OWNING JACOB
by
Simon Beckett
1998
Chapter One
He found the locked box the day after the funeral.
It had been his worst day even before he opened it. Until then there had been an aim, something to focus on that filled the days with at least the illusion of purpose. The bureaucratic rituals of death and burial were details behind which he could hide, while the funeral itself was unreal, a pantomime which he watched with a numbed detachment. Afterwards, though, once he had closed the door on the last of the friends and mourners, there was nothing to occupy the space that Sarah's death had caused. He had put Jacob to bed, turned on the TV and quietly got drunk until the fact of tomorrow, and the tomorrows after that, was smudged by an alcoholic fog.
When he woke the next morning the day was as cold and bleak as the empty bed beside him. He got up and dressed, as though by moving he could keep one step ahead of the awareness that dogged his heels. Jacob was silent as Ben poured milk on his cereal, but his eyes darted about the kitchen as if he were looking for something. Ben wondered how much of what had happened the six-year-old was able to understand.
He rested his hand on his stepson's head.
'Maggie's going to take you to school today, okay?'
Jacob gave no sign of having heard. He bent and held one ear close to the cereal, listening to the puffed rice crackling in the milk. Ben tried to think of something he could say, but the effort of words was like lifting a weight above his head. He gave the boy's hair a brief ruffle and moved away.
Maggie was on time, as usual. Her forced cheerfulness filled the kitchen like a clashing colour scheme. Ben suppressed his irritation as she greeted Jacob with an enthusiasm that was as grating as it was false.
Jacob didn't acknowledge her. His attention was still fixed on his breakfast cereal, which by now had soaked itself into silence. He had eaten some of it and was arranging the rest in a neat line around the rim of the bowl.
Maggie looked at Ben, her expression becoming one of predictable concern. 'How are you?'
'Okay.' He turned away from her sympathy before she could offer it. 'Would you like a coffee?'
'No, if Jacob's ready we'd better get off. It said on the radio that there's roadworks on the way to the school, so there's bound to be jams.'
'You won't forget to take him the usual route, will you?'
Her smile twitched a little. 'Of course not.' She had tried going another way to the school one morning and Jacob had thrown a tantrum in the car. Ben had apologised, explaining that he grew upset at any variation from his routine, without mentioning what they were both aware of; that she'd known that already.
Maggie had expressed regret, but it was a little too saccharin to be sincere. And he thought there was a trace of mistrust in her eyes now whenever she looked at Jacob. She kept up an aimless chatter as Ben helped him into his shoes and coat. 'Are you sure you don't want me to collect him as well?' she offered. 'It won't be any trouble.'
'No, it's all right, thanks.' He maintained the semblance of a smile until Maggie accepted this.
She gave him a hug as she kissed his cheek. Her own was so over-powdered that it felt like suede. Her perfume had the same cloying pungency as the flowers on Sarah's coffin. 'If you want me to do anything, just give me a ring.'
Ben said he would and crouched down to give Jacob a kiss. 'See you later, Jake. Be a good boy for Maggie.' The boy didn't answer. He had a puzzle game in his hand, a plastic maze with a tiny ball rolling loose in it. Whenever he succeeded in manipulating the ball into the centre he gave the puzzle a quick shake and began all over again. He didn't look up from it as he went out with Maggie.
Ben watched from the doorway as the two of them got into the car where Scott and Andrew, Maggie's own two young sons, were waiting. He waved as they drove away, then closed the door and went back into the house.
The lack of Sarah echoed from every room. It battered at him as he returned to the kitchen. He picked up his coffee, but it was cold. He put it down again. Even the sound of the mug touching the table seemed loud in the silence. The familiar ordinariness of their home had been subtly altered, shifted into a new perspective, a parallel dimension of loss. Ben closed his eyes against it and straightaway his imagination began to play its cruel tricks. He could see Sarah, thoughtlessly humming along to the radio as she moved around the kitchen, pausing to take a hurried drink from her mug of coffee. The blue one, that she liked. He could hear her voice, internally, but clearly nevertheless as she spoke to Jacob. 'Hurry up with your breakfast, Jake, there's a good boy.' She half turned to Ben as she fixed her light brown hair in the mirror. 'I forgot to tell you, I told Imogen that we might see her and Neil this weekend.'
