‘So where is home then?’ Brendan was saying. ‘It’s where the heart is, or so my dear old mother always says. Which makes things pretty simple for you and me, I’d say.’
‘No, Brendan, I’m afraid it doesn’t.’
‘Honey baby, I don’t get all this,’ said Brendan, his handsome, easy-to-read face rumpled in its puzzlement. ‘Here we are, terribly in love, and together at last, just like in the movies, and with a beautiful baby not so far away who we can take with us, and OK, so you’re married to some old guy you certainly don’t love, but I don’t see why we can’t just iron out all the creases.’
‘Brendan, I do love him. I love him very much. Not like I love you, of course, of course not, but I do love him. He’s been terribly kind to me, and patient and unbelievably loyal, and he loves me very much indeed, and he’s been here all this time that you weren’t . . .’
‘Now come on, baby. That wasn’t my fault.’
‘I know. But nor was it his. And he was, anyway. With me. Even while I was having – having the baby, he was there all the time, just waiting, in the hospital, and somehow that helped get me through. And –’
‘What about screwing? Do you enjoy that? With him?’
Caroline met his eyes steadily. ‘Yes. Yes, I do.’
‘You’re lying.’
‘I’m not.’
‘OK. Well, we’ll leave that one. Christ, I cannot believe I have actually found you again, and you’re talking about leaving.’
‘I’m sorry, Brendan. But it’s too late. It’s just too late. All the time I was pregnant, all the time you were away, I fantasized about this, about how you’d turn up, just walk up the drive, and we would be together again, and there’d be gorgeous music and a sunset, and we’d walk off into it, to have our baby. But now, everything’s changed. I’ve changed, and I dare say you’ve changed.’
‘I haven’t.’
‘All right. You haven’t.’
‘Caroline, can you honestly look me in the eyes and say you don’t love me, you don’t want me?’
She looked him in the eyes. ‘No. I can’t.’
‘OK. Let’s go back to my place. I’m staying in a hotel just down the road.’
‘Brendan, no,’ she said, but her eyes were huge and dark, and she was breathing faster. ‘No, no, no.’
‘Yes. Yes, yes, yes.’
‘Brendan, I really do mean what I just said.’
‘I know you don’t, but just in case you do, I have to put it all right, say goodbye to you properly. And try and change your mind.’
‘Brendan,’ she said, and she was standing up now, spirals of desire twisting in her body, ‘Brendan, I’m pregnant. Five months pregnant. We can’t do this.’
‘Yes, we can. I like pregnant ladies.’
‘No, it’s terribly wrong.’
‘It isn’t.’
‘It is.’
‘Come on. I’ve been dreaming about this for a long time. I don’t care if you have twins right in the middle of it. And nor do you.’
‘No. I’m not coming.’
He undressed her slowly, tenderly, as if he was afraid she might break. He kissed her already swollen breasts, moved down and caressed and kissed her stomach. ‘It’s beautiful,’ he said, ‘you’re beautiful.’
‘So are you,’ she said, gazing with a frantic hunger at a body that was young, hard, strong. ‘Really beautiful.’
‘How does it feel? To be pregnant? Is it sexy? Is it scary? What is it?’
‘Not sexy. Not really. You do feel sort of – ripe. Ready. It’s hard to describe. But I’ve never been happy and pregnant. I don’t know. To me it means, always, sadness, loneliness, loss.’
‘Come with me and you can be happily pregnant.’
‘No, Brendan. I’m not coming with you.’
‘You said you weren’t coming here. And here you are.’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ she said, and for the first time it was the old Caroline who lay there, looking up at him, her eyes enormous, molten with longing for him. ‘Just please, please, Brendan, make love to me, I can’t stand it any longer.’
