I wait.
“What do you mean?” she asks if she’s forgotten all about it.
“It’s not a complicated question. Who was he?”
It takes a few more repetitions until she gives in.
“His name is Professor William Jones.”
Talk about being gob smacked. The picture of Mum with someone like Professor Brian Cox or Steven Hawking is almost laughable.
“Your boyfriend was a professor?”
“Don’t be silly, he didn’t become professor until twenty years later. When I met him, he was still a student. Nineteen.” Her tone goes all dreamy. “Very handsome but still a virgin. Least, until he met me.”
“Eeeww. Mum, don’t.”
She laughs. “You’re such a prude sometimes, Leonie. I’m trying to tell you we fell in love. That’s why I left your dad, er, Stephen for those few months.”
A few months. Long enough to conceive me. A quick calculation tells me she would have been twenty-four. Two years after marrying my dad. It must have broken his heart.
“Anyway, I moved in with him.” Now that she’s started, she’s suddenly in a sharing mood. “He was staying in one of those new student blocks, small studio flats in Shoreditch. The area was just coming up, before it went all expensive. Back then it was full of young artists and fashion designers. So much fun. Loads of great pubs and bars. That was the era of wine bars, you know. Then, after closing time, everyone would pile onto the Tube and go clubbing. One night, we ended up at the Seven Dials cocktailbar in Covent Garden and got to see Kate Moss there. And once we blagged our way into the Ivey by pretending to be Naomi Campbell’s assistants. We got kicked out, but not before we had a drink with George Michael.”
“You and William Jones?”
“No, God no. Wills never wanted to do any of that. Always studying.”
I sit up a bit straighter in my bed and fold my legs into the lotus position. Who was this man? What was he like?
“What was he studying?”
“His college stuff,” she replies impatiently.
“I mean what was his course? What degree was he studying for?”
She exhales on a long pfffff, her usual show of disdain. “Who knew? Something that needed piles of books and endless work. I’d come back in the small hours to find him still at his desk, but then…” She pauses, reliving some memory. “We’d have our own party, just the two of us.”
I head her off before she shares any more details. “Do you remember which college?”
“University of London, of course.”
“Yes, but they have different colleges—”
“We went there once for a big party before Christmas. It was a big building in central London. They had one of those old-fashioned lifts with the folding doors you had to pull shut. You know like in that film with Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks.”
That’s my mother, encyclopaedic knowledge about films, nightclubs, celebrities but zero interest in what course her loverspent long hours studying. And presumably just as little interest in birth control.
“So, what happened when you got pregnant?”
“Oh, my days. Wills couldn’t get his head round it. Fell to pieces. He had a grant from some foundation to pay for his education, and he couldn’t give that up. It was pathetic. That’s why I had to go back to Stephen.”
The way she says this makes me feel even less important to her than William Jones’ college. I know she loves me in her own way, but she also sees me as an inconvenient accident.
“And he took you back?”
“Oh, you know your dad. He said he’d raise you as his own. That a child learnt love form being loved. Blah de blah.”
“And that’s the last you saw of William Jones?”