'Aw, no, you're joking,' he heard himself say, mouth moving in silent unison to the remembered words. 'Neil's the most boring man in the world.'
Her reflection gave him an arch smile. 'Well, you'll just have to be extra interesting to make up for him, won't you?' She turned her head and quickly examined her hair from the side. 'Sod it. That'll have to do.'
She went to where her jacket hung on a hanger behind the door, short skirt whisking against her legs as she walked. 'Come on, Jake, time to go.' She squeezed her son's ribs from behind, making him squirm as she tickled him. Ben had smiled to see them both laughing. He smiled again now, replaying it.
Sarah planted a kiss on the top of Jacob's head and bent to tie his training shoe laces. 'Will you be working late tonight?'
'Don't think so. I should be back by seven, anyway.'
He watched her pull back the seat for Jacob to jump down. As she straightened she winced and rubbed at her temple.
'I think I must have had one glass too many last night,' she said.
She looked trim and smart as she came towards him. He could see the exact pattern of freckling that spread faintly across her cheeks and the bridge of her nose, smell her perfume when she came close. 'See you later.' She smiled up at him, lifting her face for a kiss, and the image was so vivid that he swayed forward and opened his eyes.
The empty kitchen confronted him. The breakfast dishes still sat on the table. Two of them, his own and Jacob's. He wished now that he hadn't accepted Maggie's offer to take Jacob to school. For a moment he was tempted to go out, to escape to a more neutral environment that didn't resonate with Sarah's absence. But that would only be putting off what he knew had to be faced sooner or later. It was better sooner.
She wasn't coming back.
He took a roll of black plastic bin liners and went upstairs to their bedroom. Her personality was almost tangible in here.
Trying to close his mind to what he was doing he opened the wardrobe and took down an armful of her clothes. Her scent clung to them like a distillation of grief. He couldn't believe she was never going to wear any of them again. He got as far as the bed before he stopped, clutching the bundle to his chest as the sobs chopped into him.
The call had come through just over a week ago. He had been at the studio in the middle of a shoot when Zoe, his assistant, told him that Colin was on the phone. Colin was Maggie's husband and his oldest friend, a solicitor at the same entertainment law firm where Sarah worked. Ben hadn't looked up from the camera as he told her to say he'd call back.
'I think you'd better take it,' Zoe had said.
He was about to snap that he was busy when he saw the expression on her face.
The term the doctors used was aneurysm. It had been just another word to him before then. He hadn't even been sure what it was, but what it meant to him now was that a vein in Sarah's head had swollen and burst. A minuscule part of her, a fraction of the whole person that was his wife, had given way, and now she was in intensive care. There had been no warning
, except for the casual mention of a headache that morning. Ben had felt a vast sense of wrongness as the doctor talked of CT scans, the possibility of emergency surgery.
They wouldn't let him see her at first. Intellectually he had realised it was serious, but emotionally it was too much to take in. The night before they had cooked a meal, put Jacob to bed, drunk a bottle of wine. It didn't seem possible that she could suddenly be desperately ill. Even when the doctor came to tell him that she was on a life support machine, and that they had done everything they could, Ben couldn't accept what was happening. It was only when he saw her lying still and unconscious in the hospital bed, with her head shaved and her face bruised and pale, that he understood she was dying.
The machines had kept her alive for three days. When they turned them off on the fourth, Ben had sat holding her hand, talking to her until she stopped breathing with a lack of fuss that was almost an anticlimax.
