A / N: Thank you to those of you who reviewed chapter 24, this one is the one that will see a much needed talk between father and son.
Chapter 26 will be written and posted within the next two weeks from today.
After only having about six hours of sleep, Will returned to the local hospital in the mid-afternoon on the twenty-ninth. When he arrived, he learned from the doctor that a liver specialist wouldn't be able to see them until the second of January which was only a few days away, so in the meantime his father would be staying at the hospital in Watford on the drip so that the infection could clear up.
It was as the doctor left Reginald's room that Will turned to face his father, there was a lot that the two of them needed to talk about.
"So, what do you think about what the doctor said?" Will asked.
Reginald grunted, "I think I need a drink." His father muttered.
William tutted, "Didn't you listen to what I said to you this morning?" he asked.
"Of course I did, Fitzwilliam. You believe that I owe it to you and Georgiana to get better." Reginald replied bitterly.
"And?"
"I want to have my children back but I don't know where to start." His father admitted.
"There's a lot you need to do." William replied.
Reginald sighed, "If I went to rehab, got sober, had the transplant and never touched another drop of alcohol for the rest of my life, would that be enough to make amends?"
"Not really but it's a start." William replied honestly.
There was a moment of silence between father and son as Reginald took in his son's words before nodding curtly. William didn't know where to start with his father, he wasn't entirely sure if they could ever have a relationship again because of Reginald's past misdeeds that were, at the moment, unforgivable.
"Fitzwilliam, you left Pemberley. You turned your back on me all those months ago and we haven't spoken a word to each other since your departure. What do I have to do to have you back in my life?" Reginald questioned.
"Like I said, rehab and getting sober would be a start but it's also because I promised Georgie that I would help you, she needs you dad. But it's not just about getting yourself physically better. You've done things that have hurt me, have hurt the woman I love and whether she knows it or not, you hurt my daughter and there is a lot we need to talk about." William stated.
"How have I hurt your daughter?" Reginald asked.
"By preventing me from knowing about her, Rose went the first three and half years without a father and I'll never get to experience all those firsts that she had in life. I have this amazing little girl, she's so curious and so funny, she has her own little personality but for the rest of my life, I'll know that it was you who prevented me from helping her learn to walk or watching her reach those other important milestones. That's how you've hurt her. You decided to keep her father away from her when she deserved to know who her daddy was." William answered.
Reginald sighed, "What do you want me to say?" his father muttered.
"I want to know from your point of view why you drink because I don't really understand it. I want to know why you changed into the person you are because the father I had before mum died wasn't the one who pushed for me to live my life the way you wanted me to live it. I want to know why you deemed Elizabeth not good enough for me."
"So not much then?" Reginald asked sarcastically.
"Don't I have the right to want to ask so much of you? You deliberately kept my daughter a secret from me and you kept Elizabeth from me as well and there has to be more to it than the fact that Elizabeth is from a different background than me. You have so much that you need to explain." William said through gritted teeth.
Another silence, this one a little tenser than the last. William took a few deep breaths to try and calm down, he didn't want to get angry. He didn't want to feel frustrated. When he had entered the main entrance to the hospital he had silently promised himself that he would talk to his father like a calm and mature adult without getting angry or shouting at him.
"Where do you want me to start?" Reginald questioned.
"At the beginning."
"We'll be here all night!"
"I don't care. I need to know."
Reginald stared off into space, it was as if the old man didn't want to look at his son while he spoke.
"It all started when I was a teenager. My father always liked a drink. Pemberley was in ruin and our family nearly lost everything and my father's way of coping with everything bad was to hit the bottle. When I was fourteen, I heard my parents arguing so badly that I had to hide in the wine cellar. I could hear bottles being smashed, my parents screaming at each other so loudly and so violently that I wanted to shut it all out. Being in that wine cellar, I opened one of the bottles and finished the entire lot, before I finished another. And then another. By the time my parents had stopped arguing, I had finished five bottles of wine by myself and I passed out in the wine cellar." Reginald began.
William didn't say anything, just watched as his father continued to tell him where the drinking all began.
"Well that's how I became dependent on alcohol. Whenever my parents would argue, I would lock myself away in my suite or somewhere secluded within Pemberley with the whiskey I had stolen from my father's study or a bottle of wine from the wine cellar and drink until I could forget that my parents were arguing or I seemed a little merrier than the miserable being that I was when I was in the house with my parents who didn't love each other."
