“At all?”
“With Stephen.”
“Oh.”
“Yes. Oh.”
“Do you know why?”
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“Because if I have a baby with Stephen, I’ll have to stay with Stephen.
And I’m not sure that staying with Stephen is what I want to do.”
“Right.”
“So, you see, this not being able to get pregnant, this thing that is supposed to be, like, absolutely the worst thing that can happen to a woman like me, is actually a gift. And I don’t want to go to the doctor, and get in the stirrups, and let them poke and prod and probe me, because my greatest fear is that they might actually find out what is wrong with me and they might actually be able to fix it, and then I won’t have anything left to hide behind and I’ll have to tell him. That I don’t want to have a baby with him. Because I’m not sure that I want to stay with him.”
Mark didn’t speak at once, and Jennifer laughed a red wine laugh.
“So I’m the happiest infertile woman in England, you see. Except for being so unhappy, that is. . . .”
“And Stephen doesn’t know any of this? How you’re feeling?”
“Now that’s a good question, Mark. Does Stephen know any of this?
I’m not sure. He knows things aren’t right. Any idiot can see that. But he chooses to believe, I think, that it’s all because we don’t have a baby. This baby, this nonexistent baby, he thinks, can fix all that ails us. Hence the sulking. I’m stopping it from happening, of course. I’m standing stubbornly in the way of all our future happiness, which lies vested in one teeny tiny six-pound baby that isn’t even born. Isn’t that daft? Isn’t that the craziest thing you ever heard?”
“Jen—if he loves you, of course he wants the two of you to have a baby. Like it or not, it’s the next logical step, for most of us. Babies are a physical manifestation of your love for each other.”
“A love I’m not at all sure I still feel.”
“That’s a separate issue. I don’t think you can blame him for being angry at you for not seeing the doctor, if he doesn’t know how you feel.
And even if he knows things aren’t all perfect—I mean, he wouldn’t be
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the first person to think having a baby can fix things. And I’m not sure he’s all wrong, to be honest. It doesn’t always work, granted. It didn’t work for your mum and Donald, I know. But for some people, having something else to focus on, someone else—that can change things a lot, for the better. I’m sure . . .”
“Mum and Donald?” There was a strange new look on Jennifer’s face.
He seemed to have made her angry, but he didn’t know why. She sat up, a little unsteadily, and leaned forward.
“Yes.” He had no choice but to go on. “I mean, it doesn’t take a genius to look at the timing of Amanda’s conception and think that it was some sort of attempt, by one or both of them, to hold their marriage together.”
“That’s what she told you?” Jennifer’s tone was almost accusatory.
“She never talked about it much, to tell you the truth. We left the past where it belonged, when we got together. But I think it’s pretty obvious. . . .”
“You do, do you?” Now it sounded a little like she was mocking him.
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing.”
“Jennifer?”
“Nothing. I mean nothing.” She shook her head. And then she passed the point of no return. “I’m just saying . . . you don’t know what was going on.”
“I don’t, no.” He paused, feeling the great weight in her silence. “Do you?”
If Jennifer had been sober, she would have stopped there, before it was too late. She wasn’t sober. She was drunk. And she didn’t get drunk.
If Jennifer had stood up then, she would have realized how drunk she was. She might have felt nauseated, excused herself, gone to lie down, and let the feeling and the moment pass. But she didn’t stand up. And it was out of her mouth before she even knew she was going to say it.
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“I know that Amanda didn’t belong to my dad.”
Mark himself was a little anesthetized by alcohol, so his world didn’t stop when she said it, rather began spinning alarmingly on a new axis.
“What?”
“Mum had an affair, when she was married to Dad. She got pregnant.
With someone else’s baby. I guess she was a little more fecund than me.”
She laughed an ugly humorless laugh. “And pretty bloody careless. That must be why Dad left her.”
“How do you know?” Of all the questions, that was a bizarre one to start with. Shock was setting in.
