The Brave (8 page)

But this wasn't how she had planned it. Last night on the phone, her father had begged her again, for the last time, not to go ahead with it. And when she said she wasn't going to change her mind, reluctantly, they had agreed that when she brought Tommy home from school, they would first have a family supper and then, as gently and lovingly as possible, tell him. But the air was already bristling. She had to do it now. She was still standing by the door. They were all staring at her. On the television the cricket scores droned on.

"What is it?" Tommy said. "What's wrong with everybody?"

"For heaven's sake, Diane," her mother said. "Just get it over with."

Diane walked stiffly across to the television and switched it off. Then she came back to the sofa and sat down at the opposite end from her mother. She tried to smile but it felt as phoney as it must have looked. It was as if all her acting skills had suddenly deserted her. She patted the cushion beside her.

"Tommy, darling. Come and sit here. There's something I've got to tell you."

"What?"

Instead of simply puzzled, he now looked frightened. Warily watching her, he came and sat down next to her. Diane took his hand in both of hers.

"Tommy, this is something I've wanted to tell you for a very long time. In fact, all of your life. But I've never been brave enough."

She glanced at her parents. Her mother shook her head and sighed and looked away.

"All these years, darling, you've thought that I was your sister. Well. I'm not."

"What?"

"Tommy... I'm your mother."

Tommy gave a confused little laugh.

"Is this a joke or a trick or something?"

He looked around and saw from their pained faces that it wasn't.

"I was very young when I... when you were born. Only just sixteen. And we all decided that it would be better, at least for the time being, if everyone thought that I wasn't your mother but... your sister, instead."

She couldn't believe what a wretched job she was making of it. She never normally forgot her lines. But now, when it really counted, she could hardly remember a single word of what she had prepared.

"Why?" Tommy said. "I don't understand."

Diane looked again at her mother, this time out of some desperate, instinctive hope that she might come to the rescue. But the face showed no mercy, just a stony disapproval, distorted by drink. Her father looked desolate, his forehead now propped by one hand so that she couldn't see his eyes.

"Tommy, I was so young. I was still at school. Girls that age, if they get pregnant, usually have—"

"Diane, really," her mother said. "He's just a boy. Surely you don't have to go into all that."

Diane ignored her.

"Sometimes, Tommy, when women get pregnant but don't want to have the baby, they can... Doctors can do an operation so that the baby doesn't get born. But I didn't want to do that. I wanted to have you. I..."

The tears ambushed her, suddenly, out of nowhere. And the last thing she wanted to do was cry. She wanted to be strong, and loving. Like a mother should be for her child. She angrily wiped her eyes.

"I'm sorry. It's just..."

Tommy put his arms around her and clung to her and, of course, that made it so much worse. She was sobbing and couldn't help herself. She put her arms around him and now he was crying too. It was all going wrong. She had completely messed it up. Through her tears she saw her mother get up, snatch her empty glass from the coffee table and walk from the room.

"Joan, dear, please," her father called after her.

"I'm sorry, I can't listen to this."

"Joan..."

He got up and hurried after her. It was probably better that way, Diane thought. It had seemed the right thing to do, to tell Tommy when all three of them were there to reassure him and make him feel everything was all right. But she'd been foolish to imagine it could work. Her mother's resentment could never be put neatly to one side. Diane hugged Tommy even more tightly, then held him away from her so that she could look at him. Her son. The poor darling. He was still crying. His face had gone all red and blotchy. Maybe she had made a terrible mistake.

"I know it's an awful shock, darling. But we're all still the same people. We all still love you."

"Why are you telling me this?" He sniffed. "Why now?"

"Because I love you. And I'm proud of you. And I want everyone to know I'm your mother."

"So, Mum and Dad, I mean, aren't..."

"They're your grandparents, sweetheart."

"You all said I didn't have any grandparents. That they were dead."

"Well, it's true, in a way. Their parents, my grandparents, are dead."

He looked so unhappy and confused. He kept rubbing away the tears which, like her own, didn't seem to want to stop.

