit, trying hard not to treat Dan with disdain but not succeeding. ‘I wanted to make it clear that I was not lining up to receive Novello family money or possessions.’

‘I’ve been trying to think,’ said Isla, in a meditative voice, ‘where all this innuendo could have come from. There is only one source I could
think of.’ She shut her mouth determinedly and looked straight at Micky. He held her gaze for a few seconds, and then looked down.

‘Anyway, what does it matter?’ asked Ivan Battersby. ‘You’re not a titled family. And if you were, what difference would that make? There’s hardly a person in the world can be one hundred per cent sure who their father is, and that includes the aristocracy.’

‘That’s what I’m trying to say,’ said Isla. ‘Thank you, Ivan. Kit is of the right blood group. He was born to me, and into what seemed to be a stable marriage. One more child was born after him. My husband, all the time of the separation and divorce, never once made any allegation that he was not the father of Peter Novello. What more do you want?’

‘In any case, it’s irrelevant,’ said Maria.

‘Of course it is,’ said Isla. ‘Ivan was right. In the olden days women went with so many lovers that every child could have had a different father. There was a Duchess of Devonshire like that – long, long ago, of course. And there was Winston Churchill’s mother – she had a string of men. Nobody went up to Winston and said “We’d like you to take a blood test before we let you save the nation”. All this “illegitimate” and “legitimate” hardly matters to anyone these days.’

‘It matters to me,’ said Dan, who had no sense of the ridiculous. ‘When you go I shall expect to get my third of the estate.’

Everyone looked at Isla.

‘You were always my favourite child,’ she said.

‘I know, Ma,’ whined Dan. ‘So why are you doing this to me?’

‘I think in the future I shall show less favouritism. In fact, at this moment it would give me great satisfaction to leave you nothing at all.’

‘Mum!’ wailed Dan.

‘Can I just have a word?’ asked Kit. ‘I seem to be in the middle of a discussion which is all about me, but I don’t have anything to contribute to it.’

‘Then pipe down,’ said Dan.

Kit ignored him.

‘First I’d like to guess that the person who raised the question of paternity was the man I thought, since coming here, was generally agreed to be my father. I’m guessing that Micky paid him one of his regular visits and got landed with this confidence. Is that right, Micky?’

Micky nodded miserably.

‘Yes. Yes, it was him who told me. I shouldn’t have passed it on. I’m sorry.’

He spoke in an undignified mumble, close to tears.

‘You’d have been in dire trouble if you hadn’t passed it on,’ said Pat.

‘And did he reveal the name of anyone whom he guessed, or had evidence about, who might be my biological father?’

‘We’ll talk afterwards, Kit,’ said Micky.

‘All right – that’s good enough. But then there’s the question of the abduction. Did he say anything about that?’

‘Not much. Said he never could accept you – hated to be near you. When he told me that, little scraps of memory came back to me: of his never playing with you, hardly even talking to you.’

‘Shame on him,’ said Isla.

‘Anyway, he said that in the end the kidnapping solved his problem.’

There was silence, everybody thinking of the implications of the words.

‘He didn’t say he arranged the abduction, to solve the problem?’ Kit asked.

‘No.’

‘But that possibility is one that he left open?’

‘I suppose so. I just took it to mean that it was a coincidence but, still, it did solve the problem.’

‘Except that soon after Dan’s birth Dad moved out of the family home and the marriage was over,’ said Maria. ‘That could have solved the problem without anything as sensational as
an abduction. I remember that, young as I was. It was a horrible time.’

‘Where does all that leave us?’ asked Pat Novello, nagging away at the bone of her grievance. ‘We should be clear about that.’

‘It leaves Micky, Maria and Dan set to inherit one third each of the estate that I will leave since Kit has disclaimed his rightful share,’ said Isla. She looked around and saw a degree of relaxation in the shoulders of the two men. ‘Of course, I have a legal right to change the will at any time. We Britishers have an absolute right to leave our property to whom we like – unlike some countries where the rights of children and other relatives to inherit a proportion of the estate are protected. Personally, after today, I feel the person who needs the protection is the one who makes the will.’

