On the seat beside her was a small photograph album, carefully compiled, showing James’s progress from nought to eighteen. She would let Guy keep it if he expressed an interest, though it would be hard to part with some of the best pictures. James, digging on the beach at Bournemouth, in a funny pith-helmet; in his over-large school uniform, aged four; holding Moriarty, his pet guinea-pig, now deceased. The poor creature had been abducted from an insecure cage by a fox. The lies she had had to tell to cover that one up. Moriarty has run away to the railway cutting to live with the other guinea-pigs. James had cried so much he’d had to have the day off school. She was tempted to slip that photo out and keep it, but that would leave a gap, which would need explaining.
In the most recent shots he wasn’t smiling – it wasn’t the done thing apparently. You just had to face the camera down with a good, hard stare. In some ways he was a typical teenager, in others, not at all. Nina had been astounded and humbled by his reaction to her recent confession. He had been dazed and a little disbelieving at first, to think that the man whose grave he had been made to visit all these years, whose absence was such a feature of his childhood, was not in fact his father. And he had fidgeted uncomfortably in his seat when Nina had been obliged to refer to her sexual history. But he hadn’t raged or stormed over the deception, or reproached Nina in any way. A daughter would never have been so forgiving, Nina was sure. Once he’d heard her out she had left him alone in the restaurant to digest all her excuses and explanations, and waited for him in some trepidation at the tube station. Ten minutes later he had caught up with her and simply said: ‘So am I ever going to meet this guy, Guy, or what?’
‘It’s up to you,’ she’d said, overcome with relief that he’d forgiven her, and not imagining that he would make such quick and efficient steps to track Guy down. For a moment she had worried that his equanimity might be a front for inner turmoil; perhaps he was saving his angst for Kerry. But she hadn’t been able to sustain this anxiety for long. With James there were no hidden depths – the waters were transparent and unpolluted.
Five minutes. Guy would have had time to buy a drink and find a table by now. She checked her appearance once more, for smudged mascara and lipstick-on-teeth, before getting out of the car and following Guy into the pub.
From the vantage point of her own car, Jane watched the new arrivals, trying to guess which one was Nina. Those old photographs weren’t much help – unless she turned up in batik and clogs, which was unlikely. Most people seemed to come in twos and threes, anyway, or were indisputably students or teenagers.
The plan, arranged by telephone the night before, was for Guy and Nina to meet somewhere on neutral territory to discuss James and any matters arising. Once the ice was broken and initial embarrassments smoothed over, after an hour and a half, say, Jane was to join them for a drink. ‘I don’t want to come,’ she’d said, knowing all along that she would have stalked him and lurked in bushes just to get a look at Nina, but feeling that a show of mature incuriosity was required.
‘I want you to be there,’ Guy insisted. ‘Just so it’s clearly understood where my priorities lie.’
‘Which is where?’ It was only the Sunday of the aborted weekend away, the day after Jane’s return from Erica’s, so certain issues were still smouldering.
‘With you of course. And the girls. And then with James.’
‘She’ll think I’m being possessive, or nosy, or both.’ And she’ll be right, thought Jane. She would never have believed herself capable of jealousy on this scale until now. She had thought all such stormy and irrational passions to be beneath her. It was most confusing. I must love him more than I know, a still small voice inside her kept saying, while more clamorous voices talked of rage and revenge.
‘No, she won’t,’ said Guy. ‘Anyway, who cares what she thinks? It’s what we think that matters. And we’re facing this together, aren’t we? Isn’t that what we’ve agreed?’
‘Well, yes, all right,’ Jane admitted, grudgingly. ‘But you can go in first and get all the awkward stuff out of the way.’
