The Kind Folk Read Free

that nobody is close enough to have overheard, she says "Then you think..."
    "If Mr Brittan's people didn't make a mistake," Freda says, "someone must have mixed up the babies at the hospital," and leans across the aisle to grip Luke's arm. "Just don't forget what I said about you, Luke. We ended up with the baby we wanted."
    "Nobody's arguing," Maurice says and stares at his brother. "And you're saying bugger all. It's not like you to have nothing to say for yourself."
    Terence meets his eyes but withholds his expression. "What do you want me to say?"
    "Whatever you're thinking." When Terence doesn't respond his brother mutters "You were always the clever one, that's what ma and dad thought. They never knew half of the stuff you were into or they wouldn't have been so pleased with you."
    Luke is dismayed by their hostilities and can't help feeling somehow responsible, but it's Freda who intervenes. "That's not fair, Maurice, and it's got nothing to do—"
    "I may not be the brightest but I've got enough upstairs not to waste my time on that crap. You'd better not have put any of it in Luke's head."
    Before Luke can establish that he doesn't know what his father—no, Maurice—is talking about, Terence raises his lower lip and his head. "I helped him grow up how he has," he says. "I did my best, I'll tell you."
    "Are you making out we didn't?"
    "I'm sure you all did," Sophie says. "I think you should be proud."
    An awkward silence seems to drag at the train, which is slowing as it reaches Runcorn. Terence shoves himself to his feet and avoids touching anyone as he lurches into the aisle. "Be in touch," he mumbles as a promise or a plea if not something else entirely, and hurries to the nearest door.
    He doesn't look back from the platform. A few terraced streets on the bank of the Mersey drift past the windows, and then a silent whirring like the flight of a swarm of geometrical creatures closes around the train. The metal lattices that form both sides of the bridge across the river are retreating at speed. "I'll be getting the test," Freda announces, "and then I'll be finding out what the hospital has to say for itself."
    The hectic activity comes to an end, revealing that the river has exposed a bank of mud like the ridged glistening back of a colossus about to heave itself out of the murky water. It's the kind of notion Terence might have shared with Luke when he was little, and it leaves Luke feeling painfully nostalgic for his childhood. There are other fancies he will have to live without now—the ideas that Terence was his uncle or Maurice was his father.

NOBODY'S SON
    "You did know already, Luke. You were as good as theirs, though, weren't you?" Gently and yet with a hint of fierceness Sophie reminds him "That's what you said."
    "I wonder how they'd have treated me if they'd known I was an imposter."
    "You're nothing of the kind. I expect they'd have wanted to make it up to you, and Terence would."
    Hasn't she just contradicted herself? Luke stands up to switch off the television, which is showing him and the Arnolds like a tableau in a waxworks, every face besides his trying to suppress their expressions while he couldn't quite find one. "After the break," Brittan says, "we've a mother who's here to tell her son she'll disown him if he turns into a woman because his wife is now a man..." Luke extinguishes him but can't put the words that streamed along the bottom of the screen out of his mind. After the show was recorded DNA testing proved Freda Arnold wasn't Luke's mother.
    As Sophie said, he already knew. Maurice phoned yesterday, sounding as if he were being required to apologise on his wife's behalf. Luke leaves Sophie on the pudgy leather couch in front of the television and crosses the polished boards to the window. They're in the apartment Freda and Maurice helped him buy when Arnold Building Contractors were converting this Victorian office block. That was early in the renovation of downtown Liverpool, when