Coming Home (17 page)

Slightly out of focus, it wasn’t great. Like any toddler, he’d been in motion when the lens had clicked; he wasn’t looking directly at the camera and it was difficult to see his eyes. I moved my head around the picture, as if I could somehow see around the angles that prevented me from looking him in the eye. Still, to all intents and purposes, it could have been Graham. He had the same, curly dark hair and was of a similar build. But the outfit was not one I’d seen in photos of Graham at that age. I squeezed my hand over my mouth, inhaling deeply through my nose. Breathe, Evie, breathe. Was I really looking at my half-brother?

Desperately needing to talk to someone, I dialled Luca’s number, my fingers clammy on the touchscreen.

‘Please pick up, Luca,’ I whispered. ‘Please. I need you.’

‘You have reached the voicemail of …’ said the automated voice, ‘Luca Rossi,’ said Luca’s voice. I hung up, opened WhatsApp and bashed out a message for Luca.

‘Hello. How are you? Really, really need your advice. Please can we meet tomorrow? It’s urgent. E.’
Then I tried to go to sleep.

It didn’t work, of course. My curiosity was a woodpecker jabbing at my brain. Once more I sat up in bed and groped for the light switch. When my eyes had accustomed to the light, I opened my iPad and read the final email in the ZeePee account. Dad had emailed himself a document containing all Zoe and Tom’s personal information, from phone numbers and addresses to the bank account number that I knew so well. Now there was just one thing left for me to do: open the photo-sharing site and see once and for all what my half-brother looked like.

I didn’t know if I could do it.

I snapped the cover over the iPad and lay back on my pillows, my heart thumping so loudly I thought the house would shake.

‘Come on, Evie,’ I told myself, trying to think logically. ‘Do you want this or not?’ Once I’d seen the pictures, there’d be no going back: Zoe and her son would become more real and would take up residence in my head (as if they hadn’t
anyway). Did I want that? I was burning with curiosity, but it would kill me
not
to see them. Sweating on the pillow, I realised that I’d definitely look at some point—it was just a matter of how soon.

So, with shaking hands, I opened the iPad cover, clicked the link and entered the password. I closed my eyes while the page loaded and, when I opened them, there he was, laughing in the sunshine in what looked like a pub garden: my half-brother, Tom Peters. Woodside—the whole of England—could have been obliterated by a meteor at that moment and still it wouldn’t have torn me away from the picture in front of my eyes. With a hand pressed to my chest, I stared.

I
woke the next morning to the sound of Mum’s clock radio roaring into life. I was still slumped up against the pillows, the iPad still open on my lap. My eyes felt puffy; a crumpled tissue was still in my hand.

I felt sick at the thought of what I had to tell Mum. I was rehearsing sentences in my head—‘Could you pass the butter, please, and, by the way, Mum, did you know Dad had another son?’—when I heard her bustling across the hall. I managed to slide the iPad under my pillow and lie down properly just in time.

‘Morning, darling!’ she said, knocking and entering in the same fluid movement. ‘How are we today?’

‘Uh. Not that great. I feel all congested, like I’m coming down with something.’

‘Maybe it’s all the stress, dear. It’s not been an easy time,’ said Mum. ‘Anyway, you need to get up. We’re going out. I’m treating us both to a spa day!’

‘What? Today? Have you booked?’

‘Yes, today! I wanted to surprise you. Also because tomorrow—I hope you don’t mind—I’ve been asked to play in the Ladies’ Morning Challenge at the golf club. You don’t
think it’s too unseemly, do you—’ she didn’t pause long enough for me to gather my thoughts, let alone reply, rattling on ‘—but the girls really need me. Anyway, so I thought we’d do something nice together today. I’ve arranged for us to go to Hinton Hall—it’s only half an hour on the motorway and we’re booked in for a full day’s pampering.’ She walked over to the window and pulled open a curtain.

‘It’s a lovely thought,’ I said. ‘But I really don’t feel well. Maybe we could do it another day?’

‘Oh, come on, Evie. We’ll have a nice massage, then a facial and a “spa cuisine” lunch. After that, we’re free to use the facilities, so bring a book. I think there’s a nice indoor pool to lounge around, and some exercise classes and stuff. I’d quite like to try yoga. In the afternoon, we’ve got manicures and pedicures followed by afternoon tea.’

‘Mum. It sounds lovely. But I’m really not up for it today.’