A woman was making her way across the car park. She had blonde bobbed hair topped with a pair of sunglasses, and was dressed in a stone twill skirt with buttons down the front, and a pink polo shirt. She was carrying a purse and a small, flip photo album. That’s her, was Jane’s immediate thought. Size fourteen, minimum, was her next. Then, relieved to discover that Nina was nothing like the femme fatale she had been expecting, and in fact resembled an ordinary woman, a working mother, a pillar of the tennis club and PTA, Jane settled down with Erica’s copy of Jude the Obscure until it was time to make her entrance.
At his corner table in the Windmill, Guy sat back, one arm along the top of the banquette, in a pantomime of relaxation. In fact he was sweating profusely: every so often he would take a pad of tissues from his trouser pocket and apply it to his forehead and neck to mop up some of the run-off. He was grateful for the foresight which had made him put on a white cotton shirt which wouldn’t show the huge, soaking patches under each arm. He picked up a discarded Evening Standard from the floor and fanned himself, and then, under cover of the table top, discreetly took his pulse. 128! He’d keel over and die in a minute if he didn’t calm down. His blood pressure – borderline at the best of times – would be off the scale. He’d been feeling sick all evening. He didn’t know if it was anxiety or that piece of day-old salmon quiche Jane had given him for tea. ‘I think I’ve just eaten something that’s off. You try it,’ she’d said.
He belched behind his hand and tried to turn it into a cough. ‘Come on,’ he thought, looking at his watch. ‘Let’s get this over.’ It was the anticipation he couldn’t stand. When James had accosted him outside the school without warning he had coped fine. It was much better to be mugged by bad news than tortured slowly. Not that he considered James, in himself, to be Bad News. He was, in fact, pleasant, intelligent, well-mannered: exactly the sort of son Guy would have wanted in other circumstances – that, on occasions, when he saw some young boy kicking a ball to his dad in the park, he still did want. They had talked and talked that Friday evening, once Guy had recovered his powers of speech. James had told him about his early childhood, looked after by Irene – Martin’s mother – while Nina went out to work. Guy had related his version of the desert trip: how close they had all been, and then how suddenly Martin’s murder had caused their dispersal and estrangement. Nina had been rescued and brought home by her father; Hugo had stayed on in In Salah, refusing to abandon his unfinished project, and he, Guy, had driven the Land Rover himself the hellish journey to Oran, picking up hitch-hikers wherever possible, en route, for company.
They discovered some features in common. James was planning to study Economics at university – though not so far with a view to primary teaching. Both were keen armchair sports enthusiasts, with a particular interest in cricket. While Jane and Erica had been playing ping-pong in a cellar, they had traded occult cricketing lore and statistics. Q. Who is the only Nobel Laureate to be mentioned in Wisden’s? A. Samuel Beckett. Guy had promised to take James to Lords.
It seemed possible that from this shattering experience something intrinsically good and worthwhile might be salvaged: a father-son relationship that was free from the constraints of discipline on the one hand, and rebellion on the other.
A sudden gust of fresh air made Guy look up: there was Nina, framed in the open doorway, just as she had been that time at the flat when he’d brought Hugo home, stoned. Her features were instantly recognizable, though they seemed smaller – or was it just the rest of her that was bigger. This was the woman he had followed across two continents, and who had seemed an ideal of beauty when he was twenty-one, but her entrance today caused no heads to turn. It gave him a pang to see how ordinary she had become. He half rose to his feet and then sank back again, pinned between table and seat, and she gave a quick nod of acknowledgement, and made her way towards him, a smile frozen to her face.
‘Hello
.’ She extended her right hand across the table as though they were business associates, or strangers, and then gave a yelp as Guy reciprocated with one of his firm, headmasterly handshakes, of the sort usually reserved for visiting dignitaries and overbearing parents.
‘Sony,’ he said, aghast at his own strength, as Nina flexed her crushed fingers. There: exactly what he’d promised Jane he wouldn’t do – start on an apologetic note, as if Nina, not he, were the wronged party.
‘Bitter?’ asked Nina.
He was about to deny this vigorously, when he realized she was pointing to his empty glass.
