’Oh, for goodness sake, Alice. Why NOW?’ Alice would long remember Charles’ irritated reaction to her labour pains. What an inconvenience it had been for him! He had had to switch off the television in the middle of a test match and drive her to their remote army base hospital in the pouring rain.
Alice remembered the chaotic scenes at the hospital, their arrival coinciding with the arrival of a truck full of wounded soldiers from Afghanistan. And the birth of her adorable only child David did not alter Charles’ attitude – the boy seemed to be a permanent inconvenience.
Twenty years later Alice still couldn’t explain why she got a bitter, metallic taste in her mouth every time she thought of Charles. Maybe it was because of his ramrod posture and unnerving, steely blue eyes, maybe it was his choice of silver-grey suits and his mop of silver-grey hair. Laughter did not come easy to him and if some tiny spark of joy did manage to sneak through his rigid armour he would take himself to the library and play tunelessly on an old harmonica. Sometimes she knew he phoned his secretary Charlotte from there, his voice seductively, unctuously honeyed.
She had married Charles on the rebound and against the advice of friends and family. And, of course, over the years she had come to regret her impetuous entanglement with this remote, self-absorbed member of parliament who spent more time with his constituents than he did with her and David. She had hoped that the birth of David might bring them together, but instead he seemed to have driven a jagged wedge between them.
Perhaps Charles expected his child to be a mirror image of himself. But he wasn’t, and that was also inconvenient. ‘How can I bond with that sprog, that cuckoo?’ he protested, a fine
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spray of spittal landing on the breakfast table. ‘I’ve always had my doubts about that kid – he doesn’t look remotely like anyone in our family – or yours. For God’s sake, he’s got red hair! The bastard’s probably the product of one of your ghastly liaisons. I’m not stupid, you know!’
Alice would wail and sob, dropping her head into her hands to hide the ugliness of her grief. She was used to disappointments – having in her self-effacing way always attracted dominant, uncaring suitors. She wasn’t unattractive in a pastel sort of way, but somehow life had passed her by, and here she was at fifty three, entrapped, bullied and diminished. What ridiculously blind optimism had possessed her to give up her scientific career for this?
A phone call would change everything.
“Is that Alice Camberley? I’m phoning from Casualty at the Base. I’m afraid there’s been an accident on the motorway…” Alice remembered the next few hours in contorted, disjointed flashes.
‘I’m afraid it’s critical, Mrs Camberley. We are giving him blood plasma for the shock. He’s slightly complicated in that he’s rhesus negative. We’re doing the best we can.’
Alice slumped into a chair, tearing at her greying hair and rocking back and forth. And from some alien place beyond her grief seeped a new and shocking emotion. Science had taught her too well that she and Charles – both with ‘O’ positive blood – could not have produced a rhesus negative son. She looked aghast at her darling, darling wounded son and acknowledged with growing incredulity that he couldn’t be hers. She struggled to her feet and stooped to smother his ashen face with kisses. “You’re mine, my darling, all mine!”
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Anxiety corroded the weeks that followed. Alice paced the length of her kitchen, black coffee in one hand, a cigarette in the other. Two questions pervaded her thoughts: ‘How was Davidand who was David?’ It would be ludicrous to share her knowledge with Charles. It would simply convince him that she had been unfaithful. It was no use agonising. She would go to the army hospital and find out once and for all who else had been born on 17 June 1994.
Alice’s research was unexpectedly easy. The only other child born on that chaotic night of multiple emergencies was Steven Knee. The hospital would have to acknowledge that in the chaos of that night the babies had simply been switched around. But now a new interest in Steven rattled Alice’s equilibrium. How would she feel if she found him? How would David feel about her if he knew? Whatever the consequences, she simply had to find him.
Facebook, the medium she found so vulgar and self-promotional, had its uses after all! There was Steven, her other-self, leaning against a bright red car and smiling at the camera. He had all the features of his father, except good humour played around his lips, making him at once attractive. Alice felt strangely incomplete now. She would have to find him and Charles would have to know.
‘Good, God, Alice! There’s my boy! How many times have I told you?’ Charles beamed at the computer screen, his triumphant face lit by pure joy. It was a face that Alice hardly recognised.
‘What do we do?’
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‘Contact him, of course. Charlotte can do the necessary. She’s not the tight-bottomed, blow-dried twinkly you think she is. The girl’s got a good brain.’
‘Well, let her do it then,’ Alice cringed. At least this would give her more time to spend with David at the hospital.
Days of waiting. And then the shattering phone call announcing David’s death. Alice collapsed on the floor, wringing her hands and keening like some alien animal. Charles, momentarily shocked, slipped away to the library. And far away, Alice could hear, between her rasping sobs, the sound of that awful harmonica.
And then Charlotte on the line, her voice clipped and stark. ‘I’ve found him, Mrs Camberley, but the circumstances are -unexpected. Apparently he’s being held in Norwich on suspicion of murder.’ Alice’s world stopped – and so would that wretched harmonica.