She rolled her eyes at me. ‘It’s a spa! It’ll make you feel better! All you’ve got to do is loll about in a dressing gown being pampered. You don’t have to come to yoga if you don’t want.’

‘Can you take anyone else? One of your golf friends? I’m sure they’d love it.’

Mum’s voice dropped its cheery tone. ‘I really need this, Evie. And I’d like you to come with me. Please humour me.’

I sighed.

‘Good. Thank you.’ Mum looked at her watch. ‘But you really need to get up now. We need to leave by nine-thirty.’ She bustled out of the room.

But I wasn’t ready to leave my new half-brother. I needed
to see his face again, and this time I needed to look more objectively. I needed to find a trace of Dad in him; I needed to know that he wasn’t a fake, an imposter. What if that Zoe woman had tricked Dad? Had he ever had any proof that the baby was his? Had he asked for a paternity test?

My mind flooded with doubts as I took the iPad into the bathroom, locked the door and sat on the toilet. I opened up the photo-sharing site with shaking fingers. And there he was again. There was no doubt that he was Dad’s son: my new half-brother looked uncannily like my dead brother.

Once I got beyond the shock of seeing what Graham might have looked like grown-up, I couldn’t stop looking at Tom, devouring every detail of his face. I held the iPad close to my face and stared into Tom’s eyes; I pulled it away and looked at him from the corner of my eye, as if I’d just caught sight of him. Would I have recognised him in the street? What had he got from Dad? Did he look at all like me?

Tom’s hair was entirely from our side: he had the same shock of curly nut-brown hair that Graham and I had shared, and he had Dad’s light-hazel eyes while I’d got Mum’s blue ones. His teeth were white and even, his cheeks rosy over a tan; there was something familiar about the shape of his mouth, but I couldn’t place it. The physical resemblance to the Stevens side of the family was strong—I was sure I’d have done a double take had I seen him out and about. I traced my finger round the outline of his face, touched it to his cheek. My brother.

But the picture of Tom didn’t tell me anything more about
him, about this person who was suddenly my family. He looked nice, but I wanted to know what he was really like; whether he was kind or arrogant, friendly, sporty or bookish. I wanted to know how he filled his days. Did he know about me? Did he wonder who his dad was?

In the photo, Tom was in a pub garden, wearing a polo shirt and jeans and half-standing up from a picnic table, a pint glass in his hand. There was a handful of pretty blonde women behind him, and two more guys. I clicked onto the next picture. It was a ‘selfie’ of him and an attractive, middle-aged woman, their laughing, windswept faces squashed together as they struggled to get in the shot. I recognised her at once: the woman outside the church. Zoe. Tom’s mother.

I yanked my towel off the rack, bunched it up and slammed my fist into it as hard as I could, again and again. At the funeral, that woman—that adulterer, my father’s mistress—had known exactly who I was.

I felt sick to remember that I’d liked her. And then I remembered what she’d said before she went into the church: ‘My son will be wondering where I am.’ I spun around and retched into the toilet.

W
hen Mum said she’d booked a spa, I’d imagined one of those community fitness-centre jobs—a blobby manicure and a no-frills massage in an afterthought of a treatment room shoved behind the squash courts—but Mum had really pushed the boat out: Hinton Hall was a huge Jacobean country-house hotel, which stood magnificently in its own sprawling grounds in the Kent countryside, and its spa was no afterthought. Franchised by Six Senses, it was the real deal—walking through the double doors into the rarified air of the spa made me feel like we’d walked into a little piece of Thailand. As we stood at the reception desk, my shoulders dropped and I took a deep breath, inhaling the scent of the aromatherapy oils that infused the air.

Although I sometimes went for the odd massage in Dubai, this wasn’t a natural scene for Mum. She’d always avoided spas, re-gifting any vouchers people bought her for Christmas and claiming she didn’t have time for all that ‘touchy-feely’ stuff, so I was surprised how enthusiastic she was. She’d been as giddy as a goat all the way down in the car—an infectious mood that hadn’t allowed me to dwell
on my thoughts. It continued now, as we were shown to the changing room and asked to slip into the thick bathrobes and unflattering mesh spa pants.

‘Thank you for coming with me,’ Mum said, as we opened our lockers. She sighed. ‘What would I do without you, Evie? You’re the best daughter I could ever have asked for. I hope you know that.’ She smiled tenderly at me.

