Barbara Hannay - Her Secret, His Son

‘Hi, Tom.’

‘Your Dad told me about you. I figured that you probably like knights in armour.’

The boy’s eyes widened and he nodded solemnly.

‘This is for you.’

To Mary’s relief, her son remembered to say thank you without being prompted.

‘Would you like a hand to open it?’

Ethan nodded and Tom set the box on the floor. For the next few moments the two males were silent and focused as they stripped the brown paper away and opened the box to reveal a toy castle, complete with towers, turrets and pennants. There was even a moat and a drawbridge.

‘Wow!’ exclaimed Ethan.

‘The knights are inside,’ Tom told him, and he swung a hinge that opened the castle.

‘Wow!’ Ethan breathed again as he reached in and drew out a model of a knight in shining plastic armour seated on a black horse. ‘Oh, this is so neat.’ He looked back to Mary, his eyes shining.

‘Aren’t you lucky?’ she said.

‘Is this from my dad?’ Ethan asked. ‘He said he’d bring me a present.’

Before Mary could set her son straight, Tom said without hesitation, ‘Sure, mate, this is from your father.’

Ethan’s eyes shone and Mary suppressed a choking sob.

‘Now, these guys with bows and arrows go up in the keep,’ Tom said, lifting out some models and setting them in place.

‘And this one can be riding across the drawbridge,’ Ethan chimed in excitedly.

Mary was so absorbed by the astonishing sight of them together that at first she didn’t notice the way her eyes were brimming with tears again. When a damp splotch rolled down her cheek she hurried away to clear the breakfast things and to make coffee.

After a while, Tom straightened again and left Ethan to play. He crossed the room to where Mary was taking a blue and white sugar bowl from an overhead cupboard.

His eyes drifted to her feet and his mouth quirked into a grim smile. Mary followed his gaze. Good grief! She was wearing one red shoe and one lime-green. Heavens, there must have been two pairs of slip-on shoes under the kitchen table and she’d taken no notice.

‘So you still have trouble making decisions, Mary-Mary.’

‘I jumped up to answer the door in a hurry,’ she muttered as she crossed the room and extracted the odd shoes from under the table. She slipped off a lime-green shoe and swapped it for a red one. ‘There, that’s better,’ she said, forcing a tiny laugh. ‘At least I’m colour coordinated now.’ She was wearing a red shirt and blue jeans.

She looked back towards Tom and their gazes linked. One corner of his mouth lifted into a tight, rueful smile. Was it her imagination, or could she see a shadowy sadness in his eyes as he looked at her for a long moment without speaking?

‘Ethan looks like you,’ he said at last. ‘Same big brown eyes and soft blond hair.’

She nodded and gulped.

‘Ed’s mighty proud of him,’ he added.

At the sound of his father’s name Ethan’s head snapped up. ‘My dad’s a Ranger,’ he announced with pride.

‘That’s right, General.’

The boy’s eyes grew huge and worried. ‘Why did you call me General?’

‘It just kind of slipped out. That’s what your dad called you when he talked about you.’

Ethan’s lower lip trembled.

‘That was Ed’s special nickname,’ Mary explained. ‘No one else called him General—only Ed.’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t realise.’ Tom walked back over to Ethan, bent down and touched him on the shoulder. ‘Your dad and I were good mates.’

Don’t talk in the past tense, Mary pleaded silently. Ethan’s very bright and he picks up on any subtleties.

‘Do you know when my dad’s coming home?’ Ethan asked.

‘No,’ Tom admitted with reluctance.

The light died in Ethan’s eyes. He turned back to the knights and the castle and played with them quietly, keeping his head low, as if he needed to retreat. Sensing his mood, Tom backed away, but tension hovered in the air.

Mary fetched milk from the refrigerator and set it and the sugar bowl on the table. After a very short while Ethan asked her, ‘Can I go back to watch TV?’

‘I guess so,’ she answered, nodding.

The boy hurried away and left the castle and its splendid knights on horseback lying abandoned in the middle of the kitchen floor.

Mary worried her lower lip with her teeth. ‘He’s not dealing very well with the bad news about his father,’ she said.

‘I dare say it will take a long time.’

She frowned. ‘Why do you keep acting as if Ed’s already dead? Surely, while there’s a chance he’s alive, we should hope?’

Tom kept his gaze fixed on the abandoned castle. ‘I don’t think there’s much chance, Mary.’

‘Why are you so sure?’ she asked quietly. ‘The Army has a great support network but I can’t find out what happened. Were you there? Can you tell me?’

He swung his gaze back to hers and for the first time she saw how tired he looked. Smudges of shadow lay beneath his eyes and creases bracketed his mouth. ‘We were involved in a hot extraction. You’ve heard about them, haven’t you?’

‘Where ropes are lowered from a helicopter?’

‘That’s it. Well, we’d finished a mission in the jungle and we were ready to be winched back up—’

‘Where? Where was the mission?’

‘South-East Asia.’

‘But which country? Which jungle?’

‘You should know better than to ask me that, Mary.’

She sighed. ‘It was worth a try.’

‘Anyway, the chopper was in position above us and we were below in the jungle and we had to get out fast. Really fast. There were guerrilla fighters all around us and it was pitch black. Even with night vision goggles we couldn’t see a lot because of the dense timber, so we’re not absolutely sure what happened. But somehow, when it was Ed’s turn to ascend, the rope got tangled.’

‘Oh, no,’ Mary whispered.

‘Sometimes trees, brush or ground debris can snag it. It hardly ever happens that the rope breaks, but it did this time.’

Mary flinched and tried to blot out the picture that formed in her head. ‘So Ed fell,’ she whispered.

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘But what happened then? Couldn’t you find him?’

Tom heaved a loud, painful sigh.

‘You did search for him, didn’t you?’

‘We tried, but we couldn’t hang around for long. There was too much enemy fire. We had to consider the safety of the rest of the squad. And—’ He looked as if he was about to say something else and changed his mind.

‘So you just left him there?’

‘Believe me, if I had my way I’d still be looking for him now, but that’s not how the Army works. I had to follow orders. When I demanded permission to go back I had a run-in with the brass. A proper ding-dong confrontation.’ He let out a hiss of air through gritted teeth. ‘By the time I persuaded them that we should at least go back and recover his body there was no trace of him.’

Looking away from her, he stared through her kitchen window to a view across Arlington parkland. ‘I think you should resign yourself to the fact that Ed won’t be coming back, Mary. Everyone is convinced that he couldn’t have survived that fall.’

She didn’t answer, but she shook her head.

‘I’m sorry,’ Tom added, and his throat worked.

The smell of coffee filled the room and Mary distracted herself by collecting the coffee pot and their mugs and setting them on the cleared kitchen table. They took seats opposite each other and Mary felt painfully self-conscious. She wondered if Tom felt as awkward as she did to be sitting in such a domesticated setting—after all these years. It was so strange to be taking coffee with Tom Pirelli as if he were no more than a friend of Ed’s.