Flora’s smile is still in place, but she can feel herself quivering, as though something is struggling to burst through. The caterers finish loading their platters with canapés and bustle out of the room.
‘I’m sorry,’ Flora says, as tears spill down her cheeks. She didn’t cry in the service. Jean wept modestly, creditably, into a handkerchief, while Flora sat dry-eyed and hatless, with Lou beside her.
Landon draws her towards him again. ‘Has it been horrid?’
‘Completely.’
‘Tell me.’
Flora sniffs; almost a laugh, but more a sob. ‘I hardly know where to start.’
‘Try.’
‘Oh . . .’ Flora wipes her eyes, but the tears start up again as soon as she tries to speak. ‘Later,’ she says. ‘I must go back. So many people. Are you leaving?’
‘Absolutely not.’ Landon squeezes her shoulder. ‘Here till the bitter end.’
‘There you are!’ Jean’s voice is exasperated and triumphant, as though Flora is a lost dog. ‘I wondered what had happened to you.’
‘I’m just coming,’ Flora says. ‘Landon’s here.’
‘So I see. How nice of you to come, Landon.’
‘Hello, Jean.’ Landon holds out a hand, his manners impeccable. ‘I’m so sorry about your mother.’
*
The last stragglers don’t leave until six o’clock: hanging on, Jean says with a quick shake of her head, in the hope of being offered supper.
‘I hardly think so,’ Flora says. ‘They’ve come a long way, some of them.’
‘They’d want to get back on the road, then.’ Jean doesn’t meet her eyes: she’s at the sink, filling the kettle. Always busy, Flora thinks viciously, with some productive task.
‘A wonderful turnout, anyway,’ says Henry. ‘I hope I can rustle up that many mourners.’ He leans back in his chair, looks at his watch, sighs. ‘I must get going,’ he says.
Flora swings round. ‘Going?’
Jean has turned too. Henry puts on his rueful face, running his stubby fingers through his hair. ‘I’m covering the late night prom. I’m sure I told you.’
‘For God’s sake, Henry: tonight? Surely you didn’t have to. Surely someone else . . .’
‘It’s the première of Mikhail’s cello concerto,’ Henry says. Flora has heard this tone of voice so often: the reasonableness, the patience, the self-justification. It incites suspicion as an instant reflex.
‘What about the car?’ she says. ‘How am I supposed to get home?’
Henry smiles, all amiability. ‘I can come back for you tomorrow.’
‘I’ll give you a lift.’ Landon is standing in the doorway. He smiles, and Flora feels a little jump in her throat.
‘Are you staying, then?’ she asks.
‘He means he’ll take Henry,’ says Jean. ‘Don’t you, Landon? Then Flora can keep the car.’
Landon demurs. ‘I meant . . .’
‘We might need Flora’s car tomorrow,’ Jean says firmly. ‘And we wouldn’t want to put you to any trouble, Landon.’
Henry gets to his feet. ‘Well, that’s great,’ he says. ‘Thanks, me old mucker. Good opportunity for a chinwag on the way.’
Landon stands very still for a moment – like an actor, Flora thinks, pausing before his next line – and then he smiles again. ‘Albert Hall by ten?’ he says. ‘We’d better get on the road.’
*
That night Flora lies beside Lou, drifting in and out of sleep. In the dark, she can smell the slight, sweet scent of buttered teacakes from the high tea provided, without consultation, by Jean. Lou has been angelic all day, Flora thinks. She replays images in her mind, to help keep at bay the tumult of emotion that threatens to burst out from the safe corner where she has confined it: Lou sitting obediently on Great Aunt Liza’s knee; talking politely to the vicar; answering the same questions over and over again with her sweetest smile.
Jean and Derek are sleeping on the top floor, and they have been in bed since ten thirty, so when Flora hears footsteps coming up the stairs she knows it isn’t either of them. She glances at the alarm clock with its blobs of luminous paint: it’s almost two o’clock. Sharply awake now, she listens for another step, and another. After a moment a figure appears, silhouetted in the doorway.
‘Flora?’
‘Landon?’ Her voice is louder than she intended, inflated by surprise. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’
‘I said we’d talk later. You looked as though you needed it.’
In outline he looks taller than usual, a slender statue framed by the light from the bathroom. ‘How did you get in?’
‘Through a window. I planned to serenade you, if I couldn’t find one open.’ He begins to sing, very softly: ‘Deh! Vieni alla finestra, o mio tesoro . . .’
‘Everyone’s asleep,’ Flora says. She wants to laugh, and to cry. She wants him to go on singing, but only to her. ‘Jean and Derek are upstairs.’