After that it was all confusion, and she could not have told you where she was, or why, nor even her name; only that there was a bright hot need in her that needed cooling, quenching, and as he sank into her, infinitely gentle, she felt her entire being go into the great dark depths of him, her hunger at once increased and eased. He led at first, and she followed, opening and folding, rising and falling, and then suddenly she could feel the fierceness growing, a snarling explosion that blanked out thought, emotion, time, space, and she climbed, rose, struggled on the waves of it, reaching, clutching for release and relief and then, at last, it broke, broke in great dark, endlessly extending curves, and as at last they began to ease, to soothe, to die away, she clung to him, saying over and over again, no, no, make it go on, go on. And when finally he came too, and she felt him shudder slowly and sweetly into her, she knew that whatever she had meant by love before, she had not known, had not understood it at all.
‘Are you all right?’ he said after a long time. ‘Is the baby all right, is this really all right?’
Yes, she said, yes, of course it was, everyone had sex when they were pregnant, once the first few weeks were over, although not, she added, smiling at him, kissing him in between each word, with someone other than their husbands, and he smiled too, and said I love you, and Caroline, weak suddenly, with emotion and anxiety, fell suddenly and easily asleep.
It was late when she woke: almost ten o’clock. He was sitting on the bed, smiling at her, watching her. ‘Brendan,’ she said, strengthened by the sleep, the happiness, ‘Brendan, I have to go. Ask them to send up some tea or something, and I’ll have a bath, and I must go. You know that, don’t you?’
‘No,’ he said, full of bravado, like a small boy who won’t admit he’s frightened by someone bigger and stronger than he is. ‘No, I don’t. I can’t lose you again, Caroline, I just can’t.’
‘I’m afraid,’ she said, ‘I’m afraid you have to.’
Brendan started to cry; clinging to her, his head on her breast, sobbing. ‘Caroline, you don’t know what you’re doing to me. You just don’t. All the time I was in that hospital, my legs broken, my lungs punctured, in terrible, terrible pain, I thought about you. You got me through, kept me sane, kept me safe. If you hadn’t been there I would have died. Given up and died. And then, when – when I was better and they put me in prison camp, and I was hungry and utterly lonely, and still in pain, and afraid, I just hung on, on and on, because I knew at the end of it, you were there. By then I knew about the baby, and that made me brave too. Ever since I was released, and I’ve been travelling, to find you, I knew that once I was here and with you it would all be wiped out and life would be sane again, good again. And now you tell me it isn’t. Caroline, I can’t stand it, I really can’t. You’ve been with me all this time, you can’t leave me now.’
‘I have to,’ she said, and the effort of saying it, of staying loyal to William, and to herself, made her physically weak. ‘I have to.’
‘Caroline, no.’
‘Brendan, yes.’
He began to cry again, his head buried in his hands. Caroline looked at him, and her heart ached with such love and such sadness that she wondered how she was possibly going to bear it: not just then, not just for that hour, that night, but for whole of the rest of her life.
‘Brendan,’ she said, ‘don’t. Please don’t.’
‘I have to,’ he said, suddenly angry. ‘Why shouldn’t I? Why should I make it easy for you, to leave me, to go to him? What right have you to tell me what to do, to ask anything of me, anything at all?’
‘None,’ she said, sadly, ‘none at all, I suppose.’
And then, in a great blinding shot of br
illiance, she realized what she could do for him, and for herself as well, and what would make sense of the whole sad, dreadful story and put at least some of the wrong to right.
‘Brendan,’ she said, ‘Brendan, you must take the baby. Our daughter. You must have her, and take her home with you.’
All the way back to Jack’s cottage, she talked about the baby. She told Brendan everything she knew, and everything she remembered, which was painfully, dreadfully little; about her black hair, her dark blue eyes, her waving little flower-like fingers, her small, perfect head. She told him where he should go to set about reclaiming her, promised to phone Mrs Jackson first thing, and her solicitor too – ‘You’re on her birth certificate, as her father. I insisted, thank God’ – made him promise to do it, to take her, to care for her, to make her his own.
She got out of the car quickly, brutally, snatching even her hand away from him, knowing if he held her again, she would weaken, give in to him, to his arguments and his love; and knowing too that if he could not have her, he would certainly want to have the baby.
