‘I think your rug’s DNR, Thomas,’ she said. ‘Literally – it looks like it’s bleeding out.’
‘You’re probably right,’ Tom said from the kitchen. ‘I guess if it’s today’s only casualty, that’s not too shabby.’
A few minutes later he joined her on the sofa, placing a tray with glasses of squash and sandwiches on the coffee table.
‘Amazing,’ Rachel said, picking up a granary creation that appeared to contain chicken and sliced tomato. ‘Ooooh, that’s good.’
They ate and drank in silence, but when the last sandwich had gone Rachel turned to Tom and asked: ‘So. Are you going to tell me?’
He shifted uncomfortably, colour momentarily draining from his face. Then he asked, ‘About Oscar?’
Rachel nodded.
‘Ah. We’ve only recently been in touch, and I wanted to get to know him a bit before introducing him to anyone … Who knows, maybe he’ll even meet my mum at some point.’
‘Er. Okay?’ Rachel’s face betrayed her confusion.
‘Oscar is Christine’s son. Christine is the woman my dad ran off with when he left my mum and me. She was one of the secretaries at his firm and twenty years younger than him. I was fourteen.’
None of this was news to Rachel, exactly. She knew Tom’s parents were divorced and that their split had been bitter – but there’d never been any mention of his dad having more children.
She nodded, signalling she was ready to hear more.
‘As I think you know, I barely saw my dad after the split. He and Mum hated the sight of one another, and when he and Christine moved to Essex everything sort of fell apart. I was lucky if I got a birthday card. I grew to hate him almost as much as Mum did for choosing someone else over us. After a while I stopped trying to keep up any contact.’
‘I don’t blame you,’ Rachel said, livid on teenage Tom’s behalf.
He shrugged. ‘I found out towards the end of last summer that shortly after they ran off together, Christine and my dad had a baby. Oscar. It seems Mum couldn’t bear to tell me Dad had binned us off and started another family straightaway … I was hurt enough. I suppose she was worried I’d feel replaced. And after that, I guess there was never a good time to tell the truth.’
‘Bloody hell,’ Rachel breathed. ‘I mean, your poor mum. But … what a thing to keep from you.’
‘Yeah. I’ve been pretty angry with her. In her defence, though, she always thought my dad would tell me himself. Of course heleftChristine within a couple of years for another woman – disappeared again – so that never happened. And there was no love lost between Christine and my mum, so I don’t think the idea of trying to forge a relationship between Oscar and me ever occurred to them. It was easier for them to ignore one another.’
‘That’s awful.’ Rachel twisted in her seat, struggling to comprehend what she was hearing.
‘Yeah,’ Tom agreed. ‘Anyway. As you’ve probably worked out by now, Oscar is a bit of a handful. He started poking around Christine’s attic one afternoon – the story is he’d taken to smoking up there – and discovered a wallet of old photos inside a leftover box of our dad’s. There was a little boy in some of the pictures, and he realised it wasn’t him—’
‘Because your eyes are blue, and his are brown,’ Rachel interrupted.
‘Exactly. So he interrogated his mum, and within a couple of weeks – even though she told him not to – he’d tracked me down online.’
‘Wow. I guess you can’t fault his nerve.’
Tom laughed and shook his head. ‘Definitely not. And he’s a good kid – he’s just a bit mixed up. When Christine found out he’d been visiting me in London, she freaked. I didn’t know he’d been going behind her back, and I told Oz we needed to sort things out properly before we could carry on spending time together – that I couldn’t come between him and his mum. Clearly, my sensible speech hasn’t worked.’
‘No,’ Rachel agreed. ‘But at least you tried. What are you going to do now? I mean, aside from give him two Nurofen and a round of dry toast when he wakes up.’
‘I’m going to have to call Christine and tell her he turned up here today. She’ll be even madder with him than I am.’ Tom winced.
‘Maybe there’s a way you can tell hermostof the truth but avoid getting him into too much hot water,’ Rachel said.
Tom frowned.
‘Just … don’t be too hard on him,’ she went on. ‘I was a younger sibling. It’s a tough gig, even without all this extra complication thrown in. And this is a wonderful thing, or it will be: you and Oscar are lucky to have found each other.’
Tom squeezed Rachel’s hand, then sprang away as the washing machine gave an almightyCLICK.
Rachel jumped too.
