I spent the next day – Boxing Day – on my own, wandering bareheaded in the rain on Hampstead Heath. More than one person would have seen me standing in exposed places, looking skywards, a fly to wanton boys, demanding to know Whether There Was Anyone Who Could Tell Me Whose I Was. But no one offered me any help.

I went home in the early evening, hungry and hoping not to find Fitzpiers, having rejected most of the more lurid explanations of my birth. I believed that I could very nearly have been Rabika’s – that it was a close thing – but that I wasn’t quite. I didn’t look like her. I didn’t have her rubbery lips or her bold eyes or her expression of easy confidence. I looked like my mother. We had the same heavy slightly saturnine countenance. And I didn’t believe she could have given me that just by bringing me up as hers.

I decided similarly against the German airman and the legless bombardier and the unconscripted Dorsetshire yokel. After all, I had my father’s lack of concentration. His selective memory. And his soft spot for Rabika Flatman. But nothing was dead certain. Doubt had entered my soul. I was relieved to remember, at least, that Thomas Hardy had died childless.

Chapter VII

CHAPTER VII

[1]

I WAS NEVER able to forgive Sharon for giving away my secret and Sharon was never able to forgive me for giving away her.

‘I don’t know how you could have told him,’ I said. ‘And in our bed.’

‘I don’t know how you could have allowed him into our bed,’ she replied.

‘Sharon, I didn’t see you objecting,’ I said.

‘Me? Why should I have objected when you didn’t?’ she always concluded.