Brendan watched her as she tore open the door of her car, started the engine, drove manically, recklessly fast, away from him down the lane, and felt as if some vital part of him had been wrenched away.
He sat there for many hours, all night, until the winter sky began to lighten and he became aware of the cold, of his own physical discomfort and weariness; and then, slowly, like an old man, and aware of every action he made, he began to move. He turned the key in the ignition, let in the brake, moved forward, turning the steering wheel stiffly, rather erratically, as if he had never done any of it in his life before. He moved jerkily, awkwardly down the lane, dimly conscious of the beauty of the misty morning unfolding before him, of the almost flat rolling countryside, the neatly irregular hedges and toy-like clumps of trees in the distance, the panoramic stretch of sky with the sun a great golden mass striking through the mist. It reminded him fiercely, horribly, this landscape, of the magically happy time with Caroline in the war, when they had travelled it together and she had showed him its quirky beauty, taught him of its rather reluctant charm; and he had indeed learnt to see it, had grown to love it even, but that had been because of her, her vision, her presence beside him, and without her the beauty was fraudulent, the charm hollow.
He stopped again, finding the pain in him too harsh to bear, and sank his head on his hands on the steering wheel; when he looked up he realized he was in Easton, the picture-postcard village next to Caroline’s, where the harriers were kennelled, and that just beside his car was the lych gate and the church.
Almost in a trance, Brendan got out of the car, and walked up the path; the door was open and he went in. The church was tiny, stone-walled, a blend of modest country charm and an odd grandness, with big carved wooden pews bearing family names, ornate memorial plaques in marble with gilt carving, and wild country flowers set in great jugs below the high vaulted windows. Brendan sank on to his knees in one of the pews at the front, near the tiny altar, and tried to pray, thinking with a touch of wryness even in his misery how horrified his mother would have been to see him there in an Anglican church, and became slowly aware above his pain and his thudding heart of an odd, loud howling; he wondered in the madness of his pain if it was the hounds of hell, and then realized it was not, it was merely the hounds of Easton, demanding their breakfast. The noise was horrifying, on and on; he wondered how the villagers could stand it, but he was actually grateful for it: it suited his mood, they were howling for him, he felt, expressing his agony, and it was almost cathartic, oddly comforting. Then, unbidden, into the noise and the silence around it, he began to hear, as if for the first time, Caroline’s voice talking about the baby, and he remembered and made sense of what she had said: ‘You must have her and take her home with you.’ He heard the other things she had said about the baby; how pretty she had been, how she had had his eyes, his black hair, and what else had she said? A little stalk-like neck, frond-like fingers, and a head like a little flower. Brendan sat and thought, and imagined her, and thought about having her with him, being with him, growing with him; as the sun rose, and filled the church, he relaxed and grew warmer, and in spite of himself he smiled. ‘A little flower,’ he said aloud, ‘my little flower. That’s what I shall call her, Fleur. Fleur FitzPatrick. It’s a fine name.’
He liked children; he would make, he thought, rather a good father. He would go and find the dreadful Mrs Jackson, and thence the lovely Fleur, and start organizing it all straight away. Make the arrangements and take her away with him home to New York, and they would be together always. If he couldn’t have her mother, at least he would have his daughter. It would be some kind of a comfort.
Brendan stood up and walked out of the church and down the path towards the car.
None of it was quite that easy of course: in fact it was horrendously difficult, a nightmare of complex legalities, of appalling officialdom. Several times, as the battle raged, he was tempted to abandon the whole idea. Then he thought of her, his daughter, with Caroline’s blood in her veins, and knew he had to go on and have her.
Finally, on a dark, foggy day early in January she was his; he sat in Caroline’s solicitor’s office, his heart beating so hard and so high he really felt he might choke from it. He heard a car draw up outside, heard the door open, footsteps on the pavement, the front door open, and more footsteps walking nearer and nearer to him, and in an endless age, time suspended, he saw the door open, slowly, silently, and Mrs Jackson herself walked in with a child in her arms.