There was a degree of covert looking at each other, and stiffening in chairs. The meeting was finishing, but unsatisfactorily to most of the participants. Pat had got the message that the more she said, the less she advanced her cause. She was fighting on the side without weapons. She steamed out of the back door and started marshalling her children towards the car. Kit didn’t tell her that he had seen the eldest of them listening at the kitchen door for most of the meeting. Dan was by now on the phone ordering
a taxi, and when he put down the phone he turned to Wendy.

‘I think I’ll go outside and wait. I don’t like the atmosphere in here.’

‘Your going will improve it,’ said Isla bitterly. ‘Are you going to start looking for a job, now that you’re back?’

‘I’m talking to Bradford. Things look promising.’

‘Bradford … Oh, the football club. Well, if that comes to nothing, be sure you register for unemployment benefit. It’s not much, but you have expensive tastes and apparently no way of financing them. And I shouldn’t think your lady friend brings anything into the household beyond two tits and an ever-open door. That looks like your taxi now.’

The room by then was well thinned out. Kit noticed the Honda driving off, leaving Micky still in the room. No doubt he was going to have the powwow with Kit that he had mentioned earlier. But the person who came up to him, obviously intent on making a point, was Ivan.

‘Just in case you don’t follow English football Kit, Bradford City Football Club is not in the top rank of English clubs, or even in the second rank. If Dan is not taken on by them he’ll really be back in the Stanley Matthews era: ten pounds a week and your bus fare to the ground.’

Kit grinned.

‘I rather thought I’d never heard of them. That sort of wage won’t keep Wendy in lipsticks.’

‘If he accepts a job like that, Wendy won’t be around. I hear from Maria she was making advances to you at the family party. If that’s true, lock up your wallet.’

‘I will – and run a mile.’

‘What I really wanted to say was that I’m sure Frank would never dare try to prove his non-parentage. If the medical evidence is sound – and Isla seemed quite sure – there’s no other way he could get a court to accept his claim. Also, they’d want to know why he had waited twenty-odd years before he tried to shut you out in the cold.’

‘That’s what I thought. I suspect Frank’s great pleasure in life is causing mayhem, and I doubt if he has any legal action in mind. On the other hand if he gets to hear about this morning’s shenanigans he’ll laugh his cruel laugh – at all of us, I suspect. My impression is that Frank feels superior to pretty well the whole human race.’

‘So I’ve heard,’ said Ivan. ‘There’s another point. Frank is – was? is? – a solicitor and he’d know better than most that going into law is a sure way of losing money … and losing face as well.’

‘He’s not going to lose either if he can help it.’

‘Well, I just thought I’d mention it … Wasn’t Isla splendid, by the way?’

‘Bang on target,’ said Kit. ‘And not at all the genteel upright type I’ve observed recently. This was another side of her altogether, and absolutely direct. You could say she stepped down into the gutter. But if you’re dealing with filth you sometimes have to hurl some in reply.’

‘You’re thinking of Daniel, aren’t you? Absolutely. He’s been asking for it for years. Maybe she’s been less illusioned about him than she pretended. Best of luck in what you’re trying to do, Kit. I’ll let Micky have his word.’

Micky had been lurking outside in the hall. He knew Kit had seen him there, so he had no compunction in saying: ‘I can’t say I thought Mum improved with plain speaking. I was waiting for four-letter words, though thank God they never came. It’s not the mother I know at all.’

‘I suppose it had to be strong for Dan to get the message. Whether she was really so soft about him in the past is maybe an open book. Ivan obviously thinks not, but you said he’d always been the favourite.’

‘True. But I’m not the sharpest knife in the set. Anyway, I wanted to apologise for telling Pat what my father had told me … I mean, what he had alleged. When you’ve been married
for a while you automatically tell your partner everything.’