False Hope Read online

  His eyebrows rose. ‘Hang on. Dillon? As in your son?’

  I nodded. There was no point trying to pretend any more. ‘He’s also her grandson. At least, he was.’

  I watched him try to join the dots. ‘O . . . kayyyy,’ he said eventually. Then frowned at me. ‘Was?’

  ‘He was my sister’s son. Aidan’s son. But Aidan walked out on them. And when Hope died, Matt and I adopted him – as per her wishes.’ I paused, instinct kicking in. Unwilling to elaborate further. ‘Well, perhaps naively, we thought, you know, that that was going to be the end of it.’

  Neil was nodding. ‘Now I get it. No wonder you wanted shot of him.’

  The tea was cooler now, so I took another sip, to show willing. Smiled a grim smile. ‘Exactly. Welcome back to Brighton, eh? God, let’s just hope this is the end of it.’

  ‘Well, they’ve arrested her, so that should at least give the woman pause for thought. And you be sure to fill in the incident report for HR here as well – and while it’s fresh in your mind, too, ready for when you make a statement to the police. They’re going to come back tomorrow, by the way, and speak to you then. Oh, and let me take some photographs,’ he added, picking up his mobile off his desk. ‘Because you know how these things go. Given her age, they might be inclined to let her off with a warning. But you shouldn’t let it go. She could have broken your nose. And I’m not at all sure you shouldn’t get your things and head home. You look like you’ve done a round with Ronnie Kray.’

  I smiled. Lowered the tissue. The flow had finally stopped. ‘No, just Vi Kray,’ I corrected, as Mo appeared with digestives.

  Though as I returned to work (on which we compromised: Neil would see my last three patients), the similarities between the infamous gangsters’ mum and Norma felt all too real. Both were famously blind when it came to their precious boys. Which perhaps made her all the more dangerous.

  I did a stupid thing then. With a little time to kill before I’d need to leave to meet Isabel and the boys, I decided – no, felt compelled – to go and see Aidan.

  I didn’t know what I hoped to achieve. Even more grief, most likely. After all, Norma could have been released by now and be perched at his bedside. Or Jessica might be there with their girls. But my hunch was that the former was logistically unlikely (and after all, she must surely have known he wasn’t in danger by the time she attacked me), and if the latter, so be it. I could always walk away again.

  It was close to five, and the ward I had tracked him down to was still busy, but a quick visual sweep revealed him to be alone. And bar the nurses, who greeted me incuriously as I passed, every other occupant was otherwise engaged, some with visitors or magazines, others scrolling through tablets and phones.

  Aidan was awake, but doing nothing. Just staring up at the ceiling, though when he sensed me approach he turned his head. And did nothing to temper his expression when he saw me, which was one of intense exasperation. He looked, to use the off-duty technical term, like shit. He had one leg outside the covers, the foot and ankle thickly bandaged, but the sheet and blanket were pulled up to his chin. By a sympathetic nurse, I suspected. He lay still, like a corpse, his stubble thick and oily-looking, as if painted on for a part in a play. He’d also had a recent haircut, which had aged him. Or perhaps life had done that on its own.

  ‘What?’ he said, as I reached to sweep the curtain around the bed. ‘I’m not receiving visitors. Didn’t anyone tell you?’ Then when I didn’t answer immediately – I wasn’t even clear what I wanted to say to him – he added, ‘Come here to gloat, have you? Go ahead. Don’t mind me.’

  Then he turned his head dismissively so he was back staring upwards. As disabled as he was – by the drugs, the missing arm, and now by an injured ankle – I supposed it was all he could do. His mobile was by his bed. I wondered if he’d heard that his mother had been arrested.

  ‘Aidan,’ I said. ‘Look at me.’ He didn’t. ‘Do you see this?’

  I put a finger to the side of my nose. It was sore and swollen now, and the skin of my cheek and right eye socket was already darkening with subcutaneous blood.

  ‘Your mother attacked me in outpatients earlier. She did this. Look, I’m sorry for what’s happened to you, and I genuinely hope you and your wife manage to sort things out. But all this stuff with Norma, it has to stop, okay?’