Reginald cleared his throat and reached for the small jug of water on the table, gesturing for William to pour them both a cup. William took the jug from his father, pouring Reginald a drink of water before handing him the cup. His father drank it slowly, absentmindedly swirling the water round in the cup just like he used to do with his whiskey.
"It got a little better when I moved away to Cambridge for university. I was away from all the arguing and for the first time since I was fourteen, I could breathe and not worry about whether my mother would have a black eye or be covered in bruises, or wondering if my mother had thrown another glass or bottle at my father which had caused him to have those cuts and grazes. I met your mother at university, I fell in love. I deeply loved her, she became the light in my dark life and you know the rest. We got married, my father died because his alcoholism caused his liver to fail and I inherited everything. It wasn't long after that that my mother passed away and then your mother gave birth to you and we lived happily. Georgie came along and still, we lived happily and then your mother started getting these headaches."
Reginald gulped down another mouthful of water, his eyes filling with tears.
"We found out from her brain scans that she had developed an untreatable cancer and that it was starting to spread to other organs. Your mother was told that any treatment she received would only prolong the inevitable, that it would make her feel weaker and tired. She decided against receiving treatment, deciding to spend her remaining days with me, you and Georgie."
William felt a knot in his chest, he felt like crying with his father. He hadn't known that his mother had decided to turn down the cancer treatment.
"But she might have had a little more time with us if she had taken the treatment." William muttered.
Reginald sniffed, "She didn't want you to remember her as weak, Fitzwilliam. She wanted you and Georgie to only remember her as the smiling, loving mother that she always was. Especially you as you were so much older than Georgie was when she died." His father replied.
Another pause took place before Reginald cleared his throat and began talking again.
"When she passed away, I lost a part of myself. When you really love someone, the way I deeply loved your mother, they become a part of you. Your mother and I were together from the age of eighteen until she passed away, a long time we spent together and we were so, so happy. The light of my life had gone out and I was surrounded by darkness that hitting the bottle was my way of coping with daily life again."
"Alice told me that you shut yourself away from everyone. That you left Georgie to be looked after by her and me when I came home on the weekends for visits. She always used to say that you were busy with the business or away with business associates." William sighed.
"Alice didn't want you to know the truth, she thought it would be too painful for you and your sister to see me in that state and she was right. You had just lost your mother and the last thing you needed was to see me drinking myself to death." Reginald stated.
"She's like a second mother, she really cares about all of us."
"It was Alice Reynolds who gave me a reality check after your mother died. Georgiana managed to get into my study while Norman and a few of the other lads were taking me to my suite and before Alice could get a cleaner into the study, Georgiana had cut herself on a bottle that I had broken. It required a trip to A&E and several stitches to get the cut healed. When Alice returned back to the house with Georgie, she gave me a rather harsh telling off."
"What did she say to you?"
"That if I didn't get my act together and stop drinking so heavily, then I would lose the only two things left in the world that Anne had given me. I had two children who needed me, a boy who was away at boarding school and was too young to inherit the estate and a little girl aged only four who was the spitting image of her mother. So I did as she asked, I dialed down the amount I was drinking and I started spending more time with you and Georgiana." Reginald replied.
"And that's when you started thinking about what you wanted for our futures."
Reginald nodded, "The future for you and Georgie became my new focus for my life. I wanted you both to attend Cambridge, qualify, do a masters degree and then learn to run the family business. I wanted you, as my heir, to meet someone at university like I had your mother and love her as deeply as I had felt when I was with your mother. I wanted you to live the same way as I had, only minus the part about having the knowledge and burden of an alcoholic father." His father explained.
William took in his father's words, having gotten an explanation of sorts which made him understand why his father was the way he was. But there was still a lot more that he needed to know.
"So when I met Eleanor, you approved of her."
"I did," Reginald confirmed, "Eleanor, like your mother, came from the same background that we had been raised in. We both came from families that were from old money, we both had a family name that meant something. Your relationship with Eleanor was the same in the sense of when I first starting dating your mother and she seemed to really love you, and you her."
"I did, to begin with. But Eleanor was always trying to dictate the way I had to live my life. The weekends were all about what she wanted us to do when I would rather laze about at home and watch the TV or go out and play a sport if I wanted to. Eleanor was always planning our future together when I wasn't ready to have those things. It was something that always caused us to go our separate ways in the end."
"But you still went back to her every time?" Reginald questioned.
