It felt strange to be telling someone about it all. For so long, Alan Derek Baker had only existed inside her head, trapped there like a fly battering itself against a closed window. Talking about this man suddenly made him real.
‘How long were they together?’ asked Jake.
‘I don’t know. In the letters, Mum talked about the summer they’d spent with each other, so it might only have been a few months. But she’d obviously really fallen for him.’
Just a couple of weeks ago, Eve had been considering telling Ben what she’d found out about her father. Desperate to hear someone else’s view on the whole thing, and unable to get any sense out of Flora, it had come into her mind suddenly – on her way to meet Ben at the pub for their discussion about Daniel – that he might have an interesting take on it all. He wasn’t a part of their lives anymore, and had no emotional baggage to set to one side before considering the options. But he had known Flora for several years while he and Eve were still together, so that small connection might give him some sort of insight into what had happened.
But that night in the pub had got off to a bad start – and an even worse finish – and she’d never got the chance to mention the letters or her confusion about whether or not to try and find her lost father. She was glad now; things seemed better between her and Ben, but he was still too wrapped up in his own life to really care what was happening in hers.
She had no idea what had made her tell Jake. She’d slept in late after her long day trip to Brighton, and had woken to find a text waiting from him:
She’d texted back to say that she was a superior wrapper of gifts and would be delighted to offer her services, and he arrived half an hour later, carrying a plastic bag full of presents, two long tubes of garish cartoon Christmas paper, a pair of pinking shears and a roll of Sellotape.
After she’d boiled the kettle, they sat at the kitchen table and – to her own amazement – the words just came out. Once she started talking, she couldn’t stop, it was as if someone had turned on a tap and everything that had been bottled up inside her for the last few weeks came pouring out. After all the emotion and exhaustion of the previous day, it was such a relief.
‘So,’ he said, remarkably unfazed by the revelation that Eve’s past held a messy secret, ‘the big unknown is whether or not Alan was aware your mother was pregnant?’
‘Yes. Which means that, either he was a nice guy who didn’t realise what a mess he’d left behind. Or he was a bastard, who knew but ran away from the problem. Although he wasn’t a nice guy at all, because he was having an affair and leading on my Mum.’ She pulled out another length of paper and slid it underneath a make-up mirror Jake had bought for Katie.
‘But when it comes down to it,’ said Jake, breaking off a piece of Sellotape and passing it across, ‘does it really matter?’
‘Of course it matters!’ she said. ‘If he had guessed that Mum might be pregnant, then he deliberately ignored her letters and left her to cope with everything on her own. If that was the case, he was a prize shit.’
‘Yes, but does it matter now?’ persisted Jake. ‘In some ways, whatever he did forty-five years ago, is irrelevant. The man isn’t alive anymore, so you’ll never be able to find out the truth. And it doesn’t matter to your mother, because you say her memory is failing.’
‘Well, it must have mattered to her back then, that she’d been abandoned,’ said Eve. ‘She would have been devastated.’
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘But you were more important than all of that. From what you’ve said, she always intended to go through with the pregnancy and have you – however hard that turned out to be.’
He was right; she hadn’t thought about it like that. She remembered how ecstatic she’d felt when she discovered she was pregnant with Daniel. Even when Ben didn’t seem as enthusiastic as she’d hoped, when he didn’t seem to share her excitement, she had deliberately ignored the warning signs. She had wanted the baby and would have gone ahead with the pregnancy, come what may. She hadn’t really thought about it before but, even if Ben had been so furious at the news that he’d walked out, she wouldn’t have considered any other option. She would never have given up that baby.
They sat without speaking for a while, as Eve used the last section of Jake’s paper to wrap a jumper she’d bought for Daniel, folding the edges neatly and taking care to make it perfect, even though she knew her son would rip through the paper in frenzied seconds, not caring how well it was wrapped. The only sound was the zipping of the tape as Jake tore off strips to pass across to her. Eve looked up at him and smiled. This oddball neighbour of hers had a way about him that put her totally at ease; it felt as if she’d known him for years and could talk to him about anything.
‘The thing is,’ she said eventually. ‘However hard I try to tell myself it’s all in the past and it doesn’t matter anymore, it does. It matters to me.’
