The Accidental Family (18 page)

“My dad said what bloody use would a kid of barely sixteen be? He said we’d take care of it ourselves. And as for me, I thought you’d gone right off me. I didn’t see the point in telling you either. I must admit that when we moved back down a year or so back, I wondered what would happen if we bumped into you. But we never did.”

Wendy and Louis looked at each other across the desk with a kind of familiar fascination and wonder that made Sophie feel very uncomfortable. They looked as if they had just rediscovered a long-lost treasure that had once been very dear to them.

“And did he …did Seth ever ask about who his dad might be?”

“We lived with my mum and dad till he was eight,” Wendy told him. “My dad was still young enough and fit enough to play football with him, run in the fathers’ race. The subject never came up, I think because he’d never had a dad, so he didn’t miss one. Actually,” she said, pausing and looking pensive for a moment, “he did ask me when I met someone and got married. He wanted to know if Ted was his dad.”

“Wait, you’re married?” Louis asked her.

“Not anymore.” Wendy shrugged. “It didn’t work out. I tried to love him, but in the end there was always something holding me back …” She looked up through her lashes at Louis. “Or maybe someone.”

To his credit Louis broke Wendy’s gaze first, clearly feeling a little awkward by the implication of her last comment.

“So what did you tell him?” he asked her.

“I told him Ted wasn’t his dad, but that his dad was someone I’d once loved very much.”

“And he has no idea about me now?” Louis asked her.

“None,” Wendy said.

“And are you going to tell him?”

Wendy hesitated and Sophie waited for the same angry denial she had experienced.

“No,” Wendy said, reaching across the desk to take Louis’s hand. “I think you and I should tell him together.”

Nine

As Sophie paced the single and largely empty platform at the St. Ives station waiting for her guest to arrive on the 4:46, she wondered about two things. First, why Cal had never learned to drive and was forcing her to meet him at the station on this chilly and gloomy afternoon, and second, why Louis had arranged one of the most important and momentous events of his life without discussing it with her at all.

After Wendy had dropped her bombshell, Louis had just sat there for a moment. Sophie hadn’t been sure exactly how he would react. She’d expected something radical though—some kind of drama that seemed befitting of the occasion. But instead Louis had merely sat back in his chair, his whole body relaxing as he ran his fingers through his hair, shrugged, and said, “Okay then, when?”

He’d looked relieved, Sophie thought, glad that someone else was taking charge of the situation, telling him what to do. She couldn’t blame him, she supposed, but she also couldn’t help the
feeling of unease that blossomed in the pit of her stomach. No matter how reasonable and sensible Wendy seemed now, Sophie found it hard to trust her and she was sure it was due to more than mild jealousy over Louis’s past love. But as Sophie stood in the tiny cramped office at Wendy’s workshop, she realized that regardless of whether she liked Wendy, Wendy was the mother of Louis’s son, and when Sophie married Louis this woman would be in her life forever.

Wendy had smiled, watching Louis’s face closely. “You two are so alike, you know. Of course I’ve known Seth for twenty years, he’s my boy. I did my best to forget what you were like, and I don’t just mean how you look, but your mannerisms …your smile.” Sophie looked on as Louis and Wendy watched each other closely. “Now I look at you sitting in that chair and it’s amazing. He’s the spitting image of you.”

“Sophie mentioned that.” Louis’s laugh was easy and relaxed, as if suddenly he’d decided that discovering a child wasn’t that big a deal after all. “It’s pretty crazy to think that’s he out there, this son I’ve never met …so when shall we go and see him?”

“I need to pick the right time,” Wendy said, glancing at Sophie briefly, as if she was irritated by an eavesdropper. “How about Friday? He’s coming over to my house for dinner, he often does on Fridays, says he needs to get a good feed in before the onslaught of the weekend. How about you come too?”

“We could make Friday, couldn’t we, love?” Louis asked Sophie, looking up at her. Sophie had been momentarily thrown by the fact that he’d called her “love”—a term of endearment he had never previously used and one she’d always thought more fitting for either couples who had been together for more than a hundred years or bartenders.

“Well, Cal is supposed to be coming on Friday afternoon, but this is much more important. I’ll get out of it, he’ll understand and—”

“Actually, I think it would be better if it’s just us, I mean just you and me, Louis,” Wendy said, cutting across Sophie. “It’ll be enough of a shock for the poor kid without strangers trooping in too.”

