The Way We Were_ A Novel - Marcia Willett [39]
By that age he'd accustomed himself to the truth, found his own way of dealing with it so as to protect himself. Slowly, very slowly, he'd been able to assuage the pain of his abrupt loss of family identity with a new pride and growing sense of identification with Tiggy and Tom. That's how he thought of them: Tiggy and Tom, as though they were older siblings or a very young aunt and uncle. Once the truth was out, the whole family had been very ready to share their memories of them. He'd been given some photographs, not many but enough to make a connection. A romantic, adventurous, tragic couple they were: Tom with a group of fellow climbers, and Bwych y Moch making a magnificent backdrop, staring at the camera with a half-smile; Tiggy posing by the camper van, dressed in a cheesecloth shirt and denim jeans, laughing in the sunshine. Both of them orphans with no families of their own, he was the result of their union and he'd been determined to knit this fact into the strong fabric of his own family life so that the two pieces of his existence should become an indestructible whole.
Most of the time it worked, though there were particular moments of anxiety when it was necessary to explain it again to new friends: changing schools, starting university, contemplating marriage. He had a horror of the truth being told by someone else, pre-empting his own telling of it, yet at certain times he'd dreaded the need of explanation.
‘I don't want to tell Caroline,’ he'd said to Liv, very casual, a bit offhand. ‘You know, about being adopted.’
Her quick look, a mixture of anxiety, sympathy, shock, told him what he'd already known.
‘I shall, of course,’ he'd said at once. ‘It's just … you know.’
‘It won't make any difference to Caroline,’ Liv had said vehemently. ‘Why should it? You're Zack. She loves you. You're special to her. To all of us. Why should it matter?’
‘Because so far she only knows me in the context of our family,’ he'd answered irritably. Sometimes the insistence on his specialness factor was tiresome; OK, he was special, so what? Everyone was special, let's not get wound up about it. Surely Liv could understand the reality here. ‘She knows Mum and Dad, you and the boys. And I'm part of all that,’ he'd said. ‘She's bound to have taken a view, even if it's a subconscious one, of my character based on what she knows about all of us.’
‘I see what you mean,’ Liv had said after a minute. ‘But it's down to nature and nurture. We've all had the same nurture, so we're all alike as far as that goes, and I expect our genetics are as much of an unknown mix as yours. And Tiggy and Tom were both teachers, weren't they? So that means they related to the young, so that's a positive start. But OK, I take your point. You're still going to have to tell her before somebody else does.’
The terror of that prospect had driven him to it. Clumsily – because, after all, how do you bring the subject up naturally?–he'd told Caroline about Tiggy and Tom. And he was right; there had been a few seconds when she'd stared at him blankly and, behind her eyes, he could see that she was re-evaluating, making new assessments. Luckily she'd been impressed by the tragic little story; moved by Tiggy's journey to the west after Tom's death, determined to keep her child.
‘That was really brave back then,’ Caroline had said. ‘She must have been quite a girl,’ and everything had been fine.
It was only in the last few weeks, with a new posting from Faslane to a submarine based in Devonport and a fortnight's leave, the old fears had resurrected: would he be a good father? Would some unknown trait suddenly appear and take him off guard? Whenever he had these rare periods of depression he wondered just how much his unhappiness was due to the way in which he'd discovered the truth. It had certainly been a baptism of fire. Time and love had dulled