‘She doesn’t want him prosecuted?’
‘No.’ He cracked a stick, throwing the pieces into the grate. ‘She says he suffered enough in the trenches.’
It was his dispassionate tone. The set of his jaw.
‘You don’t think he did?’ said Iris.
‘I’m sure he did,’ said Robbie. ‘But everyone suffers in war.’ He reached for another stick. ‘He’s the only one who’s put my mother in a wheelchair though.’
He went on, saying that his father had told everyone, Robbie’s headmaster included, that the fall had been an accident.
‘My headmaster called me to his office,’ he said, ‘just as I was about to leave for Waterloo to meet you. My father had telephoned from the hospital in York, saying I had to come straight away, that Mum might die. My headmaster drove me.It was the longest journey of my life. Well –’ he raised a wry brow – ‘at that point, anyway.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ said Iris, her cold hands full of leaves, aching at how terrified he must have been. Aching for his mother, too, with her shy smile and basket of holly.
‘No, I’m sorry,’ he said, taking the leaves from her. ‘I hate that I left you waiting like that.’
‘What choice did you have?’
‘I should have found one.’
‘You couldn’t have.’ She watched him push the leaves into the grate. ‘There was nothing you could have done.’
‘But I did do something.’ He looked back at her, and his face – his strong, handsome face, that was older, and tired, and still the one she liked more than any other – strained with regret. ‘I did the wrong thing.’
She frowned, uncomprehending. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean … ’ He exhaled a ragged sigh. ‘Imean,Iris, that I told my father about you. Clarence.’
‘Oh,’ she said, and that was all the time it took her – just the length of that single syllable,oh– to realise, with a cold jolt, why he’d never received her letters.
As she stared into his eyes, picturing his father’s arctic replicas – the disdain in them when he’d used to watch her in church; his sneer when he’d towered over her in her gran’s kitchen …you’re not in his class –it all made crashing sense.
Silently, she listened as Robbie told her the rest: how he’d lost his temper when he’d got to the ward and found his father next to his mother’s bed, and dragged him away from her, letting go all his fury, a lifetime of it, telling him that his control over both of them was done with.
‘All those years after you left Heaton, he stopped me seeing you,’ he said. ‘He kept me from your mum’s funeral, your gran’s. I needed him to know that he hadn’t won, thatwehad, bystaying in each other’s lives anyway. I wanted him to feel weak, a fool, so I told him everything.’ He stared at her. ‘I was the fool.’
‘No.’ She wasn’t having that. ‘You can’t blame yourself for who your father is.’
‘I should have known better. Shouldn’t have lost control.’
‘Anyone would have … ’
‘But I asked a nurse to send you a wire, right in front of him. I gave her the money.’ He shook his head. ‘He must have stopped her.’
‘Yes,’ said Iris, boiling inside, because how dare he have done it?
To them.
To his own son.
He was the one who wasn’t in Robbie’s class.
Hewas the one who was less.
‘My mother didn’t properly wake up for days,’ Robbie said. ‘At first, I didn’t leave the hospital. I was terrified she was going to die. And that my father would try to come back into her room. Which he did. Often. Until I threatened to go to the police. After that, I stayed in a local pub. I couldn’t go home with my father there. But he went back every night. He’d have been there each morning for the post.’
Iris closed her eyes, visualizing all those letters she’d written arriving at the Dower House, straight into his hands.