  He turned his head then, finally. Cast his gaze over my face. A part of him, I realised, seemed to be enjoying this.

  ‘You honestly think I can stop her doing anything?’ Those pale eyes, so reminiscent of a Siberian husky’s, bored steadily and unblinkingly into mine. A whisper of a smile then. ‘You honestly think I even care? Tell you what, why don’t you just fuck off, Grace.’

  It wasn’t a question.

  And as I left him, cursing myself for having gone to see him – what else had I expected? – he was already reaching across the bed for his phone.

  Chapter 11

  I looked, no doubt about it, a bit of a state. Though my patients, every one of them, had kindly refrained from passing comment (presumably because they didn’t need to – news travels fast in waiting rooms), a quick inspection in the wing mirror before I’d climbed into the car had reminded me why I should always keep sunglasses in it, however dark and overcast the day. My upper lip, though still swollen, was looking slightly less alarming, but I’d obviously burst a tiny capillary in my sclera, because there was a smear of bright red in the white of my eye. And the bruise that was forming between my nose and right eye socket was still at the start of its journey. Soon, it would darken to a deep navy-purple, where the haemoglobin in my blood, starved of oxygen, broke down, and within a week, it would be green, and then yellow.

  Right now, though, it was an arresting shade of raspberry-red, and as I walked into the climbing centre to meet Isabel and the boys, I was aware of the stares it couldn’t help attracting, and the presumptions of violence (people always assumed violence) it no doubt inspired as well.

  I had already texted Isabel to warn her, so she knew what to expect, alluding to a misjudged intervention when helping a colleague with a distressed and angry patient. Occupational hazard! I’d finished it, jauntily.

  Matt I’d told the truth to, between patients. Well, a version of it – a milder ‘holding’ one, at least till I saw him on Friday, because there was no sense him fretting and fuming in London. And, for once, I was glad I wouldn’t see him till then. Give it time to go down, so he wouldn’t overreact.

  Which, of course, the boys did, because I looked such a fright. And more down to that, I judged, than concern for my welfare. Which was good. I didn’t want them worrying I now worked in a war zone.

  They had just finished their session and were emerging as I went in. ‘Oh my GOD, Mum!’ Daniel said, characteristically mindless of his decibels. ‘You look like you’ve been in a punch-up!’

  ‘It feels like it, too,’ I said, ‘but thankfully not. Just accidentally ended up at the sharp end of an elbow.’

  Dillon looked anxious suddenly. He pointed towards my chest. ‘Is that blood?’

  ‘It is,’ I said, nodding. ‘I had a nosebleed as well.’ I smiled broadly, which hurt. ‘A rather spectacular one, too.’

  Isabel, off to meet her boyfriend, was pushing her arms into her coat sleeves. ‘You sure you’re okay?’ she asked. ‘That looks majorly painful.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I reassured her. ‘Only seeing the odd star now. Nothing a large gin and tonic won’t remedy later. One of those things. You get off. Honestly. I’m absolutely fine.’

  ‘How did it happen?’ Dillon asked now. ‘Did he, just, like – oof!’ (he did the mime) ‘and try and use it to smash your face in?’

  ‘No,’ I said firmly. ‘Not at all. He didn’t mean it. It was an accident. It was just one of those things. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time.’

  Isabel frowned. There was more to it, and she knew it.

  Being in the wrong place at the wrong time was a familiar feeling; whe
re Hope was concerned, I’d found myself there a lot. First as an observer – of her being left, of her dying, of my nephew being as good as orphaned – but then, with an inevitability that I had somehow not factored into any of those events (how?), for me and Matt, it stopped being a spectator sport.

  Yet, in my naivety, I’d thought I could make everything work. It was one of my core character traits, after all, hewn over years of conflict and insecurity. I had to make everything work, because if I didn’t, who would?

