Page 97 of Don't Believe A Word

Robert inhaled again, and took some time to roll back through the years, unlocking memories he seemed not to have visited for a very long time. ‘It was 1998 in Tierkidi, one of the Sudanese refugee camps. She was brought to me as an emergency. She’d suffered a major cardiac event while helping to process new arrivals and … It was severe, we almost lost her …’ He broke off, drew an unsteady hand across his mouth, the memory of it seeming to have the power to affect him even now. ‘She alwaysliked to say that I gave her a reason to go on living …’ He tried to laugh as if to lighten the weight of it, but it came out as more of a groan. ‘That was how it started between us. She was a patient; I was the surgeon who … wanted, more than anything, to save her.’

A touching picture that Cristy was finding it very easy to believe in … perhaps too easy? ‘I’m guessing you were married at the time?’ she said, seeing little choice but to go with his story, at least for now.

He nodded. ‘And not in the habit of cheating. It was just with her … Christ, Cristy, you have to believe I’d have told you right away if I’d realized Sadie was in any way connected to her. It never even entered my head …’

Still angry with herself for not having explored the possibility when she’d known they moved in the same world, she said, ‘You have to see that this …revelation …calls everything into question about you, and seriously jeopardizes our credibility for not having known something so important about you sooner. It seems pretty obvious now, having read your letters, that you were the reason Lottie was so keen to break free of her sister. She got her a husband, and then a child … And the fact that you just happened to stumble across that child’s mother on a hillside close to the house where Lottie and her sister were staying, and then you turn up all these years later just as the same child goes public with her suspicions … Everyone’s going to be asking who the hell you really are.Iam asking who the hell are you?’

His eyes were solemn and dark with sincerity as he said, ‘I am exactly who you think I am, Cristy, and the main reason I took an interest in helping Sadie is because it matters to my mother.’

‘But the sisters were in Somerset at the same time you were back in 2000,’ she cried. ‘By your own admission you knew Lottie – Carla – then. Janina even talked to you about her … That’s what you said.’

‘She did, but I had no reason to think that one of the women she was referring to was Carla. There are hundreds, thousands, of women from all over the world who get involved in the camps. And as far as I can remember Carla was in Malawi around the time I was in Somerset, or I thought she was … For God’s sake,Cristy, coincidences can be real even if they seem unlikely, or convenient, or flat out unbelievable. You must know that.’

Though she did, she remained very uncomfortable with this one. Opening up theHindsightwebsite on her phone she found the shots of George Symmonds-Browne with Lottie and Janina, and thrust the phone at him. ‘Do you know who he is?’ she asked.

Looking at it Robert frowned and shook his head. ‘I’ve never seen him before.’

‘But you do recognize Lottie?’

He nodded.

‘So can you explain what’s happening there, where this is …?’

‘I have no idea, I’m sorry.’ He put the phone down on the table. ‘I know you won’t want to hear this, why would you, but finding out that Carla is dead …’

‘Lottie. Her name was Lottie, and I think we’ve already established that she really wasn’t the woman you thought she was.’

His eyes hardened slightly as he said, ‘Maybe not, but we’re all capable of being different people at different times, and if, as you say, you’ve read my letters you’ll know how much she meant to me. I saw nothing bad in her, only good …’

‘If you loved her so much, why didn’t you leave your wife to be with her? You told her in one letter it was too soon, your children were still too young …’

‘They were, and they’re the only reason I wouldn’t end my marriage. When you’ve seen the kind of suffering I have, that Carla saw too, children, babies, orphaned and maimed … Losing parents to a divorce doesn’t equate, of course it doesn’t, mine would still have had a mother and father who loved them, a proper home to live in … Even so, I didn’t want to hurt them, to see that same look of bewilderment and fear in their eyes as I was seeing in the fieldand know I had caused it.’

‘Did your wife know about Lottie?’

‘Yes, she did.’ He gazed down at the phone, its screen dark now, masking Lottie’s image, and Cristy couldn’t help wondering how much he wanted to feast his eyes on her again.

‘Here’s the thing about my marriage,’ he said, circling a hand around his empty glass as if to stop himself reaching for the phone.‘I know you’ll see my affair with Carla as cheating, a betrayal of my family, my principles, of everything really, but Jenny, my wife … We came to an agreement after our second child was born, which – here’s another coincidence you’re probably not going to like – was the year I met Carla, and yes my wife and I went on to have another child after that, in 2000. But the decision Jenny and I took in ’98 to have an open marriage was actually nothing to do with Carla. It was so that Jenny could be true to herself and stop pretending she was someone she wasn’t.’

True to herself? Pretending?Regarding him sceptically, Cristy said, ‘Are you about to tell me your wife is gay?’

‘She is bisexual,’ he confirmed. ‘The children know that now and have long accepted it. What they find slightly moreunusual,or used to anyway,is that Jenny and I have chosen to stay together.’ He seemed to expect her to find it unusual too, even scorn it, but she said nothing.

‘It suits us both,’ he explained. ‘We like one another, enjoy each other’s company – I guess you could say we’re each other’s best friend, and yes there have been times – still are – when we’re intimate. She’s always been there for me when I’ve needed someone, and I like to think I’m always there for her. Certainly she helped me over the break-up with Carla. I might have gone mad otherwise. I simply couldn’t understand why she’d decided we shouldn’t continue our relationship. I could see, when she told me, that it was tearing her apart too, but nothing I said or did was enough to make her change her mind. She kept saying we had to move on, to stop the dependency on one another that was only going to hurt us more in the end.’

‘Did she know you were in an open marriage by then?’

‘Yes, and she’d always sworn she was happy with the way we were, that she could wait until I was ready to be with her completely, just as long as we kept seeing one another. Then suddenly it changed.’

‘When exactly did it change?’

‘In 2005. We were in Nairobi, as I said. She told me she couldn’t see a future for us even if I left my wife, so it was best that we let one another go right then.’

‘Did you see her again after that?’

He shook his head. ‘I wrote to her, of course, many times, but she never responded to my letters or emails and the number I had for her was disconnected. Obviously, I could have made contact through other people, but it clearly wasn’t what she wanted, and so in the end I … I was going to say I gave up, but I never consciously did that. I guess what I did was carry on hoping that eventually she’d change her mind and contact me.’

Realizing that the hope, on some level, had still been alive until a few minutes ago, when he’d learned of her death, Cristy’s tone was a little gentler as she said, ‘Why don’t you get us another drink and we’ll try to work out how we handle this now, with Sadie.’

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