Maggie and Colin had taken him home. He'd known Colin since university, drunkenly tried to warn him out of marrying Maggie, reluctantly been best man at their wedding.
But now neither he nor Maggie seemed completely real. They had waited with him until Jacob arrived back from school, and then left for Ben to try to explain to the boy that his mother was dead. Jacob had kept his eyes averted. Only the fact of him rocking backwards and forwards gave any indication that the news might, after all, have reached him. Ben could have envied his stepson's autism right then.
He cried himself out and set the clothes gently on the bed before returning to the wardrobe for another armful.
There were a lot of them. Sarah had been a hoarder, never throwing away anything unless she absolutely had to. He had often ribbed her about it, calling her a magpie. She countered by accusing him of having a consumer mentality.
The memory brought a short-lived smile. 'Don't worry, Oxfam won't throw them out either,' he said out loud, but the joking tone rang hollow.
It was a battered old strongbox. The black paint was chipped and faded to reveal the dull patina of brass. He couldn't remember seeing it before, but Sarah had been a compulsive wanderer of antique fairs and flea markets. He'd lost track of half of the things she'd bought. Even so, he thought, it was odd that it had been hidden.
There was a faint rustling from inside when he tilted it, but the lid was locked. He looked in the drawers for a key.
There wasn't one. He thought for a moment, then went to the antique tea caddy where she'd kept her jewellery. She had been buried in her wedding and engagement rings, but there were other pieces, none particularly valuable in themselves, that he couldn't see himself casually discarding. He tried not to think about that as he poked among them for a key.
He found one under a nest of thin gold chains.
It fitted the lock of the strongbox. There was a click and the lid sprang open against the sudden lack of resistance. Ben laid it back against its hinges.
Inside was a cluster of yellowed newspaper cuttings, folded and paper-clipped together. A larger piece of paper lay at the bottom. Jacob's birth certificate, he saw when he took it out.
Except for that the box was empty. He put the certificate down and unfolded the pieces of newspaper.
The headline of the top one was 'BABY STEVEN'S MOTHER IN TV APPEAL'. He looked to see what was on the other side, but there was only part of an advert.
He flicked quickly through the rest. They weren't in any chronological order, but were all concerned with the same story, a baby abducted from a maternity hospital. All seemed to be from the Daily Mail, which surprised him a little because the only papers he'd known Sarah to read were the Guardian or the Evening Standard.
The thought I'll ask her why she kept them was followed by the gut punch of remembering that he couldn't. He put them down, his curiosity suddenly soured. They were just another loose end that would now never be tidied up. He would have left them on the dressing table, ready to be thrown out, except for a nagging feeling that he had missed something.
He picked them up again. There were five of them, decreasing in size from the banner-headlined'BABY STOLEN FROM MATERNITY UNIT' to a single-column filler as the story sank without development beneath the weight of fresher news.
Only the one from the front page had a date on it, but as far as he could tell they spanned about a week, all from March, six years earlier. Something about that hovered, waiting to be recognised. He looked at Jacob's birth certificate, then at the date on the first cutting.
March the third. Jacob's birthday.
A sense of unease was building up in him like a trapped gas bubble. He read the reports again, paying more attention now.
They dealt with the search for a newborn baby that had been taken from its hospital cot in central London. Its parents were a John and Jeanette Kale. The names didn't ring any bells.
Kale was a Royal Engineer corporal, serving in Northern Ireland and described as a 'veteran' of the Gulf War. It was their first child, a boy, and there was editorial indignation that someone should have abducted the son of a soldier who was 'serving his country'.
There were the predictable police appeals, both for witnesses and to whoever had taken the baby. One of the cuttings showed a photograph of the parents. It was a poor picture of the father, a youngish man with a cropped, military haircut, head half turned away as he emerged from the hospital. Next to him his wife looked older than her given age of twenty-three.
But who wouldn't? Ben supposed, feeling uncharitable as he took in the anguish the shot had frozen.
