The Last Witness

already what it would say. But even with what fight I’d put up, or perhaps fearing that I’d change my mind again in a few months — my father vowed that he’d bury him out of reach and out of sight. I’d never find him.’ She traced one finger absently across the tablecloth. ‘And looks like he was right. I never could win the day against my father… and now it’s much the same with Ryall. Powerful men: blight of my life.’ Elena grimaced tightly and looked down for a second before looking back directly at Gordon. ‘But at least you know now why there was such antipathy between me and my father. Why I rebelled against him so all those years.’

Silence as she finished, crushing silence: she could practically hear Gordon swallow as he tried to summon his thoughts and some composure to be able to meet her gaze with equal steadiness.

After a moment, she added thoughtfully: ‘I suppose there might have been some sort of tame reconciliation later if it wasn’t for Andreos’s suicide. I blamed my father mostly for that too — always pushing towards this perfect picture of what he thought everyone should be doing with their lives. But nothing was ever good enough for him.’ She bit at her bottom lip and lightly shook her head. ‘After all, who could live up to the great Anthony George?’

Gordon merely nodded, the stifling silence returning. ‘You could have told me,’ he said at length. ‘I’d have understood.’

‘Could I… could I?’ She saw him flinch under the feverish intensity of her stare and look slightly away again, suddenly not so sure. ‘This wasn’t just about you not knowing, Gordon, it was about everyone not knowing — but most especially me. Because if I had to admit what had happened to anyone, I’d have also had to admit it to myself. And before you know it, I’d have been back in the bathroom, swallowing another bottle of pills. And so I buried it: buried the thought, buried the memory, buried everything. It never happened.’

She rubbed her left temple, her brow furrowing heavily. ‘The years in Marrakech and in hippie communes weren’t just to seriously piss-off my father — it was all part of the oblivion, the forgetting. Then eleven years later I woke up in a Camden Town squat laying partly in somebody else’s vomit, having lost a flatmate just the month before from an OD, and trying to fight my way through an LSD haze to work out if the pattern on the wall ahead was wallpaper or just in my mind — and finally said enough. Enough! I realized then that I was punishing myself more than my father — he’d probably given up caring long ago. And meanwhile I wasn’t making good on what I’d done: no amends were being made. That’s when I cleaned up my act and started working with Uncle Christos. Then a few years later we met, married and started adopting — which was how I felt I could possibly make amends.’

‘Uncle Christos to the rescue again.’ Gordon raised his glass, but it lacked any exuberance: the mire of abortions, attempted suicides, lost children and lost years, clung too heavy in the air for even a trace of a smile. ‘Was it always him that helped you?’ Gordon remembered her telling him that during the years in the hippie wilderness, Uncle Christos sent bits and pieces of money. Her father had set up a trust fund for her, but she refused to touch it on principle — so Uncle Christos had stepped in.

‘Yes, pretty much. You know, my father was annoyed even that I wanted to name the baby Christos. He protested: 'You only name children after dead relatives”.’ A fleeting wry grin curled her mouth. ‘There was always this rivalry between them, mostly coming from my father's side: 'If Christos had done this, if Christos had done that — he could have been as successful as me.' But my father seemed to have missed the point completely. Uncle Christos was too laid-back to be bothered to compete. He didn't want to be a big shot like my father, didn't have the first inclination to be ruthless or determined like him. And when I saw those qualities as endearing, started to see Uncle Christos as an alternate father — that incensed my father even further. He couldn't stomach it — or maybe he truly couldn't comprehend it — but he used to rub the salt in all the more about Uncle Christos being a failure.'

She looked at her glass and tapped its rim, as if prompting where she was with has story. ‘So making amends became the thing. We adopted, named him Christos, and though for a while everything was fine — it still wasn’t enough. So when he was old enough, I joined the agency… to see how many children I could make happy after the child's life I might have destroyed — my own child.’ Elena gripped the stem of her glass tight. Here eyes were watering heavily again.