‘Oh. Yes, thanks. Just a half.’ He hadn’t intended to down the first pint so quickly. He wasn’t here to get boozed after all. While Nina was buying the drinks he moved around the table so that they would end up sitting adjacent to one another, rather than directly opposite, which all those management courses had taught him was off-putting and confrontational. He had rearranged his office at school on just the same principles, and could no longer open the window without clambering on to his desk.
‘You haven’t changed,’ she said on her return.
‘Neither have you,’ he replied, adopting the convention.
‘Hah!’ She laughed derisively. ‘Well, cheers. Here’s to tact and diplomacy.’ They raised their glasses, slopping beer – a result of full measures and slightly shaky hands. ‘I know I owe you an apology,’ Nina went on. ‘Several apologies. I’ve probably wrecked your life. James tells me you’ve got two little girls.’
‘Yes. Sophie and Harriet.’
‘That’s nice.’ She took a sip of her Guinness, leaving a pair of tiny foam tusks at the corners of her mouth. ‘I’m sorry if I’ve caused any upheaval.’
‘Yes, well, we’re still getting used to the idea,’ said Guy.
‘You know, I felt guilty all those years for not telling you, and I feel even worse now I’ve told you.’
She was urging him to say, oh it’s okay, don’t worry, what’s another kid between friends? but he wasn’t going to let her off that easily. ‘It would have been better if you’d said something earlier. I mean right at the beginning, before he was born,’ said Guy, as if thinking it out, rather than issuing a direct rebuke. But would it really? he thought. He probably would have stuck with Nina and never met Jane, something it pained him even to consider. And he couldn’t wish his own daughters unborn. His sense of regret remained annoyingly unfocused.
‘I wanted to tell you. I would have done, but I was staying with Martin’s mother, Irene, at the time, and she guessed I was pregnant, and I couldn’t deny it. But of course she assumed it was Martin’s, and she was so happy. I couldn’t tell her the truth – the thought of the baby was the only thing keeping her going.’
‘But how could you sustain a lie like that for so long? It would have been on my mind the whole time.’
‘It seemed the lesser of two evils. I searched my conscience, I honestly did. I prayed and prayed for a miscarriage – I even decided to have an abortion and tell Irene I’d miscarried. I got as far as my appointment at the clinic, but when I went up to the desk to check in, or whatever you call it, I could see my file on the top of the heap. It had the word STOP written across it in big black letters. I thought it must be some sort of sign. I was already in a state anyway, but when I saw that I just burst into tears and ran out of there as fast as I could and never went back.’
‘How awful,’ said Guy, ambiguously. He was thinking what a narrow escape James had had.
As if Nina had read his mind, she said, ‘I’ve never told anyone that before. Please don’t tell James, or anyone.’
‘Of course not,’ said Guy, though he was making no promises not to tell Jane. In his view their marriage vows invalidated all subsequent oaths of secrecy.
‘It was only much later that a friend who works in a hospital told me that STOP just stands for Surgical Termination Of Pregnancy. So it wasn’t a sign after all.’
‘Oh, I think it was,’ said Guy. ‘They’re everywhere.’ Hadn’t James himself come to him in answer to a prayer? Though not, of course, the answer Guy had been expecting, but wasn’t that always the way?
‘lt certainly seemed like it at the time,’ Nina admitted. ‘You do understand why I couldn’t be honest. It wasn’t for my benefit. It was for Irene. She was looking forward to the birth so much. She was the one who looked after James while I did my finals, and then went out to work. My own parents weren’t all that supportive. Well, they weren’t even in the country. They thought I was being irresponsible and throwing away my future. They wanted me to have the baby adopted. But Irene really loved James. And once I’d decided that Martin was going to have to be the father, it wasn’t that hard to believe it. I mean there was no scientific evidence that he wasn’t. I suppose there’s an outside chance he might have been.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Guy. ‘What makes you so sure James is mine?’