I took a deep breath. ‘Mum, while we’re being all serious, there’s something I …’

But her head was once more inside the locker.

‘What on earth are these?’ she asked, pulling out the spa pants.

‘They go on your head,’ I said, deadpan. The moment was over. ‘Keeps the oil off your hair? And these?’ I held up the slippers. ‘These go on your hands. They’re spa mittens.’

Without missing a beat, Mum obediently put the pants on her head and the slippers on her hands, which she then flapped about like a seal, and we both collapsed in fits of giggles that neither of us could stop. Each time one of us straightened up, our giggles erupted again. We doubled over in our gowns, snorts of laughter bursting out of us like geysers.

The door swung open and the spa manager, clearly fed up with waiting for us, came in, a disapproving look on her face. Mum whipped the pants off her head and, mouth twitching, I fought to look serious. Mum’s hair was still mussed up from the pants and I felt another round of giggles starting in my belly. I stared at the floor and turned my laugh into an explosive cough, while Mum dutifully followed
the manager out into the relaxation area, where she took us through our massage choices.

If only there was one that could soothe the mind as well as the body, I thought: while the giggles had relieved a lot of tension, the problem of how to tell Mum about Tom resurfaced during my treatment and my thoughts slid around like eels, tangling themselves up until I felt queasy. Could I tell her during the afternoon tea, when she was all relaxed? Or should I wait till we were back home and she didn’t have to get in a car and drive? Or would it be better to tell her while she was distracted with driving? My mind swam.

I didn’t see Mum again until after our facials when we met up in the relaxation room. Sipping from a cup of ginger tea, Mum was glowing—the facial seemed to have plumped up her face, making her look younger and fresher.

‘Don’t get settled,’ she said, as I plopped down in a wicker chair opposite her. ‘It’s nearly time for the yoga class. Will you come?’

‘Sure.’ I did a bit of yoga in Dubai. Maybe that would calm my thoughts.

As it happened, we were the only two who turned up and the teacher suggested that she take us through a series of gentle stretches and twists to get us warmed up before we started on some easy ‘chest-opening’
asanas
.

I was belly to the floor, hands at chest level, doing my best impression of a cobra when I heard a strange noise: a stifled sob. Mum was really struggling to hold the pose.
She slumped back down onto her front, her head flopping into her hands.

The sobbing noise continued.

‘Sorry,’ Mum whispered and I thought she was apologising for not doing the pose right, then I realised that she was crying.

‘Oh, Mum,’ I said, releasing my own baby cobra and sitting up to pat her back. I passed her a tissue from my pocket and she blew her nose, struggling to compose herself. I didn’t think I’d seen her cry for twenty years.

‘Sorry,’ she kept saying. ‘I don’t know what happened. Sorry. I don’t know why I’m crying. I feel fine, it was just … it just came over me. Sorry.’

‘Maybe we should call it a day?’ I said. I helped her into the changing room then went back to the studio to apologise to the teacher.

‘Chest-opening
asanas
often have that effect on people,’ she said, as she wiped down the mats. ‘They open up the heart area, which can trigger a release of bottled-up emotion. Is your mum under any kind of emotional strain?’

I gave a little laugh. ‘You could say that. Her husband—my father—died, just over a week ago. They’d been married for over thirty years.’

I felt awkward talking about it with a stranger.

‘I see,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ She paused long enough to be decent, then continued. ‘But that would be it then. It’s perfectly normal for the emotions to come out like that—you can’t keep them bottled up. It does more harm than good. But your mum’s reaction was quite extreme.
Are you able to keep an eye on her? I think she’s probably feeling a lot more than she’s letting you see. Maybe she’s trying to be strong for you?’

Given I’d been planning to drop an emotional atom bomb on her later that day, I didn’t really want to hear that and, slightly taken aback at getting Psychology 101 from a yoga teacher when all I’d expected was some sun salutations, I edged towards the door, muttering a thank you as I left.

I found Mum in the relaxation room and poured us each a glass of water from a jug packed with lemon, lime, cucumber and mint leaves.

‘Are you all right?’ I asked.

‘Sorry, darling,’ she said, much more composed. ‘I do miss him. I know he wasn’t perfect, and he could be an awkward old goat sometimes, but we’d been married for thirty-three years. It’s odd not to have him there. Just you and me now, darling.’