Page 71 of A Family Affair
He’d called my beautiful sleeping boy,it.
I was barely able to make my lips work but when they did, I made then answer honestly because there was no denying Robert, then or ever. ‘Yes. I had a little boy and I named him Robert.’
And then the dagger to my heart, of which I have always been glad because as his words plunged deep into my body and soul, Father freed me of him and Chamberlain.
‘Then you are dead to me. You are nothing to this family. Do you hear me? Never contact us again. Stay away from your mother and your sister or God help me I will not be responsible for my actions. You have shamed our family name and you are not worthy to call yourself a Chamberlain. Goodbye.’
Perhaps that was the day Molly saw me. I wandered for hours, around and around in a daze until I was too exhausted to walk any further. Perhaps I’d have recognised her, had I seen her first, but my memories of that night were like fog before my eyes and in my brain. I knew there was another woman there, but I never asked after her. I just presumed she’d gone home with her baby to her family.
The day she saw me, I may have stood and stared in shop windows or sat on vacant benches looking similarly so. All I do know is that I ended up back at the hospital and sat on a chair in A&E. To this day I have no idea why, but when Rory finished his shift that night he saw me, took me for a cup of tea, and the rest is a much happier history.
It was six months before I agreed to meet his children. One-and-half-year-old Iris and three-year-old Ian. I didn’t think I would ever know love again until the day I saw them both in the garden. I watched from the gate and Rory waited, allowing me to decide if I’d like to go in and meet them. Or run away. Back to the cemetery where Robert’s little casket lay in a spot I visited far more often than was good for me.
Iris was sitting on a blanket, wisps of blonde hair sprouting at all angles, chubby legged and shaking a rattle for all she was worth. Ian was flying a paper plane, all skinny limbs with a mop of fair hair that he flicked out of the way as he ran. Two motherless children and one childless mother and by her side, a man who would never let her down.
I didn’t want them to be cared for by a nanny as I had been, or a housekeeper who saw them as part of her daily duty. And I wanted Rory to know he’d saved me and in doing so, could free himself of a burden too heavy for one as good as he to carry. He deserved to be loved. They all did. I did.
As for my other family, I wiped them out of my life the minute I became Mrs Rory Flynn, the doctor’s wife. Nora Jones had never really existed, and I knew that somehow my father would have found a way to erase me, probably with the help of his slug of a brother Oscar. Mother would go along with whatever he said and believe whatever he said and dear little Clarissa, she deserved none of it. To have them for parents or me for a big sister. With the way our circle, our class worked, it was entirely feasible that my mud could stick to her. So I did what Father told me to do. To the letter.
Back then it was so much easier to disappear, blend into the background and become someone else entirely. People were neighbourly, and we had extended families but to a certain extent we kept ourselves and our private lives to ourselves.
Rory knew everything, of course, but he also respected that I wanted to start again and that it was my right. So he went along with my harmless story that all my family were killed during the blitz. Nobody ever came to look for me, and why would they?
As father said, I was dead to them. And they were dead to me.
And as time went by, they faded away and became people I used to know, whose paths I’d crossed and thought of occasionally.
And we had such a happy life, the four of us. After the war, Rory started his own practice, and we worked together. I ran the surgery, and he did what he did best and saved as many people as he could. But you know what Rory gave me – apart from a family I adored, and, I can safely say, adored me back? He gave me freedom to be who I wanted to be.
Yes, once I got my confidence back and society allowed women to speak that bit more freely I too found my voice. Rory didn’t mind when I marched off to protest about whatever I’d got the pip about this time. And I know he rather liked it when I burnt my bras on a bonfire in the garden and it had nothing to do with my liberty. Oh I do miss him.
He was my rock and the fact that I couldn’t have any more children didn’t matter to him or me. I would always have Robert and the hours I spent with him and in my dreams, and sometimes in my daydreams I imagined him grown and what he would look like. What he would have done for a living. That type of thing.
It was as though he hadn’t really gone, not completely. That his spirit had stayed close and wanted me to know he was still around; and if I reached out and closed my eyes that I could touch him. And now I know why. He’d been there all the while. Thirty miles away. My Robert. Just waiting to be found.
I often wondered what happened to my locket and reasoned that in my semi-conscious state I may have loosened the blanket while I tried to feed him during the night. Or it was lost when I was taken from the debris, up a ladder and into an ambulance. It’s all such a blur. I mourned the loss of the only photo I had of my Robert like I mourned the loss of his son. So to hold it in my hands again, after so long, is a gift.
But the greatest gift is knowing that my baby lived and that he still does. I will see his face again. I can tell him how much I loved him and have always done. And that he was never forgotten. All I want now is to hold him in my arms, even if it’s just one more time. That will be enough.
CHAPTER54
HONEY
Apart from when Levi changed gear, Honey clung onto his hand while they sped back to Marple. There were moments of intense silence where they plunged into worlds of their own. Then one of them would blurt something out and this time, it was Levi.
‘I just can’t get my head around it. It’s like my brain is going to explode with it all. Is yours?’
Honey was resting her head but her eyes, tired, red from crying tears of sheer joy for her Grandad and Eleonora, were fixed on the road, willing the miles away.
‘Yep, totally mashed, because as soon as I get one thing straight in my head another question pings up. I mean, Eleonora’s dad for a start, just cutting her out of his life like that… it’s so cruel. He sounds vile and I suppose she was better off without him. And I don’t blame her either, for digging her heels in and doing the same in return. Imagine being bereft and alone and your dad turning his back like that. I’d have hated him forever.’
They’d stopped at some lights. ‘Me too. And what the hell did her father say happened to her? That really freaks me out, that he somehow erased her from the Chamberlain family. And then there’s your great gran, Molly. What a life she must have lived. Terrified she’d be found out and arrested and dreading ever bumping into my great-grandma again. No wonder she kept herself to herself and was the way she was. It’s like loads of things fall into place, don’t they.’
Honey sighed. ‘They do and it’s the little things, like where Grandad really gets his red hair from. And it’s uncanny that his personality is so similar to how Eleonora describes herself, and then… this is so weird, how she’s volunteered for charitable organisations all her life. And it’s my thing, too. Is it what inspired you to do your job?’
The lights changed and they were off again, ‘I suppose it is, although I didn’t have career ambitions in that direction but when I saw the job advertised I knew it was right up my street. You know, because Mum and Great-grandma, even Grandma Iris, all had the mother hen streak in them. Wanting to look after people in one way or another. But really, we all got our values and morals from Eleonora. She’s the one who always pointed us in the right direction.’
Honey smiled and wrapped her fingers around Levi’s as their hands rested on the centre console. ‘And this is another odd thing. We both knew… me and Eleonora when we met earlier. Not in a conscious way, more a feeling, a sense of something you can’t describe. I’ll never ever forget that moment when I saw her. I swear. I didn’t recognise her from the photo in the locket because she’s changed so much. Perhaps it was subliminal.’