“Except that Seth’s already met me,” Sophie retorted before she could bite her tongue. “I’m not the stranger, Louis is.”

“No, and you’re not his father either,” Wendy said, directly addressing Sophie for the first time. “Look, I’m sorry, you might have been the one to work out who Seth was, but as far as I’m concerned, for now Louis is the only one who gets to be there when we tell Seth who his dad is.”

Sophie had waited for Louis to object and to insist that Sophie should come with him, but he hadn’t. He’d just twisted in his chair and looking up at her said, “I think Wendy’s right, love.”

Sophie checked her watch. Louis was there now, at Wendy’s house in Newquay. She’d invited him over for four thirty, giving them time to work out how they were going to handle things before Seth arrived around six.

Sophie had been looking for the spare key in Louis’s hall table drawer to give to Mrs. Alexander, who’d agreed to babysit, when she’d come across the brochure for Fineston Manor. It had been only a couple of days since she’d found out about Seth and since Louis had told her he’d found the perfect place to get married. They still hadn’t looked at the brochure together, and as far as she knew he hadn’t booked the place for any date, let alone New Year’s Eve. She held the glossy folder in her hands for a few seconds, counting backward from ten, trying to snuff out all the irrational and childish feelings that surfaced in her when she considered that all of their plans had been so suddenly and carelessly shelved. Of course discovering Seth was more important than booking their wedding day, but even so, as Sophie looked at the brochure tucked away in the drawer where Louis put credit card bills, bank statements,
and everything else he didn’t want to think about, she couldn’t help feeling jealous and neglected.

Only a few days ago the whole world had been about them and the girls, about how she felt about Louis and how he felt about her and the new family they were endeavoring to put together in the best possible way. It had been about kissing in doorways and the awe and delight they felt in each other. Now all of that was gone, and despite herself Sophie discovered she was angry.

“What about this?” Sophie asked Louis as he came down the stairs. He’d dressed carefully in a blue shirt and jeans, a shirt to appear smart and dadlike, Sophie guessed, and jeans to show he was still young and cool. His hair was brushed off his face and tucked behind his ears and he’d shaved too, which oddly made him look younger and undermined the responsible-adult image Sophie thought he was trying to achieve. He didn’t look like himself. The tension, nerves, and fear of the unexpected had altered his face somehow in small, subtle ways so that his features were all slightly out of kilter.

More than that, he hadn’t looked at her in the way he usually did in several days. Instead he looked at her as if he didn’t really see her. It felt like suddenly finding yourself standing in the shadows when you had become accustomed only to basking in the sun.

“What about what?” Louis asked her.

“This.” Sophie held the brochure under her chin, peering up at him over it, like a child peeping over a tabletop. It seemed to take Louis a second or two to register what it was.

“Oh …that,” he said. “I haven’t booked it.”

“I guessed as much,” Sophie replied, putting the brochure back in the drawer. “And I understand why …it’s just—do you still want to get married on New Year’s Eve? Because if you do, then we should probably sort it out, that’s all.” Her voice was edged with an unreasonable anger that Louis registered with a sigh.

He picked up his keys and looked first at his watch and then at the front door. Sophie knew that he didn’t want to discuss it now. She knew that he wanted to drive to Newquay and be on time to meet Wendy and then eventually his son. She knew all of that and yet still she asked him. She discovered she couldn’t stop herself.

“Of course I still want to get married …,” Louis said, frowning at the front door as if he could somehow will it to open.

“Still on New Year’s Eve?” Sophie pressed him uncomfortably.

“Well yes, why would that change?” Finally Louis focused his attention on her and looked her in the eyes, reaching out to cup her cheek in the palm of his hand. “I love you, Sophie,” he told her, with just a shade of impatience. “All this secret-son stuff is doing my head in, but it doesn’t mean I don’t love you or don’t want to marry you anymore …”

“Really?” Sophie heard herself sounding insecure and needy and felt the muscle in her gut wince. She rested her hand on Louis’s chest, feeling the beat of his heart against her palm. “I’m sorry—I know this is a really important day for you and that you have to go now and that the last thing you need is me asking you if you still feel the same but I can’t help it, I can’t …”

Louis engulfed her in a hug, the kind of all-encompassing embrace that had been absent for the last few days.

