The Other Child (16 page)

‘No!’ He struggles away from her hand, panicked. ‘Don’t, don’t – don’t tell him. Please – please. You’ll only make it worse!’

‘OK. It’s OK. But the school can stop these kids without involving you, you know. They’re really good at that.’ She wonders if they actually are good at that here. She actually has no idea how the elementary school would handle bullying.

‘I wish I’d never told you now.’

She folds her arms around him. ‘You can always tell me. I won’t talk to the teacher if you don’t want me to.’ As she says it she knows that it is a lie. If she tells him that she is going to see his teacher, he will only be more stressed. But she can’t not go and talk to the school now. He buries his face against her, and she holds him tight. Sometimes loving someone and lying to them are not as contradictory as they ought to be.

The baby gives a massive, powerful kick.

‘What was that?’ He looks up with huge eyes.

‘It’s the baby kicking. Really hard. Here . . .’ She guides his hand onto her belly. The baby kicks again. He laughs. It kicks again. ‘I think we have a footballer in there,’ she says. ‘Don’t you? Are you excited? It’s not that long now till January.’

‘It’s
ages
. That’s even after Christmas.’

‘It’s not that long really. We’ll be putting up Christmas decorations before you know it.’

‘It’s
ages
away.’

‘It’s only a month. You need to write a list. Tell me what you want for Christmas.’

He begins to list things: Lego, Nerf guns, magic tricks . . .

She could start Christmas shopping this week. She needs to be organized. She’ll have to post things for Nell and the boys in advance, and cards for friends in England. And they have not yet bought any baby gear: they’ll need a Moses basket, a cot, pushchair, nappies, Babygros, a sling, a car seat. It had seemed like tempting fate to buy things for the baby, but now it is definitely time.

‘How about next weekend we all go shopping? We can get some Christmas presents, and we also need to buy some things for the baby. Would you like to do that? You can help me pick some stuff out for the baby’s room, and we can get some things for your room too. You wanted a football beanbag, didn’t you? And you know what, we need to think of names too, for the baby. What shall we call it, if it’s a boy?’

He thinks for a moment. ‘Ronaldo.’

‘And if it’s a girl?’

He frowns. ‘I don’t like any girls’ names.’

‘It might be a girl, you know, it might be a sister in here.’

‘I don’t mind if it’s a sister, I just don’t like girls’ names.’

‘OK, fair enough,’ She kisses his head. ‘You know I’ll love you just the same, don’t you, when our baby’s born? It will change things, but it will never change the way I feel about you. You’ll always be my first boy, my special one.’

He doesn’t answer.

‘I was thinking if it’s a girl we could call her Lily. That was your granny’s name, my mum, who you never met.’

‘Was she nice?’ He has asked this before, and she gives the same answer.

‘She was lovely. She was ill for a long time, but before she got ill she was the loveliest mum you could hope for. She was kind and funny. And she would have loved you so much. She always said she wanted a little boy after me, but it never happened.’

‘How old were you when your mum died?’

‘I was sixteen.’

‘How did she die?’

He has never asked this before. But she has always known he would.

‘She fell under a train, Joey.’

He lifts his head, alarmed. ‘I don’t want you to fall under a train!’

‘I’m not going to do that.’ She kisses his head. ‘I promise. I am very careful. So, what do we think of the name, Lily?’

He rests his head back on her. ‘It’s OK, probably.’

There is a rattling downstairs. They both jump. The door to the basement slams.

‘It’s just Greg!’ She laughs, pressing her hand on her heart. ‘It’s OK. It’s only Greg.’

But Joe’s face shows only alarm.

*

It has been snowing all night, but it is easing off now, the flakes turning from heavy clumps to intermittent, weak structures that float to earth one by one, like ghostly parachutes. When she walked Joe to school, in his new snow boots, he was swept away by the excitement – chucking snowballs with other kids, skidding down the road, the anxiety of the night before erased by the unexpected magic of the weather.

While he is playing in the snow, she slips into reception and makes an appointment to see his PE teacher.

Back at home she makes a cup of tea and takes it to the sofa. Folding her legs under herself and shifting until she finds a spot that works for both the laptop and her belly, she opens up Google and types in ‘Alex Kingman, Marblehead’.

The first link is to an article from a Marblehead newspaper about a planning application protest, led by ‘landscape architect Alex Kingman’. She peers at the grainy picture: beard, pea coat, woollen hat. It could be him. It’s a bit blurred.

She tries ‘Alex Kingman, Landscape Architect’ and the website of a Boston-based landscape architecture firm appears. She clicks through descriptions of impressive projects: a university campus, a downtown park, an arboretum. Then she finds a button for ‘Team Members’. And there he is. She recognizes the beard and the steady eyes. In the photo he is wearing a white shirt and linen jacket and sitting at a desk above spread-out plans that show lots of greenery and trees. There is no text to go with the picture. She clicks around, but the website is so trendy that she can’t find a button giving actual written information about staff members. There is a ‘Talks & Lectures’ link – she clicks that and reads down a list of forthcoming events.

