‘The home wasn’t a bad place. They meant well and they did their best. There was no affection because the staff turnover was so high, but I couldn’t have dealt with that anyway. I’d learned enough not to want to get close to people, so I don’t know what I’d have done if anyone had tried to get close to me. Something violent, probably.’
She shook her head in instinctive denial. At one time she might have mistaken him for a violent man, but now she sensed differently.
‘I left when I was sixteen,’ he resumed, ‘and on the last day-’
He stopped, and a shudder went through him.
‘What happened?’ she asked softly.
He didn’t answer at first. Then he said, ‘Give me a minute.’
He rose and walked to the window. She stared at his broad back, wondering how she could ever have thought his size and strength alarming. All she could see now was that he was racked with misery. She went to stand beside him, turning him towards her, and had to fight back tears at what she saw.
He was actually shaking. Something was devastating him, and for a moment she thought he would be unable to speak of it.
At last he said, ‘When I left they had to tell me the whole truth about myself. That was when I learned that my birth mother had given me away almost as soon as I was born.’
Evie stared at him, slowly shaking her head in speechless horror.
His laugh was harsh and bitter.
‘You’ll hardly believe this, but I was left on the orphanage doorstep like some Victorian foundling. If your mother does that, she can’t be traced, you see. She’s got rid of you completely.
‘That was all they knew. I turned up one evening out of the blue. Apparently a doctor said I was about a week old. They did some research into the babies that had been born recently in that area, but none of them was me.’
‘You mean your birth wasn’t even registered?’
‘Not by my mother. The orphanage registered me, of course.’
‘It’s awful,’ she whispered. ‘All this time, not knowing who you really are.’
‘But I do know who I am,’ he said with bitter irony. ‘I’m the son two mothers didn’t want. What could be clearer than that?’
‘I used to wonder why you were so angry and suspicious all the time,’ she said. ‘Now I wonder how you’ve managed to keep your head together.’
‘I’m not sure I have. For a long time I was crazy. I didn’t behave well, either in the home or after I’d left it. I drank too much, brawled, got into trouble with the police, served some time in jail. That brought me back into contact with my adoptive parents.’
‘They came to help you?’ she asked, longing for some redeeming moment in this dreadful story.
‘No, they sent a lawyer to say they’d get me a good defence on condition that I stopped using their name. They had an unusual name, Strassne, and since I still bore it people were beginning to associate this young low-life with them.’
‘So that was when you became Justin Dane?’ she asked. She would have liked to say something more violent, but was controlling herself with a huge effort.
‘No, I became John Davis. My one-time “parents” insisted on doing it by deed poll, so that it was official and they’d never have to acknowledge me again. Then they paid for a very expensive defence, and John Davis was acquitted. They didn’t even attend the trial.’
‘So what happened to John Davis?’
‘He didn’t survive the day. I changed my name to Leo Holman. Not by deed poll. I just took off and gave my name as Leo wherever I went.’
‘Don’t you need some paperwork to get things like passports and bank accounts?’
‘Yes, and if I’d needed those things it would have been a problem, but I wasn’t living in a world of passports and bank accounts. I worked as a handyman, strictly for cash, got into trouble again, went inside-never long sentences, just a couple of months, but every time I came out I changed my name again. I lost track of how often. What did it matter to me? I no longer had a real identity, so it didn’t matter how often I changed it.
‘The last time I was in prison I met a man who put me straight. His name was Bill. He was a prison visitor, but he’d done time himself so he knew what he was talking about. He saw something in me that could be put back on track, and he set himself to do it.
‘When I came out he was there waiting for me. He gave me a room in his own house, so that he could watch me like a hawk to see that I stayed on the straight and narrow. And he made me go to evening classes. I learned things and I found that I enjoyed having ambitions. Bit by bit I turned into a respectable citizen, the kind of man who needs paperwork.
‘So I changed my name one last time. I was Andrew Lester at that time and I turned into Justin Dane. I did it officially, by deed poll, and I went to work in Bill’s firm.’
‘How did you choose the name?’
‘Bill had a Great Dane I enjoyed fooling with. I forget where Justin came from. In the end he loaned me the money to start my own business. In three years I repaid him. In eight years I bought him out. Don’t misunderstand that. He was delighted. I gave him a good price, enough to retire on. I wouldn’t have done him down. I owed him, and I repaid him.
‘After that I just made money. It was all I knew how to do. I didn’t seem able to make relationships work.’
‘What about your wife? You must have loved her?’
‘I loved her a lot. I even told myself that she loved me, but we married because she was pregnant and I wanted a child badly. But it didn’t work out. In the end she couldn’t stand me. She said so. The only good thing to come out of it was Mark.
‘I thought with him, at least, I could make a success, but I haven’t. I don’t know how. I’m driving him away as I seem to drive everyone away.’
‘But what happened with your mothers-either of them-wasn’t your fault,’ she urged. ‘It couldn’t be.’
‘Maybe not, but it started me on a track I don’t know how to escape.’ He gave a soft mirthless laugh. ‘You’ll hardly believe this, but when people tell me to get lost I feel almost relieved. At least it’s familiar territory.’
He fell silent. Evie slipped her arms about him and leaned against his body as they stood there in the window. But she too said nothing, because in the face of such a terrible story there was nothing to say.
CHAPTER EIGHT
AFTER that they didn’t speak of it again. He had said as much as he could bear to, and Evie’s instincts told her to leave it. She must start getting to know this man again from the beginning.
Everything she had thought true about him was now reversed. Instead of the harsh bully, manipulating her for ulterior motives, there was a forlorn child desperately wondering what he’d done wrong to be so unloved. That child would remain a part of him all his life, making him so vulnerable to slights and rejections that he could only cope by being the first to attack.
She smiled to think how annoyed it would make him to be seen in this light. It was something she would have to keep to herself.
They didn’t tell Mark why the atmosphere had suddenly become happier, and he never mentioned the nights he awoke to find Justin’s bed empty, and went contentedly back to sleep. His air of strain fell away and he smiled more, but, like his father, he knew how to keep his own counsel.
One night, as they lay peacefully in bed, Justin said, ‘So what was all that about Andrew?’
She gave a gasp of laughter.
‘Don’t remind me what a fool I was. I guess I wanted to believe I was in love with him, and the effort to convince myself was tying me in knots.’