  Though there were ground rules, Matt’s red line – a clean break from the Kennedys – being one of them. No half measures, no guardianships, no shared responsibility. In joining our family, Dillon must, definitively, be leaving theirs, so we began the formal process of adoption immediately. And with Aidan’s affidavit (signed and witnessed at a law firm up in Hull), a formality was all it was ever going to be. He’d wanted out. He’d already proved it. Had voted with his feet. Now he had formally, legally, confirmed it. So, out in the real world, just as I would be Dillon’s new mummy, Matt, his former uncle, would become his legal dad.

  And, at first, it did work – at least, as far as it was able, given how painful her son’s disappearing act must have been for Norma to process. And not least – Aidan’s willingness to walk away notwithstanding – because of all the things I knew about him and she didn’t. (And wouldn’t. Not from me. She had suffered enough, hadn’t she?) It worked because Norma loved and needed to see her grandson, and because I fully accepted that the same was true in reverse.

  But I had badly overestimated the extent of her acquiescence about her role in the new family dynamic we’d agreed on. Perhaps I’d been hopelessly deluded to think it ever could work.

  Because it was a dynamic that, of necessity, airbrushed Aidan from Dillon’s future. That had been his choice, after all. But what was true for us could so obviously never be true for Norma. So while we’d agreed that Aidan would play no further role in Dillon’s childhood, for Norma, though he was absent, he was always fully present.

  First in small ways. A couple of little wooden trains I found in the bag I would always pack for him when I took him to visit her.

  ‘Ooh, this is nice,’ I said, when I found the first, thinking Norma must have bought it for him. He pointed. Said ‘dad-dy’. Said ‘train’ and said ‘dad-dy’.

  ‘Oh, that,’ she said, her voice light as cotton wool when I mentioned it. ‘Well, I thought I might as well get Aidan’s train set down from the loft. Lovely to see it being played with again after all this time,’ she’d added brightly. ‘They made toys to last back then, didn’t they?’

  I let the ‘daddy’ thing go. After all, I was feeling my way through all this as much as she was. At some point we’d perhaps have to have a difficult conversation about Aidan, and the business of how he was referred to around Dillon, but not till he was old enough to understand a little better. And with Aidan out of the picture, that time wasn’t yet. In the meantime, I didn’t want to go there.

  Three weeks later, however, Dillon emerged on to Norma’s doorstep with a teddy bear clutched in his hand. An expensive Steiff teddy – it had the little trademark button in its ear – but old and balding; it had clearly seen much better days. And to which, Norma explained, Dillon had ‘taken such a shine’, which was why she’d told him he could take it home.

  It was clear he had, too, so I automatically made the right noises. But my instinct said otherwise. And my instinct was right. Almost the first thing I noticed, after Dillon pressed the bear on me so I could kiss it hello, was that it had something written on one of his paws. It was faded, but not so much that I couldn’t work out what belonged in the gaps. Fill them in and it was obvious. Aidan Kennedy. And I couldn’t help it. I thought of Hope, and all the horrible things he’d put her through. I didn’t want the thing in my house. ‘It has to stay here with Nanna Norma,’ I told him firmly.

  ‘Oh, bless him,’ she said, as he went into meltdown. ‘I don’t mind if he wants to hang on to it, honestly.’ She squatted down to him. ‘As long as you take werry great care of him, Dilly. Because Daddy’s teddy is werry werry precious.’

  Again, I said nothing. This was not the time or place. But as our eyes met, the defiance in Norma’s was obvious. As far as she was concerned, the fact that Aidan had formally relinquished him was neither here nor there. He would always be Dillon’s father, end of.

  I stood my ground. Politely. Made Dillon hand back the teddy, and drove back home with him screaming blue murder till Gatwick. Where he finally fell into the sort of deep, exhausted sleep that I knew meant he wouldn’t settle again once we were home and another fractious evening was in prospect.

  I was brimming by now with anger – that ‘werry werry’ had set my teeth on edge – and, alongside that, a growing sense of hopelessness and panic that I knew had been brewing since we’d first taken Dillon home. Not so much about the chaotic new dynamic we were struggling with, profound though that was, but about me. About the rogue thoughts that were beginning to ambush me, almost hourly. That the child sleeping in the back of my car wasn’t my child. That I had willingly invited a cuckoo into my nest.

