The thing is, my ‘journalist’s brain’， if that’s what you call it, isn’t always to be trusted. Far too many times it has decided that some man or other is in love with Emma. The current suspects are Kelvin and Dr Moru, neither of whom I’m concerned about, but there have been others.
It started when she’d been presenting This Land, and I’d found a chat forum full of men talking about her. I’ve always known Emma’s sensational, but it was something else to hear other men talking about her in that way.
When I told her about it she went large on my ‘adoption issues’。 Apparently I’d had a terror of being abandoned from the moment I lost my birth mother, and now – according to Dr Emma Bigelow – I was projecting the very same abandonment fear onto her. ‘I am not going to leave you,’ she kept saying, as if I’d told her I feared she would.
I didn’t desire further amateur psychoanalysis, so I never brought it up again. When I see men looking at her nowadays, I pretend it’s not happening.
But she’s right: I don’t like it. Just last week, on the way back from the Tom Jones concert, there was a man in a baseball cap staring at her while we waited at a zebra crossing. Just staring, as if she wasn’t quite obviously with her husband and child.
She was looking down the hill and didn’t notice him, but it took everything I had not to walk up and kick him in the balls.
But this business with Jeremy Rothschild: it’s not some freak eyeing her up on the street; it’s real. And I don’t know what to do.
If she can so easily lie about her degree, about Mags Tenterden and the many other things in her folder that made no sense, who’s to say she couldn’t have had an affair with a man she’s never even told me she knows?
I bought three miniature bottles of aeroplane wine and passed out just as we came in to land.
Emma called soon after, but I didn’t pick up. It was still light and the air was warmer than it had been in Glasgow; everyone disembarking the plane seemed happy – perhaps the miracle of a budget airline landing on time. I smiled at them in the baggage queue, as if I was happy too, rather than mildly drunk and miserable. I took a taxi all the way to my parents’ in Hitchin and shared funny stories with the driver about family life. I could see myself in the mirror, looking like a man who had his shit together. Crew neck jumper, recent haircut, stylish luggage which Olly and Tink got me for my fortieth.
Emma texted as we turned into my parents’ road. The sun disappeared after breakfast so we went to Alnwick Castle. Ruby more interested in gift shop. Flight was fine, just landed at Heathrow. Call me! xxxxxx
Everything is OK, I repeat to myself now, even though it’s not. I spot a glorious sunset through the landing window as I follow Mum up to see Dad; orange and blood red layered on tired grey, with streaks of pink straight from an eighties disco. The bell of the local church strikes the hour and somewhere a family is barbecuing.
When I arrive in their room, Dad’s trying to prop himself up in bed. ‘Oh, Leo,’ he says, gesturing in frustration, or perhaps resignation. He refuses analgesia on the grounds that he’d ‘rather know’， but tonight he’s surrounded by painkillers and he looks frayed. ‘I’m seventy-one and I feel like I’m a hundred. To hell with this.’
‘To hell,’ I agree, sitting down. We don’t hug these days. He’s lost weight, I notice, although he did have a fair bit to spare. My father is one of those men who pretends he is extremely proud of his overeating; patting his belly like a friend, boasting that he eats more in one meal than most small families eat in a week. Emma says that Dad’s feelings are stored in his stomach.
Mum hands him a bowl of crumble, which he eats so fast I can’t imagine he’s tasting it. ‘Making up for lost time,’ he says, laughing and coughing. On cue he pats his belly, a still substantial mound under the duvet, and looks at Mum for comment, but she’s hanging up his newly washed dressing gown.