“Sounds good, but I’d better check with Maddie.”
“She handles your diary, does she?” Miles’s grin robbed the words of any offense.
“It’s just that she doesn’t get to spend much time with Theo during the week,” I explained.
Miles patted my shoulder. “Don’t worry—I know what it’s like. Lucy and I are the same. I just turn up where and when I’m told. Speaking of which…” He pulled out his phone. “You know we talked about spending Easter together? I thought maybe we could go to Cornwall. There are these fantastic houses right by the beach on Trevose Head—you literally step out onto the dunes and the sea’s just there in front of you.” He was flicking through photos with his thumb as he spoke. “Sand, rock pools—it’ll be cold, but you can get little wet suits, and something tells me Theo’s the kind of kid who’d love to build a sandcastle and watch the waves come and knock it down. Here, take a look.”
The house he showed me was massive, with vast windows framing a view of picture-perfect Cornish beach. “It looks amazing,” I said enviously.
“Great. I’ll book it.” He scrolled down to a BOOK NOW button.
“But again, I should talk to Maddie,” I said quickly. “We may not be able to afford it.”
Miles shook his head. “You don’t have to, Pete. My shout. And we can always cancel.” He tapped the button.
“I can’t let you pay for everything.”
“Well, you won’t need to after the hospitals pay up.” He put the phone back into his pocket.
“You really think they will?”
“Of course. The last thing the NHS wants is anxious mothers starting to panic about whether their baby really is their baby. They’ll make us sign an NDA to protect their reputation, and then they’ll write us a whopping great check.”
“The NHS?” I said, frowning. “I thought it was the other hospital you were suing.”
Miles shrugged. “Our lawyer thinks it’s better to sue both, from a tactical point of view. After all, we can’t prove exactly where the mix-up happened. Better to let them fight it out between themselves. And at the end of the day, the NHS has deeper pockets.”
“I’m not sure I’d be happy about suing the NHS. As a taxpayer-funded service, I mean,” I said uneasily.
Miles looked at me fondly over the top of his pint. “You know what, Pete? I’m coming to realize something about you, which is that you are a really decent bloke. I admire that. But I also know you’d do anything for Theo, am I right? And the way I look at it is, if I can make you and Maddie just a little bit wealthier, or at least more comfortably off, I’ll be doing something for Theo, too. As well as removing one of the biggest difficulties about this whole situation.”
“Which is?”
“Well.” Miles had the grace to look awkward. “That it’s currently somewhat…asymmetric.”
“Asymmetric?” I echoed.
“Yes. To put it bluntly, we’ve got more money than you have. And obviously, I’d hate to see Theo being held back because of lack of funds. With the payout in your bank account, conversations like the one we had the other day about schools are going to be a whole lot easier, am I right?”
“Not wanting Theo to go to boarding school isn’t about money.”
“Maybe not at the moment. But when you can afford the best education money can buy, perhaps you’ll view things differently. All I’m saying is, it’ll give you options, and that can’t be a bad thing, can it?”
I felt we were getting into dangerous territory. “Look, I’ll talk to Maddie about litigation. But not schools. A boarding school is completely out of the question.”
Miles held up his hand, the one that wasn’t wrapped around his glass, in a gesture of surrender. “Of course. Your call entirely, Pete. So it’s a yes to suing, but a no to Hogwarts. Another pint?”
“Yes. But this time it’s my round,” I said firmly.
* * *
—
THAT ONE DISAGREEMENT ASIDE, we got on surprisingly well, given the difference in our backgrounds. Three pints in I realized we’d better steer clear of politics, after I mentioned Vladimir Putin and Miles frowned. “Say what you like about the oligarchs, Pete, but at least they’ve put that country back together.” Mostly, though, we talked about our children. Miles never tired of quizzing me about Theo’s achievements—“Can he jump with both feet yet? Stand on one foot? What’s he like on monkey bars?”—although I noticed he was far more interested in physical milestones than social ones. It would have been awkward not to reciprocate about David, so rather than ask about his progress, which would inevitably have led to negative comparisons with Theo, I asked what he was interested in.
“Oh, you know,” Miles said. “Movement. Tops and spinners and things like that. Poor little chap.”
“Right,” I said. There didn’t seem to be anywhere to go with that.
“You know, the worst thing about it is what it’s done to Lucy.” Miles’s tone was suddenly serious. “She’s not like your Maddie. She’s…fragile. And having a child like David brings out her anxious side. It’s made her overprotective, I suppose.”
To break the silence, I said, “Actually, Maddie isn’t as tough as she looks. She really suffered after the NICU. I won’t go into details but…it wasn’t easy for her. And all parents are overprotective, I think. I once lost Theo for twenty minutes in Sainsbury’s, and it was one of the most terrifying things that’s ever happened to me. It turned out he’d only wandered off to look for cartoons on the back of cereal packets, but…” I shook my head. I was a little drunk now, unable to articulate the full horror of that time, the sudden irrational fear that Theo might have been abducted or hit by a car in the car park. “It was visceral. That was one of the things that made me realize…It’s not about genetics, is it? It’s about who you love.”
“I’ll drink to that.” Miles clinked his glass against mine. “ ‘To love.’ ”
We both drank. “Though a social scientist would probably say this is quite an interesting experiment,” he added.
“How so?”
“You know—nature versus nurture, all that stuff. Will our children take after their biological parents, or will they be shaped by their environments? Or, to put it another way, will Theo turn out to be a driven, competitive little bugger like me, or an all-around decent bloke like you?” He nodded. “You should write about that. It’d make an interesting article.”