Rachel's Research Ch. 02: Ellie & Mark

"How was that?" I asked.

"Tricky," Mark told me. "Keeping the physical part hidden was hard but it wasn't the hardest part. When you're with someone you develop private jokes and stuff. It was really hard not to let anything slip."

"Has everything gone smoothly since then?" I asked, hoping to provoke more interesting stories about their lives. From the look they exchanged I had done the right thing.

"I left school that summer," Elaine began. "I got a job in a bank half an hour away. I still lived at home so Mark and I continued our relationship - at least we kept on having dates when we could."

"We invented mutual friends," her brother explained. "And went to the cinema together during the week when we knew we couldn't be together at the weekend. We had to keep our own friends in the dark too which wasn't easy."

"Mark had to stop seducing girls at school," Elaine teased.

"That must have been tough for you," I joined in the joke.

"It depended on how much sex I was getting elsewhere," he retaliated. "Some weeks were better than others, but I tried hard."

"We kept it going for two years," Elaine carried on. "Until Mark went off to University. That's when it went wrong."

I could tell that a more serious note had just been struck. I looked at them both for explanation, expecting Elaine as the older to take up the story but she held back so long that her brother had to fill in the silence.

"I went a bit wild at Uni," he eventually confessed. "There was so much freedom and so many girls that I... I cheated on Ellie - quite a lot."

The wounds must still have been raw because the looks of pain on Elaine's face and of guilt on her brother's were profound.

"When Mark came home for Christmas, I didn't realise what he'd been doing. We picked up where we had left off, but I could tell something had changed. He'd hardly communicated with me after the first few weeks, but I was too stupid to realise why.

"When he went back to Uni in the Spring, I found out he'd been with other girls and..." the tears were beginning to flow so she took a deep breath and stopped herself. "I'd rather not go over it again," Elaine said softly. "It was so hard being here on my own, knowing what he was doing and not being able to talk to a single person about it."

"I know," Mark said, taking her hand yet again. "I behaved like a selfish shit. It's the biggest regret of my life. I nearly lost you over it."

"Very few pre-Uni relationships survive three years of separation," I suggested. "And for much the same reasons on both sides."

"We actually broke up for a whole year," Elaine told me. "It was impossible living in the same house as him after all we'd done together, so he spent most of his time at Uni even during the holidays. We both found other people for a while."

"Then I got into a more serious relationship," Mark continued. "It lasted a year and a half but came to a sticky end halfway through my final year. I came home very upset just before my exams. Thanks God Ellie had the decency to take pity on me and help me through it. She was amazing; we began to rediscover our feelings for each other. It ended up in bed again but this time it was the real thing."

"You weren't just on the rebound?" I asked.

"Being with her again showed me how stupid I'd been," Mark explained. "I understood what I'd put at risk and knew I'd never do it again."

"How did you feel?" I asked his sister.

"I was in a relationship myself at the time," she replied. "With someone at the Bank. We'd been together for six months and were talking about moving in together. I was torn between the two of them."

"For a few months the tables were well and truly turned," Mark said ironically. "This time I was head over heels in love with Ellie and had to watch her with another man. I finally understood what I'd done to her for the last few years. It wasn't pretty."

Elaine's expression was hard to read.

"You ended the relationship?" I suggested.

"Eventually," she said quietly.

"That must have been difficult."

"He wasn't good enough for you," Mark interjected bitterly.

"You were just jealous," Elaine growled.

Mark looked at his sister sideways then turned towards me with a mischievous grin on his face.

"Too right I was jealous! It didn't make it any easier knowing how good in bed she had become."

"Mark!" Elaine squealed in horror.

"It's true. I might not have liked him, but he taught you a hell of a lot about sex. I was amazed the first time we got together again."

"Don't say that!"

"Come on Ellie! You're the hottest thing I've ever been in bed with!"

His sister's face was bright red in embarrassment, but I could tell there was at least an element of pride mixed in.

"What about your parents?" I asked to break the tension. "Were they in on the secret?"

There was a pause; they looked at each other meaningfully.

"Dad died when we were in our mid-twenties," Elaine said. "It was sudden and tragic."

"Mum was devastated as you can imagine," Mark added. "We were too. It was such a shock."