Nina was swilling the last inch of Guinness around the glass, leaving a tidemark of froth. ‘Well.’ She leaned forward a little, so that the uncomfortable subject of sex wouldn’t have so far to travel, and addressed her remarks to the buttons of Guy’s shirt. ‘I wasn’t actually sleeping with Martin on that trip. Because we were never alone, and I didn’t want to anyway. And before that we’d always used precautions.’
Guy nodded sagely, trying not to look as though he was remembering their own recklessness. He tried to imagine what it would have been like to be Nina, bereaved and pregnant, and locked into a deception which could only have been remedied by causing pain. He found himself inclined to believe and pity her.
‘You know,’ she said, examining her bitten nails. ‘I think if you’d got in contact or come to see me when you got back from Algeria I probably would have cracked and told you then.’
Guy’s sympathy evaporated. He wasn’t about to have the responsibility for eighteen years’ duplicity thrust back at him. ‘Well, if I’d known you were pregnant I certainly would have done,’ he said with some asperity. The truth was, Martin’s death had made it impossible for Guy to make any further approaches. It would have been like dancing on his grave. A similar feeling of guilt and self-disgust had gripped Nina, too: he’d seen it in her eyes when she’d said goodbye before leaving In Salah with her father. He knew then that they would meet at Martin’s funeral as fellow mourners and nothing more. And he was almost ashamed of how quickly he had got over her once he was home, even though he had dreamed of her every night of the long journey back overland. It wasn’t shallowness on his part but a form of self-preservation. Martin, Hugo and Nina had dropped into his life and out again, like characters in a dream. They had had no mutual friends; in Guy’s circle their names never even came up. England was just as he’d left it – unchanged, indifferent. People had been interested in hearing about the tragedy, of course, but Guy had no wish to satisfy morbid curiosity. He’d been torn between telling everything – the whole story of the trip, detail by detail – and saying nothing at all, and it was generally easier to do the latter. After a time even his memories of Algeria seemed to take on a dreamlike quality. Only his diary and photos, shut up in a box and never re-examined, were proof that it had all happened.
‘I’m sorry,’ Nina said again. Then, ‘You know, it wasn’t Irene’s death that set this off. It was Hugo. You’ve heard he’s coming back, I suppose?’
Guy nodded. ‘We’re meant to be putting him up. I’ve phoned and faxed him from school, but there’s no reply. I don’t know exactly when he’s coming.’
‘I haven’t even returned his calls,’ said Nina. ‘I’m not desperate to see him, to be honest, but I know he’ll track me down in the end. My first thought when I heard his message was, Shit. He’ll meet James and work out the dates and put two and two together. That was when I decided to tell James myself. I didn’t want either of you to hear about it from Hugo of all people.’
Guy acknowledged that this wouldn’t have been a pleasant scenario. ‘It must have been h
ard for you, bringing up a baby on your own,’ he said. He wanted to tell her she’d done a good job, that James was a credit to her, but he’d never been good at delivering straightforward compliments. They always sounded phoney to his ears.
‘I wasn’t on my own. I had Irene. But, no, it wasn’t easy.’
A silence settled over the table as Guy realized he had inadvertently lapsed into his apologetic manner. ‘Anyway,’ he said, hauling himself back on to the level, ‘the important thing is James. What can I, we – Jane and myself – do for him?’
‘I don’t want money, if that’s what you mean,’ said Nina quickly.
‘But he’ll be off to university soon – he’ll need funds for that. They don’t get grants any more do they?’
‘No,’ said Nina. ‘But he’ll be okay. Irene left him a couple of thousand.’
‘That’s hardly the point. I’d like to contribute, however belatedly, to his education.’
‘I don’t know.’ Nina shook her head. Her bobbed hair, neatly blow-dried and lacquered, moved as one piece. ‘It’s something I’ll have to think about. I’m not sure a handout would be at all appropriate.’
A Dry Spell Page 29