Felipe

Felipe is a visiting uncle whose sexual encounter with Polly Drayton is strongly implied to have resulted in her pregnancy. He is largely absent from the later events, but the circumstances of that night make him central to the secret underlying Polly’s claim that Robbie Dexter is the father of her child.

Identity and the encounter

Felipe is identified only as the visiting uncle of someone Polly barely knew; the text gives no further account of his family connection, background, or life. His brief appearance occurs on a moonlit night in late October, against the back wall of a pub beside a vent sending greasy kitchen vapour into the dark. Polly had let him chat her up in the week after Robbie dumped her, hoping for a consolatory act of revenge. Instead, the encounter is remembered as crude thrusting and groping, with Felipe’s beery breath and obscene remarks as he leaned over the front of her shirt.

The contrast between Polly’s expectation and the encounter’s reality is sharply drawn. She had turned to Felipe while reacting to her breakup, but afterward she thought longingly of Robbie’s tender hands and gentle kisses. The episode therefore marks neither a new romance nor an enduring attachment to Felipe: its lasting consequence is the pregnancy and the secret Polly builds around it.

Pregnancy and concealment

Several months later, Polly is nearly five months pregnant. Her recollection of the timing establishes why Felipe is strongly implied to be the child’s biological father: her period came after her last sexual encounter with Robbie, so she knows that encounter did not result in the pregnancy. The child’s dark hair and brown eyes, as well as its fair skin, make it possible for her to conceal that paternity from Robbie; Polly privately recognizes that she would not have succeeded in passing the child off as his if the baby’s appearance had been different.

At supper with Robbie, the concealed history shapes an intimate domestic scene. As the baby seems to kick, Polly invites Robbie to feel it. He cannot, but grins and calls it their baby; Polly answers that they are all his. Her outward tenderness and inward knowledge diverge: the child is Felipe’s by implication, while Polly presents Robbie as its father and accepts the future that claim may bring.

Narrative role

Felipe’s importance rests on a single encounter whose consequences extend beyond his own brief appearance. The narrative supplies no evidence that he knows Polly is pregnant, that he has contact with her afterward, or that he plays any part in her later decisions. Instead, his absence leaves Polly free to conceal the paternity while she tries to regain Robbie.

That concealment links Felipe to the fragile domestic picture Polly is constructing: supper served at a kitchen table, a baby welcomed as Robbie’s, and a past encounter kept out of view. His role is thus less a continuing relationship than the undisclosed origin of the pregnancy—and the fact that makes Polly’s apparent reconciliation with Robbie depend on a lie.