Girl Unknown(86)

‘I wanted to. But it was a shock.’

‘You didn’t want it to be true, did you?’ she said, and the anger stirred in me, as I watched her turn it on, how easily she went to work on him.

‘Zo?, please,’ he said, stepping towards her, although he was standing close enough already. ‘How many times do I have to say it? You’re my daughter and I’m glad you are …’

She didn’t believe it. ‘Linda told me this would happen.’

I saw him slow and tense at the mention of her name. ‘What?’

‘Towards the end, when I told her I wanted to find you, she warned me not to.’

‘She warned you?’ He was hanging on her words, soaking them up, while I listened with growing scepticism.

‘You asked me once why Linda never told you about me.’

‘You said you didn’t know.’

‘Yes,’ she said, but I could see something moving behind her eyes, some new deception being put into play. ‘I didn’t want to hurt you with the truth.’

Linda hadn’t told him about the pregnancy or the birth of her baby because she’d known he wouldn’t want it.

‘It broke her heart, she said, but there was no point. No point in telling you. Because she knew that this had happened to you before and there was only one outcome you’d wish for.’

Half the things Zo? ever told us were lies. Even now, sifting back over these memories, I can’t be sure of what was true and what was false. But if he had told Linda, then how had he told her? In what tone was his explanation couched? Heavy with regret? Or with a sigh of relief?

Or did it matter? Zo? would have twisted whatever it was. I knew that much, the way she had already drawn him in. There was something magnetic about her – you couldn’t pull your eyes away from her. And I could see the way he was watching her, the way he hung on her every word, and for just a brief moment, I understood the power she had to hold you in her spell.

‘No,’ he said, ‘it wasn’t like that.’

‘She thought you wouldn’t want her to keep it.’

‘No,’ he said again. ‘I would have wanted to … It was different, you see. I loved her.’

It was as if he had forgotten I was in the room. The hurt was instant, but not new. The love of my life. I had felt it before and still it had capacity to wound. She was a knot in the wood of our marriage, the grain of it forming around her. I was so busy focusing on his admission of love for that other woman that I failed to absorb the new truth – the real hurt – in what he was saying. It took a moment for my thoughts to catch up.

‘You would have kept that baby?’ I asked, disbelief curling up the end of my question. ‘But you didn’t want ours?’

I had asked the question but I didn’t want the answer. I already knew it. It was there in his eyes. A sensation of deep and bitter regret rose in me. Somehow, for almost two decades, I had lived with a man who had kept one eye over his shoulder peering back at his past. And I had chosen to ignore it.

He was saying something now about timing and opportunity, but I was backing away. Enough. No more, I wanted to say. I needed to be alone, to be free of this house and the people in it. I caught the look on her face as I backed away – the narrowing of her eyes and the hard line of her feline grin. There, it seemed to say. Now you see. Her triumph over me was complete. There was nothing I could say, nothing I could do.

I stumbled against an ancient dresser in the hall, felt the crack of pain against the bone of my ankle but didn’t stop, not until I was outside in the warm dark, the gate jangling some distance behind me, not glancing back to check if I could still see light from the house, or if any of them had tried to follow me.

It was better that I was alone. Hurrying along the little footpath, away from the lights of the village, walking quickly without purpose towards the welcoming dark of the coast, the gentle hiss of the sea greeting me. The sand running along the crescent of the beach was dark, bluish grey, no moon to cast it in a silver glow. The hulk of an abandoned boat lay rusting on one side, like a beached whale that had long given up the will to return, sinking to its inevitable ruin.

There was something inevitable, too, about the feelings stirring inside me, or so it seemed. The ring in my pocket, the hard roundness of it smooth against my palm. Feelings of an ending, I was sure of it now. Our marriage, that dry, desiccated thing, was a dead animal we had been dragging about for so long, both of us too cowardly to pronounce its demise. Or too blind. Willing ourselves to look away, to keep things going for the sake of the children. But I knew he would leave me once the kids were gone. All that love, the terrible waste of it.

I stood at the shoreline, listening to my breathing, waiting with no clue of what I should do next. Memory stirred uncomfortably. After what had just happened, I was vulnerable to it, helpless, and I remembered a narrow room with a high ceiling, a milk-white lampshade on a brass chain suspended above us, the shadow of dust gathered in its bowl. I remembered lying beneath it, the two of us, looking up at it, feeling the rise and fall of his head against my chest.

‘I’m sorry,’ he’d said, drawing away.

It was our first time after I’d come back. Our first time since the problem had been taken care of.

I needed his touch to make me feel healed. I needed him inside me again as absolution. But in the darkness of that room as we tried to find our way back to each other, I had felt a third presence – a watchful eye inside me. Perhaps he felt it too. But when he rolled away from me, his hands going up to cover his face, moaning his apology, I felt ashamed. Contaminated. A failure. The ghost of what I had done watched me, like a fragment of glass mingling with the dust in the lamp above our heads.