The Brave by Nicholas Evans Page B

tightly, then held him away from her so that she could look at him. Her son. The poor darling. He was still crying. His face had gone all red and blotchy. Maybe she had made a terrible mistake.

    "I know it's an awful shock, darling. But we're all still the same people. We all still love you."
    "Why are you telling me this?" He sniffed. "Why now?"
    "Because I love you. And I'm proud of you. And I want everyone to know I'm your mother."
    "So, Mum and Dad, I mean, aren't..."
    "They're your grandparents, sweetheart."
    "You all said I didn't have any grandparents. That they were dead."
    "Well, it's true, in a way. Their parents, my grandparents, are dead."
    He looked so unhappy and confused. He kept rubbing away the tears which, like her own, didn't seem to want to stop.
    "So, who's my father?"
    Diane had known, of course, that this would come. And for the first time she could remember what she had prepared. It was the truth, after all. She took a breath and spoke as calmly as she could.
    "He was at the boys' school down the road from mine. He was called David. His parents lived abroad. I've never seen him again. I heard he got married to someone else."
    Tommy's face contorted and creased up and he wailed and turned away from her. She still had her hands on his arms but he broke loose and ran for the door.
    "Tommy! Please!"
    She went after him into the kitchen but he ran for the stairs, yelling at her through his tears to leave him alone. Diane stopped and clasped her head between her hands. The slamming of his bedroom door made the whole house shudder. Her mother was slicing some tomatoes, a cigarette hanging from her lips. There was no sign of her father. He'd probably fled out to his workshop. Her mother didn't look at her, just took a long puff of her cigarette and put it down in an ashtray.
    "Well," she said. "I hope you're satisfied."

Chapter Eight
    SHE HAD only done it for a dare. At least, that was the glibber version of the truth that Diane had settled on. It had a sort of ironic resonance that now, nearly a decade after the trauma of Tommy's conception, she had come to find appealing. Life, after all, was so damnably dark and cruel that if you didn't laugh in its face, it just grabbed you by the throat and swallowed you. Naturally, the notion that her son was simply the result of a dare neither adequately explained nor justified what had happened.
    David Willis had been one of a group of boys from St Edward's whom Diane, along with her best friend, Katie Bingham, and a few other Elmshurst rebels, used to sneak out to meet on those long summer evenings when her head felt it might implode from boredom. The two boarding schools had adjoining sports fields and there was a narrow, tunnel-like lane, overhung with sycamore and hawthorn, behind the sheds where the groundsmen kept their lawnmowers and rollers. The boys would always be there, waiting for them with packs of cheap cigarettes in their blazer pockets. Occasionally there would be alcohol too, though rarely anything more potent than a bottle of cider.
    Most of the boys were either show-offs or stupid or both, but David Willis was different. He hung back a little, not exactly shy or aloof, just slightly disengaged, as if unsure that he wanted to be there. Diane would often catch him staring at her but he always looked away. She had never been able to resist a challenge and one evening, she smiled at him and he blushed and gave her a crooked little grin.
    From then on he was the only boy she could be bothered with during these clandestine nicotine assignations. His father was in the Royal Air Force and every two years was posted somewhere else so the whole family would have to pack up and move. At fifteen, David had lived in half a dozen different countries and this, to Diane, immediately put him in a league far more exotic than all the other boys. His mother and father were currently based in Kenya and the stories he told her about going on safari and seeing lions and