Still it wasn’t dawning on Jennifer. What she was saying.
“She wrote it, in her letter to Amanda. Didn’t let her dirty little secret die with her.” Until she said it, she didn’t even know she thought of it that way. In vino veritas.
“Amanda told you that?”
“She told Lisa. Lisa told me. It’s just you and Hannah who don’t know. Who didn’t know.”
Mark didn’t say a word.
His face made her start backpedaling. That, along with the fact that drunken logic allowed her to return almost immediately to the point of her revelation, which actually had nothing to do with her mother. “But that doesn’t really matter, does it? It was a long time ago. I suppose she could have told you, maybe she should have told you. But she didn’t.
Guess we’ll never know her reasons. The point is . . .” For a moment, she forgot what the point was, but then it came back to her, and she nodded her head as though the point had been spoken out loud to her, before resuming. “The point is, babies don’t fix things, do they?” She looked as pleased as a prosecution barrister delivering closing remarks in an open-and-shut case. He wanted to slap her mouth closed.
Mark looked at her as though he suddenly didn’t recognize her and stood up. “I think that’s enough. I’m going to go to bed now. I think you should, too, before Hannah gets home.”
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Jennifer stood up in front of him. He was only a couple of inches taller than her. She was too close to him. When she spoke again, he smelled the red wine on her breath.
Then, a moment of clarity. “Oh God. Mark. I’m sorry.”
He didn’t answer. He just looked at her.
“You’re a good man, Mark. A really good man. I’m sorry she did it.
Too good a man to be lied to. A really good man.”
“Don’t do that.”
“Don’t do what?”
“Don’t you apologize for your mother.”
“Well, she sure as hell never did.”
“She had nothing to apologize to me for.”
“What about Amanda? What about my dad? She didn’t apologize to them, either.”
Jennifer knew she should let this go, but the rage and distress on Mark’s face was making her defend herself.
“And you. You’re so sure, are you? That she had nothing to apologize to you for? What is it they say? Once a cheater, always a cheater. Isn’t that it? She’d done it once, hadn’t she. Fucked someone else, when she was married.” She drew out every syllable in the word, made it ugly and violent. “How can you be sure she didn’t do it to you, too? She might have been sleeping with other men the whole bloody time. Are you even certain Hannah is yours?”
“Why are you saying all this?”
“Maybe because someone needs to. All these secrets. All these months of deifying her. She was the perfect bloody woman, wasn’t she?
No one could possibly hope to live up to her complete . . . marvelous-ness. The perfect wife, the perfect mother. Who could compete with that? Certainly not me. Brittle, she said I was. Bloody hell. She was always just pissed off that I wasn’t more like her. That’s why she loved Lisa more. Peas in a bloody pod.”
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that he wanted to move physically away from her to escape its molten stream.
And she wasn’t finished.
“Only she wasn’t perfect, was she? She was a liar. A cheat. She lied to you. She lied to her own daughter. To all of us. And she was a coward.”
Mark shook his head.
“So forgive me if I’ve had enough of the Barbara Forbes for sainthood movement. If I’ve stopped trying to live up to something that never actually existed in the first place. If I’ve stopped mourning her.”
“Stop it.” He put his hands on her shoulders, held her hard, and spoke through gritted teeth. “I won’t have you talk about your mother like that in my house, in her house.”
“I’m sorry, Mark.” Instant contrition.
“Go to bed, Jennifer.” Mark didn’t want to hear it.
His voice was cold, and quiet, and full of fury. He walked off quickly, anxious to be as far away from her as his house allowed. If she wasn’t drunk, he’d have thrown her out.
He went into the garden, without turning around, and gulped at the cold air that assaulted him.
He was beyond angry with Jennifer. How dare she come to him and behave that way? No amount of unhappiness, or red wine, could excuse her. He felt panic—how could things ever be normal again? His brain, still under the influence of the wine he’d drunk himself, tried hard to sort the new information it had received tonight. He pulled his sweater around him and sat down on a teak chair, glad that the cold night air was doing its job on him.
