Chapter Three
Wednesday 6 November
The next few days prove me right. There are lots of places to rent, none of them affordable. In the middle of all this, Mum keeps calling me. It’s the worst possible time to speak to her because things are so up in the air. However, it’s never easy to ignore my mother when she wants to talk to me.
“Hi, Mum, I’m just getting into bed.” I put her on speaker while changing into my pyjamas.
“Your step father is not happy about how you left things. You should apologise to him.”
“No.”
“That’s not like you,” she says sounding very reasonable. “Howard is a good man, and he is your stepdad he deserves respect.” My mother’s self-absorption and insensitivity are truly impressive.
I take a deep breath and ask. “Mum? Who was my biological father?”
“What?”
I wait.
“What do you mean?” she asks if she’s forgotten all about it.
“It’s not a complicated question. Who was he?”
It takes a few more repetitions until she gives in.
“His name is Professor William Jones.”
Talk about being gob smacked. The picture of Mum with someone like Professor Brian Cox or Steven Hawking is almost laughable.
“Your boyfriend was a professor?”
“Don’t be silly, he didn’t become professor until twenty years later. When I met him, he was still a student. Nineteen.” Her tone goes all dreamy. “Very handsome but still a virgin. Least, until he met me.”
“Eeeww. Mum, don’t.”
She laughs. “You’re such a prude sometimes, Leonie. I’m trying to tell you we fell in love. That’s why I left your dad, er, Stephen for those few months.”
A few months. Long enough to conceive me. A quick calculation tells me she would have been twenty-four. Two years after marrying my dad. It must have broken his heart.
“Anyway, I moved in with him.” Now that she’s started, she’s suddenly in a sharing mood. “He was staying in one of those new student blocks, small studio flats in Shoreditch. The area was just coming up, before it went all expensive. Back then it was full of young artists and fashion designers. So much fun. Loads of great pubs and bars. That was the era of wine bars, you know. Then, after closing time, everyone would pile onto the Tube and go clubbing. One night, we ended up at the Seven Dials cocktail bar in Covent Garden and got to see Kate Moss there. And once we blagged our way into the Ivey by pretending to be Naomi Campbell’s assistants. We got kicked out, but not before we had a drink with George Michael.”
“You and William Jones?”
“No, God no. Wills never wanted to do any of that. Always studying.”
I sit up a bit straighter in my bed and fold my legs into the lotus position. Who was this man? What was he like?
“What was he studying?”
“His college stuff,” she replies impatiently.
“I mean what was his course? What degree was he studying for?”
She exhales on a long pfffff, her usual show of disdain. “Who knew? Something that needed piles of books and endless work. I’d come back in the small hours to find him still at his desk, but then…” She pauses, reliving some memory. “We’d have our own party, just the two of us.”
I head her off before she shares any more details. “Do you remember which college?”
“University of London, of course.”
“Yes, but they have different colleges—”
“We went there once for a big party before Christmas. It was a big building in central London. They had one of those old-fashioned lifts with the folding doors you had to pull shut. You know like in that film with Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks.”
That’s my mother, encyclopaedic knowledge about films, nightclubs, celebrities but zero interest in what course her lover spent long hours studying. And presumably just as little interest in birth control.
“So, what happened when you got pregnant?”
“Oh, my days. Wills couldn’t get his head round it. Fell to pieces. He had a grant from some foundation to pay for his education, and he couldn’t give that up. It was pathetic. That’s why I had to go back to Stephen.”
The way she says this makes me feel even less important to her than William Jones’ college. I know she loves me in her own way, but she also sees me as an inconvenient accident.
“And he took you back?”
“Oh, you know your dad. He said he’d raise you as his own. That a child learnt love form being loved. Blah de blah.”
“And that’s the last you saw of William Jones?”
“More or less,” she replies airily.
“What’s more or less mean?”
She hesitates and my stomach sinks. Please, please, don’t let it be that she carried on seeing him right under Dad’s nose.
“Mum? What is it?”
“He sent money.”
It takes a long few seconds to absorb this. “Money?”
“Yeah. He organised something. I don’t know how because his grant didn’t leave much to spare after paying for his uni, and he was never going to give that up. He made it clear, he didn’t want to get involved. There would just be a money transfer to my account once a month.”
“How much?”
“Oh, I can’t remember. It changed. Not much to start. It increased later. Stephen was very difficult about it.” She huffs. “He really was the most unreasonable man. All big talk saying we didn’t need his money. But he was only a driving instructor, and every little helped. So, in the end, he agreed but then got very stubborn and refused to spend the money on house repairs or a holiday. He made me transfer it to a separate account to spend it on you. Once I used some of it for a haircut and he went apeshit.”
I remember this. The shouting in the bedroom about not enough money for Vidal Sasoon. Later, when we were alone, I told Dad I could contribute my pocket money, and he ruffled my hair. “No sweetheart. That’s yours.”
He’d just started a new business and was struggling. Yet, there seemed to be cash for a tutor to help with my GCSEs. So that was the money from Will Jones. Money Dad ring-fenced for me. My darling, darling dad.
“How long did this go on?”
“Will’s payments?” she checks. “Until you were eighteen. He was Professor Jones by then, because that’s the name on the letter from the solicitor. He sent a lump sum for your higher education. How else do you think you could pay for acting school?”
My mouth drops open. The Guildhall School of Music and Drama isn’t cheap, not even ten years ago. So, my biological father paid twenty-seven thousand pounds, possibly more.
The shock of this stays with me.
Long after midnight, lying awake, I keep turning my pillow around every hour for the cooler side.
William Jones. A man who didn’t want to be involved.
It doesn’t fit with the nineteen-year-old student who must have scraped together what money he could to pay for his child.
The suspicion takes shape and grows. My mother’s relationship with the truth is hit and miss. Reading between the lines, my guess is he would have done the right thing. If he didn’t marry her, it would have been because she’d already lost interest. Because he didn’t offer the fun-filled life she wanted, the exciting nightlife.
Horrible Howard sneered that He dumped her . But I’m starting to wonder if it was she who did the dumping.
Poor nineteen-year-old student, so out of his depth. At least he tried his best.
Which raises the question, why didn’t he try to see me or write to me?
Did she ask him to stay away? Was he worried about causing more harm to her marriage?
The next day, after a sleepless night, I call her again and ask her to send me that last letter from Professor William Jones’ solicitor.
Then I start packing.
Let Emma give up the flat and move to St Andrews as soon as she wants. I’m taking a trip.
Professor William Jones is going to meet his daughter.