‘Don’t they like Don Giovanni? I’ve always thought Jean would make an excellent Donna Anna, up her own arse with righteous indignation. Whereas you –’
The next moment he catches her in his arms. Flora isn’t quite sure how it happened, whether she fell or flung herself at him, but the sensation is extraordinary: a sudden yielding to gravity. Nothing mattering in quite the same way anymore because all the usual landmarks have vanished.
‘Did you really drive all the way to London and back?’ she asks. ‘You could have dropped him at the station.’
She can hear his voice in her chest when he speaks. ‘Better this way,’ he says. ‘No one needs to know.’
They have never slept together before. All the years they’ve known each other, Flora thinks; all that time her mother hoped Landon might prevail, if Flora wouldn’t have one of those army officers or stockbrokers. Why has she never realised before that she wanted him? Even that night, years ago now, when she first came back from the hospital to find Henry . . . But there is, now, an overwhelming, a magnificent sense of inevitability.
‘Not here,’ she says, as he runs a hand down her back. ‘Come to my room.’
She and Henry have been billeted in the little room her mother used for sewing. The curtains aren’t closed, and the moon transfigures the neatly folded stacks of fabric, the Singer sewing machine hunched like a fertility symbol under the window. Flora shuts the door behind them and slips her dressing gown off her shoulders.
‘I’m not Don Giovanni,’ Landon says. ‘I came back so you could talk to me.’
‘Later,’ Flora says. ‘Please don’t start having scruples now.’
‘By no means.’ He smiles as she lifts her nightdress over her head.
He is gentler than Henry, and more expert. Flora is aware, at some depth, of the irony of this, but mostly she is aware of the sheer reckless pleasure of making love to a man who isn’t her husband – the only other man she has ever made love to – on the floor of her mother’s sewing room, on the night of her funeral. She cries, not for her mother but for herself, and for the shock and solace of this extraordinary turn of events.
Afterwards, they lie in silence. It’s still dark, but the first birds are singing in the garden and a tiny breeze ruffles the edges of the sheet Landon has pulled over them.
‘Better?’ he says, eventually.
‘Yes.’
‘You poor thing.’ He strokes her cheek with his finger, and Flora shivers. ‘Is it Henry?’
‘Not just Henry,’ she says. ‘It’s my mother, and Jean, and the job, and Lou . . .’
‘But it’s what you want, the job?’
‘It’s what I want, but it’s hard. You have no idea how hard. Sometimes I wonder . . .’
She falls silent again. No use, she thinks. She isn’t going to turn back now. Better not to talk about it.
‘There’s someone new,’ she says. ‘For Henry. Someone much more important this time.’
‘Do you know who she is?’
‘A musician, I think. Has he talked to you about her?’
‘No. He knows better than that.’
Flora studies his face in the moonlight. ‘Does it bother you, talking about Henry’s infidelity when we’ve just . . .?’
He smiles at her, and shakes his head, but she can see there’s something on his mind.
‘What is it?’ she asks. ‘Tell me.’
‘I’m getting married,’ he says.
Flora freezes. ‘What?’
‘It’s not someone you know,’ he says. ‘I met her – oh, quite recently, actually, but . . .’
‘For God’s sake!’ Flora sits up, pulling the sheet around her. Cuckolding Henry is one thing, but another woman’s fiancé . . . ‘Why didn’t you tell me? What on earth were you thinking?’
‘Please don’t,’ he says. ‘We could have done this a long time ago. Perhaps we should have done.’
‘But we didn’t,’ Flora says. ‘We did it now. Right now. I can’t believe . . .’
‘Rosanna will never know,’ he says. ‘It’ll never . . .’
‘Too right it’ll never happen again.’ Flora can feel tears rising again, and this time she won’t let herself think what they mean. Her brain spins, grasping at practicalities. Landon has already driven for hours, so she can hardly throw him out into the night, but the thought of Jean finding him here is more than she can bear.
‘I’ll go,’ he says, as though he’s read her mind. ‘There’s a Travelodge at the motorway exit. I can sleep there. I’m sorry – I’m very sorry that you feel . . .’
‘Don’t,’ says Flora, ‘don’t say anything else.’
But she’s glad that he doesn’t move at once.
‘It’s my only weapon,’ she says after a few moments. ‘Fidelity. Knowing I’m beyond reproach.’
‘You don’t need a weapon,’ Landon says. His voice is gentle; there’s no hint of umbrage. ‘I don’t know quite what you need, Flora, but it’s not a weapon.’ He leans across and kisses her on the forehead before he gets up. There are no more apologies, no more explanations.
For a long time after he leaves Flora lies awake, feeling nothing at all. Perhaps she will never sleep again, she thinks. Perhaps there will be no peace for her now. But then she feels Lou’s hand on her cheek, and sun is flooding into the room.
