One Father, Another Part Two

He was beautiful, she thought, though it was a word most men would hate to hear said of themselves.

She peered up at him through painted lashes, pleased to find nothing of her husband
in the young man before her. It was a constant source of agony to her that the children she had raised, sacrificing her own pleasures for theirs, constantly arriving late to dinner parties in order to give the nanny proper instruction on Freddy’s bath-time and where to keep the key for the pantry safe from Eleanor’s chubby little grasp, should resemble their distant and uninvolved father with every passing day.

But here was Sebastian, free from the taint of Talbot blood, fragile and thin, a delicate
thing, so far removed from the heavy limbed children she longed to disavow herself of.
“I wanted to meet you,” Sebastian was saying, his voice soft and low as though he
were speaking to a lover who did not particularly like him. “I’ve known about you for quite some time, I just never worked up the courage to call you. Until now of course.”

“I’m glad you did darling. So glad,” Lilya said with a sudden rush of emotion that was
alien to her.

She had never been girlish and she swore she never would again, but in his company
she found herself changed somehow, stirring circles in her freshly ordered iced tea as she let out peals of laughter like the chimes of church bells, her fingers twitching towards his across the table top, stopping just short of touch.

They talked for hours of this and that, of nothing at all, neither noticing as time
slowed down and slipped away, though the whole while the unasked question hung in the air above them like a loaded gun upon Checkov’s wall – why?

She had been sixteen when Sebastian was born, this much he knew, though the identity of his father remained a mystery to him. Lilya saw no reason to elucidate on the matter. What was past was past. She had lost him once but it would not happen again. She had been young then, unable to argue when her mother sent her away, afraid of her father’s reaction, telling friends and family alike that Lilya was staying with an unwell aunt in the countryside. It was such a cliché that no one had cause to doubt it.

After the birth she lay propped upon pillows in her hospital bed, as pale as the starched sheets tucked to her shoulders, drowning in the whiteness of the ward. Her mother sat beside her in an uncomfortable plastic chair, a portrait of poise, feet together, hands folded in her lap, watching with a clinical detachment as her daughter surrendered her grand-son to a well meaning middle-class couple in C&S knitwear and sensible shoes.

Her mother’s presence offered no comfort to Lilya, though she did not seek it. She
deserved her suffering, feeling more like a Sebastian herself, shot full of arrows as she watched two perfect strangers claim her child as their own.

These things were left unsaid as, twenty-six years later, she sat with her son in a
crowded café. He would not ask and she would not tell. What good would it do? It wasn’t anything that they did not know and so to speak of it seemed unnecessary.

So they talked of nothing at all and once the pleasantries had been dispensed with it
seemed as if they had reached an impasse.

“Well, I supposed I should get back to work,” he checked his wrist watch as the girl behind the counter began adjusting the radio dial, stations slipping in and out of signal, static filling the spaces where their voices ought to have been.

“So soon?” Lilya asked, seeing no need to disguise her disappointment.

“I’d like it if – well, if we could see each other again,” he said with a hesitancy that
seemed to suggest he considered his statement presumptuous.

Lilya smiled, finding his complete lack of self-belief a rather endearing quality. It
made such a change from the self-assured swagger of Freddy and Eleanor who, by virtue of never having to ask for anything before it was served to them in a gift box tied with a Tiffany blue ribbon, had never learnt to expect less. There was no room for doubt in the Talbot household and there was no challenge so great that it could not be defeated with a mighty swipe of Daddy’s credit card.

“Yes, of course, now we’ve found each other again I simply must see you every day,”
Lilya said, surprising herself. She was not usually so effusive. Her husband had described her as a ‘cold fish’ on more than one occasion, though she took it as a compliment whether it was intended as such or not.

As Sebastian rose from his seat she found herself echoing his actions as though he were a snake charmer luring her from the safety of her wicker cocoon with the sing-song sweetness of his voice as he spoke, the words less important than the intonation, each syllable a long forgotten melody, the kind her mother once sang as she hung laundry upon the line, Lilya’s little arms caught around her ankles breathing in the scent of fresh laundry and stale sweat.

“I’d love for you to meet Elsie. She’s the one who encouraged me to get in contact with you actually. If it wasn’t for her I don’t think I ever would have worked up the nerve,” Sebastian was saying as he held open her coat, his fingers fluttering with a moth-like uncertainty across her shoulders as she slid her arms into the jacket’s sleeves.

There was something reassuring in having him so near, his breath sweet and warm
upon her neck. It was as if before this he could simply have been a dream, some subconscious fantasy that came to her in a moment between sleep and wakefulness to leave her with nothing but lingering regret for what might have been. But having him beside her, the solidity of his body as it stood behind her own, served to transform him from an abstract concept into a human being, a living breathing creature made of her own flesh and blood.

