This is my father. He makes jokes, he sidesteps awkward conversation. He wrote to me just once, in the six months of silence after I discovered I was adopted. We were just following the advice of the adoption agency, he had written. They said it would be easier for you not to know. It was a different time, I’m sure you can understand.
I couldn’t, actually, and a few weeks later I had replied with a long list of questions he never answered. Nowadays he gives me a slightly longer pat on the shoulder, as if we have passed into a special understanding.
The room settles to silence. Mum’s looking at a picture of Olly and me on a wintery beach somewhere, as toddlers. Olly, who was not adopted （‘our miracle!’） has his hand tucked into Mum’s pocket, while I stand off at a slight distance, watchful. My skin is darker than my brother’s, my hair dark brown to his white blonde. It had never crossed my mind to question this.
My parents have hundreds of pictures from our childhood, in a large box under the stairs. The first time I came back here, after discovering I’d been adopted, I went through the whole thing: alone, in silence, on the floor of my childhood bedroom. It was as if someone had handed me a photographic archive of my alienation. Everything I’d felt, but never understood, was there. My little brother, with his round face and chunky limbs; me, with my angular jaw and slight frame. How could I never have thought to question this? And it wasn’t just the physical differences; my expression in so many photographs betrayed an outsider’s unconscious longing.
I could have understood why every atom of me felt different, I wrote to my parents. I could have had a counsellor when I was still young. But you took that decision out of my hands.
The next day I do what I came to do: I clean the house, I do a supermarket shop, I put on a couple of loads of laundry, and I let Mum sit on the sofa and complain that I’m not allowing her to do anything.
Dad falls asleep after his lunch, and a few minutes later, Mum goes up to join him, ‘Just for forty winks.’ By 12.45 p. m. the house is quiet.
I check in with Sheila, hoping there might be some crisis involving a famous dead person I can bury myself in, but she says everything is fine and I should enjoy my day off.
So I sit alone in my parents’ sitting room and force myself to contemplate the possibility of my wife having an affair with Jeremy Rothschild.
I think about the short shrift Emma has always given Janice Rothschild as an actress. The fact that she never comes to industry parties, even though she loves a good booze-up. Has she been avoiding him?
And then Rothschild complaining about my Janice feature, barring me from writing an advance obituary. Was I getting too close for comfort?
I imagine the actual act of sex between Emma and Jeremy Rothschild, and it makes me want to retch. I don’t believe it. I can’t believe it.
And yet, nothing I’ve taken for fact seems reliable anymore. Here I am in the house of my parents, who are not, biologically, my parents. And now my wife, the woman who pledged to love me until death, turns out to have lied about everything: there are untruths scattered across our relationship like landmines, and I don’t see how I can move through or beyond them.
At 2 p.m. I leave for London. I feel unarmed and vulnerable, as if in a combat zone wearing nothing more than a shirt. This is not how I ever imagined feeling about the family I chose. This is not how I imagined feeling about my wife.
Chapter Twenty-Two
EMMA
Leo doesn’t call until he’s left his parents’ house and boarded the train to London, nearly seventy-two hours since we last talked. It’s the longest we’ve gone without contact in ten years.
‘Hey!’ I say, darting into the water analysis lab. It’s a mistake: there’s a bunch of postgrads around the SediGraph, chatting and laughing at top volume as if they’re at a bloody house party. In desperation, I go into one of the cold stores.