It takes a while before he settles. I sit back on my heels, looking at him. ‘I don’t think I can do this,’ I admit. ‘I’m not ready, John.’ The only conversation I can have with Emma, now, is to confirm the details of her affair, and to tell her I can’t be with someone who has cheated on me, and I’m not ready for that.
I fight tears as I message Emma to say I need more time. I stick my head out of the shed. There is no movement in the kitchen; they must be upstairs.
That decides it. I give John a kiss, and sprawl heavily over the back wall, into the brambled alley that separates our gardens from those we back on to. Nobody ever uses this narrow lane, and the gate at the end has been locked for years. For the second time in twelve hours, I climb over it, only this time I’m watched by a delivery man, sorting through parcels in the back of an unmarked van.
‘All right?’ I say to him.
‘All right,’ he replies. In the distance, John Keats is barking again.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
LEO
Few newsrooms are empty at the weekend, and ours is no exception. Features is dead, of course, but today the news desk is frenzied, and politics is doing brisk business too. A protest has tipped into violence and skirmishes are breaking out across Westminster. Apparently the Foreign Secretary’s car has got stuck in an angry crowd. I hurry past the busy desks, unwilling to engage.
As I round the corner, I see Sheila at her desk.
‘Oh!’
‘Oh,’ she echoes. She removes her glasses.
It takes me a little while to realise she’s embarrassed. Her computer is switched off and there is a novel in front of her, and it’s ten past ten on Saturday morning. Eventually she places her book on her desk and swivels her chair to face me properly.
‘You look terrible,’ she says. ‘Are you OK?’
I shake my head.
‘Oh, Leo,’ she says quietly, and it comes to me, finally, that she has known all along. Humiliation comes at me like a landslide.
‘How did you know?’
‘The Rothschilds have been friends for years,’ she says. ‘Jeremy and I in particular; he’s always confided in me.’
I remain silent, mostly because I don’t trust myself to speak.
‘I’m sorry, Leo,’ she says. ‘I was never comfortable about you being kept in the dark.’
I’ve never heard tenderness in Sheila’s voice. It fills me with despair.
‘Is that why you kept asking about Emma being at Waterloo Station?’ I demand. ‘You were trying to tell me something?’
She looks down at her book. ‘Not really. I was passing through Waterloo on my way to interview someone, I saw Emma in the middle of the station, all at sixes and sevens, and I wondered what had happened. The next day we all heard about Janice disappearing. I realised that Emma must have just found out from Jeremy when I saw her.’
‘And . . . ?’
‘And, Leo, I felt angry for you. It wasn’t right that you didn’t know about them. That you had no idea just how close to your own life the Rothschilds have been.’ She sighs. ‘I suppose I asked about Emma because I hoped she might finally have come clean. But of course, she clearly hadn’t, and you just thought I was being nosy.’
I slide into someone’s seat: I’m still by the family and community desk, several metres from Sheila. The desk’s occupant has a Post-it reminder: PERSONAL TRAINER 6PM DON’T BE LATE.
‘You should have told me,’ is all I can say.
Sheila spires her fingertips. ‘I would have done, if I could. But I have loyalty to both parties, Leo. I had to promise Jeremy that I would never breathe a word of this to anyone.’