‘Yes, but it’s not about missing the father you never had,’ he said. ‘All of this only matters because you’re angry that everything you believed in, isn’t what actually happened.’
‘Well, is that surprising?’ Eve could hear the defensiveness in her voice. ‘It means my whole life has been a lie.’
Jake pulled at the end of the Sellotape too quickly and it ripped unevenly down the middle. ‘Bugger.’ He dug his thumbnail into the roll. ‘I hate this stuff.’
‘Give it here,’ she said, reaching across. ‘That is the hardest bit, though,’ she continued, finding the end of the tape and pulling it out. ‘Feeling that everything I grew up believing, has been a lie.’
‘But you’re wrong, Eve,’ he said. ‘It hasn’t. You had a happy childhood, with a mother who adored you and did a really good job of bringing you up on her own. You grew up feeling safe and secure and having been taught some decent values. You learnt to be resilient and independent. Okay, she was creative with the truth when it came to your father. But, so what? She only told you all those things about him for the best possible reason – to make you feel loved and wanted. She was protecting you.’
‘I know that,’ said Eve.
‘There’s something else,’ said Jake. ‘By presuming your real father wasn’t the wonderful man your mother always made him out to be, you’re undermining that whole relationship. You’re suggesting she was a poor judge of character. Maybe you need to give her the benefit of the doubt? That summer they spent together might have been the most wonderful time of her life. Deep down, she may have suspected he was married – especially when he didn’t reply to the letters. But she needed to maintain the illusion, for her own sake, as well as yours.’
Eve sat back in her chair and watched as he stood up and went to fill the kettle again. He was right, this wasn’t about her: it was about her mother. Even if she’d only known him for a few weeks, Flora had spent long enough in the company of Alan Derek Baker to fall in love with him, so maybe that was all that mattered? And while she’d done an amazing job of bringing up Eve as a single parent, she hadn’t really been alone. She’d had that pretend husband beside her, who had been such a big part of their lives and followed Eve through childhood, instilling in her security and self-confidence and the belief that she was adored. Something she now suspected her real father might not have done.
‘I’ve been thinking about the address,’ Jake said. ‘About why he’d give her a real one – even though it wasn’t his own. You thought he might have had lots of affairs and she was just the latest in a long line of lovers. But if that was the case, I think he would have given her a made-up address.’
Eve sat back and watched as he pulled the jar of coffee out of the cupboard and heaped teaspoons into their mugs.
‘I think that suggests she was special to him too,’ Jake continued. ‘Maybe he was subconsciously hoping she’d come looking for him and make some waves. Maybe he was looking for a way out of his own marriage.’
‘I don’t think that’s likely,’ Eve said. ‘He was having his cake and eating it.’
‘Perhaps. But he did trust her enough to give her an address through which she could track him down, if she really wanted to. And he may never have known that his sister returned all the letters.’
With the presents wrapped, they went into the sitting room and Eve arranged Daniel’s parcels under the tree. It was only a small one – she’d been horrified at the price of trees in the local garden centre – but the lights draped around it were twinkling prettily, and even Daniel’s haphazard efforts at decoration didn’t look too bad in the shadowy darkness.
She tried to balance a small present – a packet of felt tip pens – across one of the tree’s branches. But despite the thickness of the needles, it slipped through a gap and landed on the floor. She and Jake both leant forward to pick it up at the same time, and her forehead touched his cheek. Suddenly their faces were so close that she could smell something citrussy: moisturiser or maybe shampoo. It was a vaguely familiar smell and she was trying to place it when he leant towards her and she felt his lips gently touch hers.
As he pulled back again, she inhaled sharply, realising there was a tingling in the pit of her stomach, spreading up towards her chest, down her thighs. She stared straight ahead into his eyes. Even in this light she could see how blue they were: pale cornflower blue with dark rings around the irises.
‘Sorry, should I have done that?’ whispered Jake.
‘Probably not,’ she whispered back. ‘But I’d quite like you to do it again.’
He leant forward and kissed her once more, this time he didn’t pull away. It was a gentle kiss, a careful one, and she allowed herself to fall into it as she closed her eyes. When she felt his lips move away again, she opened her eyes and saw him smiling at her.
‘Miss Glover,’ he said, as he put out his hand and ran the back of his fingers down her cheek. ‘I think this is going to be fun.’