We eat vegetarian lasagne for supper; Janine’s a vegetarian so Luke’s become one too. She doesn’t put any salt in her food and I would like to add some to my plateful but I don’t, because it might seem like a criticism of her cooking; I don’t think Janine would mind but Luke might, he’s very protective of her. I notice him explaining me to her now and then, mediating what I say as if he’s afraid I may be too overbearing. They are gentle and conscientious and acutely attuned to one another. I wonder sometimes whether Luke has toned himself down too far to be in tune with Janine; when he gets together with his brother he’s more like his old self, scathing and funny. But perhaps this gentleness is what he’s always really wanted. When I first met Janine I was afraid that I was bound to offend her somehow; she’s mournful-eyed and graceful like a girl in a Burne-Jones painting. But she’s observant and clever too, and it turned out that she and I like each other, we’re tolerant of each other’s differences. I expect she has her own opinions about the kind of childhood that Luke had, and some of the chaos in it — but she keeps them to herself. Luke disappears upstairs after supper to the computer, and she and I wash up together.
We discuss Rowan and his music, the success he’s having and our worries about the new pressures on him: he’s been supporting headline acts at the big festivals this summer. Songs pour out of him. I have them on my iPod and I listen to them on the train and round the house: they are a miracle, they come from a place in my son that’s unknown to me. Janine has entered wholeheartedly into Luke’s attitude towards his brother, at once sceptical and protective. Rowan still picks fights with me when he comes home; he recounts episodes from the past to illustrate how I neglected him or carelessly put him in danger — sometimes in a calmly forgiving voice, as if he appreciates I was too ignorant to know what I was doing. What possessed me, for instance, allowing him to go off to live with his grandmother in Glasgow for a year? Did I have any idea of the kind of place I’d sent him to, how violent it was and how racist? I lie awake at night and go over and over these narratives, asking myself whether he’s right and I was wrong. I don’t remember allowing Rowan to go anywhere, exactly: he presented his move to Glasgow pretty much as a fait accompli at the time and I don’t think I could have stopped him — but perhaps I should have tried harder. I lose my confidence in my version of what happened. Luke is impatient if I try to talk these anxieties over with him, he says I ought to know better than to take Rowan’s complaints too seriously. He says Rowan talks nonsense about how bad it was in Glasgow; Nicky’s mother adored him and made a big fuss of him, the area they were in was perfectly friendly, Rowan was fine.
I think while I’m washing up with Janine that I might mention what Madeleine told me: that Valentine has come home. I could see what she thinks about my telling Luke. But in the end the words won’t form in my mouth; her steady competence makes me ashamed to raise this issue of my ancient mistakes, like dragging up some dirty mess out of the washing-up water. Janine has such an attractive way of doing everything: the rubber gloves are turned inside out and dried and hung by a peg on the draining board; then she makes us lotus blossom tea bought from a Vietnamese company online and we drink it out of the bone china teacups she found in a charity shop. Perhaps it’s best to leave all those old stories in the dark. Luke has always known that his father’s first name is Valentine and that he was in America: that’s just about all he knows. I also told him long ago, when he was a little boy and asked me, that his father was very good-looking and very intelligent. (— I loved him desperately, I said. — But he didn’t love me, not in that way. Though we were very good friends.) Nowadays Luke avoids the subject as if it embarrasses him. He calls Mac Dad (Rowan never does), even though he was a teenager by the time we all moved in together.
And then on my last day in town, I go to find Valentine. Of course I do. How could I know that he was in town — my long-lost twin, the secret father of my child — and not want to set eyes on him even just once after all this time? I dress carefully in new wool trousers I’ve bought — midnight blue — and a cream silk shirt and Paul Smith jacket. I want to show him that I’ve done all right, that I’m powerful, I’m not nothing. In front of my mirror I’m full of trepidation, wishing I was taller. I could have taken a taxi out to Valentine’s old house but instead I catch the bus, which has a different number now but follows the same route as the one he and Madeleine and I used to get back from school together. I look overdressed for the bus, as if I was going to a business meeting; I regret my effort with the clothes now, and realise how provincial I will probably look anyway to Valentine, fresh from New York. As the bus penetrates deeper into the suburbs, it’s extraordinary how unchanged it all seems — the old stage-set bourgeois innocence, the heavy quiet in the empty streets, house-fronts bristling with tactful paint, autumn gardens tied and tidied, a few late roses blown and tangled in the bushes. Perhaps there are more parked cars than I remember and they make the roads seem narrower. I never liked it here, this peace was always my enemy. And the deep familiarity disorientates me, as if after all what separates me from the past is tissue thin.
Valentine’s house is detached, and different to most of the development around: older and gloomier and bigger, built in ugly blocks of red stone with a rough-hewn finish. The garden gate is off its hinges, propped inside the wall, and I wonder for a moment if the place isn’t abandoned: the paint on the woodwork is faded and flaking off, evergreen shrubs in the front garden have grown high up against the front windows, flyers advertising pizza take-aways, dropped in the porch, are sodden with rain. But there are reassuring expensive lined curtains at the windows, even if the lining’s ragged, and after I’ve pressed the bell I hear slow footsteps in the hall. Then Valentine’s mother opens the door to me. I’m surprised how easily I recognise her, though Hilda was in her fifties when we last met and now she’s an old lady; in her mid-eighties at least. Her shoulders are humped with arthritis and her heavy brown hair has turned iron-grey — but it is pinned in the same old French pleat, she wears the same dangling earrings. She is still daunting, elegant, ravaged; even fumbling with the latch her impatience has its old savagery, as if she’d like to break something. She doesn’t recognise me, naturally enough, because we haven’t met since I was seventeen. I tell her that I’m Stella, that I’m an old friend of Valentine’s; for a moment while she peers unfocusedly I think she’s forgotten me, and I’m relieved. She is disappointed because she thought I was the supermarket delivery.
— Who did you say you were?
And then when I tell her again, she does remember. — Oh, Stella. You used to live on the new estate.
I don’t know what she might have guessed, when she heard about my having to leave school because I was pregnant all those years ago, in the months after Valentine ran away to America. No doubt she heard about it, everybody did. Probably she just thought I was the kind of girl who was bound to get into trouble sooner or later, with some boy or another. She may have believed I was partly responsible for Val’s going; or she may have understood all along the mistake I’d made, imagining I could have him for my lover. Now I see calculation in her face behind the old frigid politeness.