“You nut,” he said gently, kissing the top of her head. “How I feel about you hasn’t changed,
nothing
can change how I feel about you. I really want to marry you more than anything and preferably before they chime in the New Year. I promise you I’ll ring them tomorrow, because I’d be gutted if we lost out on our New Year’s Eve wedding for any reason. But right now I have to go and meet my adult son who I knew nothing about and who has no idea I exist.”

Louis sucked a thin breath in through his teeth.

“I’m so sorry.” Sophie looked up at him, nipping her bottom lip. “I’ve behaved like a selfish brat …and I feel like an idiot. Of course nothing is more important than getting to Wendy’s on time.”

“I actually kind of like it that you care enough about the wedding to bring it up now, just at the very second I’m going out to meet Seth.” Louis’s smile was wry. “I like the irrational, vulnerable bit of you. I
love
all of you and I am going to marry you as soon as I have sorted this, okay?”

“Okay,” Sophie said, allowing a small smile to insinuate its way into the corners of her mouth. “But at no point did I openly admit to being irrational.”

“And remember,” Louis said, keeping his voice low as he kissed her temple. “If the girls ask, I’m going to meet a cousin and you’re out with Cal.”

“You’re sure you don’t want to tell them about Seth right away?” Sophie asked, risking starting another conversation, but only because she wasn’t at all sure about Louis’s decision to keep the news of a half brother from the girls. However difficult it might be to tell them now, Sophie was worried that with all the people who already knew, including Wendy, Carmen, Grace, Cal, and even Mrs. Alexander, they’d find out some other way, and if they did she wasn’t sure how it would affect them, especially Bella, who had struggled so hard to trust her father again.

“I am sure.” Louis nodded. “It’s too much for them to take in right now. I’ll tell them in my own way when the time is right.”

“Okay then,” Sophie said.

“Okay then,” Louis repeated. He kissed her on the cheek, smiling briefly. “Wish me luck.”

“Good luck, and Louis …” Sophie hesitated, unsure if she should risk skewing the equilibrium that had been so delicately restored between them. “Just be careful of Wendy. I know she seems
great and friendly and open but …she was a whole different person when I spoke to her at the wedding fair. She didn’t seem very …nice.”

The description was something of an understatement but Sophie thought that calling her a “threatening, vicious, hatchet-faced old harridan” might not be terribly tactful at that precise moment.

“Don’t worry about Wend,” Louis said, shortening her name with familiarity. “I know her—she’s great, and more important, she’s handling all of this amazingly well. I expect she was probably shocked when you found out about Seth and that probably made her act all angry and protective. I know she’s not great around you, but that’s probably just because she’s a bit jealous …”

“Jealous?” Sophie snapped. “Of what?”

“Of you.” Louis shrugged, his hand on the door latch. “But you don’t have to worry, because it’s you I love …”

“I wasn’t worrying until then!” Sophie lied, wondering if Louis had spotted her silently seething whenever Wendy came up in conversation. “It never crossed my mind she might be after you, but it’s crossed yours, I see.”

“It hasn’t!” Louis insisted. He looked at his watch. “Look, I’m sorry, but I haven’t got time for this now, it’s just stupid! I’ve really got to go.”

“I know,” Sophie said miserably, feeling the peace between them wash away again.

“There is nothing to worry about,” Louis told her firmly as he opened the door.

Sophie knew she should just have smiled and nodded and hugged him and sent him on his way feeling that everything was okay between them before he faced his son. But she felt confused, angry, and anxious, so instead she simply looked him in the eyes and said, “Isn’t there?”

He’d slammed the door on his way out.

•      •      •

Finally the train pulled slowly into the station, a total of eleven minutes late. Sophie hugged her arms around her torso, waiting for Cal’s tall, elegant frame to emerge from one of the carriages. On this cool late-September evening he was easy to spot among the five or six passengers who reeled off the train, because he was the only man wearing a gray cashmere overcoat over a tailored suit finished off with black patent-leather shoes, but even if he had arrived in the heat and turmoil of the summer season, he would have stood out a mile. Cal was one of those people other people looked at. At some point in his life, as part of his evolution into an adult being, he had made a decision to stand out from the crowd. It had nothing to do with his looks, although he certainly was striking, or even that he was gay; it was something more fundamental than that. Cal had decided that life was too short to blend in, and that he’d been put on this earth to be seen, regardless of the consequences. And no matter how much they argued and bickered, it was the part of Cal that Sophie had always admired and aspired to the most.