Gordon wanted to reach across to grip her hand, assure her that everything was all right. He understood. But her other hand was clenched tight into her, and with her still caught up in the throes of her confession, her body trembling slightly, his reaching all the way across would have felt like he was imposing, invading her space. He felt frustrated, inadequate. A decade of secrets stripped away between them, and he couldn't reach across to bridge that final gap of the table-top.

Elena shrugged helplessly. ‘But still it wasn't enough. I had to save one of those children myself… so we adopted young Katine. Still something missing, a need there — and the only thing that helped fill it was each child I saw successfully placed with a happy family. Because each one told me that the son I'd given up had probably gone to a good family somewhere: he’d been happy, had had a good life. And I was doing fine…’ Elena smiled crookedly. She was suddenly reminded of a line from an old Bill Cosby LP. ‘I was doin’ fine… only then my eyeballs started bleeding.’ The thought seemed so ridiculously out of place that she burst out with a nervous laugh; but it went awry, became a half-laugh, half-cry, her muttered ‘Until…’ on a fractured breath barely out before her face contorted, the build-up of her emotions finally too much. Her shoulders sagged as if a sack had been laid across them and her head dipped as she sank into uncontrollable sobbing.

That brought Gordon around to hug and console her, though still he felt inadequate: it had taken the final submission of his wife’s tears for him to be able to cross that last distance between them: it wasn’t that noble.

He hugged her a moment more, trying to savour that now, finally, there were no more secrets between them; but apart from the gentle quaking of her body with her crushing emotional distress, it felt no different to all the other times he’d embraced her.

He made fresh coffee for them both — always Gordon’s solution in times of trouble, Elena thought wryly, wiping back her tears: make tea of coffee — poured a Bailey’s for her and a Glenffidich for himself, and she told him the rest: how Ryall with Lorena had finally broken down the wall she’d long built up and set her on her search of the past ten days that now too, like her help mission for Lorena, had hit a dead- end.

‘Until Ryall I’d always told myself that my son was probably in a good home somewhere, happy. And each child I saw successfully placed re-affirmed that. Then with Ryall it hit me that no matter how secure and happy- looking that home might be on the surface, all kinds of horrors can be lurking beneath. And suddenly I had to know. I had to know what kind of life he’d had. Whether he had been happy, or whether I’d abandoned him to a wolves’ den, a living hell.’

Gordon thought of venturing how that might help: if he’d had a bad life, how she’d even begin to make up for it. But that base desire to find a long-lost son he knew rose above all else: rationalising wouldn’t help. And besides, the possibility of ever finding him now looked gone, chapter closed — so in the end all he said was, ‘I understand…’ Then after a moment he shook his head. ‘You know, I should have known… should have at least guessed. All the signs were there.’ The depth of antipathy with her father, the lame story — now in retrospect — of her not being able to have children due to an early horse-riding accident, the aid agency, the adoptions… She’d held up a giant route map in front of his face, and he’d hardly noticed.

‘How could you have known?’ She raised an eyebrow, sensing that he was just saying it to make her feel good, take some of the burden away that she’d held all of this secret throughout their marriage, deceived him. ‘I’d buried it even from myself, so everyone else was a step further removed. They couldn’t get there until I got there first.’ As she saw the acceptance slowly filter through in Gordon’s eyes, she looked away again, fixing blankly, distantly ahead.

Gordon came and snuggled her close again. He felt her breath against the hollow of his neck and slowly closed his eyes. She’d finally got there, and now didn’t know where to head next. The route-map had finished in two dead-ends. And he wished he could think of some bright, snappy answer to buoy her spirits.

Because while the barrier of twelve years of secrets between them had suddenly gone, the son that she would now never be able to find again had as quickly taken its place. While that stayed unresolved, he knew that a part of her would remain distant, out of reach. The barrier would continue, having lifted only briefly for those few moments of her pouring out her heart to him — before crashing back down again. Like some cruel magician’s trick.