Everything inside her screamed at her to kiss him. She stepped backwards. ‘I can’t.’
She saw a taxi coming towards her with its light on and relief swept over her. ‘Taxi!’ she shouted and stepped off the edge of the pavement, into its path, desperately waving her hand in the air.
‘50 Greenslades Road, Wandsworth, please,’ she said to the cab driver through the window.
Luke was right behind her. ‘You’re making a mistake.’
‘No,’ she replied. ‘I’d be making a mistake if I stayed.’
She got into the taxi and closed the door without looking at him again, and as they pulled away she laid her head back on the seat. She thought of how close she’d come to kissing him, then thought of her husband. She had to sort this out; hiding at Sophie’s, nearly kissing Luke, avoiding the issues she had to face, wasn’t going to help.
She had to talk to Will.
She leant forward to tap on the glass screen between her and the driver. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I gave you the wrong address. Can we go to Baron’s Court instead?’
C H A P T E R F O U R T E E N
In the wine shop, Will was trying to focus on the website of a little-known producer from the southern tip of Italy who had just won a prestigious award at a regional wine festival in Naples. He was keen to begin importing from some different vineyards as his stock was becoming predictable and this one looked promising. It was impossible to concentrate, though. His thoughts constantly drifted back to Harmony, as they had done ever since she walked away from him, her gait uncertain, her small suitcase bumping along behind her. He was desperate to speak to her but every time he telephoned she either left the call unanswered or spoke in flat, single-word utterances that left him bereft. At night it was worse, her side of the bed cold, the bedroom quiet without her restlessness, his stomach like a roiling sea. He’d walked each night, pacing the pavements, anxiety consuming him.
He forced himself back to the Castella de Valde webpage, trying to read words that blurred on the screen. The bell on the door jangled and he looked up.
‘Harmony!’ he exclaimed, jumping off his stool and coming out from behind the counter.
She stood in the doorway, the evening sun behind her casting her face in shadow. He combed his fingers through his hair, aware of his dishevelled appearance, cursing himself for grabbing yesterday’s shirt off the floor that morning.
‘Are you back? Are you coming home?’
She tucked a few stray strands of hair behind her ear. ‘I’m not sure what I’m doing.’
‘I’ve missed you,’ he said, as he approached her, carefully, as if she were a wild horse, likely to bolt.
She didn’t move. Her eyes flicked over his face, her hurt as raw as it had been when she walked away from him.
‘Shall we go home?’ he said. ‘We can’t talk here.’ She didn’t answer.
‘Harmony?’
‘No, I don’t want to be in the flat. Let’s walk. I’ll go back and change my shoes and put some jeans on. Meet me there in ten minutes.’
He watched her walk out of the shop. He stood for a moment, unsure whether she was back to tell him she was coming home or leaving for good. He would have sold his soul to turn back the clock to before the vasectomy, before the miscarriage and the pregnancy, back to when their lives weren’t on this emotional roller coaster.
He’d sent Frank home earlier that day. He was still devastated about his cat, and Will couldn’t cope with seeing him so fragile, so grief-stricken, not with the way he was feeling himself. Two of them moping about the place was too much. Will emptied the till, locked the money in the safe, switched the lights off, then turned the sign on the door from Open to Closed.
As he turned into their street he saw her coming out of the front door, wearing jeans and a sweater, her hair pulled free of its ponytail. He started to jog and reached her as she stepped onto the pavement. They stood in front of each other, apprehensive and uncomfortable.
‘Where do you want to walk?’ he asked.
‘Is doesn’t matter.’
‘Shall we go down to the river?’
They walked in strained silence for most of the way, passing groups of people enjoying the warm evening, standing outside pubs, spilling onto the pavement, laughing and joking, others rushing to get home or heading to the park for an evening kick-about.
Without warning she stopped in her tracks. ‘You know,’ she said, her voice tempered with anger. ‘I never once questioned you. I never once asked you to tell me why. I just accepted it because I loved you.’ She glanced over his shoulder and placed her hands on her hips, looked at him again. ‘You need to tell me why. You need to explain it to me. Right now.’
