‘Have you been good for Gina?’ she asked him.
He nodded solemnly, eyes twinkling, and Briony’s heart contracted on a wave of love. He had wound his way so tenaciously into her heart and life, this child whom she had borne in such pain and despair, without realising that her love for him would far outweigh the circumstances of his birth.
‘Go and get your toys for Mummy,’ Gina instructed him, closing the living room door behind him as he toddled off obediently. Italian parents adored their children and spoiled them lavishly, and yet they were also wise in teaching them good manners and obedience. Briony too was firm about not giving in to the impulse to over-compensate for her absences by too much indulgence, and already Nicky knew what was and was not permissible.
He was an attractive child, with soft dimples and a roguish smile, his dark curly hair making him easily mistakable for Gina’s own child. Briony never made any attempt to hide her unmarried state. She was proud of her son and loved him dearly, but she also wanted him to grow up in truth.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asked Gina anxiously as she closed the door.
‘Nothing really. It was just that while we were in the Park today Nicky started asking about his father. He’s very intelligent, you know, Briony. He sees that Caterina has a mummy and daddy and constantly he asks me what has happened to his daddy.’ She saw the look of anguish in Briony’s eyes and mistaking its cause said gently, ‘Can it really be that his father does not want him? Surely.…’
‘His father doesn’t even know he exists,’ Briony told her harshly, taking a deep breath. ‘Oh, Gina, please don’t ask me about him. Not tonight of all nights. I just couldn’t bear it.…’
‘For Nicky’s sake you must,’ Gina said gently. ‘You cannot fob him off for ever. Soon he will be old enough for play school, and children can be so unkind.…’
‘One-parent families are nothing unusual these days,’ Briony defended, ‘and surely Nicky is better off with me than with two parents who fight continuously, or worse—’
Watching her compassionately, Gina said softly, ‘He is a sensitive child, and when he asks about his daddy there is such a puzzled, hurt look in his eyes that my heart fails me. Today he asked me if his daddy didn’t want him.’ She spread her hands wide in a gesture of dismay. ‘What could I say? Fortunately I managed to distract his attention, but he is growing all the time. He is two; soon he will be three.…What are you going to tell him?’
‘What can I tell him?’ Briony asked bitterly. ‘He was conceived entirely by accident, and my…affair with his father was long over by the time I discovered I was expecting a child.’ Her lips twisted bitterly. ‘How do you tell a child that his father doesn’t care a row of beans for his existence, which is the truth?’ They heard the door opening and Nicky ran towards them clutching a huge teddy bear and a bag of plastic bricks.
‘Say goodnight to Gina,’ Briony instructed him.
Later, when she was tucking him up in bed, she inspected his features carefully. He showed his fathering, this child born out of what she had thought a night of perfect love and which instead had been an act of ruthless and deliberate expediency. He had nothing of her in him, unless it was his temperament. In looks he was all Kieron; his father in exact miniature from his dark blue eyes to his thick glossy hair.
When she first discovered she was pregnant she had been out of work and depressed. She had fainted twice in one week and put it down to nervous strain until, despite the fact that she had barely been eating, she discovered that her skirt wouldn’t fasten round her waist. She had known the truth then, but refused to accept it, confirmation finally coming in the shabby, impersonal interview room of a pregnancy advice bureau. They had been kind and helpful, offering to arrange for a termination of her pregnancy, despite its advanced state. They had probably considered that she wasn’t capable of bringing up a child, she thought wryly. She had been practically hysterical with all that she had endured from the Press and police, and the information that she was expecting Kieron’s child could have been the final straw which tipped her into insanity.
When it came to the point, though, she could not go through with it. As though bearing her child was some means of punishing herself for being so easily taken in by Kieron, she forced herself to accept it.
When he had been born, after a night of pain and anguish, she had not even wanted to look at him, but the midwife, experienced in the ways and mysteries of birth, had placed him in her arms, and from that moment she had been lost.