"So, who's my father?"

Diane had known, of course, that this would come. And for the first time she could remember what she had prepared. It was the truth, after all. She took a breath and spoke as calmly as she could.

"He was at the boys' school down the road from mine. He was called David. His parents lived abroad. I've never seen him again. I heard he got married to someone else."

Tommy's face contorted and creased up and he wailed and turned away from her. She still had her hands on his arms but he broke loose and ran for the door.

"Tommy! Please!"

She went after him into the kitchen but he ran for the stairs, yelling at her through his tears to leave him alone. Diane stopped and clasped her head between her hands. The slamming of his bedroom door made the whole house shudder. Her mother was slicing some tomatoes, a cigarette hanging from her lips. There was no sign of her father. He'd probably fled out to his workshop. Her mother didn't look at her, just took a long puff of her cigarette and put it down in an ashtray.

"Well," she said. "I hope you're satisfied."

SHE HAD only done it for a dare. At least, that was the glibber version of the truth that Diane had settled on. It had a sort of ironic resonance that now, nearly a decade after the trauma of Tommy's conception, she had come to find appealing. Life, after all, was so damnably dark and cruel that if you didn't laugh in its face, it just grabbed you by the throat and swallowed you. Naturally, the notion that her son was simply the result of a dare neither adequately explained nor justified what had happened.

David Willis had been one of a group of boys from St Edward's whom Diane, along with her best friend, Katie Bingham, and a few other Elmshurst rebels, used to sneak out to meet on those long summer evenings when her head felt it might implode from boredom. The two boarding schools had adjoining sports fields and there was a narrow, tunnel-like lane, overhung with sycamore and hawthorn, behind the sheds where the groundsmen kept their lawnmowers and rollers. The boys would always be there, waiting for them with packs of cheap cigarettes in their blazer pockets. Occasionally there would be alcohol too, though rarely anything more potent than a bottle of cider.

Most of the boys were either show-offs or stupid or both, but David Willis was different. He hung back a little, not exactly shy or aloof, just slightly disengaged, as if unsure that he wanted to be there. Diane would often catch him staring at her but he always looked away. She had never been able to resist a challenge and one evening, she smiled at him and he blushed and gave her a crooked little grin.

From then on he was the only boy she could be bothered with during these clandestine nicotine assignations. His father was in the Royal Air Force and every two years was posted somewhere else so the whole family would have to pack up and move. At fifteen, David had lived in half a dozen different countries and this, to Diane, immediately put him in a league far more exotic than all the other boys. His mother and father were currently based in Kenya and the stories he told her about going on safari and seeing lions and elephants and crocodiles made him seem almost impossibly romantic.

On Sundays, the pupils of both schools were allowed out for afternoon walks—though, of course, not together, for to consort with members of the opposite sex was a dire offence at both establishments. At Elmshurst these walks were the subject of strict rules of conduct: a minimum of four girls per walking group; school uniform to be worn at all times, including hats (hideous straw boaters whose sides the rebels would wet and bend to give them a racy, cowgirl look); walking was permitted only on certain designated lanes and footpaths; and, most important of all, absolutely no straying up into the rolling, bracken-clad hills that loomed wickedly beyond.

Upon diehard rebels like Diane and Katie, this last injunction naturally had an effect entirely opposite from the one intended. That nature should be deemed out of bounds served only to heighten its allure. And it was thus that on a sultry afternoon in late June, having abandoned, as well as hats and cardigans, their two complicit classmates, they found themselves strolling along one of the grassy trails that wound through the ferns with David and his friend Henry Littlemore, a shambling, acne-smitten creature for whom Katie had developed an unaccountable passion. It was Henry who had provided the cigarettes, some lethally strong, untipped Player's at which they were all bravely puffing and trying not to choke. The boys were walking some ten yards ahead of the girls and were talking about cricket, specifically whether England's Denis Compton could be compared with the legendary Australian batsman Donald Bradman.