He is to give a guest ‘Landscape Lecture’ in mid-December, a few weeks away, at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in downtown Boston. It is a place she has wanted to visit; she has read about it – a house of treasures collected over a lifetime by a wealthy nineteenth-century art-lover. She clicks into her calendar. Greg is on call that night. She could ask Sandra’s nanny, Delia, to babysit for Joe. She could go and visit the museum, listen to Alex’s talk, maybe catch him afterwards and ask why he is so sure that he knows Greg.

She jots down the time of the talk, then she goes back to the
Philadelphia Inquirer
archives – the ones she visited briefly when she was in the hotel room. She types in the name Carlo Novak and the dates, as she did before. There are three news items. She reaches into her bag for her wallet and enters her credit card details to get access to the full reports.

They are all disappointingly brief. She rereads the first one, which has no further paragraphs. The details feel more stark in the daylight: a young man accused of a macabre crime, the judge’s decision to adjourn because of the intolerable stress of an overheated courtroom.

She clicks back to the search. The next article was written a few months beforehand.

The third article is dated just a week after the one about the jurors being sent home.

She stares, for a minute or two, at the screen. This could be nothing – just a coincidence, just a name hooked from the past, a random event in someone else’s grim life. But of course it can’t be: the library card in Greg’s box was a University of Pennsylvania card. She looks again at the dates, and makes some quick calculations. Carlo Novak would have started medical school two years before Greg. Greg was accelerated through his Pittsburgh undergraduate degree so he would have been three years younger than Novak. It is not clear how their paths would ever have crossed. The two men were at separate universities, in different cities, academically two years apart.

She shuts down the computer. There is, of course, another possibility: Novak is a Polish name and Greg’s mother was Polish, so Carlo could be a relative. If this is the case, and it seems the most likely connection, then Greg’s failure to mention him has to be more than forgetful – it feels slippery, almost deceitful not to have said anything. It is like looking over your shoulder to see a shape rising out of the fog, but not knowing what it is or how menacing it might prove.

*

That night, when she comes downstairs after putting Joe to bed, Greg is at the dining-room table with his papers spread out around him. She brings him a cup of tea, and he looks up, smiles and murmurs, ‘Oh, thanks, hon.’

‘I saw Joe’s PE teacher today,’ she says.

‘You did?’

‘She says she’s noticed some of the other kids are ganging up – well, her words were “a little hostile at times”. She hasn’t noticed any physical violence, but she’s going to talk to his form teacher about it and bring it to the staff meeting, and they’re all going to keep a close eye on things.’

‘That’s great. They’re good at this stuff. Don’t worry, if something’s going on, they’ll be on it now.’

‘I can’t bear it that it’s been going on all this time and I haven’t protected him from it.’

‘It’s only been a few months.’

‘A few months is an eternity for a nine-year-old.’

He reaches for her hand. ‘I know it is. But you’ve done everything you can – you’ve been to see them several times, haven’t you, and it’s notoriously hard to pin this stuff down – kids can be sly. But if something is going on, then they won’t tolerate it.’

‘Something is
definitely
going on.’

‘You want me to come with you, to see the school?’

‘No, I’ve got it. I’m going to go and see his form teacher tomorrow, just to make sure.’

‘You want me to talk to Joe?’

‘No, God, no, don’t say anything. I don’t even want him to know I’ve spoken to them. He’ll only worry more if he knows.’

He lets go of her hand and sips the tea. ‘Wouldn’t it be better to be honest?’

‘Not about this, no. Not yet.’

He shrugs and nods, putting down his tea.

‘Greg,’ she stands by his shoulder, ‘talking of truth telling – I keep thinking about the man on the beach in Marblehead.’

He flicks through some papers. ‘Uh-huh.’

‘I got the feeling you recognized him.’

He glances up at her, over the top of his reading glasses. ‘Tess.’ His voice is heavy with exaggerated tolerance. ‘Why are you obsessing over this?’

‘I’m not obsessing . . . I just had the feeling, when I asked you, when we were in that café, that you weren’t quite telling me everything.’

‘OK, you’d just passed out, you were freezing cold, your BP had crashed, your blood sugar was low and you were about to throw up: I’m not sure you were at your most clear-headed.’

‘So you didn’t know him then?’

He flicks through his papers again, plainly irritated. ‘Listen,’ he says, ‘I’ve got to go through a deposition tomorrow at 7 a.m. with the legal team – do you think we could do this another time?’

She stiffens. ‘Fine. But also, I wanted to let you know that I put your stuff – you know, from your boxes? I transferred it all to some damp-resistant containers. It was getting really soggy down there and . . .’

‘You did what?’ He looks up, sharp-eyed.

‘Your boxes in the basement. I bought some damp-resistant containers.’

His jaw is tight, his face suddenly thunderous. ‘Those are my personal files, Tess, all my vital documents and certificates, my . . . just about everything’s in there.’

‘I know that. And they were getting damp. Have you been down there lately? The walls are almost wet.’

He slams his hand, flat, on the table. ‘What the hell, Tess?’

She jumps. Then she squares her shoulders. ‘Don’t shout at me.’

His nostrils flare and he looks at her for a moment longer, then he turns his head away and swallows hard. ‘OK. I’m sorry.’ His voice is controlled again. ‘I’m not . . . I can’t . . .’

‘What can’t you?’

‘I can’t do this right now. I have to think about this deposition . . . Could I please,’ he takes a long, slow breath, ‘get on with this now?’