  That while I was trying to navigate a situation I had no part in creating, my own son – already so confused and disorientated by it all – had been denied his mother on her day off, again, so that a child I barely knew could spend time with a woman I barely knew, and where both – there was no getting away from this truth – would far rather be with each other. Dillon was far too young to understand, and thank God for that, but Daniel’s bewilderment and distress at the invasion was palpable. Only two days before (the only positive being that Matt hadn’t been there to hear it), he’d asked me outright. Can Dillon go home soon?

  I carried regret around like Atlas, a world of ‘what ifs’ on my shoulders. Guilt and shame like an unexploded bomb tied to my chest.

  Matt, understandably, felt even more agitated than I did. ‘We need to address this,’ he said. ‘Nip it in the bud. We don’t have the first clue what she says to him when she’s alone with him, do we? We need to make it crystal clear that Aidan is no longer Dillon’s daddy and that she mustn’t refer to him as such. I mean it, Grace. If we don’t, this could all become too messy to be viable. Just remember whose mother she is. D’you want me to speak to her?’

  No, I thought. Thank you, but definitely not. Because it would require a level of diplomacy my straight-talking Glaswegian husband simply didn’t possess. I fretted then, for days, about how best to approach it. But then fate took it out of my hands. I’d planned to visit Mum a couple of weekends later, and drop Dillon at Norma’s for a couple of hours, when a crisis at work meant I had to take on another doctor’s on-call shift and cancel the trip at short notice. Norma was fine, if a little terse, pointing out that she’d already booked a slot at a soft-play centre. Then suggested that perhaps she could come to us instead.

  To which I had to say no, another red line having been that, for all that we’d try to support Norma’s relationship with Dillon, this didn’t include the whole extra layer of complication of her – Aidan’s mother – coming to our house. Which was not what I said. I had no desire to hurt her further, so I explained that I’d already now booked both boys into their usual nursery – but when I told her that I wouldn’t be able to make it down for at least another couple of weeks now, she said, ‘Ah, so this is how it’s going to be, is it?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘That it’s going to become too much of an inconvenience.’

  ‘Norma, it’s not an inconvenience. It’s just difficult to organise. I have a busy job, and—’

  ‘And you have to shove my grandson into a fecking nursery so you can do it. It’s not right.’

  I was shocked by her sudden vehemence. ‘Look, I realise it’s disappointing, but there’s nothing I can do about it. I’ll bring him down to see you again as soon as I can.’

  But had I subconsciously wished just a little too hard? Because fate stepped
in again then, perhaps to accelerate what would always be inevitable; two weeks later, both boys went down with chickenpox, just a day before I’d arranged to take Dillon to see her.

  This time, she was angry from the outset. So angry. It was a side of her Hope had alluded to but which I’d never seen before.

  ‘I understand that you’re upset,’ I said. ‘But—’

  ‘You understand nothing! What the hell do you think you know about my feelings?’

  ‘Norma, I appreciate just how hard all this must be for you, but they have chickenpox.’

  ‘So you say.’

  ‘Please, Norma, stop this. I’m trying to do my best, okay?’

  ‘Yes, your best to deny me my grandson. Don’t deny it. To estrange me from him, to deny me a part in his life, just like your sister did to his father.’

  ‘That’s not fair, Norma. Aidan left her, remember. Left both of them.’

  ‘Because she gave him no choice! That was the plan you cooked up together, wasn’t it? Don’t think I don’t know what you and that lying bitch were up to.’

  ‘I don’t know what to say to you,’ I said, because I didn’t. But by the time I’d drawn breath to try, she’d slammed the phone down.

  And even then, we might still have patched things up. After all, patching stuff up was my default setting, wasn’t it? Doing things for the best. For the good of all concerned. I’d half expected her to ring me, to apologise for what she’d said, and even when she didn’t, still I hoped we’d smooth things over. I’d had more than enough bile and bitter conflict in my childhood, and fallings-out made me anxious and stressed. But a week later, just at the point when I’d steeled myself to call her, I returned home from work to find Matt almost apoplectic with fury, after a lengthy conversation with the adoption agency.