So this was Fleur, this was his daughter; a little, tense, wiry thing, with loose ringleted curls, lovingly dressed for the last time by the mother who was losing her, her big dark blue eyes and long black lashes wet with tears and bewilderment at what was happening to her. She was struggling in Mrs Jackson’s arms, sobbing almost silently, her small chest heaving; instinctively Brendan held out his own arms, but she looked at him blankly and buried her head silently in Mrs Jackson’s shoulder, pushing him away when he tried to take her.
‘Come along, darling,’ he said gently, ‘come along, my little one, little Fleur. Come to your daddy. I’ve come to take you home.’
‘Her name is Angela,’ said Mrs Jackson fiercely, her face white and contorted with pain and rage, ‘not Fleur, and she knows another daddy and another home. I do hope you know what you are doing, Mr FitzPatrick, for the child certainly does not.’
‘I do,’ he said, taking the child, ignoring her struggles and her cries, ‘I most certainly do. She is mine and she belongs with me.’
But as he sat in the hotel room that evening, listening to Fleur’s endless crying, and watching her later as she tossed fitfully in the little cot he had bought so confidently for her, he did not feel quite so sure.
1952–4
‘I don’t want to be Mary,’ said Fleur. ‘Not if I have to wear that silly blue dress. Why can’t I be Joseph?’
Sister Frances looked at her curiously. In all her years of teaching First Grade, she had never known a little girl turn down the chance of playing Mary in the Nativity Play.
‘But, dear, why not?’ she said. ‘It’s so lovely to be Our Lady, and sit holding the baby in the stable with all the shepherds and the three kings and . . .’ Her voice trailed away as she realized she was in danger of overselling the role. Which was ridiculous; there were plenty of other little girls dying to play it. It was just that Fleur FitzPatrick, with her dark curls and extraordinary blue eyes, her rather grave, pale, oval-shaped face, would have made such a beautiful Virgin Mother. Still, if it was not to be, it was not to be, and Sally Thompson, she of the blonde waistlength hair and deceptively angelic little face, would do just as well; certainly she did not want a reluctant Mary in the play.
‘I told you why not,’ said Fleur. ‘I don’t want to wear a dress. I hate dresses. I’ll be Joseph.’
‘Fleur, you’
ll be who I say or no one,’ said Sister Frances firmly. ‘You do not go picking and choosing what you’ll do in my class. Besides, Joseph wears a sort of dress as well. That is to say, he wears a robe. Am I right in thinking you would object to that as well?’
‘Oh, no, that’d be OK,’ said Fleur. ‘If that’s what all the men wore then. Well it’s up to you, I guess, Sister. Can I go now, please?’
‘Yes, dear, you can go.’ She looked at Fleur shrewdly. ‘Your father will be very disappointed,’ she said, playing her trump card. ‘I told him I was going to choose you and he was, oh, extremely proud.’ Fleur’s love affair with her father was well known in the neighbourhood.
Fleur turned and looked at Sister Frances.
Now, the old nun thought, now I have got her.
But the little girl’s voice was cool. ‘You shouldn’t have told him without asking me first. You’re right, he will be disappointed. Very disappointed. Good afternoon, Sister.’
‘Good afternoon, Fleur.’
That night at supper, Fleur decided she should get the bad news over. ‘I’m very sorry to be a disappointment to you, Daddy,’ she said, ‘but I am not going to be Mary in the Nativity.’
‘That is a disappointment, Fleur.’ Brendan’s dark blue eyes, so exactly like his daughter’s, were concerned and puzzled over his forkful of chicken. ‘Sister Frances told me she was going to ask you. What went wrong? Were you naughty or something?’
‘No, I was not. I turned it down, that’s what happened.’
‘Turned it down? Fleur, why? A girl doesn’t turn that role down. It’s a classic.’
Fleur smiled and went over to him and started to climb on his knee; she loved it when her father talked theatre to her in that grown-up way.
AN Outrageous Affair Page 9