No destination had been mentioned for the walk. But despite the temporary distance between them, no one had any doubts about its purpose, which laced the air as blatantly as the musky, moist smell of the bracken. Neither girl could be considered a novice. Their Sunday afternoon walks that summer had already seen much tumbling and fumbling in the ferns, sprigs of which they would later scrupulously pluck from each other's hair. Katie (or so Diane believed) was a lot more advanced in these matters, claiming to have done things with Henry Littlemore that Diane had difficulty even imagining.

The boys were still locked in discussion ahead of them, when out of the blue Katie asked her if she and David had done it yet.

"Katie! Sshh!"

"Oh, they're not listening. Have you?"

"No, of course not!"

"Why of course not? We have."

"You haven't!"

"Well, more or less."

"I didn't think there was a more or less when it comes to... you know."

Katie dropped her cigarette end and squashed it into the grass with her heel. Far below them a patchwork of hayfields stretched away into the distance, shimmering in the heat. The still air trilled with the song of skylarks.

"I dare you."

Diane laughed.

"Or are you saving yourself for the man you marry?"

The mocking tone made the idea sound so boring and bourgeois that Diane couldn't possibly admit that this was, in fact, precisely what she had in mind.

"It wouldn't be the first time for David," she said instead.

"How do you know? Boys always lie and pretend they've done it."

"I believe him. He did it last summer in Kenya. With a native girl."

"Crikey."

"I know."

"I dare you."

The odd thing was, Diane wasn't one of those slightly unhinged girls (of which, at Elmshurst, there were several) who found it hard to resist a dare. She would always weigh the fun against the consequences of being caught. But that afternoon, for some reason, she didn't. And half an hour later, when they'd reached a suitably deserted spot and gone their separate ways, each couple wandering off to make its own discreet nest among the ferns, Diane found herself lying on her back while this virtual stranger rummaged inside her clothes and kissed her nipples and slid a hand slowly up her thigh.

That was when she should have stopped him. But she didn't. She even helped him pull down her sensible school underpants then watched while he fumbled with his buttons and pulled down his own. She'd seen artistic depictions of penises, of course, but not one in earnest and the sight was so comical she almost giggled. His face was clouded and flushed and he wouldn't look her in the eye, just lowered himself upon her and, tentatively, as if at any moment he expected to be scolded, found his way into her.

She'd been told that it would hurt but it wasn't as bad as she had expected. The pushing was more painful than the sudden fleshy shock as she gave way. And it was over almost as soon as it had begun. He gasped and twitched and she felt the spurt of him inside and then he rolled off and flopped beside her on the crushed ferns. And he looked so worried and wretched and ashamed that she smiled and stroked his face and gave him a little kiss on his forehead. And then she lay there, gazing at the motionless clouds and listening to the incessant twitter of the skylarks and wondered why this curiously disappointing act was invested with such mystique and importance.

It was almost three months before she knew the answer. Her mother, never overly tolerant with illness of any kind (except, of course, her own) clearly suspected her daughter's morning bouts of nausea were part of a cunning plot to delay going back to school. And only in September, when the family doctor was at last summoned to deal with what they all, Diane included, believed to be an unusually persistent strain of gastric 'flu, did reality finally dawn.

Dr Henderson was a Scotsman with gingery bristles sprouting from his nose and ears and a pair of half-moon glasses which made him seem in a state of permanent surprise. He played golf with Diane's father and belonged to the same Masonic Lodge. He sat that morning on her bed and made her stick out her tongue, then told her to cough while he held the cold plate of his stethoscope to her chest and her back. Finally, in answer to some increasingly intimate questions that seemed to embarrass him rather more than her, Diane disclosed that she had missed two periods, a fact to which she had perhaps surprisingly attached little significance. Dr Henderson made a strange guttural sound, as if he had swallowed a fish bone, and left the room to confer with her mother. And a few moments later, the more or less comfortable world of the Bedford family exploded.

With the help of Dr Henderson's red leather pocket diary, while her mother wailed the scandalous news to her father over the phone downstairs, Diane was able to pinpoint the Sunday afternoon when her morals had so shockingly deserted her. Dr Henderson made the interesting observation that this was the very same day that North Korea had invaded the South, an event that still looked likely to provoke a third world war, for which Diane would no doubt also be held responsible.

