‘Well, what is there to talk about?’ said Ralph. He realized amazedly that his behaviour had been aptly surmised. ‘I was just trying to be nice. I didn’t know you wanted to talk about it any more. You gave me the impression that you’d decided everything.’
‘I’m allowed to change my mind, aren’t I?’ she said. ‘It’s not against the law, is it?’
She stared at him provocatively, a vague smile twisting her lips, and for the first time, without really expecting it, he experienced such a wrench of resistance that his skin abruptly flamed and his heart seemed to fly from his chest. For a moment he could not ascertain what it meant: it was as if he had been told that he would suffer pain, and then been made to wait so long for it that when it came, it felt not like pain at all but reassurance.
‘Have you changed your mind?’
‘Maybe.’ She fiddled with something on the table. ‘I don’t know.’
He opened his mouth but found that he didn’t have anything to say. Something strained at the locks and bolts of his thoughts and grew frantic, pounding at its walls. He fought it back, panicked by the things he might feel if he let it out. It wasn’t up to him! It had nothing to do with him, none of it! Disturbance sang through his veins, and with it every part of him seemed to find its note, loud as the keys of a piano. He chorused silently his own despair. Francine was watching him now, waiting to see what he would do. He saw himself quite clearly lunging across the table and clawing at her plump cheeks with his blunt, innocuous fingers.
‘What do you mean?’ he said nervously. ‘You must know what you mean.’
He met her gaze, willing her to let him go, but her sharp eyes pricked his swollen, dreamy detachment and he felt its poisons rush over him. He understood then that she wanted to hurt him, to draw him out and show him his own helplessness. What had he done? Why was he being punished so? As he wondered, everything — Francine, the germ she carried, the room itself — seemed to gather against him and accuse him of his own significance.
‘I don’t know,’ she said obstinately. ‘How should I know? It’s too complicated. How do you expect me to just decide?’
‘I don’t.’ He was surprised to feel tears leap to his eyes. ‘I thought you had.’
‘That’s just so pathetic,’ she spat. ‘I mean, you act like it’s just nothing, you know, like it’s my decision and it doesn’t have anything to do with you.’
He saw to his amazement that she hadn’t really thought about it at all, that she just said things to engage him; that all the time he had thought her to be moving in a particular direction, however obliquely, she had only been spinning threads around him, a web in which he now knew himself to be caught. Their predicament rose before him, new again, as raw as an untended wound.
‘I—’ He felt all at once terribly confused and his voice sounded thin, as if he were forcing it through something dense. ‘I don’t know,’ he said weakly. He dragged his eyes to her face. ‘I just can’t seem to believe in it.’
As he said it, he suddenly knew that at last he had jumped and that something would now happen. He watched Francine as he fell airily away from her, and she appeared to grow so hard before his eyes that he wondered if she might break like a glass bottle if she fell with him.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ she said finally. Her voice sounded harsh and deliberate, retaliating for his obscurity with belligerence.
‘I don’t think you can either! I don’t think you’ve actually realized that you’re going to have a baby. A baby.’ He said it again, understanding that he hadn’t really known it until that moment. His acceptance of it came in a rush, whole, as if he had solved a mathematical enigma, and he felt the knowledge begin to function in him as efficiently as a machine.
‘You don’t know anything!’ said Francine. Her words rattled like dice, looking randomly for victory. Ralph realized that he was frightening her, and the sense of returned power, its possibilities, aroused him. ‘You don’t know what it’s like.’
‘Go on, then. Tell me. Tell me what it’s like.’
She settled back in her seat, confident again, and examined her fingers with studied self-deprecation.
‘What do you want to know?’ she said, more sweetly.
‘I want to know why you’ve decided not to keep it.’ He felt utterly unlike himself, and he trusted his new incarnation, loved the sound of his voice. ‘Tell me what’s going on in your mind. I want to know how you made the decision.’
Her eyes brightened at his mistake.
‘I didn’t say I’d decided, in case you’d forgotten. I only said I might have changed my mind.’
She straightened in her chair and looked at him defiantly. His hatred for her snapped its leash and leapt unbounded at her throat.
‘But what if I said that I wanted you to have it?’
Ralph heard the air gasp. A silence teetered between them. Francine looked down at her hands again, and when her eyes returned to him they had assumed a new softness.
‘Do you?’ she said.
He almost laughed aloud as he realized that she was actually flirting with him. A smile strained at his lips and seeing it, she coyly fiddled with something on the table.
‘I’m not talking about us,’ he said, surprised to hear the gentleness in his voice. It felt wonderful to say what he was saying. His life flowered before him, a future filled with a person he now knew he could be. ‘I’m talking about what’s the right thing to do.’
‘I can’t do it on my own!’ she said, thumping the table wildly with her fist. She appeared to have shrunk before his eyes, her words coming in enraged squeaks. ‘It’s your responsibility too!’
‘I know it is.’ He paused and then said what all at once seemed perfectly natural. ‘What I’m suggesting is that I look after it.’
His meaning launched itself, rose, drifted between them. Ralph watched it anxiously, wondering whether it would work, whether it were plausible and true, a thing that could be said.
‘It makes sense when you really think about it,’ he continued hurriedly. ‘I can provide financial support and’ — he felt himself growing horribly ridiculous, his confidence draining — ‘and take full responsibility for it, and you can get on with your life as if nothing had happened, if you want.’
Francine was so still that it seemed impossible that she would ever again come to life. His words echoed around her as if in an empty room. Ralph prayed for her to speak, to clothe the nakedness of what he had said.
‘Without me?’ she said finally.
‘Yes.’ Her comprehension fuelled him for his last leap. ‘I–I don’t love you. You must know that.’
It seemed odd to him that he should suddenly have found the means to tell her that which, in the uncomplicated weeks before all of this happened, had been so impossible to pronounce. He was astonished by his own courage, which he seemed to have found lying idle in him as if it had been there all along; an ungainly tool whose beauty he had discovered only in its use. Now that he had it, he could see with one frenzied examination that his life was broken and that he could repair it all. Already he had built a firm platform of righteousness, and from it he steadily viewed the range of what he could do, whole reaches of himself he had never explored. It was as if he had laboured all this time in a dark, unfavoured comer, scratching life from a soil so blighted that it multiplied his efforts far beyond its yield; while all along a whole kingdom had been in his possession to which only truth gave entrance. He had never felt more certain of his recognition of this key, more expert in his ability to pluck it from amongst its thousand glittering imitations.