"I'm sorry," I mumbled.

"We'd been together in secret for a couple of years by then," Elaine continued. "We were both still living at home because neither of us could bear to move away from the other. So when Dad died, we were both there to help Mum."

Elaine was still clearly upset.

"After the funeral when everyone had gone home, Mum asked us to sit with her in the kitchen. She poured three very large brandies."

"Mum hardly ever drank alcohol," Mark added. "So we knew something big was coming."

"She sat us at the kitchen table, took a long sip, pulled a face and said that she knew all about us."

"Goodness!" I exclaimed. "What did you say?"

They looked at each other again before Mark took up the story.

"Mum used the voice she always used when she'd caught one or both of us doing something we shouldn't. There was no arguing with that voice; if Mum said she knew then she knew. There was no point even trying to deny it."

"Was she angry," I asked.

Elaine shook her head.

"Not angry," her brother agreed. "It was strange. She said that she knew about our relationship and although she didn't understand it or condone it, we didn't need to hide it from her any longer."

"That's amazing," I said stunned. Elaine continued.

"Mum said that she'd just said goodbye to the love of her life forever. She couldn't bear to think of us being denied the gift of being together like she and Dad had been. Mark asked how long she'd known. She said more than a year."

"When I asked how she found out, she asked us what kind of mother she would be if she couldn't tell when her children were so much in love?" Mark said as if in quotation marks.

"Did your father know too?" I wondered.

Elaine shook her head.

"Mum didn't want to upset him."

"How did things change after that?"

"At home everything changed - and very much for the better. We started to share a room and a bed. We could talk about the future openly and with some kind of confidence."

"Mum has never really accepted us being a couple," Elaine said sadly. "Even now we have kids. But she loves us both and wants us to be happy."

"Which we are," Mark added, taking his sister's hand in his and kissing her fingers.

"Which we are," she agreed with a smile.

"Would you like to be able to marry properly?" I asked.

The look on Elaine's face gave me all the answer I needed. She was staring at the ring on her third finger as she spoke.

"We went through a form of ceremony in Las Vegas. We told them we wanted to re-enact our vows; that we were already married but wanted to do the whole Vegas Wedding thing."

"And they didn't suspect?"

"They're used to strange requests. Our ceremony was close enough to a marriage to get the photographs and a document of sorts, but not close enough for us to have to prove our identities to any authorities."

"We chose as normal a ceremony as we could find. The building even looked like a church. We made our vows in front of what passed for a Minister - and of course Mum was there."

"I did have a really lovely dress..." Elaine mused.

"You're not joking," Mark broke in. "Look!"

He fiddled with his phone then passed it to me. On it was a picture of the two of them with an older woman who could only be their mother. Mark looked gorgeous in his dark suit; Elaine looked simply stunning in a thigh length white dress, white fascinator, bare legs and high white heels. Their mother looked as proud as any mother should on her child's wedding day.

Apart from the strangeness of the building behind them, they could have been any attractive couple in any town in England.

"We feel married," Mark insisted. "And to all intents we are. Our passports have the same surname and we wear wedding rings. Who would think anything else? It was only when we wanted to have kids that we knew we had to do something more serious.

"That's when we made the move to France. Ellie trained as an English teacher; we both learned the language. Two of my biggest clients were French anyway so it was just as easy to live here and fly to the UK as it was the other way round."

"Why France?"

"Napoleon's gift," Mark chuckled. "Incest isn't illegal here, as long as it's consensual."

"It's not accepted though," his sister added. "We still have to keep it secret."

"You don't plan to 'come out' about your relationship then?"

"Jesus no!" Mark exploded. "It's just that if we are ever found out, the legal consequences here would be far less severe."

"Plus there are far fewer people here who know us; no one at all from our school days. There's far less chance of anything getting out," Elaine explained. "We're not on Facebook or any other social media platforms."

"Do you let the boys use social media?"

"They're not that interested right now," she replied. "But we'll have to when they're older. It would look suspicious if we tried to stop them."

"Weren't you worried about having kids? Wouldn't that just make things even more complicated and increase the risk of being found out?"

"Kids make life more complicated whoever you're with, don't they?" Elaine asked. "You don't avoid having them just to avoid complications."

