Except it was all a lie.
Throughout that whole day, the thoughts she normally managed to keep at bay came flooding out, unchecked, thoughts she’d believed she’d left behind in childhood. She was useless. Bad. No one in their right mind would trust her, or like her, much less love her. Why had she ever believed she was good at anything?
If Rachel got rid of her, she’d have three months’ money and that would be it. Rachel would call it a ‘restructuring’. Paula already knew that much. Her exact job title would be scrapped, but whoever replaced her – Charlie or Amira, those snakes in the grass – would get a different title that would say much the same thing. Three months’ money. That’s all there would be to show for her decade of loyalty, all those mornings she’d got in early and the evenings she’d worked on long after the others had left. She’d never been ambitious, just imagined living out her working life in the office, the stabilizing centre while everyone else came and went around her.
Now who would employ her? She was fifty-five, and she both looked and felt it. Not one of those ‘stay in shape, fifty-is-the-new-thirty’ types. Everyone wanted the new thing, the latest model. Who would take on a dinosaur who’d been chucked out by her old department like so much rubbish?
‘Are you even listening?’ Amy demanded at dinner after recounting a long story about a customer at the pub where she worked who’d insisted that two separate bottles of wine were corked, only to be met with blank silence from her mother.
‘Sorry,’ Paula said. ‘I’m not feeling myself.’
But if not herself, who even was she?
She didn’t tell Ian about what she’d overheard in the office kitchen. They’d got well beyond the stage where they could give any comfort to each other. Instead, she went to bed early, shutting herself away with only her own destructive thoughts for company. Round and round they went like a washing-machine cycle of self-doubt.
Throughout that long, sleepless night, the pounding in her ears never left her – the noise of all her old insecurities whooshing around in her brain.
33
Anne
It had to happen sooner or later and now it has. Some UK journalist or other. They have no rules over there. There’s nowhere their gutter press won’t go. They uncovered the details of the adoption all those years ago. Traced it back to La Luz City and found a story bigger than they could have ever believed.
The first I heard of it was when the new departmental secretary knocked on the door of my office this morning.
‘Sorry to disturb you, Professor Cater, but there’s a journalist on the phone. He’s asking lots of questions about a Professor Korsky who used to work here.’
‘Do you mean Kowalsky?’
‘Yes, that’s the one. He’s very insistent. Says it’s in connection with some big case in England.’
‘I’ll talk to him. Put him through.’
As I listened to the secretary’s heels clicking on the floor down the corridor, past the framed faculty photographs, I took a deep breath in and then held it, counting in my head, trying to control my thoughts. When the phone started ringing, I expelled the breath in a long, steady exhalation.
‘Professor Cater? This is Derek Walsh from the Sun newspaper in London.’
‘Hello, Mr Walsh. What can I do for you?’ I aimed for warm but professional. If you smile while you’re talking on the phone the listener can hear it in your voice.
He explained about the terrible thing that had happened in London and I pretended it was news to me.
‘We tend to be very insular over here, Mr Walsh.’
He said that didn’t surprise him, having spent a year in Massachusetts as part of his college degree. He sounded touchingly proud of that fact.
‘The thing is,’ he said, and there was no disguising the excitement in his voice, ‘we did some digging and found out about the adoption and then we did some more digging and found there were rather sensational circumstances, and your Professor Kowalsky was the shrink who oversaw the adoption process. Looks like he rubberstamped the whole thing, said there was no lasting damage. So in effect he might be held partly accountable for what happened. Him and his assistant, I forget the name now. Hold on.’
The line clicked a few times as if someone was setting down a handset on a hard surface. I closed my eyes and breathed in slowly. Then came the sound of papers rustling and then the handset clicked back into life.
‘Ah right. Here it is – knew I had it. Yes, Professor Kowalsky’s sidekick was . . .’ a sound like a biro tapping against a page, time slowing to a standstill . . . ‘a Dr Oppenheimer. Ring any bells?’