Five Winters(92)

How many times had I seen Mark in full-on make-as-much-mess-as-you-can cooking mode? Many, many times. Only not so much lately. Not at all lately, in fact, because I had never once been invited over to eat in all the time he’d been with Grace. But even though I hadn’t been over to their flat for dinner, I was pretty sure Grace would have put a cap on the number of saucepans Mark used and insisted on him doing the washing up as he went along, instead of leaving it all until the end.

Uh-oh—Grace. We were going to have to speak about Grace, weren’t we? No matter if it would take some of the shine off this gleaming, glittering day. She was the elephant in the room. And elephants were big creatures capable of trampling and crushing things out of existence just by moving from place to place.

I waited until we’d eaten Mark’s delicious stir-fry and he was smiling at me across the table in a way that made me think about the crumpled sheets on my bed.

“What happened between you and Grace? Why did it go wrong?”

“You mean apart from the fact that she was probably in love with Jaimie all along?”

“D’you think she was?”

“I do, yes. I think she spent our entire marriage trying to turn me into him.”

“Did she try to get you interested in becoming a naturist?”

He flashed me a grin. “No. But then, I have a sneaky suspicion Jaimie won’t be a naturist for very much longer. Grace may love him, but that doesn’t mean she’s going to do everything he wants. This is Grace, after all. She’s very controlling.”

A flicker of something crossed his face. Remembered hurt. Sadness. He reached for my hand across the table, turning it over so he could caress my wrist. Tingles of desire instantly shot right up my arm. I knew he didn’t want to talk about any of this. That he’d much prefer we go to the bedroom to create some highly effective oblivion. But he took a deep breath, sighed, and pressed on.

“Grace controlled me right from the start,” he said. “I thought I was the one making the moves, deciding it was high time I grew up and got married. But it was all her. She was beautiful. Successful. She wanted me. To be married to me. But then we were together, and nothing I did measured up. I didn’t measure up. I’d spend my whole damn time trying to change.” He ran a hand through his hair, remembering. “If we’d had a child together, I bet I still wouldn’t have been good enough for her. She’d have criticised every little thing I did. Don’t hold him like that. He doesn’t need that. That’s not the right way to change a nappy. I’d have spent my whole time trying to be the type of father she wanted me to be.” He shuddered. Then he said, “God, I can’t tell you how happy I am that I’m not a father.”

I can’t tell you how happy I am that I’m not a father.

The words reverberated around my head. On and on, like the gong bath Rosie had dragged me to once. I’d hated it with a passion, emerging afterwards feeling as if my brain had been chewed up by a tiger rather than soothed and unblocked, the way it was supposed to have been.

“What?” Mark asked, instantly sensing something was wrong.

I don’t suppose it was very difficult to sense it. My heart and my mind and my body had all done a sort of emergency stop, turning me rigid, inside and out.

I withdrew my wrist from his grasp, putting my hand on my lap, out of his reach. I looked down at the table, away from his anxious, probing gaze.

If Mark had constantly tried to change himself to be what Grace had wanted him to be, then I had spent an inordinately large amount of my life waiting for him to notice me. And now he was doing just that—noticing me and apparently loving all that he saw. Only he couldn’t see all of me, could he? Because there were still things about me he didn’t know. Huge things. Things I wasn’t prepared to change.

I couldn’t become the person he’d been with Grace, constantly doing my best to adapt, leaving myself and all that I was behind in the process. I couldn’t let anyone—even Mark—stop me from pursuing my dreams.

“You’re crying,” he said. “Please don’t cry. What did I say? What’s wrong? Tell me. Please, Beth. What is it?”

“It’s your timing,” I said viciously. “It completely sucks.”

He frowned. “My timing?”

“Yes, your bloody timing! Why couldn’t you have waited until next year to tell me all this?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. Maybe because I’ve already waited thirty years to tell you, and that feels plenty long enough?” He reached across the table to take my chin between his fingers, lifting my head up to look at him. “Maybe because I felt like I was going to explode? Because I was so scared another Tom or Jake or Jaimie might pop out of the woodwork? Pick your reason. Look, what’s this all about, Beth? Please tell me.”

I pulled my face away from his hand, swiping the tears away from my cheeks. “You should have waited until next February to say something.”

He frowned. “Why February?”

I met his eyes. “Because by February, I’ll be pregnant. Hopefully. If all goes to plan. And when I presented you with a fait accompli, you’d have thought, Well, that’s not ideal, but I love Beth, so I’ll love her child too.”

Mark was still frowning. “Why might you be pregnant by February?”