He thrust his hands deep in his pockets and thought for a moment or two, trying to formulate his mush of reasons into a coherent answer. He knew there was nothing he could say that was going to help. The argument they were going to have was unavoidable. ‘I have no idea how to be a father.’
‘That’s not good enough! Nobody knows how to be a parent until they become one.’ She shook her head. ‘You can’t have that.’
‘It’s true. The thought of it scares the shit out of me. I learned nothing from my father. Nothing at all. How on earth can I think of becoming a father if I’ve nothing to fall back on?’
He saw his family then, the three of them standing in the car park outside the halls of residence, his mother fussing around him, reminding him to do his laundry, kissing him, trying not to cry, his father in the background, hands clasped behind his back, face devoid of emotion. For Will this was a new start. Moving out of home with no intention of moving back. His first step into adulthood. He’d looked at his father, given him a moment or two to step forward, but the man didn’t make any move towards him.
Be the bigger man, Will told himself. You must be the bigger man.
So Will walked up to him and offered his hand. His father took it and they shook briefly, both grasping the other too firmly. Will straightened his back and smiled awkwardly.
‘I guess I’ll see you at Christmas, then,’ he’d said, unsure what else to say.
‘I’m sure we’ll see you before then,’ his father had replied, his eyes stony. ‘You’re bound to cock it up. You always do.’
Will looked at his wife, her questioning eyes burning with livid incomprehension. ‘I’d get it wrong, Harmony. If I tried to be a father, I know I would. It’s not worth the risk. I’m not strong like you.’
‘I’m not strong.’ She started walking again, her eyes focused on where she was going, her mind working overtime. ‘I’m not strong at all.’
‘But you are,’ he said, catching up with her. ‘It was the first thing I noticed when we got talking the day we met. You’d seemed vulnerable and sweet when you were scrabbling around on the floor for your books and then we got talking and I was blown away by how determined you were. How independent, with all this fight inside you. You hadn’t had things easy, but you were gutsy and secure, and so optimistic.’
My anchor in a storm, Will had thought, after they’d made love for the first time, squashed together in her narrow bed, basking in the glow of sex. She was his salvation. She was everything he wanted to be: tough, in control, focused on the future, not shackled by the past.
‘I’m not like you. The way I’ve coped, the way I get through life, isn’t to fight, it’s to leave the things that have happened behind me. Move on. Not let it get to me.’
‘But that’s just the point!’ she yelled, throwing her hands in the air in angry frustration as she marched. ‘You aren’t moving on, you aren’t leaving it behind, you’re letting it all govern your whole fucking life! Your past, this very thing you’re trying not to dwell on, is making all your decisions for you.’
He shook his head. ‘This isn’t a nice world. Children are vulnerable. I’d want to be there all the time to make sure nothing could hurt our child but that’s not possible, is it? If you have a child you have to accept that at
some point they’ll get hurt. I mean, look at us. Your dad leaving, your mum dying, my dad being a cunt, crying myself to sleep in a room with twenty other eight-year olds, all of us trying to keep our crying silent so we didn’t get the shit kicked out of us. I don’t want a child of mine to feel those things.’
Her eyes welled and she snatched angrily at the tears with the back of her hand. ‘But our child wouldn’t have felt those things,’ she said. ‘Our child would have been loved and cherished. Our child would have been happy.’
‘You can’t guarantee that.’
‘Of course I can guarantee that!’ she screamed. ‘We’d have loved him or her with every breath in our bodies and if you couldn’t have managed that, I’d have loved it enough for both of us. Christ, I can’t believe this conversation!’
‘I think you’re being naive.’
‘Naive?’ she repeated.
‘Yes, naive,’ he pushed on, trying to ignore her outrage. ‘Fine, things at home would be good, our family would be content, but what about the bastards out there?’ He shook his head and looked up at the sky, blocking an image of Alastair Farrow, eyes glinting with spite.
