And so I set up my hopefully temporary home, and began to consider how I could get back into my own life, and into Tom’s. It didn’t take long for me to realise that it wouldn’t be easy. In truth, I didn’t have a clue about how I was going to do any of it.
But as it happened, six months after my ‘death’, all the subterfuge became irrelevant. I’ll never forget how I found out.
I was having lunch in my favourite bar on the Strip; as always the place was busy, full of half-pissed rednecks having fun. Most of the television monitors were showing a country-music video, but there was one that was tuned to CNN. I happened to glance at it, just as a shot of a smiling Oz appeared. I couldn’t hear what the anchorman was saying, but from the look on his face, one thing was certain: it wasn’t a good news story. I left my chilli unfinished, went straight home, and switched on the telly.
They said, after the autopsy, that it was a ruptured aorta, a time-bomb in his heart that had been waiting to happen, the same condition that had almost killed his father a few months earlier. It had caught up with him on the set of a movie, during a stunt that he had insisted on handling himself.
At that moment, I didn’t care what it was: all I knew was that the man who had tried to kill me was dead, that my unforgettable lover, my ex-husband, was dead, that Tom’s father was dead. I cried for two days, and very little of that was out of relief.
Briefly, I thought about getting a flight home to Scotland and turning up at the funeral, which I knew would take place in Anstruther, his home town. Again, it didn’t take me long to abandon that idea; it would have caused a sensation, and been desperately cruel to Susie, Oz’s widow, and to the rest of his very nice family. Also, it might just have got me arrested if it had led to someone finding out that I’d entered the US under a fraudulently obtained passport. So instead I sat tight in Vegas until I saw coverage of the send-off on Entertainment Tonight. Next day, I called my father.
At first, he didn’t believe it was me. He thought I was a malicious caller, until I told him that his middle name was Montgomery, spelled like the soldier, not the golfer, and that he had a birthmark on his shoulder in the shape of the mouse that had scared my grandmother when she was carrying him. When he was convinced, he asked me the obvious question.
‘Because, at the time, being dead seemed like my best option,’ I told him. ‘I think that’s what was meant to happen.’
Dad’s a very clever man. He knew what I was saying to him, not least because of the timing of my call. The line was silent for a few moments, and then he said, ‘When your mother was alive, I became rather used to telling her, “Primavera knows best.” I’ve always believed it too. What are you going to do now?’
‘Come home, if I may.’
Two days later, I flew back to Vancouver as Jan More. I burned her passport, very casually, in an open fire in the Sandbar restaurant, and continued my journey as Primavera Eagle Phillips. I kept the Blackstone passport, but I didn’t want to use the name at that point. Dad met me at Glasgow Airport.
On the way back to Auchterarder, I told him the story I’ve just told you, and much more too; I told him the truth about all of my life with and around Oz. He’s a very slow driver, yet I had only just finished by the time we arrived at the great false-Gothic pile that is Semple House.
He dealt with the Dawn situation, thoughtfully and very welclass="underline" instead of speaking to her, he called Miles, who was in the US at the time, and told him what had happened. Two hours later my sister phoned back; by that time she had calmed down and didn’t give me too much grief over the pain I had caused them. Miles handled the inevitable American aftermath of my reappearance; he’s a powerful guy, with political contacts, and so all I had to do was sign an affidavit, describing what had happened and saying that I had left the scene in a state of shock, a statement close enough to the truth for me to live with.
My reconciliation with Tom was down to me alone; that was less than plain sailing. The newly widowed Susie went ballistic when I called her at her home beside Loch Lomond. I wondered why her reaction was so extreme until, later, she told me that Oz had been so completely shattered by my disappearance that he had barely spoken to her for the last few months of his life. I could guess why that was, but I didn’t tell her, not then at any rate.
‘I suppose you want to see Tom,’ she said, eventually.
‘I want more than that, Susie,’ I told her, as gently as I could. ‘He’s my son.’
As I spoke, I had visions of an expensive legal battle. But Susie’s a good person, through and through, better than I’ve ever been, and she’s a mother too. ‘Come and see him,’ she replied, ‘and let’s take it from there.’
We did. A month later legal custody passed to me, with the proviso that Tom would always be able to visit his half-siblings, Janet and Jonathan. He moved into Semple House with Dad and me, while I considered where our permanent home would be.
The choice, when I made it, surprised even me.
Early in our travels together, when we had only just started on the road to badness, Oz and I, nouveaux riches, pitched up by chance in a tiny village called St Martí d’Empúries, just along from the town of L’Escala, a fishing village that’s become a family holiday resort. St Martí goes back to the Greeks and Romans, and maybe even before them. It’s like a snapshot of history, and yet it has moved easily into the twenty-first century, catering for northern European tourists in summer and for Spanish weekenders and expats in winter. We were happy there, until he left me. After that I stayed on for a bit, content on my own, until he reappeared and took me back to Scotland. Of all the places I’ve ever been, St Martí is where I’ve been most at peace with myself.
I took Tom out there for a week, in early summer, before the place got too busy; Mrs Blackstone and her son, as we will always be from now on. He wasn’t quite five then, so I had no school problems in Perthshire. We stayed in a hotel near the village; it opens on to a beach and Tom thought that it was paradise. My friends in St Martí remembered me. . they never forget a face. . and welcomed me back. After a couple of days I asked a few of them if anything was for sale. Property there is never advertised; the word is put about, that’s all. Someone told me about the house, that it might be on the market, at the right price, and I bought it, there and then.
That’s a couple of years ago now. Tom’s turned seven and he goes to the local primary school; we speak English at home, but with his pals he speaks Catalan, Castellano or both, and he’s retained the French that he picked up when he was in Monaco with Oz and Susie.
He couldn’t be happier, and neither could I. . even after all that bloody drama with Frank!
Two
Frank? Of course, you haven’t heard of him before. He wasn’t part of my back story with Oz. He’d dropped out of my life five years before the two of us ever met. . not that he’d ever really been in it, not in any meaningful way.
Frances Ulverscroft McGowan was my cousin, the product of a fleeting union between my mum’s older sister Adrienne and a Japanese deep-sea trawlerman named Kotaro whom she met on a winter holiday in Las Palmas. By the time she discovered that she was pregnant, at the age of thirty-six, she was back in London, at the helm of her successful literary agency, and the unfortunate mariner was at the bottom of the Atlantic, his vessel having foundered in a tropical storm. (Or so the story went: Auntie Ade has always been seen as a tiger in business, but in her younger days she liked drink and men, in no particular order. I wouldn’t put it past her to have made up the sailor’s name after the event, having neglected to ask for it before.)