He thought about Barbara. Amanda had been eight when they met.
She’d been gorgeous, too. Just like her mum. With pigtails and an over-bite. A ballerina, at that point, always twirling and leaping. She’d had so much energy. Their closeness had been apparent; in the same room together, Amanda would always sit on her mother’s lap, one hand behind
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her mother’s neck, smoothing Barbara’s hair between her fingers. When she was tired, Amanda would suck her thumb and rest her head against Barbara’s chest, instantly relaxed. Her breathing would slow, the sucking calming and soothing her, although Barbara told her she was getting too old to do it. Mark had found Barbara the most beautiful when she sat this way, Amanda on her lap. She looked like some modern-day Ma-donna.
He hadn’t lied to Jennifer—he and Barbara had agreed, early on, not to get bogged down in the details of their pasts. That had been her idea, he now realized. She said that the only thing he needed to know about the girls was that they were hers, and that they were the great loves of her life. He needed to understand that. She no longer loved their father, so that part of her heart, the part not occupied by them, was free. For him.
He’d had a girlfriend. He’d been seeing someone for a couple of years. He was still with her, when he went into the gift shop and got hit by the thunderbolt. They were both thirty, and their friends were starting to get married, and he had known that she wanted him to ask her, but he hadn’t, some part of him always sensing that whatever he felt for her, it wasn’t enough. He’d broken it off with her, straightaway. But Barbara hadn’t wanted to know about that girl, either. She said it wouldn’t help.
They both had pasts, and it didn’t belong in this present, or their future. He could hear her saying it. Remember her saying it, sitting across from him.
Was that why? Was that why she hadn’t wanted to talk about it? Because she had something to hide? Because she was afraid he’d think less of her if he knew?
And would he have?
Mark thought about the thing he had never told
her
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enough grades to take up a place in the architecture and civil engineer-ing department at the University of Bath, he’d gotten his girlfriend pregnant. They’d been together for a year or so. They’d met at sixth form. It had been the first serious relationship for both of them; they’d been virgins when they first had sex together, in her bedroom on Boxing Day, while her family sat downstairs, eating Quality Street and watching television. She was called Kate, and he had believed himself in love with her. They’d gotten careless, carried away, whatever you called it, and she’d become pregnant. She took the test while he was sitting his last A level mathematics paper and told him when he came out. He watched his friends whooping and laughing and felt like the sky had fallen in on him. They told their parents, of course. What else could they have done? He still remembered, all these years later, the abject humiliation and embarrassment of sitting with them all, in Kate’s living room, at a meeting called to discuss their “situation.” His mother’s disappointed face, his father’s cheek muscles flexing with suppressed rage. Kate’s mother had cried throughout, silent tears mopped with a white handkerchief. Kate’s father had done the talking for both of them, but he never once looked Mark in the eye. It was a fait accompli, the discussion more a briefing. Their futures must be safeguarded.
They were too young to handle the responsibility of a baby. There was, of course, no question of them getting married. It was the 1970s, for God’s sake, not the 1950s. Kate was only a few weeks pregnant, less than three months—and she would have an abortion. They would both get over it. Any relationship the two of them might have had was killed that day. Kate, her blue eyes red and downcast, didn’t say a word. He never really knew what she felt about it. He felt relieved.
Kate went away that summer, while he stayed at home, working at the pick-your-own farm outside town and trying to regain some kind of footing with his father. He didn’t see her before he left for Bath, and he never saw her or spoke to her again. He thought only occasionally about her, and the child they never had together. That child would be
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almost thirty now. Which seemed ridiculous—how was it that your life sped up without you even noticing it happening?
That was the secret he never told Barbara. Everyone had secrets, didn’t they? Silly, really. She would have felt desperately sorry for him, he knew. And that is how he realized he would have felt about her, if she had told him that Donald wasn’t Amanda’s father.