her to know what he’d done. I wanted her to know that I existed.’
‘And she stayed with him despite knowing?’
‘It’s what people did back then.’
‘And that was that? No contact, nothing all those years?’
Angela lifted the end of her dressing gown and crossed the room to where Joanna’s photographs lay scattered on the floor.
‘He wasn’t … he wasn’t a bad person, Joanna. He was young, arrogant, I suppose, yes, but his intent, it wasn’t malicious. He cared for me, I know that – but he couldn’t leave her, it would have meant losing too much.’
‘What do you mean? People do it – they do it all the time. They simply decide what’s most important to them – and clearly we weren’t.’
Angela shook her head. ‘It wasn’t that straightforward. Rachel’s father was the head of the newspaper. He was the one that gave Vince his chance.’ She paused, looked up from the pictures. ‘He was a journalist – covered all the sports events. He took pictures, too. So, you see, you have inherited something from him.’
‘But you must have hated him – he chose Rachel … she was his wife, yes, but it didn’t mean he couldn’t have been some part of our lives, of mine. Did he even send you money?’
‘Sometimes. Cheques arrived – no note – nothing to ask me how I was doing, how you were. It was one of the conditions, you see.’
‘What conditions?’
‘Rachel told Vince that he would cut all contact – that it would have to be as though he and I had never met – it was that or she’d tell her father – and Vince could say goodbye to his career.’
‘What – and he was okay with that?’
Angela shrugged. ‘It was the choice he made. And now you know – I’m sorry you had to find out like this. I really am. I just hope you can understand, even a little bit, why I didn’t tell you. Protecting you was all I ever had in mind.’
Angela had crossed the room. She put her hand on Joanna’s arm, but she pulled away.
‘I can’t believe you expect me to accept this,’ she said. ‘Twenty-six years, Mum! And what’s worse, if that woman hadn’t come here tonight, you’d never have said anything, would you?’
‘Joanna, keep your voice down. The neighbours—’
‘Who cares about the neighbours? Who cares? This can never be fixed – don’t you understand that? You’ve robbed me of any chance to know my father.’
‘I’m sorry, Joanna. I know how this must seem to you now, but—’
‘It’s unlikely it’ll seem any other way, so don’t expect it to. I don’t care what kind of person Vince Arnold was – and he doesn’t sound like much of one – I should have had the opportunity to find that out for myself.’
They stood staring at each other.
‘I’m sorry,’ Angela said, again. ‘What else can I say?’
‘Nothing,’ Joanna told her. ‘Nothing you can say will put this right.’
Oliver leaned forward at his desk and tried to focus on what the woman was saying. Her mouth was moving, but he couldn’t concentrate on the words that were coming out; instead, he was hearing fragmented bits of speech floating on the air thick between them. The woman sat back and crossed her black-stockinged legs. The action caused him to shift his gaze momentarily from her face. She was not beautiful, but she gave the impression of a woman convinced by her own attributes. Her small face, framed by a thatch of dark hair, was too pointed at the chin, and her narrowed blue eyes gave her the look of a small, but fierce animal. It was her full lips, startlingly red against her pale skin, that captured his attention. And there was something else, too, something that despite their physical dissimilarities reminded him of Mercedes. He couldn’t quite figure what it was, but it bothered him.
‘So, what are my entitlements? I’m still his wife, so that must mean I’m entitled to half of this new house despite the separation? I mean, I’m not the one that walked out on the marriage.’
If he hadn’t been feeling so ill, he may have commented on that. The fact that this woman had had an affair with her husband’s friend – a lover who, from what he had gathered, had long since departed the scene – seemed to escape her memory.
Oliver pulled at his tie. She was staring at him, waiting for an answer, but the air in the room seemed to have evaporated and a nauseous feeling was rising from the pit of his stomach. Something in the atmosphere, maybe the woman’s perfume, seemed to exacerbate it, and when he looked again at her expectant face he found that it was partially obscured by splotches of yellow light.
‘I’m sorry, but could you excuse me for a moment?’ he said.
He felt rather than saw her eyes follow him from the room.
In the men’s room the nauseous feeling overcame him and he leaned on the sink with both hands and retched acid-tasting bile. Perspiration broke out on his forehead, and he loosened the knot of his tie and tried to breathe, but he couldn’t calm the frantic beating of his heart. The woman who sat in his office was nothing like Mercedes. And yet in every woman that he’d met since that terrible night he had seen something to remind him of her. It would have to stop.
He examined his face in the mirror. Beneath the fluorescent light his skin was opaque and the dark circles beneath his eyes screamed of his sleepless nights. He turned on the cold tap, cupped his hands and doused his face several times in icy water. Eventually his heart resumed its regular beat, but his legs felt weak and he couldn’t still the trembling in his hands. It was the panic that he felt in his dreams, but in daylight it was far more frightening.
To distract himself, he thought of the woman who sat in his office awaiting his return. It was a divorce case that he’d been working on for the past year. She was the sort of woman that he despised, intent on taking her husband for everything she could get, but he couldn’t afford not to represent her. Business had been slow, and it was an easy case to win.
He took a deep breath, grabbed a bunch of paper towels from the dispenser and blotted his face dry. The woman was his last client of the day. He would simply have to get through it.
‘I’m sorry about that. Haven’t been feeling very well all day,’ he said. His legs were still shaking as he sat back down in his leather chair. The woman leaned forward at his desk.
‘So,’ she said, ‘what are my rights here?’
If it was sympathy he’d been after, he’d miscalculated. The woman, who seemed to have forgotten that it was her infidelity that had instigated her husband’s divorce proceedings, was interested only in money. It pained him that the law, albeit to his advantage, was on this woman’s side. He gave her a long, silent look in which he hoped his distaste was evident and then, putting his personal feelings aside, forced himself to enter legal mode.
When the woman had left, he closed and locked the door behind her. His partner, who worked in an adjoining office, had gone to the courts and wouldn’t return that evening. Oliver sat down but, not feeling like working, he picked up the newspaper from his desk. He’d read it briefly that morning. The body in the canal had made the front page. The man, named as Vince Arnold, had worked as a sports journalist for one of the national papers. Arnold. It wasn’t such a common name. He’d known an Arnold once – sat his bar exams with him at the King’s Inns. He wondered if there was any connection. Putting the paper down, he typed the man’s name into Google. The obituary came up. Oliver clicked on it, read: ‘Sadly missed by his wife, Rachel, brother, Patrick …’ Patrick Arnold, that was it. The name of the guy he’d studied with.