He had a solicitor waiting in the car park. I found that out later. Somebody had rung him the moment I was admitted, because he still had my name flagged on something at that hospital through the insurance he had cancelled.
The doctor said, very quietly, that I needed to rest and that everybody else needed to leave.
Tobiah said he was the father and was entitled to be there.
And the doctor looked at him for a long time and said: I know.
I did not understand that either. Not for another hour.
About twenty minutes later I was in a wheelchair in the corridor outside the nursery. They had taken my son through for his checks and the blind on the window was down.
There were about eighteen people in that corridor. Midwives, a porter with a trolley of towels, two families waiting to go in and see their own.
And his mother came down it, in her good coat, with a folder.
She had not come to see the baby either.
She got hold of my wrist and she said it loud enough for every single one of them:
Sign it, Alethea. You can’t even afford a car seat.
Nobody moved. A midwife set a clipboard down on the desk.
She did not let go. She leaned in and said:
Just sign. Well?
And I did not look at her.
I was looking past her.
Because the doctor had come out of the nursery doors behind her, and he had stopped dead in the middle of that corridor.
And he was not looking at me.
He was staring straight at Philippa Wrexham.
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.
