And that might’ve been that. He would’ve kicked off a bit, but really what could he do? My existence was a potential grenade in his life and I couldn’t see that changing. He would never tell his wife or daughter about me. And I didn’t want him to. Better to shake hands and go our separate ways – I felt confident that he’d see that eventually.
But that night Simon’s parents were killed in a car crash. I found out when he called me sobbing the next morning. I had the letter in my bag, ready to send on my way to the office. Instead I found myself leaving work （I pleaded a family emergency, which wasn’t a total lie） and heading for Simon’s house in Hampstead. His wife and daughter were in Monaco, he had said. Could I come over? I’m not a monster, I couldn’t leave the man crying alone. So I sat in his lurid mansion as a small Vietnamese woman served us iced tea and offered up an endless amount of biscuits. The biscuits sat uneaten, even though I was starving. The iced tea was rejected in favour of a bottle of whisky that Simon kept reaching for, topping up a gold glass on the floor by his feet. Simon himself sat slumped on a sofa surrounded by huge tasselled cushions that threatened to envelop him. I positioned myself across from him, perched on a large pouffe, wishing fervently that I was almost anywhere else on earth.
In between phone calls to his brother, a lawyer, and his assistant, he talked in my general direction about how Kathleen and Jeremy were ‘diamonds’。 I offered him up some words of condolence, and told him I knew how hard it was to lose a parent. He didn’t much like that, slurring that I was trying to make him feel bad about not taking on his responsibilities. So then I apologised, trying to downplay my own loss and then being annoyed with myself for doing it.
The day dragged on, and I was mainly left on my own in the sitting room as Simon took more phone calls and drank more whisky. At 4 p.m., he muttered something about Bryony being on her way home, which I gratefully took as my cue to leave. As I made obvious moves towards the door, Simon grabbed my arm and pulled me down onto a peach chaise longue in the hallway. And then, in a slightly garbled and not entirely coherent way, he told me something which changed the course of my life. He told me about you, Grace.
Until that moment, I don’t think I’d really examined the idea of having a whole other family. Simon was a means to an end – I had my family and I didn’t have any desire to know Bryony or her ghastly mother. I didn’t want much to do with the way they lived and I suspected that they’d feel the same about me, had they had any idea of my existence. But you were different. You were an outsider, someone who had no choice in the matter either. And as Simon rambled about how he’d failed to live up to the standards set by his own parents, I saw the similarities in our stories. Both born to young and silly women dazzled by this big man, and then cast aside when he was bored and it became inconvenient. Though I do think that two illegitimate kids by two different women stretches the word ‘inconvenient’ somewhat.
I don’t know why he told me about you, Grace. He was drunk, but he must’ve been drunk a thousand times and not told people about his secret daughter. I can only suppose it was the grief. It’s supposed to do funny things to people, isn’t it? Like my old aunt Jean, toeing the party line on my parentage for twenty-three years and blurting it out at a funeral as though she couldn’t hold it in any longer. He told me that he was young, that his parents had told him to sort the problem and that he’d been afraid of losing everything. It was all bollocks, of course. A real gentleman wouldn’t abandon one child, let alone two, but I couldn’t say that while he sat there drunk and weeping. I just told him he’d done what he thought was best while I asked questions about you as gently as I could.
In his slightly broken state, his guard was down just enough to give me enough to go on. I’ll be frank with you. He didn’t know much. His sadness about it all was pretty performative and I don’t imagine he’d kept up with your life. I hope that doesn’t upset you. From what I know of you, I imagine it won’t. He knew your name, and where you’d grown up. He even knew that you worked in fashion, which meant that ‘the apple didn’t fall far from the old tree’ apparently. I stayed poker-faced, not showing that this information meant a thing to me, and I extricated myself half an hour later, at which point he was on the phone shouting at his brother about the family house in St John’s Wood. He’d forgotten everything we’d discussed.
But I hadn’t. I spent the next two hours in a pub trying to find out as much as I could about you from Google. I must say, Grace, you’ve got a remarkably minimal online presence. It’s so small as to make one suspicious actually. It’s almost as if you’re trying to hide from the world. Still, you can’t avoid it entirely, can you? There’s always going to be a footprint, even if you have sworn off social media and seemingly never so much as looked at LinkedIn. Well done you for that, by the way, it’s a cesspit of braying estate agents and other bullshit merchants.