‘You’re fear-mongering, Will, and it’s pathetic.You’ve convinced yourself the world is an evil place, but it’s not. It’s an amazing place with amazing things in it – knowledge, laughter, love – all these things make life worth it.’ She shook her head in frustration. ‘If every person thought like you the human race would cease to exist. And why? Because of fear. How is that good? Yes, you and I have experienced pain, we’ve cried as children, but we found happiness, and not just superficial happiness – bona fide, gratifying happiness. You don’t think that makes up for the bad stuff?’ She didn’t pause long enough for him to answer. ‘I do. I think it makes it all worthwhile. What you’re saying, this crap you’re spouting, belittles everything we have together.’
She stormed ahead then, her feet slamming into the pavement, her hands balled into tight fists at her sides. He followed her, turning over her words, knowing there was truth in them, wondering if she were right. She made so much sense when she argued and he found his thoughts were muddled.
She stopped at the railings that overlooked the Thames and he came up beside her. The tide was low, and the pebbles and rubbish revealed on the shoreline were covered in thick, dirty silt. Will waited for Harmony to say something, but she stayed quiet, leaning over the railings, watching the listless, muddy water pass by.
‘You know,’ he said, gripping hold of the metal railing which was still warm from the day’s sun. ‘This is going to sound harsh and I know it’s going to upset you, but … ’ He stopped himself then, wary of the words he wanted to say.
‘For fuck’s sake, just say it,’ she said, looking down the river, the slight breeze brushing her hair across her face.
‘I’ve felt this way since I was eighteen. When most people were struggling with politics or religion or trying to get laid, I was dealing with this. The decision I made, not wanting to be a father, is fundamental to me – rightly or wrongly, it makes me who I am. The man you married. If you don’t understand that … then,’ he paused. ‘Then maybe it’s you who doesn’t love me as much as you should and not the other way round.’
She lifted her hand and slapped him hard. The noise rang in his ears and his cheek burned.
‘You self-absorbed fuck. You think I don’t love you?’ she said bitterly. ‘You really think that? If I didn’t love you I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t be bloody standing here trying to work our marriage out.’ She shook her head, tears spilling down her cheeks. ‘You fuck,’ she said, batting her hand feebly against his chest. ‘You utter fuck.’ And then she turned on her heel and walked away from him.
‘Harmony!’ he called. But she didn’t reply, just kept walking, head down, arms wrapped around her body. He turned and slammed his hands against the railings, swearing under his breath.
When he got back to the flat she was sitting at the kitchen table. As he approached the table she lifted her eyes to look at him. They were red from crying, the skin beneath them puffy.
‘I heard what you said,’ she said calmly. ‘About being a father. I can’t change how you feel, I know that, but I can’t forgive what you did. What you did goes beyond your reasons for not wanting children. It was dishonest and hurtful and made decisions affecting my life that you didn’t have the right to make.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘A sorry isn’t going to make this better.’ She sighed and exhaled slowly. ‘You lied to me. When I lost the baby, when I needed you the most, you gave me no support. You didn’t care. It’s taken you this long to open up about something you describe as fundamental to who you are. You don’t tell me anything about your past. I know there’s something you’re not telling me about Luke. I can see it. Why won’t you tell me? I find it terrifying how easily you can keep things from me. And, right now, right this minute, I feel like I’ve wasted the last twenty years of my life investing in this relationship.’
‘Don’t say that.’ She didn’t reply.
‘Look, Harmony, you’re wrong,’ he said. He pulled out a chair and sat opposite her. ‘It’s not easy keeping things from you. It’s harder than you can imagine, but I do it because that’s how I deal with things. I don’t want to spend time discussing what happened at school with you. Luke, Alastair Farrow, the caning, the bullying, it’s not worth talking about. I don’t need your sympathy or pity, and I don’t want all of that shit fouling our lives. It’s irrelevant to me.’
