The one problem with this, the one thing that didn’t fit, was the simple fact that there was a part of his life he was hiding. He’d been hiding it for many years, and he’d never had a problem with it until now. Well, he thought, as he strode back across town past the huge houses on their tiny lots, maybe “hiding” was the wrong word. He wasn’t actively hiding it as much as he was just not talking about it. He wasn’t ashamed of it. He wouldn’t have been embarrassed if his secret had become public. These days, there wouldn’t even be any real consequences if it did. It was just that he had spent so long—nearly thirty years now—saying nothing on this particular subject, it no longer occurred to him to mention it even when he should.
He had told Gregor Demarkian that he was going to check up on Annabeth, and he was, eventually, but right now he was heading for his own rented house. It was a very nice house, since the production was renting it for him, and he didn’t need to spend his own money. It was not, however, on the beach, because Stewart didn’t like the number of hurricanes that hit the Atlantic coast of America during the season, and when they had first begun filming it was still the middle of hurricane season. This was a little overcautious. Hurricanes rarely came this far up. The ones that made it north of North Carolina tended to peter out in Connecticut. Still, he hadn’t liked the idea of them. He’d asked for an interior house and gotten one, on a good acre plot, so that he didn’t have to know what his neighbors were watching on television every single night.
He let himself in through his back door, took off his watch cap and threw it over one of the coat pegs in the back hall, and headed to the back of the house and his bedroom. It was too hot in here. Central heating in America was so good that it was impossible to find a decent temperature to live at. You were either freezing or boiling, and he preferred to be boiling. He took off his peacoat and dumped it on the bed. Then he took off his gloves and sat down.
The pictures were in the drawer of the little table with the lamp on it. He kept them there so that he could take them out and look at them, which he liked to do. Someday this whole thing was going to come out and people were going to say that he had abandoned his children, that he had erased them from his life and pretended they didn’t exist. This was not true. He had three children, all of them by the same woman, the first woman he had ever slept with and the only woman he had ever married. He had been seventeen when he’d gotten her pregnant, and due to start at university. They had married quietly and spent the next three years trying to negotiate his life as a student and hers as an almost-single mother. He would pack up his books and notes and go to the house she had rented in the nearest town and sit with Colin while she went to work as a barmaid. Then Andrew had come along, and Caroline, and the next thing he’d known, they were all living in London, in the worst sort of area, and he was trying to find his way as an actor.
It was the first American offer that had made him think about the name, and made Connie think about it too. They were divorced by then, but Stewart was anything but an absentee father. They lived only a few streets away from each other, and he came to play with the children three or four times a week. He also paid for things, because by then his acting career was actually getting off the ground. He had something significant to do in the West End almost every season, and enough television work to make him think about buying a house for Connie and the children. It didn’t occur to him to want a house for himself. It would have seemed like too much space. Then the offer had come, and he had sat at Connie’s kitchen table for an hour, turning over its ramifications as if he were studying it for a laboratory. The money had been terrific, and not for a starring role, but it wasn’t the money that had bothered him.
He got the pictures out and spread them across the bed. There were three of each of the children, the first ones as children, the second at the age when they had left secondary school, the third more recent. They were all grown now, with families and professions, and they all liked him, as far as he could tell. He had nothing to be ashamed of in his children, except maybe that nobody on earth knew they were his children, outside the very restricted circle of themselves. Hell, every once in a while he indulged in that thing where he looked himself up on celebrity “info” sites, and most of them didn’t even register the fact that he had once been married.
He thought about using the cell phone and decided against it. International calls were not always clear on cell phones. He picked up the landline and then had to go to his cell to find the number. These digital storage devices were hell on the memory. You didn’t have to remember, so you didn’t bother. He got the number and punched it into the landline and waited. The phone rang three times before it was picked up, and then Caroline sounded wary. She was a psychologist. God only knew what might have gone wrong with her day today.