Tangled Lives by Hilary Boyd Page A

think there was a perfectly good couple who’d chosen to give him away. She looked her son straight in the eye. ‘We were never in a relationship. It was one night. He wasn’t interested after that.’
    Daniel glanced away. ‘But you … liked him? At the time?’
    ‘At the time, yes, I suppose I did.’ She didn’t want to say that she had quickly made up her mind that Charles was an arrogant prat – good-looking and rich, the perfect profile of the man her mother had brought her up to desire. She had been naïve and inexperienced; he had taken advantage. That’s what she had told herself. But she had to admit that it hadn’t been entirely one-sided.
    ‘Are you in touch now?’
    She shook her head. ‘We never spoke again.’ How bleak to have this as the beginning of your life. No love, no friendship, no connection at all. Just a hasty, fumbled lust.
    ‘So he really didn’t want anything to do with me?’
    ‘No, it wasn’t like that. I never told him. He doesn’t know about you to this day. Almost no one does.’
    Daniel turned away from her, but not before Annie had caught the surprise on his face.
    ‘Wow! That bad. So he might not even be alive.’
    She kicked herself for her insensitivity. Did he really have to know that his very existence was like a dirty secret? He must now be wondering if things would have been different if she’d chosen to tell his father – a question she’d asked herself endlessly.
    ‘I think my mother would have heard via the grapevine if something had happened to him,’ she told him. ‘His family knew my mother quite well, not friends exactly …’ She paused. ‘My mother ran a finishing school for girls in Knightsbridge: the Westbury Academy. His sister was one of her pupils. He came with her to theend-of-year dance and that’s where I met him.’ For a moment she had a flash of what had been, for her, a magical night. But her past seemed so shallow and redundant in the telling. A finishing school? Knightsbridge? Hardly the profile of a disadvantaged single mother driven by economic circumstances to give her baby away.
    ‘What was his name?’ Even Daniel spoke about him in the past, as if he no longer existed.
    The name stuck in her throat. ‘Charles Carnegie.’
    There was a knock at the door and Marjory peered in.
    ‘All OK in here?’
    Annie turned. Her face felt flushed by the heat of the fire. ‘Yes … yes, fine, thank you. We won’t be long.’
    Marjory waved her hands expansively. ‘Take as long as you like.’ She eyed the fire, then Daniel. ‘Put another log on, would you, dear? I don’t want it going out now it’s lit.’
    Daniel jumped up immediately and took a couple of logs from the wicker basket by the fire, riddling the glowing ashes with the poker before efficiently tenting the two pieces of wood for maximum draw.
    ‘I was thinking a glass of wine might be appropriate?’ Marjory suggested, nodding her approval at Daniel’s work.
    Annie longed for one, but Daniel hesitated. ‘I’ve got to drive, but perhaps a small one.’ He grinned at Marjory.
    ‘Right, well, I’ll leave you to it. Come through when you’re ready.’ The door closed quietly behind her.
    Annie wanted to say something personal, acknowledge him somehow as her son, but she didn’t know how.
    ‘Why did you choose to find me now?’ she asked instead.
    Daniel shifted awkwardly in his chair at the question. ‘My mother died, a couple of years ago.’
    His mother. Annie felt her heart contract. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
    ‘It was sudden, a stroke. She lived for twenty-four hours, then … I wouldn’t have looked for you while Mum was alive. It might have upset her.’
    ‘She was a good mother, then?’ Her emotions as she spoke were too complicated for her to analyse. How conflicted would I be if he said, No, she was a terrible mother, I had a hellish childhood?
    Daniel nodded. ‘Wonderful.’
    ‘And your father?’
    ‘Dad? He’s a … how would I describe him?’