He didn’t knock. He just opened the door and stumbled into the front room, red-faced and out of breath. His mother was knitting by the fire, a woollen shawl draped over her knees. His father appeared from the bedroom, wearing trousers held up by braces, and an old vest. There was no sign of his brothers.
‘What is it, Michael?’ His mother could see his expression, see that all was not fine.
‘I have two words to say to you, Mam. John Johns.’ Knox saw her flinch as if he had struck her.
She put her hand to her mouth and gasped. Knox’s father remained rooted to the spot, unable to say anything.
‘Born eighteen hundred and six. March the tenth. You would have been eighteen at the time.’
She stared at him, the edifice of her life beginning to crumble around her.
‘This would have been before you married him.’ Knox pointed at his father.
‘Michael, please…’ His mother’s voice sounded weak, alien.
‘Perhaps this was before you even knew him. But he wasn’t the father, was he? Otherwise there would be no reason to leave his name off the birth certificate.’
‘No good will come of this, Michael. Please, I beg you, don’t take this any farther,’ she muttered, her hands trembling.
‘No, Mother, I will not leave it. You’ll tell me the truth. What I’ve been doing these last few weeks, why my life has been destroyed.’
Sarah Knox began to weep.
‘Moore’s the father, isn’t he?’ The words filled Knox with revulsion, the thought of his mother, his own flesh and blood, lying with that man.
‘Oh, dear Lord.’ His mother gasped for air.
‘Did he force himself on you? Was that it?’ Knox waited, light-headed, dizzy. ‘No, that couldn’t have been it. You wouldn’t have stayed in his service for forty years. He wouldn’t have let you.’
‘He’s not the monster you think he is…’
Knox grabbed his mother by the shoulders and shook her, more violently than he’d wanted to. ‘That man paid some thugs to destroy our home, giving us no time to clear out our possessions, taking to it with crowbars and sledgehammers.’
Disturbed from his sleep, Peter stumbled bleary-eyed into the room and scurried over to where their mother was sitting. Instinctively she opened her arms and allowed the lad to nestle against her.
‘If not for me, son, then for Peter’s sake. Please. Just let sleeping dogs lie. I’ll tell you all you want to know in time. But not now, not like this.’
Without knowing what he was doing, Knox slapped her around the cheek, once, the noise echoing around the small room. ‘Our child, your grandson, is desperately ill with a fever he picked up after we’d been driven from our home.’ He stared at her, then at his hand, unable to comprehend what he’d done.
Peter was wailing in her arms, sobbing and shaking uncontrollably.
‘Little James is ill?’ She had been trying to console Peter but all of a sudden she looked up at Knox through bloodshot eyes.
‘I want to hear you say it, Mother. Tell me to my face. John Johns is Moore’s son. Your son.’
She bowed her head and nodded.
Knox never thought the day would come when he hated his mother but in that instant he felt nothing but contempt for her; contempt for the life she’d built, a life built on lies.
‘Yes, Michael, he’s our son,’ she whispered, not looking at her husband, who hadn’t uttered a word. ‘There. Are you satisfied?’
Our son. Hers and Moore’s.
‘I’ve lost everything, Mother. My position, my home, maybe even my child. You could have helped. You could’ve said something. But you just let it happen.’
Peter had calmed down a little but she still wouldn’t look at Knox, wouldn’t meet his eyes.
‘And if I’d told you, what do you think Moore would have done? That he wouldn’t have tried to evict us? And how long do you think your brother would have lasted, living hand to mouth, sleeping rough?’
This took the sting out of Knox’s anger but it didn’t dissolve it completely. ‘He asked for me, Mother, for me. Because he knew he could lord it over me. Knew you would keep me in line. He asked for me because he thought I was weak, pathetic, that I’d roll over and let him get away with it, just like this family’s been doing for the last forty years.’
Tears were flowing down his mother’s cheeks again and Knox began to feel a pang of sympathy for her. ‘You don’t think I’m proud of myself? That I don’t hate myself for turning my back on you? What I did, I did for your brother’s sake alone. But every night I went to bed and prayed for you, Michael, prayed that God would keep you safe.’
Knox felt another spike of anger. ‘You prayed? You think God — if there is a God — is listening? Folk are dying out there in their thousands. If God cares so much, why doesn’t he do something about it? I don’t need your prayers.’ Disgusted, Knox looked across at his father. ‘You knew about this, didn’t you? That she’d given birth to Moore’s bastard. And yet you went ahead and married her.’
But Martin Knox didn’t say a word. Instead his mother rose and moved into the space between them. ‘Michael, I’m begging you, please go. I’ll meet you in a day or two, we can talk then, I’ll tell you everything…’
Knox stared at his father. The man’s lips were dry and flaky, and his eyes were empty. There was something else, something they knew, his mother and father, something they’d both wanted to keep from him.
Knox turned back to her, afraid now. ‘He was here, wasn’t he? John Johns. He came to see you.’ The reality of what he’d done — striking his mother — was starting to sink in and Knox knew he was capable of worse, knew it because it ran in his blood.
‘I told him he couldn’t stay.’
‘He’s your son; he came to you in his hour of need. And what did you do? You turned your back on him, just like you turned your back on me.’
‘ NOOOO.’
They stopped and stared at Peter, who had bellowed this, the loudest sound Knox had ever heard coming from the lad’s lips.
Sarah Knox gathered him up into her arms and held him. ‘Whether you can understand or not, Michael, I did what I did, I made the choices I made, to ensure this one would have a roof over his head.’
‘What did Johns want? Why did he come here? It has something to do with the man who died, doesn’t it? Did Johns kill him?’
‘I don’t know, Michael. Please, I can’t do this. Not now. Not like this.’
‘Well, does he look like me?’
That drew the first sound from his father’s lips. It came out like a strangled laugh. For the first time, Knox saw there were tears flowing down his cheeks too.
He had a terrible sense of foreboding.
‘What is it you’re not telling me?’ Knox looked first at his mother, and then at his father. ‘This is me you’re talking to, Mam. If you turn your back on me again, I’ll walk out of that door and never come back. Is that what you really want?’
‘I don’t know what I want any more.’ This time, she shouted, her face red and blotchy. ‘I want what’s best for everyone but I know I can’t have that.’
His father turned and withdrew into the bedroom. His mother went to follow him but Knox grabbed her wrist.
‘You don’t understand. I need to talk to him…’
Sarah Knox managed to free herself from his clutch. When Knox joined her in the bedroom his father was sitting on the edge of the bed, weeping. Knox tried to summon pity for the man but he couldn’t. He thought about all the times his father had beaten him, with a leather strap, with a cane, with his fists.
‘I’m not your real father,’ the man said listlessly. ‘Moore is.’
His mother had collapsed on the bed and was weeping. Somewhere in the other room, Peter was screaming. Numb, Knox looked between his mother and father, still trying to assimilate what his father had said. His father, who wasn’t his father. The truth of it was beginning to dawn: why his father had always hated him, the living embodiment of his wife’s infidelities.