‘There’s no chance . . .?’ Emma begins.
I wait.
‘There was never any crossover? With you and my dad?’
My heart starts to beat abnormally hard. Is she asking what I think she’s asking?
She spells it out, too impatient to wait for me to catch up. ‘There’s no possibility Lawrence isn’t my dad?’
‘No. Lawrence is one hundred per cent your father. Your mum is just confused.’
Emma looks abruptly exhausted. It’s not hard to get why. She is pregnant, and caring virtually full-time for a mother who no longer really knows her. And now this. I want to put my arms around her, but with Emma I can never quite predict if she’s going to stick an elbow into my stomach and tell me to get off.
‘You promise?’ she says.
‘I promise. Me and your mum never—’
I break off.
Well, there was that one night. Obviously. The night I think Rachel is remembering. When she turned up in the rain after that stupid row with Lawrence and I lent her my Teenage Fanclub T-shirt. And yes, we drank a whole bottle of brandy, and I spent much of the next day with my head in the toilet. I’d pretty much blacked out after a certain point. But we’d woken up fully clothed, in separate beds. And Rachel was still really into Lawrence, albeit he’d been acting like a bell-end. It’s never occurred to me that anything happened between us. I haven’t given it a second thought. Not once. And neither has Rachel, as far as I’m aware. We never felt the need to discuss it, not in all the years since.
But, suddenly, it strikes me that the maths would tally.
My skin turns cold as snow.
No. Not a chance. For one thing, Emma is so much half Lawrence, it’s scary.
‘You never what?’ Emma prompts.
‘Nothing. There’s no chance Lawrence isn’t your dad.’
Somewhere in the room, a bulb is buzzing, incessant as an insect. I make a mental note to sort it, because it’s the kind of noise that really winds Rachel up these days.
Emma lets out a breath. ‘Okay. Okay.’
I smile. ‘Little bit relieved there, are you?’
‘Um, yeah. What with you being twenty-nine and everything.’
Fair point. I lean back against the worktop, try to recover from the past few minutes. My eyes land on Rachel’s cookbooks, lined up along a shelf. Some of them are from when we were married. Delia, Nigella,The Naked Chef. The sight of them always stills my heart. Because, true to form, Rachel’s house isn’t groaning with stuff, the way my flat is, after nearly seventy years on the planet. She has kept the habit of a lifetime, only holding on to possessions that mean the most.
‘Have you told your dad about the babies yet?’
Emma nods. ‘Although, we’re not actually speaking at the moment.’
‘Why not?’ Lawrence and Emma fall out pretty regularly – another reason I’m convinced they’re related. Their rows are always fierce in a way that borders on primal, that would seem almost impossible without them sharing genetic code.
‘Oh, you know. As soon as we told him, he started interrogating Kai. Coming up with all these outdated and inaccurate opinions about his job and why he doesn’t have his own flat and all this other irritating, regressive, patriarchal bullshit.’
‘He probably just feels bad that he’s not around to give you a hug in person.’
Emma tilts her head. ‘You know, you give people the benefit of the doubt more than anyone I’ve ever met.’
‘Well. Lawrence isn’t all bad.’
That said, I did overhear the end of a fairly painful phone conversation between him and Emma, a few weeks back.
‘It’s not about whether she recognises you or not,’ she was saying.