“Elsie?” Lilya murmured as if trying to place the name.

“My wife,” Sebastian said. “I’m sorry, I thought I’d mentioned her.”

“Oh yes, no of course,” Lilya shook her head, the corners of her lips twitching upwards to chastise her own forgetfulness. “Your wife.”

“I think you’d really like her. She’s a lot like you. Kind, warm, funny,” Sebastian was saying, though the words seemed lost in translation.

Lilya did not think she would like Elsie. For one, the name was ugly. She imagined aplain looking girl in homely clothes, her faced caked in inexpensive makeup, concealer caught in the lines beneath her eyes, thread veins laced beneath the pock-marks of acne-prone skin. Her son could do better, she was sure.

Lilya herself was not beautiful, but no one noticed when she dressed so well. She had
learnt from an early age to make the most of what little she had, choosing only the finest materials to drape across the abstract geometry of her angular body. She suspected Elsie’s wardrobe was exclusively off the rack.
It was strange to feel such hatred for a woman she had never met. She wasn’t usually
one for extremes of emotion but hearing her son utter those two syllables with such obvious affection made her want to claw the bitch’s eyes out.

She was jealous, but she wasn’t sure why.
Perhaps it was just that she disliked the idea of Elsie usurping her rightful place as the
most important woman in her son’s life. Perhaps it was that she resented Elsie’s presence at Sebastian’s side for the moments, the milestones, which she herself had missed.

No, it was more than that, she thought as she walked the several blocks back to his
office, stopping outside the ugly 1960’s breezeblock building to clasp his hands in her own.

What she felt for this man was not maternal, but rather a primitive and impossible to
ignore desire. It was as though she could not love him enough to make up for all those lost years, as though she would die unless she could press her lips to his, her hands in his hair, ringlets unfurling like flags at her fingertips. She imagined making love to him, marvelling at the Marvelling at the topography of his flesh, the way veins visible beneath the surface of paper-white skin mapped destinations and traced journeys like little rivers beneath a clear sky.

“Well, this is me,” Sebastian said with a shrug, glancing down at the hands held in his mother’s as if unable to believe it.

“You must hate me,” Lilya found herself saying, the words un-summoned from the pit of her stomach. She thought she might cry but when she dabbed at the corners of her eyes with her gloved fingers she found they were dry.

Sebastian shook his head, gathering her into an awkward embrace, his arms encircling
her as she remained entirely still in his grasp, her fingers curling into fists in the pockets of her coat as if she were afraid of what they might do without her permission.

“I don’t,” he told her, a sweet nothing whispered in her ear. “I don’t understand, but I
don’t hate you. I did, once. But that’s over now. All that matters is that you’re here and that we’ve found each other. I want you to be a part of my life.”

“If you don’t hate me, you should,” Lilya replied, removing herself from his grasp,
the brightness of her voice dulled, her intonation flat and cold as it had not been before. She felt more like her old self than ever.

As she sat in her living room, watching with disinterest as Freddy gave a dramatic
retelling of a recent victory rowing crew for Cambridge, a story which would have been more dramatic had it not been retold so many times before, she drifted in and out of conversation, catching words here and there and wishing she hadn’t, letting them go again, her thoughts always returning to the son she had left behind.
She had made half-hearted promises to see him again, accepting an invitation to have
dinner with his wife at the rented rooms they shared somewhere in a suburb of London she never wished to visit. As her mouth moved to say ‘yes’ she already knew she would not go.

Desire was a dangerous thing.

She had always known that passion would be her undoing. She lived a quiet life,
taking great pains to never find anything too interesting, to be too moved by events or the people around her. She never allowed herself to want anything because she knew that it would never be enough.

But here was Sebastian – all she had ever wanted and yet the only thing she could not have.

Watching the tableaux of domestic harmony unfolding before her, a scene which she
no longer felt apart of and had not for some time, she found strange delight in her own perversity. History, she thought, repeats itself.

When she was younger, a child still, she sat upon her father’s lap, breathing in the dust of ancient stories read aloud from an antiquated volume of Greek mythology, each sentence spinning webs in which she was happy to be caught. The book upon his knee, its cracked spine creating a barrier between themselves and the outside word, Lilya would listen as her father weaved a world around them, the scent of tobacco and Imperial Leather clinging to his clothes and becoming a part of another time and place where they had lost themselves.

Disasters stamped in the likeness of their fathers. It was the only line she could recall
from a childhood steeped in the Classics. It seemed to fit her life so well and never more than tonight.

She knew the moment she read Sebastian’s letter that she would love him. More than
was natural, more than was right, just as her own father had loved her.