“No, I didn’t! What are you talking about?”
“That day. In the sacristy when I…when I told you how I felt. You made me go through with it. I could have stopped it right then—we could have—but you forced me—”
“So you’re saying it’s my fault? Are you fucking kidding me?”
“No, it’s mine. I know that. I should have never let things get that far in the first place. I should never have started anything with Alice. But I did and I can’t change that.” I took a long breath, recalling the person I had been at that time. “I thought about writing,” I said, starting to tremble at the memory. “I did, honestly. But I was in a terrible place. I was close to suicide, Julian. You have to understand, I needed to get away, to leave everyone and everything behind me. To start afresh. The idea of even communicating with Alice…I just couldn’t have done it.”
“That’s because you’re a fucking coward, Cyril,” he said. “And a liar. You always were and I bet you still are.”
“No,” I insisted. “I’m not anymore. I don’t have to be now. Because I don’t live in Ireland. I can be exactly who I want to be now that I’m not part of that country anymore.”
“Just get out,” he said, turning away from me now. “Can’t you leave me to die in peace? You won, all right? You get to live and I get to die.”
“I didn’t win anything.”
“You won,” he repeated quietly. “So stop gloating.”
“How is she?” I asked, refusing to go. “Alice, I mean. Was she all right afterward? Is she happy now?”
“What do you think?” he said. “She was never the same. She loved you, Cyril; do you actually understand that? You who seem to set so much store by the concept. And she thought that you loved her too. I mean, marrying her kind of gave her that impression.”
“It’s all so long ago now,” I said, shaking my head. “I never even think about those days anymore. And she’s probably forgotten all about me, so what’s the point of opening old wounds?”
Julian stared at me with an expression that suggested he wished he could rise from the bed and throttle the life out of me. “How could she ever have forgotten you?” he asked. “I told you, you completely ruined her life.”
I pulled a face; yes, it must have been difficult and embarrassing for her back then. Of course, I accepted that. But time had passed. I wasn’t that much of a catch; she had surely got over it by now. And if she hadn’t, then she should have. She was a grown woman, after all. I would take responsibility for hurting her but not for ruining her entire life.
“Did she not marry again?” I asked. “I presumed she would. She was young and pretty and—”
“How could she marry again?” he said. “She was married to you; do you not remember? You didn’t leave her at the altar, Cyril, you left her at the fucking reception in the middle of the Shelbourne Hotel! The vows had already been exchanged.”
“Yes, but surely she had it annulled,” I said, feeling a sense of anxiety building inside me. “Once it was clear that I wasn’t coming back, she must have done that?”
“She didn’t get it annulled,” he said quietly.
“But why not?” I said. “What, did she want to play Miss Havisham for the rest of her life, was that it? Look, Julian, I’ll hold my hands up and admit my part in this. I did a terrible thing to Alice and she certainly didn’t deserve any of it. I was the guilty party. A coward. A total shit. But like you said, I left during the reception; we hadn’t even made it to the bridal suite. She’d have easily been able to get the marriage annulled if she’d wanted to. And if she didn’t, then I can’t be held responsible for that. That was her decision.”
He looked at me as if I was quite mad and opened his mouth to say something but then closed it again.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing,” he replied.
“What?” I insisted, looking at him, certain that there was something he wasn’t telling me.
“Look, Cyril,” he said. “Why don’t you stop with the bullshit, all right? You might not have made it to the bridal suite, but you found some place to have sex with her before you got married, didn’t you?”
I thought about it, confused by what he was saying. And then I remembered that night, a couple of weeks before the wedding. I think you should come over, Cyril. Come for dinner, we’ll drink a couple of Max’s best wines and, you know, go to bed together. A night I hadn’t even thought about since it had happened. It took an effort on my part even to recall it now.
A thought struck me and I felt a chill run through my body.
“Who’s Liam?” I asked.
“What?” asked Julian, who had turned away from me now and was staring out the window toward a sky that was growing overcast as the evening drew in.
“You said there wasn’t much of your family left,” I told him. “That your father had died and there was only Alice and Liam left. Who’s Liam?”
“Liam,” said Julian quietly, “is the reason why Alice couldn’t get the marriage annulled. The reason why she had to stay married to you and wasn’t able to meet someone else. Why she couldn’t find happiness with a husband who was a real man. Liam is her son, my nephew. Liam was your parting gift to her. And I suppose you’ll tell me now that you never even thought such a thing was possible?”
I stood up slowly, feeling my legs weaken beneath me. I wanted to call him a liar, to tell him that I didn’t believe a word of it, but what was the point when the truth was that I believed every word he said because what possible reason would he have for lying? I’d left Alice pregnant. She’d been desperate to talk at the reception, she’d kept insisting that she needed to speak to me in private, but I wouldn’t hear her out. She must have known already, or guessed, and wanted to tell me. But then I’d disappeared off to Europe and never contacted anyone from my past afterward. And so she’d borne the shame of it in Ireland in 1973, when an unmarried pregnant girl was considered little better than a whore and was treated by everyone accordingly. I’d always assumed that my own mother, my birth mother, had been unwed and given me up because of how difficult it would have been to rear a child alone in the forties. But things hadn’t changed that much since then. Had I done to Alice what my own father had done to my mother?
But of course she wasn’t unmarried and perhaps that was even worse, because without a ring on her finger she might have yet met a man, someone who wouldn’t have cared and would have brought up the child as his own. But with the ring, there was no chance. Not then. Not in those days. Not in Ireland.
“I didn’t know a thing about it,” I told him. “I swear, I never even thought about it for a moment.”