Unforgotten by Clare Francis Read Free Book Online

began to eat without enthusiasm.
    As the conversation drifted, Sanjay and Isabel went into a huddle over some pictures. Peering over Isabel’s shoulder, Hugh saw Sanjay and his wife in the pose of proud parents, the newborn baby in his father’s arms.
    ‘A hands-on father, eh?’ Hugh said.
    ‘Oh, I’m not so good in the middle of the night,’ Sanjay admitted, with a diffident smile.
    ‘Were you there at the birth?’ Isabel asked.
    Sanjay beamed. ‘I was, yes. It was . . . it was . . .’ He searched fruitlessly for a word that would do justice to the experience and fell back on, ‘ astonishing ’. He added, ‘My family were horrified, of course. These things simply aren’t done, you know. Husbands are meant to keep away.’
    Isabel passed the picture to Hugh. Sanjay’s wife was serene and long-haired, flushed with the beauty of motherhood, but it was Sanjay’s face that drew the attention, his expression of wonder as he gazed at his son. Hugh felt pleased for him, but with the pleasure came the old nudge of regret and curiosity, which, despite the long years of adoptive fatherhood, had never quite left him.
    Sanjay asked, ‘What about you, Hugh? Were you a hands-on father?’
    ‘Oh, I’d like to think so. But really I stuck to the easy bits. It was Lizzie who did all the hard work.’
    ‘And were you there for the birth of your children?’
    ‘No . . .’ Hugh passed the picture back. ‘I didn’t have the opportunity, sadly.’
    ‘Bad luck. Not work, I hope.’
    ‘No . . .’ It was always a finely balanced decision, whether to tell people that Charlie and Lou were adopted, though with Lou it was obvious once they got to meet her. Hugh had always held the belief that the two children should not be defined by their adoption but by the kind of people they were, though given the world’s love of labels it was a battle doomed to belost. ‘No,’ he said, ‘neither Lizzie nor I were there. We got Charlie when he was one, Louise when she was six months.’
    Confusion came over Sanjay’s face, then sympathy. He was about to speak when Tom’s voice cut in.
    ‘I saw two of mine born.’
    Breaking the silence that followed, Hugh said, ‘Well, two out of three’s pretty good.’
    The unasked question hovered over the table. Was it the birth of Holly, the beloved dead daughter, that Tom had missed? Or one of the two sons who lived in Devon with his estranged wife?
    Tom said, ‘But being at the birth doesn’t matter, does it? It’s being there for them afterwards that counts.’ Bleak reflections, with their melancholy undercurrents, were a feature of conversations with Tom, to be given due consideration and gently worked through. But today, unusually, it was Tom himself who broke the mood by announcing, ‘Had my boys for half term.’
    ‘Did you?’ said Hugh in open surprise, both because it was the first he’d heard about it, and because Tom’s estranged wife Linda usually made access to the children so difficult as to be virtually impossible.
    ‘Took ’em to the Brecon Beacons. Rained every day. Blew like stink. Toughened ’em up pretty quick, I can tell you.’
    Hugh thought of the younger boy, who was only eight, and hoped it hadn’t been too much of an ordeal for him. ‘You went walking, did you?’
    ‘Yeah. And orienteering. Got stuck in thick fog. But the boys, they worked out how to get us down. Got the nous, they have. Both of ’em.’ In his face was all the thwarted love and pride he felt for his sons.
    ‘Orienteering . . .’ mused Desmond, who’d been paying scant attention. ‘One day you must tell me what it involves, Tom. It sounds extremely useful.’
    ‘It’s about finding your way over difficult terrain, up mountains and over rivers and stuff like that.’ Then, with a glancearound the table, playing to his audience, Tom added, ‘And nowhere to buy a glass of red wine, Desmond.’
    They all laughed, as much with pleasure at the lightness of Tom’s mood as at the idea