He explained, “I was born to an unmarried mother.”
She reached down for a cushion on the floor and threw it at him with surprising force.
He held on to the cushion, hugging it to his body, and went on with his story, “My mother had a Christmas job in Bristol and met my father – he was a student, home for the holidays. She only found out she was pregnant after he’d gone back and she didn’t know how to reach him.
“I think she must have tried my grandparents’ home and either lost her nerve and didn’t tell them or they didn’t believe her. Anyway, my father found out after I was born. He was nineteen and at the start of his university course, so it was either abandon my mother and me or abandon his education.”
Laura was listening attentively, her chin resting on her bent knees.
“His parents, as you can imagine, didn’t approve of my mother whom they saw as a village girl out to ruin their son’s life. They threatened to cut him off without a penny if he threw away his future.”
He paused to pour himself moreslivova.
“You can’t stop on a cliff-hanger,” Laura said. “What happened?”
“Simply put, he married my mother, his parents disowned him, he dropped out of uni, moved to the village, got a small job and they lived like all poor people live.”
An odd expression passed over Laura’s face.
“What?” he asked.
She shook her head. “Go on, I’ll tell you later.”
He refilled their glasses and sipped again. “This grows on you a bit, doesn’t it?”
She didn’t answer but watched him, waiting for the rest of the story. The woman was certainly hard to distract from what she wanted.
“When I was seven, my mother fell pregnant again. When she was pregnant with me, I think she’d tried to bring about a miscarriage and failed, probably because she didn’t know how – I think she drank vinegar or something and tried to jump up and down a lot. I was a tenacious baby.” He gave her a lopsided smile.
“But this new pregnancy didn’t go well, she had some kind of infection. I remember going to visit her in hospital where she was lying in bed for what seemed to me like months and months. Eventually she had a haemorrhage…” He made himself stop and take another drink. This part of the story was difficult, because it was very close to a landmine from his future, one that had blown up his own life.
“Anyway. She lost the baby and died herself a day later.”
Whenever he told that particular story, people would rush to offer sympathy. Thank God Laura didn’t. She just listened. Gave him the space to speak at his own pace. But her warm, dark eyes on him made him feel curiously safe, better than any hug.
“The next thing I remember is my father holding my hand and leading me up some steps to a grand front door in a posh street in Bristol. An old man opened and my father said something like ‘My wife is gone.’ He said it in a dead voice. I’d been told my mum had gone to heaven to make a beautiful home for us, but my father’s voice sounded like this was a very wrong thing.
“I don’t really remember what happened next, I was in a large sitting room full of polished furniture waiting while a fierce argument went on behind the closed doors to the dining room. The shouting went on for ages, then my father stormed out and left me there. The old man came to find me. ‘Well, little Adam, would you like some toffee?’ Then told me he was my grandfather and that I would now be living with them. Until then, I’d had no idea I had any relatives of any kind.”
There it was again, that expression on Laura’s face. It made him reach over and stroke a finger down her soft cheek. She turned her head a tiny inch and brushed a light kiss on his finger. Just that then she sat back, away from his hand, and held her glass against her mouth.
Really, some women knew how to keep you away from their lips.
So he went on with the story. “I never saw my father again, I think my mother’s death broke him. He travelled, sent me the occasional postcards, but that was all. Last I heard he was working in a bar in a place called Foz do Iguaçu in Brazil.
“My grandparent raised me and loved me and gave me all the things my father had apparently ‘thrown away.’ They made sure I went to a good school and an even better university. They wanted me to have choices, any career I could dream of, they would help me achieve. But for me, there was only one choice. I wanted to be a doctor and help women through safe pregnancies. No woman would suffer. No man would ever be broken by losing his wife.”
His hands were clasped in is lap; he made them relax and breathed through the dread that squeezed his heart. He’d started the story so he had better finish it; they were very near the end anyway.
“I worked in the NHS for a while but then…” He sipped his drink. “I got drawn into private practice. Mostly for the money, I needed money at the time, and a colleague invited me to join him in a clinic in Harley Street. Spoilt girls complaining about menstrual cramps, rich couples wanting abortions because the child might have a tiny defect or, I don’t know, was a boy instead of a girl. Russian oligarchs paying thousands to put an obstetrician on call for nine months while their girlfriends called every five minutes to ask if drinking strong tea might harm their baby. In the end…”
And it was nearly the end of the story, even if he’d jumped over a big chunk of it.
“In the end, I became the kind of doctor I used to despise. I spent every weekend at some conference or other, making a name for myself, which brought me more clients, made me rich and drained away my self-respect. By then, I couldn’t even remember why I had wanted to be a doctor. Until tonight, I thought I hated medicine. I had actually come here to escape, to find a new job, taxi driver, anything as long as it was not related to medicine.”
“You came to this car-free island to be a taxi driver?” she teased. A soft half joke to ease away his self-condemnation.
He wondered if she’d have been so charitable had he told her the truth. He hadn’t lied but he’d trimmed his story, cutting around the heart of it. Even so, it was good to have told some of it; his heart felt easier.
