Free Bacchus and Sanderson (Deceased) by Simon Speight

and what the tasks are that you have been set. Let me deal with them one at a time.
    Why are you my beneficiary? There is no gentle or easy way of saying this to you, so I will just say it. You are my son...’
                  William dropped the pages onto the table and stared into space. Ridiculous. His father had been Gary Mulholland, an itinerant welder who struggled with domesticity and responsibility.  He had left before William had a chance to remember anything about him, before he had made an impression, good or bad, but he was still his father. He and his mother had reverted to her maiden name; Bacchus and that was the name that was on his birth certificate. His mother had said his father hadn’t been with them long enough to give him a feed or change a nappy.
                  If this letter were true, his mother was a liar. He picked up the letter and started to screw it into a ball. His mother wasn’t a liar, not on this scale, not on any scale. Something stopped him. He needed to read more of the letter to see if there was any substance to this man’s claim. He wasn’t sure what it was or why he stopped short of tossing the letter onto the fire, but he smoothed the pages flat again and put them back onto the coffee table.
                  Distracted; he paced around the room, thinking about his mother and everything she had ever said about his father. He realised, with regret, that it amounted to next to nothing. His father had been a welder who survived on the periphery, finding work where he could. They had met at a dance and he had swept her off her feet and within weeks they had been married. He had been born a couple of years later and then his father had left. Not a glowing portrait of the man he had known as his father, even if he had never met the man.              
                  Sighing, he picked up the letter and resumed reading, wondering if there would be anything he would recognise that would substantiate what Ernest Sanderson had written.
    ‘I’m sure that reading that short sentence was shocking and unbelievable. It is, however, true. I met your mother when she worked as a secretary at a set of barristers chambers I used in London. She was married to your father, miserable and married, but still married, though when I met your mother they were living apart.  Your mother and I fell in love. We saw each other for a number of months and had started to talk about a life together. Then Angela, your mother , disappeared. She left her job, her home and disappeared completely. I searched for her, asked questions at her work and at her home address. Nothing. I employed a private detective, who searched countrywide, advertising in local newspapers for information. Nothing. After searching for months, I had to accept that Angela didn’t want to be found. Two years later, I received a call from the private detective; I had kept him on retainer to keep trying to find her. He had found Angela living in a small village in called Batcombe, in Dorset without her husband but with a small child.
                  In the meantime, I had married Jess, an old family friend and we were very happy with each other. I was in love with her; I had found my soul mate.
                  When I received a call from the private detective, I contacted your mother.  Her husband, the man you had thought was your father, had left you both when you were three months old, telling your mother he didn’t want the responsibility. He sent a little money for the first couple of months, but this had petered out to nothing.
                  I turned up on Angela’s doorstep without warning soon after she had moved to Dorset and I learned why she had disappeared. Your father had persuaded her to take him back, telling your mother they could move away and have another try at life together. Your mother, guilty because of our friendship when she