On the night the quarrel blew up, Donna had driven to collect him from a wine bar. She had managed to stop him using her car when he went out–she was struggling financially to keep it taxed, insured and roadworthy as it was–but the result had been massive taxi bills: double fare after midnight, of course; triple if it was the small hours of Sunday morning. And so on this particular night she had resolved to collect him, and she parked near the club’s entrance, hearing the throbbing music coming from the doors. It reminded her of that magical afternoon at Charity Cottage. Was Don dancing in the dimly lit underground room, pressed up against some girl, some cheap little tart who wanted his body? If he came out tangled with a girl, Donna would drive away and leave him to find his own way home, and sod the taxi fare. But if he was on his own…
He was on his own. He was not walking entirely steadily, but he was not incapable. Donna drove forward, and leaned across to open the passenger door for him. A look of such rage showed on his face that for a moment she thought he was going to ignore her and walk home by himself, but he got in and slumped in the passenger seat. His hair was dishevelled and tumbling over his forehead, and his eyes were brilliant from drink (or drugs). He was so outrageously good-looking that Donna could hardly bear to think of all the girls who must have been watching him, planning to get their claws into him, the over-sexed bitches.
He was furious with her. He was not a child, he said, to be collected at the school gates by an over-anxious parent. Why must she do this all the time?
For a moment Donna could not speak. But she refused to be hurt because this was just one of his tantrums. One of the nerve-storms he had sometimes because his sensitivity was more finely tuned than most people’s. So she simply switched on the ignition and released the handbrake, preparatory to driving home.
He snatched the handbrake back on, and leaned over to turn the ignition off. He smelt of stale cigarette smoke and sweat.
‘Tell me,’ he said, turning in the seat to face her. ‘Tell me what the fuck this is all about!’ And then, with a sudden change of expression, he said very softly, ‘Oh, but of course, that’s what it is about, isn’t it? It’s about the fuck.’
Donna stared at him, seeing real cruelty in his eyes. She started to speak, but he cut her off.
‘It’s that afternoon at the cottage, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘That afternoon when you couldn’t get enough of it–when you couldn’t get enough of me–and they caught us. And now you want it again, don’t you? Jesus Christ, you’d wanted it for years before that day, and you’ve wanted it ever since–all these years.’ He grabbed her hand suddenly, and thrust it between his legs. ‘You can have it for all I care,’ he said, and his voice was jeering. ‘Providing I can get it up, of course, because I’m pretty pissed tonight. In fact I’m pissed off, pissed off with life. But if it’s really what you want, I daresay I can manage.’ He began to unbuckle the belt of his jeans.
Donna snatched her hand away from him as if it had been burned. She said, in a low furious voice, ‘How can you! How can you speak about it like that!’
‘About “it”? Jesus God, Donna, it was a single bizarre fuck! Nothing more! I was bored out of my mind and you were panting for it, so I thought, “Oh, why not? What’s incest, after all? Only a shag kept in the family, isn’t it?”’
Donna could hardly believe it was Don’s beloved voice. He was drunk of course, and he might be high as well. Let it go, said her mind, but the disappointments of the last years rose up in her throat like acid, and she said furiously, ‘Was it just for that–just for a bizarre fuck–that I did what I did that day at Twygrist?’
In the silence that followed she could hear the dull thrum of the traffic on the nearby main road and the throbbing beat of the heavy rock music from within the club. She could no longer look at Don; she stared unseeingly through the windscreen at the unfriendly darkness.
At last he said, in a voice stripped of the hurtful jeering note, ‘What did you do? Donna, for God’s sake, tell me what you did that day.’
Donna turned to look at him at last. In a cold tight little voice, she said, ‘Don’t pretend. You know perfectly well what I did.’ And saw with sick horror that he had not been pretending at all; he had genuinely not known what she had done that last summer at Amberwood.