“He became a different person after that. He even made a pass at me. I had to use all my strength to resist him. And he said he was staying the whole night in the basement, so it would be as easy to sleep with him as not since I couldn’t make up my own sweet mind. And he said horrible things about you.”
“This all happened after the suicide?”
“A few days. Ο boy, will I ever forget that funeral service out in Golders Green. Apparently she used to gamble a lot. And she owned a racehorse once. And eight was her lucky number. This enormous floral wreath in the figure of eight — it must have cost the earth — went through the flap with the coffin. She’d put it in the will. They’d to hold it so that the flap didn’t sweep it off.”
“But why didn’t you marry him? The child would be secure. You were fond of him.”
“You weren’t very concerned about the child.”
“That’s true, but I didn’t claim to be, though that’s no virtue. You said we should have been married because of the child, that the child was more important than either of us. What then was so different in this case? According to that logic shouldn’t you have married Jonathan for the child’s sake?”
“You sound more like a lawyer than a person,” there were bitter tears in her eyes. “Everything was different. You were the child’s father. The child was conceived in love, on my part anyhow. Jonathan was old, older even than his years. It was a last clutching at life. For the advantages I might get, I’d have to give him my life. You may be fond of an old person but when they try to be young, you find you can’t help despising them. And I’d have to make love to Jonathan, like you and I used to make love, and no matter what you say there was nothing sinful or mean or ugly about our lovemaking. It was pure and healthy and natural. How could I make love to an old man, with the memory of that, and at the same time the child of those memories growing within me. Even if I married Jonathan I’d have to give up all hope of ever seeing you again, and there was no way I was ever going to do that.”
“You sounded quite determined about it when you wrote to me.”
“No, love. I was hoping it’d have the opposite effect on you. I suppose none of this has the slightest effect on you?”
“Of course it has. It’s an awful mess to have got into in the first place. If you’d married Jonathan it would have cleared it up, only from my point of view, granted. Now it’s just a mess again.”
“I can’t take that. I know it’ll work out all right. I know that nothing but good will come of it. Because both of us are good people. We didn’t try to dodge anything. You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t a good person.”
“Tell me more.”
“Do you still write that stuff?”
“It’s all I get paid for.”
“But you have some money from your family.”
“Not enough to live on,” I said abruptly, closing the conversation. “What are you going to do now?”
“I’ll keep this job till the child comes. It’s very boring but it makes no demands and it pays quite well. One good thing that this upheaval taught me is how valueless our prized security is. I can get a far more exciting job here with my skills than that boring job back at the bank. I’d never have had the courage to find that out except for what happened.”
“What are you going to do with the child?”
“That’s the six marker.”
“Marriage is now out,” the way she reacted I saw she hadn’t by any means given it up. “It’s out.”
“That may change with the child. It’ll be your child. People long for children.”
“It won’t change with the child,” I said brutally. “It won’t change.”
“You can never tell those things.”
“You’ll have to take my word for it. It’s out. Completely out. And there are only two other ways left now.”
“What?”
“Adoption. Give the child to two parents looking for a child. That way it’ll be as if the child were born into a normal home.”
“It’s all right for you to say that. That way your little mistake will have been farmed out, got rid of. You hadn’t to leave Dublin. You don’t have to carry the child around in your body all these months, cry over it, worry over it. And then after all that just hand it over to somebody else as if it were a postal parcel. And then spend the rest of your life wondering: where is it now, what’s happening to it, is it happy.…”
“Well, the alternative is simple. You keep the child. And once you do that you’re on your own. You’ll never see me again.”
“I don’t know how you can say that.”
“I’m fed up listening to you prate about the child’s good. The child must come first, but apparently only when it happens to coincide with your own wishes. Two parents can bring up a child better than one. There’s nothing special about our seed.”
“Stop it, stop it,” she said.
“All right. I’ll pay. And we can have a brandy in the pub.”
“I need a brandy. And to think I wasn’t able to sleep last night with looking forward to this lunch.”
There was a bar a few doors down from the view of the Bay of Naples with its several sailboats and we had the drinks standing at a counter girdled by a thin brass rail. She took a brandy but I changed to a pint of bitter. As I came out of the Mens I was able to look at her for the first time. There were still no apparent signs of her pregnancy. She was a strong handsome woman, younger looking than her thirty-eight years. Years of regular hours and church-going had worked wonders of preservation on natural good looks.
“Do you know what I want you to do? I want you to come with me to Jonathan’s place. No, we don’t have to go in or anything, in fact we couldn’t,” she was in extreme good spirits again when I joined her. “But I just want you to see it. We can get the bus. We can just walk past the gate. It’s no more than twelve minutes away on the bus.”
“But why?”
“I just want you to see it. It won’t take long.”
“Whatever you say,” I was anxious to avoid the tension of the restaurant at any cost. It had been the same argument as we had had several times in Dublin and we’d never reached anywhere except the same impasse, and never would. “I’m in your hands for the rest of the day,” I said.
We left the pub like any pair of lovers in the centre of London for the day, and I caught her hand as we raced to get to the stop on Shaftesbury Avenue before a six bus which was stopping at traffic lights.
We got off a few stops after Harrods and walked. There was a feeling of decorum and quiet about the roads, of ordered, sheltered lives. The houses were rich and white, with balconies and black railings, and they all had basements.
“It’s only three doors away,” she’d grown very nervous. “If there are signs of anybody in the house we’ll just walk straight past.”
There was a magnolia tree on the bare front lawn, an elegant grey door, and the basement was down steps. It didn’t look as if there was anybody in the house.
“They must be in the country for the week-end,” she said. “When I left, the lawn was white with magnolia blossom. They must have vacuumed them up.”
“Who’s they?” I asked.
“Jonathan and his wife. Did I not tell you he’s married? The woman is a widow, has money too. It’s she who has the cottage in the country. Clutching at a late life.”
“Come on. You never know, there might be somebody in the house.”
“I’d love to just get one look into the basement.”
“No. I’m moving on if you are. It’s not right,” I was afraid someone might open the door and enquire what we wanted or — worse — invite us in.