“What?”
“Elementary. Beatrice, how many ways can a man say to you that he was wrong? And how many ways can you say to a man that forgiveness isn’t part of your…what? Your repertoire? When I thought that Pete shouldn’t be?”
“Don’t say it.”
“I have to say it and you have to listen. When I thought that Pete shouldn’t be born…When I said you should abort?”
“You said that’s what you wanted.”
“I said lots of things. I say lots of things. And some of them I say without thinking. Especially when I’m…”
“What?”
“I don’t know. Frightened, I suppose.”
“Of a baby? We’d already had one.”
“Not of that. But of change. The difference it would make in our lives as we had them arranged.”
“Things happen.”
“I understand. And I would have come to understand that then if you’d allowed me the time to?”
“It wasn’t only a single discussion, Ray.”
“Yes. All right. I won’t claim it was. But I will say that I was wrong. In every discussion we had, I was wrong, and I’ve grieved over that…that wrongness, if you will, for years. Fourteen of them, to be exact. More if you include the pregnancy itself. I didn’t want it this way. I don’t want it this way.”
“And…them?” she asked. “You had your diversions.”
“What? Women? For God’s sake, Beatrice, I’m not a monk. Yes, there were women over the years. A whole bloody succession of them. Janice and Sheri and Sharon and Linda and whoever else, because I don’t remember them all. And I don’t remember them because I didn’t want them. I wanted to blot out…this.” He indicated the kitchen, the house, the people within it. “So what I’m asking you is to let me back in because this is where I belong and both of us know it.”
“Do we?”
“We do. Pete knows it as well. So do the bloody dogs.”
She swallowed. It would be so easy…But then again, it wouldn’t. The stuff of men and women together was never easy.
“Mum!” Pete was shouting from upstairs. “Where’d you put my Led Zepppelin CD?”
“Lord,” Bea murmured with a shudder. “Someone, please, get that lad an iPod at once.”
“Mum! Mummy!”
She said to Ray, “I love it when he still calls me that. He doesn’t, often. He’s becoming so grown-up.” She called back, “Don’t know, darling. Check under your bed. And while you’re at it, put any clothes you find there in the laundry. And bring old cheese sandwiches down to the rubbish. Detach the mice from them, first.”
“Very funny,” he shouted and continued to bang about. He said, “Dad! Make her tell me. Make her. She knows where it is. She hates it and she’s hidden it somewhere.”
Ray called to him, “Son, I learned long ago that I can’t make this madwoman do anything.” Then he said to her quietly, “Can I, my dear. Because if I could, you know what it would be.”
She said, “That you can’t.”
“To my eternal regret.”
She thought about his words, those he’d just said and those he’d said before. She said to him, “Not really eternal. Not exactly that.”
She heard him swallow. “Do you mean it, Beatrice?”
“I suppose I do.”
They looked at each other, the window behind them doubling the image of man and woman and the hesitant step each of them took towards the other at precisely the same moment. Pete came pounding down the stairs. He shouted, “Found it! Ready to go, Dad.”
“Are you as well?” Ray asked Bea quietly.
“For dinner?”
“And for what follows dinner.”
She drew a long breath that matched his own. “I think I am,” she told him.
Chapter Thirty