Tests confirmed the venerable doctor's diagnosis and there was so much hysteria during the following days and weeks that Diane's recollection of them, a decade later, was little more than a series of blurred images. Her mother crying uncontrollably in the kitchen, pouring yet another gin and tonic, howling on about the shame of it all, the shame; her father hunched over the telephone every evening, conducting hushed conversations, making arrangements of which Diane as yet had no inkling, then retreating to his workshop to piece together the porcelain fragments of someone else's shattered happiness.

Diane had, some time ago, gathered that her parents had tried for years for another child, and she wondered if her mother's self-pitying rage was somehow tinged with jealousy that her daughter had succeeded where she had failed. Whether or not this was so, she left Diane in no doubt about what now must happen. Auntie Vera had a friend, she said, who knew a man in Birmingham who dealt with things like this. It took Diane a little while to understand what her mother meant by this, but when she did, she was outraged. She never had the remotest doubt that the baby would be born and her intransigence on the issue surprised even herself.

Her mother begged and bullied her to reveal who the baby's father was, but made the tactical error of saying that what he'd done, to a girl of only fifteen, was against the law and that men went to prison for such things. Diane had a vision of David behind bars in striped fatigues, a ball and chain shackled to his ankle. She wasn't going to do that to him. In any case, she didn't want him to find out. It had been her decision to allow him to do to her what he had, so it was her responsibility to cope with the consequences. Had anyone dared suggest that in some sly corner of her mind, she saw motherhood as a means of escaping the prison of Elmshurst, she would have reacted with fierce indignation. The idea had not, however, entirely passed her by.

With abortion deleted from the list of options, attention moved on to another A word: the baby would be given up for adoption. But Diane announced that she wasn't going to let that happen either. At which point her mother lost what sliver of patience she'd managed to retain. Auntie Vera was summoned to talk some sense into the girl.

Auntie Vera wasn't family. The Bedfords had no family. Both sets of grandparents were dead and Diane's father was an only child. Her mother had a somewhat dissolute brother called Ted who had emigrated to Australia before the war and all but disappeared. Once every four or five years a postcard would arrive from some new and unpronounceable place to prove he was still alive. Vera Dutton was simply her mother's best friend. They had once worked in the same typing pool and shared a more or less misanthropic view of the world as well as a penchant for gin. Every Tuesday afternoon they played whist with two other friends and on Fridays went into Birmingham to do some shopping and have their perms tweaked. Auntie Vera was even shorter than Diane's mother and always wore pale blue and a thick layer of orange-tinted make-up. She had no children of her own and was married to a bank manager called Reggie who was almost as irritating and snobbish as she was. Apart from Dr Henderson, Auntie Vera was the only outsider who knew about the Bedfords' new and shaming secret.

"Your mother's so worried, dear," she said.

They were sitting, just the two of them, on the little white wooden bench under the cherry tree on the front lawn, sipping tea from willow-patterned china cups, the ones that were only brought out for special occasions. Diane's mother was pretending to be busy in the kitchen.

"I know."

"She only wants what's best for you, you know."

"I know."

"And they'll find it a lovely home—"

"It?"

"The baby. A family who really want it."

"I really want it."

"You may think you do now, dear. But you're only young."

"And too stupid to know what I want."

Auntie Vera's face hardened.

"You know perfectly well that wasn't what I meant."

She stared into the distance in an irritated way and took a long puff at her cigarette. When she blinked, Diane noticed that her eyelids were painted the same powder blue as her dress.

"Is this boy going to marry you?"

Diane laughed and this seemed to annoy Auntie Vera even more.

"Of course not."

"It doesn't concern you what people will say?"

"No, not really."

"You won't mind them calling your baby a bastard?"

Diane wasn't going to give the woman the satisfaction of seeing that, at last, this had touched a nerve. She simply shook her head, trying to look nonchalant.