“Yeah, you do. You’ve always. And see, I don’t get it, Mum, ’cause he’s a decent bloke, seems to me. He loves you, as well. I can see that, and I don’t get why you can’t love him back.”
“It isn’t as easy as that. There are things…” She didn’t want to hurt him, and the truth would do that. It would come at this point of his delicate dawning manhood and it would tear it to pieces. She began to move past him, to get to the bathroom, to complete her futile investigation, but he was in the doorway and he didn’t move. It came to her how much he’d grown over the last year. He was taller than she now although still not as strong.
“What’d he do?” Pete asked. “’Cause he must’ve done something ’cause that’s why people get divorced, eh?”
“People get divorced for lots of reasons.”
“Did he have a girlfriend or something?”
“Pete, that’s really none?”
“’Cause he doesn’t have one now, if that’s what you’re looking for. And it must be ’cause it can’t be drugs or something like that ’cause you know he doesn’t take drugs. But is that it? Did he? Or drink or something ’cause there’s this bloke at school called Barry and his parents are splitting up ’cause his dad broke the front window in a rage and he was drunk.” Pete watched her. He seemed to be trying to read her face. “It was double glazed,” he added.
She smiled in spite of herself. She put her arms around him and pulled him to her. “Double glazed,” she said. “Now that’s a reason to throw a husband out.” But he jerked away from her.
“Don’t make fun.” He went to his room.
She said, “Pete, come on…”
He didn’t reply. He shut the door instead, leaving her looking at its blank panels. She could have followed, but she went to the bathroom. She couldn’t stop herself from a final check even though she knew how ridiculous she was being. Here, like everywhere else, there was nothing. Just Ray’s shaving gear, damp towels hanging lopsided from a towel bar, across the tub a sky blue shower curtain drawn to dry. And in the tub, nothing other than a soap tray.
A clothes hamper stood beneath the bathroom window, but she didn’t go through this. Instead, she sat on the toilet seat and looked down at the floor. This was not to study the tiles for evidence of sexual malefaction, but to force herself to stop and consider all the ramifications.
She’d done that more than fourteen years ago: She’d considered the ramifications. What it would mean to stay with a man and have his child when day after day what he so plainly told her he wanted was a termination to the pregnancy. An abortion, Beatrice. Do it now. We’ve raised our child. Ginny’s grown and left the nest and this is our time now. We don’t want this pregnancy. It was a stupid miscalculation and we don’t have to pay for it the rest of our lives.
They had plans, he told her. They had great and wonderful things to do now Ginny was grown. Places to go, sights to see. I don’t want this kid. Neither do you. One visit to the clinic and it’s behind us.
It was odd to think now how one’s perception of a person could change in an instant. But that was what had happened. She’d looked at Ray with eyes newly born. The passion of the man, and all of it about killing off their own child. She’d just gone cold, right to her core.
While he’d spoken the truth?she had given up on the idea of a second pregnancy when it hadn’t happened within a reasonable period after Ginny’s birth and with Ginny at university and engaged to be married, she and Ray were free to plan a future?it wasn’t a truth carved in stone for her. It never had been. It had, instead, been a quiet acceptance that had bloomed from initial disappointment. But it wasn’t meant to be interpreted as the end all and be all of her life. She couldn’t come to terms with how Ray had arrived at the belief that it was.