"She was…familiar I suppose. We had a history and while I will never deny that I loved her at a point in my life, I knew the difference between what I had felt for Eleanor and the love I feel for Elizabeth." William explained.
"Elizabeth." His father said sharply.
They were at this point in the conversation where they needed to talk about his relationship with Elizabeth and everything else that had happened and William hoped that he could make it through the next part of the conversation as calmly as he had regarding the explanation behind his father's drinking and obsession with his life.
"Why did you disapprove of her? It has to be more than the fact that she doesn't have the same connections in the world that we do."
"It's partly that. Nobody that we associate with would know her family, she's a stranger and not from old money. Can you imagine what your Aunt Catherine would be like if you took her to Rosings?"
Will grimaced, he knew exactly what Catherine would do and say if he ever took Elizabeth and Rose to meet his old fashioned Aunt. Not that he was planning on doing so any time soon, he rarely saw his Aunt ever since the whole thing with Anne had happened, he left the visiting to Richard.
"Exactly. When you came home from Spain with this girl who was the complete opposite to Eleanor, I thought you were making a mistake by being with her. I thought she was using you to get a huge payout, that she would dig her claws into you and then leave you high and dry. But most of all, I believed that Eleanor was the girl you were supposed to be with and Elizabeth was deliberately keeping you from her and that picture that I had of you having a deep love like I had with your mother was being threatened. I always pictured you and Eleanor whenever I had that picture in my head and Elizabeth was a threat to all of that." Reginald explained.
"So because Elizabeth threatened the life you had planned for me you were plotting ways of how to get rid of her?" William asked.
Reginald nodded, "I was," he replied, "And when I found out that she had taken a pregnancy test and was expecting your child, I saw an opportunity."
"To separate a couple who loved each other?"
"I didn't see it like that, you know I didn't. But yes, I saw an opportunity to keep you apart and you know the rest and if it wasn't for Charles Bingley marrying Elizabeth's sister, you might have gone the rest of your life without knowing of my deception."
"I don't see how. Say hypothetically, I had been ignorant of Rose's existence, you forget that I found that file in the London house safe with Richard. I most likely would have learned about Rose eventually, the safe is filled with information that I might need to pull out on the day you die." William replied.
Reginald sighed, "Is there anything else you want to know?" his father asked.
"I think we've pretty much covered the explanation to your behaviour of everything I wanted to know about." William replied.
"Where do we go from here?" Reginald questioned.
William hesitated at his father's question. He didn't know where they could go from here, even though he knew the truth behind his father's behaviour; he knew that he couldn't just forgive his father for everything bad Reginald had done to him. He couldn't just automatically forgive his father just because Reginald was ill with cirrhosis.
"Dad, whilst I'm glad that you were able to tell me everything that I needed to know, I can't just forgive you." William stated.
Reginald nodded again, "I understand. What do you need from me?"
"I've already said that I would help you get better, whatever it takes to make that happen. But if we're going to be a part of each other's lives again, you don't just need to get sober and have the transplant. You need to accept that I'm with Elizabeth, for good. You have to accept that she and Rose are my life and you need to apologise; to me, to Elizabeth for everything you've done."
"Very well. I apologise-"
"Not right now. I need you to see how important Elizabeth and Rose are to me because by seeing them with me, only then will you truly understand how wrong you were." William interrupted.
"Okay son. I'll try and make an effort with Elizabeth and I will apologise in due course. If it means having to see for myself that keeping you from Elizabeth Bennet and your daughter was a mistake, then that's what I'll do." Reginald promised.
William smiled gratefully, "It's going to take a lot of hard work but maybe we can build a better relationship from this. We can't lose you just yet dad."
"Just the thought of having you and Georgie in my life when I thought that the two of you had turned your back on me has given me something positive to focus on after months of negativity." Reginald explained.
"It seems that you've done a lot of thinking since I left you this morning."
"I can't do much else. I'm strapped to this bed until the infection goes away and when I've healed from the procedure." Reginald muttered.
Checking his watch, he saw that it was nearing the end of visiting hours. William rose from his seat and made for the door, turning back to face his father for the last time that evening.
"You're getting a second chance with me and Georgie, dad. I hope that you take it and make amends with us because you won't get a third." William warned.
Reginald sighed, "Like you said, Fitzwilliam, it's going to take a lot of hard work if we're going to have a better relationship after all this mess." His father replied.
William nodded and left the room, hoping that this fresh start for his father wouldn't prove to be the biggest mistake of his life.