Ezz dragged her gaze away from Kay to study Rick, his pale skin the type that went pink at the least thing, like hers. He sent her a tentative flicker of a smile. Her voice emerged as a croak. ‘And are you … ?’
The light that leapt into his blue eyes made them look suddenly familiar. ‘I’m your birth father,’ he said huskily, and his eyes rimmed pink, to match his cheeks.
A million questions crowded Ezz’s brain. Her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth. Her birth father waswithher mother? Had they been in touch all this time? Her eyelids fluttered, as if she were about to faint.
Kay shifted nervously. ‘Sorry we’ve surprised you. Rick came before, as you realised, but I couldn’t come then. Welooked you up online.’ Her hands twisted in her lap. ‘They tell you not to do it this way, don’t they? They tell you to go through an intermediary and get counselling. Sorry that I couldn’t wait.’ She looked at Rick and gave him a wan smile.
Rick returned it with the kind of affection that spoke of years of love. ‘I think we should tell her our story.’ He turned to Ezz, his frown suddenly anxious. ‘But we don’t want to get you in trouble with your boss.’
Automatically, Ezz glanced at the clock and managed to unstick her tongue. ‘This can be my lunch hour.’
Rick rose and made to close the office door.
Ezz stopped him. ‘It’s not that kind of job. If anyone comes to talk to me, I’ll need to deal with it.’
He exchanged looks with Kay but resumed his seat. He was tall and loose-limbed. Involuntarily, Ezz glanced down at her own willowy frame.
Unsteadily, Kay reached for the water and sipped. Then she fixed her brown eyes on Ezz again and began. ‘Rick and I went out together at school. I was fifteen and Rick was seventeen when we realised you were on the way. I was about sixteen weeks pregnant by the time I confessed. Mum and Dad went crazy. My mum …’ Anxiety puckered her forehead and she had to sip more water. ‘She was old-fashioned. She tutted at girls in revealing clothes or boys who wore earrings. My parents called our lovemaking “misbehaving” that “reflected badly on them”.’ Her lip wobbled. Rick took her hand. Ezz was incapable of doing more than listen in stunned silence.
‘They turned into jailers, walking either side of me if I went out,’ she went on in a shaky voice. ‘Friends who saw me in town shied away. School excluded me – but I wasn’t sorry because everybody made me feel dirty andashamed. I had lessons with other pregnant schoolgirls in a small room at a place we called “the unit”.’ She barked a short laugh. ‘Any schoolboysinvolved in our pregnancies remained at their usual schools, of course.’
‘That wasn’t fun either,’ Rick put in morosely, colour suffusing his entire head. ‘There was a lot of talk. And Kay’s parents wouldn’t let me near her. Literally slammed the door in my face. My mum and dad were a bit more understanding. But when the social services asked if they’d like the baby – you – to live with them, they still said no.’
A strange feeling snaked through Ezz at the idea of all the grandparents involved rejecting a helpless baby.
‘You were seventeen, Rick,’ Kay said patiently, as if this was an old argument. ‘I was underage. Everyone blamed you.’
‘I was to blame. But we could have got married as soon as you were sixteen,’ Rick said obstinately. ‘If your parents would have allowed it.’
Kay wiped her eyes and blew her nose. Her nose and eyes were red, and she wore the weary air of someone used to tears. ‘I didn’t stand up to my parents. If you read the timeline of adoption in England and Wales, it will tell you that forced adoptions had stopped by 1980, when you were born, but that means “forced” by social workers and courts. But also there’s “forced by circumstance”. My parents worked on terrifying me. My life would be ruined.That boyhad ruined it. Having sex under sixteen wasillegal.I could protect you from being called a bastard by giving you up for adoption, whereas keeping you would be selfish and make Mum and Dad live with the shame. They owned a house in a nice street and said we weren’t the kind of family to have illegitimate kids running around.’ Her eyes burned into Ezz, and Ezz feltimmobile in their tractor beam. ‘They said I couldn’t keep you if I lived with them,’ Kay choked. ‘So, I’d be out on the streets. The social worker did say that she’d do what she could to help if I wanted to keep you. She was never clear about how or when, and I used to think that I might end up trying to look after you while we both lived under a hedge. No defined alternative was actually offered. I was … a silenced voice.’
Slowly, Rick took an old photograph from his pocket and placed it on the desk.
Ezz’s gaze fell to its burred corners and faded colours. A curly-haired teenage girl smiled bashfully in the shelter of the embracing arm of a gangly youth with hair that fell forward over his forehead, the rest brushed back behind his ears. It was blond, straight hair, like Ezz’s and his smile was sharp at the corners and his nose very straight, also like Ezz’s.
The hail rattled against the window again. The room grew dimmer as big, bruised clouds sank lower over Rothach Hall. Normally, Ezz would have switched on the lights, but she felt unable to move. This was what she’d both dreamed of and feared since she was old enough to consider what it meant not to have been born to Maxie and Vince, the wonderful couple who’d loved her and protected her and earned the right to be called ‘Mum and Dad’.
In the face of Ezz’s unyielding silence, Kay sighed. ‘I gave birth to you in hospital. You were so beautiful and looked just like Rick. I had you with me for a day, then you were gone.’
‘As Kay wasn’t allowed to contact me, I found out from the social worker that you’d been born,’ Rick supplemented. ‘It was a weird feeling. I was angry. I gotin fights. I left school without finishing my A levels and got an apprenticeship as a bricklayer. I’ve got a building company, now.’
Ezz just listened. She felt heavy and stiff, as if made from new leather.
‘I did my O and A levels at a different school,’ said Kay, who seemed caught up on conveying details. ‘Mum and Dad still treated me like a naughty kid, but the social worker told me something important – that education is the key to a better life and—’ she leant forward ‘—independence. She used to say it emphatically like that. I think she realised my mum cowed me and I needed to get out from under her thumb.’
‘Worked, didn’t it?’ said Rick. He smiled into her eyes.
Surprise made Ezz find her voice. ‘You’re together now?’
Kay smiled, looking relieved that Ezz had broken her silence. ‘Yes. We’re married.’ Pleasure rang in her voice.
Ezz fought to straighten this out in her head. ‘Like … you met each other again later? Recently?’
Both Rick and Kay’s smiles faded. ‘We got married when I was eighteen,’ Kay explained. ‘The day I was dropped off at uni, I wrote to Rick and told him where I was.’
‘I drove straight there.’ Rick’s blue eyes shone. ‘She was eighteen and away from her parents. I’d finished my apprenticeship. We went to the register office and made the arrangements. By the time the notices had gone up and all that, I’d changed jobs to one near her uni and found us a rented flat. We got married.’ Triumph rang in his voice, and maybe an echo of disbelief, as if marvelling at their own actions.
‘I didn’t tell Mum and Dad for ages,’ Kay admitted, looking at Ezz apologetically. ‘I studied hard. Rick worked hard, to keep us both. I’d finished my entire first year atuniversity before we went back to my parents’ house together and told them.’