‘Of course it’s not irrelevant. Your past, that intricate jigsaw of experiences, makes you the person you are today.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I put it away so I could become the person I am today. But listening to you I can see I should have let you in more. And when it comes to the vasectomy there’s nothing I can say to defend it. I made a huge mistake not discussing it with you. I can see that now.’ He paused. ‘I don’t think straight all the time. I have all this crap in my head. I’m not like you. I don’t have the same way with words. When you had the miscarriage, you were so upset I didn’t know what to say.’ He shook his head. ‘You say I didn’t care, but that’s not true.’
Her eyes filled with tears again and she looked down at her hands.
‘I was desperate to help you, but everything I did or said seemed to make it worse. I went onto the internet and read up about it, about losing a baby, and what I should do to help, but nothing I found seemed right, and … ’ He paused, finding it difficult to speak. ‘And of course I’d had the operation and I was crippled with guilt. I could see how devastated you were, but I didn’t want to talk, in case the question of another child came up. The more upset and withdrawn you became, the harder I found it to know what to say. In the end I convinced myself that if I just got on with it, eventually we’d be okay. I told myself these things happen and it was just life, and if I was happy and strong, you’d recover. I got it wrong.’ Then he leant forward again and placed his hands on hers. ‘Give me another chance, Harmony.’
‘A part of me wants to, the part of me that wants us back to how we were,’ she said. ‘But there’s another part of me that’s just so bloody angry with you. So angry I can’t look at you. And where does that leave us? What do I do about that? Hope it goes away?’ She sighed heavily. ‘Because the way I’m feeling at the moment, I don’t think it’s ever going to go away.’
When she left the table, he didn’t follow.There was nothing more he could say, so instead he went into the garden. It was peaceful. Dusk had seen off the heat of the day and there was a suggestion of rain in the air. A movement from behind the study window caught his eye. He watched Harmony sit down at her desk, her shadowy figure moving slowly. He saw her put her glasses on and then become still as she stared at the monitor in front of her. He wondered if this was what the rest of their lives might look like, two separate beings tied together in marriage, detached and resentful, circling each other warily. Would it have been different
if he’d shared everything with her from the start? If he’d described that first horrendously lonely night at prep school? All those eight-year-old boys curled up in uncomfortable beds, abandoned, the sound of stifled crying intermingling with the creaks and groans of ancient timbers and pipes. If he’d described how he’d lain awake trying to work out what he’d done to upset his parents so much they would send him away? He remembered how his blanket had stunk of disinfectant and how he’d hidden from the smell by pushing his face into the teddy he’d brought, as specified on the uniform list: One soft toy, if required.
It started to spit with rain. Will turned his face upwards and closed his eyes, waiting for the tiny specks of wet to hit him. He thought of Harmony’s face when she’d told him about the miscarriage, how her eyes had been puffy from crying then as well, her pale skin blotched deep pink. How he’d found her slumped on the edge of their bed, her fingers clutching a ragged piece of tissue, her chin trembling as she said the words.
‘Our baby died.’
And then she looked up at him, tears coursing down her cheeks, her breath coming in short snatches.
‘A miscarriage?’
She nodded and her shoulders began to quiver.
He’d sat beside her and pulled her into him, his arms around her, his chin resting on her head. ‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered, kissing her hair.
His thoughts had been a jumble. He hadn’t known what else to say. Everything that came into his head sounded trite and insincere. His emotions were all over the place. The relief he’d felt shocked and shamed him, the sadness surprised him.
‘Do you need me to take you to the doctor?’
She sat back and shook her head, pushing the disintegrating tissue against her red-rimmed eyes. ‘I’ve already been. I went this morning.’
‘I should have taken you.’
‘There was nothing you could do,’ she said in a tearful voice. ‘I didn’t want to worry you if nothing was wrong.’ She sniffed. ‘I was hoping they’d tell me it was okay, that the bleeding was normal and my baby was fine. But when they scanned me there was no heartbeat. Nothing there at all.’ Then she started to sob again. ‘Oh, Will, it was awful.’
The Judas Scar Page 14
