PART 4
My son was born with a small streak of white hair at the front of his head.
About the width of my thumb, right at the hairline, against hair that is otherwise completely dark.
It is a family trait. It is harmless and it is rare, and it runs straight down a line from parent to child, and it has a name that I did not know that morning and that I have since looked up about forty times.
The doctor who delivered him has one.
His name is Leander Moss. He is sixty-one. His hair is mostly grey now and you have to look for it, but it is there, over his left eyebrow, whiter than the rest.
He had heard the name Tobiah Wrexham before. Thirty-six years ago, in 1990.
He was a junior doctor that year. Twenty-five. And he had a relationship, for about seven months, with a married woman called Philippa Wrexham, who was twenty-seven and very unhappy and who had married into a family with a very old name and a very large house.
She had a son that spring.
And then she cut off all contact, in one letter, and told him the baby was her husband’s, and that if he ever came near her family she would tell her husband a version of events that would end his career before it started.
He was twenty-five. He believed her. He moved hospitals.
He has told me since that he thought about that child on every birthday for thirty-six years and never once allowed himself to look him up, because he had promised, and because he was frightened of what he would find.
And then, at eleven minutes past six on a Tuesday morning, he lifted a newborn out of a stranger and saw his own hairline.
That doctor had just delivered his own grandson.
That is why he cried. That is why he asked. That is why his hands went tight on that blanket when I said the name.
And now the part that I have not been able to stop laughing about, in a way that is not really laughing.
The woman standing in that corridor with a folder — who stood behind her son three months earlier and told me that I had fallen pregnant to get my hands on the money —
had done exactly that herself, in 1990, with another man’s child, to keep a very large house and a very old surname.
She accused me of using a baby to secure a fortune.
She was the only person in that entire family who ever had.
And then there is the white hair.
Tobiah has it too.
He has dyed it since he was thirteen.
His mother made him. He told me once, early on, laughing, in bed, that she had said it made him look unwell in school photographs, and that she had marched him to a salon the week it came through properly and he had been going every five weeks ever since.
He has no idea why. He has never once asked.
He is thirty-six years old and he has been colouring over his own father every five weeks since he was a child, because his mother told him to, and he thought it was about photographs.
Leander Moss did not make a scene in that corridor.
I have thought about that a great deal since, because he had thirty-six years of reason to.
He walked up to her. Quite slowly.
She turned round, because everybody else in that corridor was looking at something behind her, and she saw him.
And I watched a woman of sixty-three recognise a face she had not seen since 1990, in about half a second, and I watched every single thing about the way she was standing change.
She let go of my wrist.
He did not say anything clever. He said her first name. Once. The way you would say it to somebody you used to know.
And then he said: he’s got it, Philippa. The baby’s got it.
That is all. Seven words.
She did not deny it. She did not say anything at all. She stood there with that folder in her hand for about four seconds and then she walked out of that corridor and got into the lift, and she did not come back that day or any other day.
Tobiah was standing about six feet away.
He had heard all of it, and he did not understand one word, and I watched him not understand it.
And then Leander looked at him — properly, for the first time — and put one hand up to his own forehead, to the white patch over his eyebrow.
And I watched my ex-husband, who has checked his reflection in every window he has ever walked past, put his own hand up to his own hairline.
It took him about eleven seconds.
He did not say anything either. He took the application out of his jacket, looked at it, and put it back in his pocket, and then he sat down on one of the plastic chairs along that wall and put his head in his hands.
That application was never filed.
The folder under my mattress went to Harrowgate and Vell the following week — to a woman I used to work with, who read the first four pages and rang me back inside an hour.
The divorce was settled in the June, and it was settled on terms that I am not going to set out, and they are fair, and the house is sold, and I have a flat and a car seat.
The companies that exist on paper and nowhere else are now somebody else’s problem, and somebody else is being very thorough about them.
Philippa has not been in touch. I do not expect her to be.
Tobiah sees his son twice a month, supervised for now, and he has not missed one. He has stopped dyeing his hair. The white came through in about eleven weeks.
He has had a DNA test. He has met Leander four times, in a café, with nobody else there, and I have never asked what they talk about.