The unease was expanding. All at once the touch of the desiccated scraps of paper repulsed him. He dropped them back on the dressing table, rubbing his hands on his jeans as he turned away. The sight of Sarah's heaped clothes on the bed struck him like a crack on the face. It shattered the last of his restraint. He rushed out of the bedroom, almost falling downstairs, and stood in the hallway at the bottom, gasping for breath. He felt himself beginning to hyperventilate and tried to fight the growing panic. Stop it.
He went into the kitchen and splashed cold water over his face, spilling it down his throat and chest The shock was calming. He turned off the tap and braced his arms on the sink.
Water dripped from his nose and chin as he looked out through the window. On the other side of the glass the street appeared the same as always. The houses were hard-edged in the bright afternoon sun. Parked cars lined both sides of the road, parallel lines facing in opposite directions. A man walked a dog, pausing to let it urinate against a lamppost before continuing beyond the edge of the window frame.
Normal.
Ben let his head hang, feeling limp with reaction. What in Christ's name was he thinking of? He felt ashamed of the suspicions that even now he couldn't fully acknowledge. Jacob was Sarah's son, for God's sake. He held on to that thought, building it up and strengthening it until the fear he'd felt in the bedroom seemed unreal and irrational.
Then he thought about the date on the newspaper cutting and a ghost of it returned.
Pushing himself away from both the sink and the fear, he dried his face and looked at his watch. It would soon be time for him to collect Jacob from school. He didn't want to have Sarah's clothes lying about in piles when he got home.
He went back upstairs to finish packing them away.
Chapter Two
He'd met Sarah through Colin. It was part of the folklore of their relationship that they might have been in the same room on several occasions before they finally spoke, but if they had neither of them could remember it. They didn't become aware of each other until they were thrown together, at a party to celebrate the signing of one of Colin's fledgling bands. Colin had negotiated the contract with a major record label and seemed to regard the deal as a personal coup. At times Ben thought he was more like a frustrated manager than a solicitor, and, like a convert to a new religion, he seemed to regard it as his duty to involve Ben in the heady world of the music industry.
'You've got to come, it'll be great!' he'd en
thused. 'The record company's really pushing the boat out on this one. Should be a good night.'
Ben wasn't convinced. He'd been to signing parties before and not enjoyed them. Most of the bands he never heard of again, and he found their habitual mixture of naivete and arrogance irritating. The whole idea bored him. But there had been nothing boring that night. Not after he'd broken his camera on the lead singer's head.
He'd been in a bad mood to begin with. He had recently split up with a girl he'd been seeing for the past six months, a model he had met on an advertising agency shoot. He was still smarting over the acrimonious end, which was probably why Colin had asked him along. And why, perhaps, he had accepted.
He had regretted it as soon as he walked into the club and felt the hammering music hit him. He had seen it all before, from the bottles of free champagne, tequila, imported beers and Jack Daniels, to the burning car suspended on chains from the ceiling. He would have turned around and left if Colin hadn't seen him and waved him over.
In his dark lawyer's suit his friend stood out from the clubbers like a crow among budgerigars. They'd shared a flat at university. The posing first-year fine art undergraduate and the ironed-jeaned third-year law student had regarded each other suspiciously to begin with, both convinced of a mistake by the accommodation department, but a mutual love of football and beer had soon overcome the less-important differences. After university they had kept in touch, despite Colin marrying Maggie against Ben's advice when she became pregnant, and the differences between them becoming more apparent. Ben's hair grew longer and Colin's suits more expensive. Maggie had once referred to them as the Odd Couple. Ben thought that was probably the closest to a joke she had ever come.
He sometimes wondered if Colin's decision to go into entertainment law, dealing with musicians and actors, was a reaction against the confines of his home life. He'd never risked their friendship by asking, though. He made himself smile as he reached Colin's table and was introduced to solicitors and sharkish executives from the record company.