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.