"That's true enough," I smiled, thinking about how my life had been changed by our two horrors. "But aren't there other, more serious considerations when parents are genetically close?"

"You mean birth defects?" Mark asked. "Six fingers and big noses?"

I laughed and nodded.

"Well, that sort of thing."

"That's the uninformed view," he replied slightly aggressively. "Sorry, I don't mean to be rude. Yes there is an increased risk of passing on some genetic defects, but you have to ask how big the actual risk is? One in four? One in forty? One in four hundred? One in four thousand? You have to get some objectivity into this."

Like most people I had no idea of the actual level of risk. I had just assumed it was high.

"Many people have genetic disorders that are nothing to do with inbreeding," Mark continued. "Some of those disorders are serious and are one hundred percent certain to be passed on. We might advise them of the risks if they do have kids, but we don't pass laws to stop them, do we?"

This was undeniably true.

"So yes, we did think about it and we did a lot of research but in the end, we weren't driven by cold hard calculations. We love each other and wanted a child from that love. Getting Elaine pregnant was planned. It took a little longer than we expected and was a lot harder work, but it happened in the end."

"Hard work?" his sister asked threateningly. "I didn't notice you complaining at the time."

Mark looked genuinely shocked. "El! That's the sort of thing I say, and you get cross about!"

He looked at me with a wry smile.

"See Rachel? You're having an effect on us already."

"Anyway," his sister laughed softly. "Once we'd had one baby it was much easier to conceive the second. Alain was conceived the first time we tried, much to Mark's disappointment!"

Her brother pulled a comically sad face. She squeezed his hand again and their expressions became soft and loving as they shared a precious memory. I felt envious; my own conceptions had been far less easy to tie down, so my husband and I had no such special moments to share.

"Were they both born healthy?" I asked. "They certainly look fit and strong now."

"They both came early and were a little underweight," Elaine told me. "But they turned out normal and, as you have seen yourself, they're no different from any other boys their age."

"Will you ever let them know?" I asked.

"Only if there's a real need," Elaine answered. "Why should they have to live with something like this hanging over them? It wasn't their decision."

"How do you explain the lack of family?" I asked.

"It hasn't come up yet," Elaine replied. "But we'll say that Mark was adopted and has no relatives. Mum's agreed to back us up on that."

"It has to be that way round," Mark explained. "Ellie looks so much like Mum that she couldn't be anything but her daughter. I look a bit like Dad but he's not around to make comparisons every day."

I doubted that; to my eye they looked so much like brother and sister that the deception would easily be seen through.

"What would happen if you were found out?" I asked tentatively.

"Here? Very little legally. Socially it would be very difficult but not impossible."

"And back home?"

"Much more serious. At the very least the kids would be taken into care. In theory, we could both go to prison but more likely, only Mark would. We'd be classed as sex offenders too," Elaine added. "Imagine it! The two of us grouped in with paedophiles and rapists. It's grossly unjust."

I couldn't argue with that.

"It all comes down to religion, Mark said quietly.

"And an element of 'yuck factor' his sister added.

"You're right," he nodded. "We've been told it's wrong for so many years it's hard to cut through the crap and see the truth."

"There's the potential abuse factor too," I challenged. "Older relatives exploiting positions of trust."

"True," Mark conceded. "But there are abusive relationships of every kind. We don't stop all marriages just because some men beat their wives. We don't ban all heterosexual sex because some victims get raped. But we do ban all sex and marriage between relatives, however loving, caring and consensual it might be. Where's the justice in that?"

At that moment the two boys returned to the house expressing hunger in both English and French, and all conversation on the subject had to come to an end. It was okay; I had all I needed for my article and story.

My mind however was spinning with memories and questions, some written on my reporter's pad, others coming from deep in my own past. As those memories and questions became stronger, watching the family together so happily became more and more painful.

I could feel the emotion welling up within me. It was definitely time to leave.

After another half hour of pleasant, uncontroversial chat, I looked at my watch, announced that my husband would be waiting, and left them to their normal, loving evening at home.

***

I returned to our hotel where one of the two men I loved most in the world was waiting.

I cried as we made love that night. In the total darkness of the room, my mind filled in the face of the man whose body I imagined was merging so completely with mine.

The face was familiar, it was adored, but it was not my husband's.