Zillah must have come into the living room just after I’d finished that and gone back into the bathroom to apply a bit of slap, because there was a plate of dinner on the table covered by a hot, inverted soup bowl. I hadn’t thought I was hungry at all until I lifted the bowl off and the aroma of steak and kidney pudding and chips hit me, but I ate it in five minutes flat, standing up, before dashing out.
Indigestion was on the cards – if I could tell heartburn from heartache these days.
We were all sitting round the table in the snug at the Falling Star, Mum’s collection of letters and the computer printouts spread over the table between our glasses.
‘So, let’s get this straight, Chloe,’ Felix said, making a valiant attempt to untangle my incoherent narrative. ‘When Lou got pregnant with you, she didn’t just tell Chas Wilde that he was your father, she told another man he was too?’
‘Yes, as a moneymaking scam. Since they were both married, once she threatened to tell their wives they agreed to pay her to keep quiet about it. She had quite a little racket going.’
I hadn’t thought I could feel any more disillusioned about my mother, but this sank my perception of her to whole new depths and I’m not sure anything could survive down there, certainly not love.
‘Gosh!’ said Poppy, wide-eyed. ‘So your father could be either of them?’
‘Yes – or neither, because there’s no guarantee it wasn’t someone else entirely, is there?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Felix said thoughtfully. ‘Since she seems to have got pregnant as a means to an end, it probably is one of them. It’s still quite likely it was Chas Wilde, like she always told you, you know.’
‘Yes, he’s always taken an interest in you and sent Christmas and birthday presents, which he didn’t do for either of us,’ Poppy agreed, ‘and called in to see you when he’s in the North.’
When I was a child those had been short, awkward visits, with me desperate to know why, if he was my daddy, I wasn’t allowed to call him that, or ask him anything else that puzzled me, like why he didn’t live with me and Mum. But later, when I was old enough to understand, we had grown closer and easier with each other. I hadn’t seen a lot of him since Mum vanished, but we kept in touch by phone and email.
‘But all that doesn’t prove he’s my father, just that Mum convinced him he was,’ I pointed out, and then looked down despairingly at the letters. ‘I wish now I hadn’t read these so I would still believe Chas is my father, because at least he’s kind and nice, despite being stupid enough to let my mother use him!’
‘But, Chloe, he may very well turn out still to be your father,’ Poppy said.
‘I know, and I want it to be Chas,’ I said, picking up one of the envelopes from the table, ‘because when you read this letter he sent to Mum when I was ten, after he’d finally confessed everything to his wife, he made it clear he was still going to carry on supporting me – that he cared about me.’
‘He is a nice man,’ agreed Poppy, ‘and he certainly paid for one weak moment, didn’t he?’
‘Through the nose – and maybe for someone who wasn’t his child after all. Have a look at these two sets of photos I got off the internet and tell me if you think I look like any of them. The ones of Chas are from when he was younger, so he looks different.’
Felix and Poppy put their heads together over the photographs and Felix asked, ‘Who is this other man?’
‘Carr Blackstock, an actor, mostly theatre work, especially Shakespeare, but he has appeared in one or two things on TV. When I Googled the name, he was the only one who came up, so it must be him.’
‘He looks slightly familiar,’ Poppy said, then added hesitantly, ‘though actually that might be because you look a bit alike. Slightly elfin, if you know what I mean – like Kate Bush.’
‘Elfin? I don’t look at all elfin,’ I said with disgust, ‘or like Kate Bush. I wish people wouldn’t keep saying that!’
‘Well, it certainly wasn’t me who got called “Pixie Ears” at school!’ she retorted.
‘No, you were “Pudding” because you ate everyone else’s jam roly-poly and custard on Wednesdays!’
‘Only because I needed the energy. I burned up loads of calories mucking out my ponies before school every morning,’ Poppy said with dignity.
‘Now, girls!’ Felix said mildly. ‘I think we’re straying from the subject in hand – and I have to agree with Poppy that if I had to pick one of these two as being related to you, then Carr Blackstock would be the man. It’s hard to tell from printouts, but he even seems to have the same unusually light grey eyes.’
‘I think my printer cartridge is fading. But anyway, Grumps has grey eyes.’
‘Yes, but ordinary grey ones,’ he said.
‘There’s nothing at all ordinary about Grumps!’
‘That’s true, they are a bit piercing.’
‘What do you know about this actor?’ asked Poppy, and I fished out the information sheet from the bottom of the heap. One of us must have slopped his or her drink, because it was a bit damp and wrinkly.
‘He’s been married to the same woman for ever and they have four children. Mum must have got him in a weak moment, like Chas. It doesn’t say a lot about men’s faithfulness, does it?’
‘We’re not all alike,’ Felix said, which was quite true in his case. He is the faithful-unto-death sort and divorced his wife several years before, only when she had a very blatant affair. ‘But your mother must have been stunning at the time, if that’s a mitigating factor? And we all make mistakes in life, of one kind or another.’
‘He must have been furious about making that one, because apart from his really terse answer to her news about the pregnancy, there aren’t any letters until my eighteenth birthday, when he sent the note saying he wasn’t going to pay any more and he’d never been entirely convinced I was his child anyway.’
‘I suppose that was fair enough, because they didn’t really have DNA testing then like they do now, so he wouldn’t have been able to prove it one way or the other, would he?’ Felix said.
‘But if he’d actually seen you he’d have spotted the likeness,’ Poppy said.
‘I don’t think there is a likeness.’ I scrutinised the photos again. ‘You’re imagining it.’
‘He’s just the most like you out of the two of them, that’s all,’ Felix conceded.
‘Or the least unlike. And whether he believed it or not, he paid up, just like poor old Chas, so Mum must have thought she was on to a good thing until the money stopped coming in altogether when I was
