THEY SPOKE LITTLE ON THE DRIVE BACK FROM ST. AGNES. And when they did speak, it was of mundane matters. She needed to stop for petrol, so they’d take a diversion from the main road if he didn’t mind.
He didn’t mind at all. Did she want a cup of tea while they were at it? Surely there was a hotel or tea shop along the way where they might even have a proper Cornish cream tea. Scones, clotted cream, and strawberry jam.
She remembered the days when it was difficult to find clotted cream outside of Cornwall. Did he?
Yes. And proper sausages as well. Not to mention pasties. He’d always enjoyed good pasties, but they’d never had them at home, as his father had considered them…There he stopped himself. Common was the word of choice. Vulgar in its most precise usage.
She supplied it for him, using the former term. She added, And you weren’t that, were you?
He told her his brother was a narcotics user, because that was the truth of the matter. Tossed out of Oxford, his girlfriend dead with a needle in her arm, himself in and out of rehab ever since. He said he thought that he’d failed Peter altogether. When he should have been there for the boy?present, he meant, present in every possible way and not just a warm body occupying a sofa or something?he hadn’t been.
Well, these things happen, she said. And you had your own life.
As you have yours.
She didn’t say what another woman in her same position might have said at the end of the day they’d just spent together: And do you think this levels the playing field, Thomas? but he knew she was thinking it, for what else could she think upon his mentioning Peter in the midst of nothing vaguely related to the topic? In spite of that, he wanted to add more life details, piling them up so that she would be forced to see similarities instead of differences. He wanted to tell her that his brother-in-law had been murdered some ten years earlier, that he himself had been suspected of the crime and had even been carted off to gaol and held twenty-four hours for a grilling because he’d hated Edward Davenport and what Edward Davenport had wrought upon his sister, and he’d never made a secret of that. But to tell her that seemed too much a begging for something that she wasn’t going to be able to give him.
He deeply regretted the position he’d put her in because he could see how she would interpret his reaction to everything she’d revealed that day, no matter his declarations to the contrary. There was an enormous gulf between them created first by birth, second by childhood, and third by experience. That the gulf existed only in her head and not in his was something he could not explain to her. Such a declaration was facile, anyway. The gulf existed everywhere, and for her it was something so real that she would ever fail to see it was not equally real to him.
You don’t actually know me, he wanted to tell her. Who I am, the people I move among, the loves that have defined my life. But then, how could you? Newspaper stories?tabloids, magazines, whatever?taken up from the Internet reveal only the dramatic bits, the heartrending bits, the salacious bits. Those elements of life comprising the valuable and unforgettable everyday bits are not included. They lack drama even as ultimately they define who a person is.
Not that that mattered: who he was. It had ceased to matter with Helen’s death.
Or so he had told himself. Except that what he felt now indicated something different. That he should care for another’s suffering spoke of…what? Rebirth? He didn’t want to be reborn. Recovery? He wasn’t sure he wanted to recover. But a sense of who he was at the core of who he appeared to be prompted him to feel at least something of what Daidre herself was feeling: caught out in the spotlight, naked when she’d worked so hard to fashion clothing for herself.
I’d like to turn back time, he told her.
She looked at him and he saw from her expression that she thought he was talking of something else. Of course you would, she said. My God, who wouldn’t in your position?
Not about Helen, he said, although I’d give nearly anything to bring her back to me if I could.
Then, what?