She nodded.
"So he's your only experience of men?"
She stared at her hands.
"Yes or no?" he demanded, the words whipping out impatiently.
"Yes," she whispered again.
"Then you obviously require lessons on the male of the species. There are only three things to remember. One: most men need to be told what to do by women. Even sex improves when women take the trouble to point the man in the right direction. Two: compared with women, most men are inadequate. They are less perceptive, have little or no intuition, are poorer judges of character and, therefore, more vulnerable to criticism. They find aggression immensely intimidating because they're not supposed to and, in short, are by far the more sensitive of the two sexes. Three: any man who does not conform to this pattern should be avoided. He will be a swaggering, uneducated brute whose intellect will be so small that the only way he can give himself a modicum of authority is by demeaning anyone who's foolish enough to put up with him, and, finally, he will lack the one thing that all decent men have in abundance, namely a deep and abiding admiration for women." He picked up her coffee cup and held it under her nose so that she had to take it. "Now I don't pretend to be a paragon, but I'm certainly not a brute, and between you, me and the gatepost, I am extremely fond of my irascible wife. I accept that what I did was open to interpretation, but you can take it from me that I went to Cedar House for one reason only and that was simply to paint your mother. The temptation to capture two generations of one family was irresistible." He eyed her speculatively. Almost as irresistible, he was thinking, as the temptation to capture the third generation. "And if my much-put-upon wife hadn't chosen that precise moment to expel me, well," he shrugged, "I wouldn't have had to freeze on. your mother's summer-house floor. Does all that set your mind at rest or are you going to go on quaking like a great jelly every time you see me?"
She stared at him with stricken eyes. She was beautiful after all, he thought, but it was a tragic beauty. Like her mother's. Like Mathilda's.
"I'm pregnant," she said finally, exhausted tears seeping on to her cheeks.
There was a moment of silence.
"I thought-I hoped-my mother-" She dashed at her eyes with a sodden tissue. "I don't know what-I ought to go-I shouldn't have told you."
Somewhere in the recesses of his heart, Jack blushed for himself. Was the self-pity of a child under intolerable stress so despicable that he had to savage it? He reached across and took her hand, drawing her off the chair and into his arms, holding her tight and stroking her hair as her father would have done had he lived. He let her weep for a long time before he spoke. "Your grandmother once said to me that mankind was doomed unless he learnt to communicate. She was a wise old lady. We talk a lot but we rarely communicate." He eased her off his chest and held her at arm's length so that he could look at her. "I'm glad you told me. I feel rather privileged that you felt you could. Most people would have waited until Sarah came home."
"I was going-"
He stopped her with a chuckle and released her back on to her chair. "Let me hang on to my illusions. Let me believe just once that someone thought I could be as easy to confide in as Sarah. It's not true, of course. There is no one in the world who can listen as well as my wife, or who can impart such sound advice. She'll look after you, I promise."
Ruth blew her nose. "She'll be angry with me."
"Do you think so?"
"You said she's irascible."
"She is. It's not so frightening. You just keep your head down till the saucepans stop flying."
She dabbed frantically at her eyes. "Saucepans? Does she-"
"No," he said firmly. "It was a figure of speech. Sarah's a nice person. She brings home wounded pigeons, splints their wings, and watches them die in slow and terrible agony with an expression of enormous sympathy on her face. It's one of the things they teach them at medical school."
She looked alarmed. "That's awful."
"It was a joke," he said ruefully. "Sarah is the most sensible doctor I know. She will help you reach a decision about what you want to do and then take it from there. She won't force you to have the baby, and she won't force you not to have it."
The tears welled again. "I don't want it." She clenched her hands in her lap. "Is that wrong, do you think?"
"No," he said honestly. "If I were in your shoes, I wouldn't want it either."
"But I made it. It was my fault."
"It takes two to make babies, Ruth, and I can't see your boyfriend showing much enthusiasm when it's fully-fledged and bawling its head off. It's your choice, not his. Sperm comes two-a-penny and most of it gets washed down the sink. Wombs and their foetuses come extremely expensive. Sarah's right when she says it's a life sentence."
"But isn't it alive? Won't I be murdering it?"
He was a man. How could he begin to understand the agony that women suffered because a biological accident has given them power over life and death? He could only be honest with her. "I don't know, but I'd say it's only alive at the moment because you're alive. It has no existence as an individual in its own right."
"But it could have-if I let it."
"Of course. But on that basis every egg that any woman produces and every sperm that any man produces has the potential for life, and no one accuses young men of being murderers every time they spill their seed on the ground behind the bike sheds. I think for each of us our own life has priority over the potential life that exists inside us. I don't for a moment pretend that it's an easy decision, or even a black and white one, but I do believe that you are more important at this moment than a life that can only come into being if you are prepared to pay for it, emotionally, physically, socially and financially. And you'll bear that cost alone, Ruth, because the likelihood of Hughes paying anything is virtually nil."
"He'll say it isn't his anyway."
Jack nodded. "Some men do, I'm afraid. It's so easy for them. It's not their body that's been caught."
She hid her face in her hands. "You don't understand." She wrapped her arms around her head. To protect herself? To hide herself? "It might be one of the others'. You see I had to-he made me-Oh, God-I wish-" She didn't go on, only curled herself into a tight ball and sobbed.
Jack felt completely helpless. Her anguish was so strong that it washed over him in swamping waves. He could think only in platitudes-there's nothing so bad that it might not be worse ... it's always darkest before the dawn-but what use were platitudes to a girl whose life lay in tatters before her? He put out an awkward hand and placed it on her head. It was an instinctive gesture of comfort, an echo of a priestly benediction, "tell me what happened," he said. "Perhaps it's not as bad as you think."
But it was. What she told him in tones of abject terror rocked the foundations of his own humanity. So shocked was he that he felt physically sick.
Sarah found him in the garden when she came home at three thirty after helping to deliver Polly Graham of a healthy baby daughter. He was forking industriously round some roses and scattering handfuls of fertilizer about the roots. "It's almost December," she said. "Everything's dormant. You're wasting your time."
"I know." He looked up and she thought she saw traces of tears in his eyes. "I just needed to do something active."
"Where's Ruth?"
"Asleep. She had a headache so I gave her some codeine and packed her off to bed." He brushed the hair from his forehead with the back of a muddy hand, "Have you finished for the day?"
She nodded. "What's happened?"
He leant on the fork and stared across the fields. The slowly fading light gave a misty quality to a landscape in which cows grazed and trees, shorn of their leaves, fingered the sky with dark filigree lacework. "That's the England men and women die for," he said gruffly.