‘Good morning, Mummy,’ Lou says. ‘Did you sleep well?’
*
For a doctor, Flora is vague about physiology. She doesn’t mark the calendar or record dates. The absence of menstruation might have passed unnoticed for some time, except that the tiny thing which has taken root inside her asserts its presence more forcefully than its sister ever did. Leaning over the operating table one morning, she feels a paralysing rush of nausea.
‘Canteen curry?’ quips her Registrar, when they meet in the staffroom afterwards, and Flora smiles primly and leaves him to finish the list.
She has never gone home in the middle of the day before. On the way she stops to buy a pregnancy test, although she knows what the result will be. She sits in the kitchen with the white strip beside her, shaking with the enormity of what’s happening to her. This is definitely not Henry’s baby – although she has slept with Henry since the funeral, a fact she clings to now with fervent gratitude, despite the taint of contamination that shadowed the event – because the timing, although close enough to spare Henry’s suspicions, is wrong. And Henry, of course, is an unlikely candidate for fatherhood, although stranger things have happened. Stranger things such as this one.
Having ignored the evidence in front of her for several weeks, Flora draws around her now her knowledge of biology, of chorion and amnion and cell division, hoping that the surgeon’s uncompromising logic might serve her better than the woman’s instincts. There is still plenty of time to make a decision. She presents the dilemma to herself: the arguments for and against keeping the baby. She couldn’t bear Henry to guess that it isn’t his – but assuming she can keep that secret, does she want to give him the pleasure of another child, especially just now when his affections are so securely engaged elsewhere? A baby might win him back, of course – but could she stand the indignity of that? Then there’s her career: she might have a Consultancy now, but that’s not the end of the road. Does she want to handicap herself further?
Henry’s Catholicism is honoured more in the breach than the observance, but he would nonetheless be horrified by the idea of an abortion, if he ever caught a whiff of it. But she must consult her own feelings, Flora thinks, not his. She can’t be swayed by the idea of angering him any more than of pleasing him. Surely it’s possible to establish what she feels, what she wants.
She isn’t in the habit of listening to the radio, but the house is so quiet that her thoughts seem to echo gratingly in the empty space. On impulse, she reaches over and turns on the set Henry keeps in the kitchen, and Radio 3 fills the room. At first she hardly hears the music; she’s simply aware of people singing. And then there’s just one man singing, and singing something she has heard before, heard recently. A lilting love song of a melody, designed to entice a woman to bed: Deh! Vieni alla finestra, o mio tesoro.
Landon’s career is blossoming just now, and he’s often on the radio. It’s more of a surprise that she should be listening than that he should be singing, but even so the coincidence clutches her tight. She sits perfectly still until the aria finishes, and at the end of it several things set themselves out quite clearly in her mind.
It isn’t quite true that she has always been in love with Landon, but it could have been.
She can’t keep this baby as a reminder of him, but thinking of love seems to light a fire inside her, something vastly more powerful than she felt before Lou was born. Perhaps that’s because she knows better, now, what’s coming, but whatever the reason, she knows for certain that she will keep the baby, and that its conception wasn’t inauspicious but an extraordinary felicity.
And if she needs a reason to allow Henry the pleasure of fatherhood again, then let it be in recompense for the circumstances that led to it.
45
They had hardly got into the kitchen before Flora stopped, her hand on the edge of the table. For a moment Kitty wondered whether she had mistaken her mother’s intentions – perhaps after all she had meant to go to bed? – but then Flora began to speak, with the same uncharacteristic surge of words that had caught Kitty’s attention a few moments before.
‘My darling,’ she said. ‘There’s something I need to tell you. Something about your father.’
Kitty’s heart leapt with fear and relief. So Flora knew, she thought. Questions rushed at her, tripping each other up. How long had she known? Did she realise it was Daniel?
‘If it’s to do with –’ she began.
‘The thing is,’ Flora said, ‘that he’s not your father. I’m so sorry: it’s a terrible thing to spring on you.’
Kitty stared at her: the words didn’t seem to make sense.
‘Who’s not my father?’
‘Henry,’ said Flora. Her face had dissolved, all its strong lines blurred. ‘At least – he was in every respect except . . .’
There was silence then, complete silence except for a cascade of semiquavers in Kitty’s head.
‘Who is, then?’ Kitty asked. ‘Who is my father?’
‘Landon,’ said Flora. ‘It was . . .’
‘Landon?’ said Kitty. ‘Landon?’
The semiquavers had halted on an agonising suspension that drew itself out and out and wouldn’t resolve. For the moment Kitty couldn’t look at Flora. It was odd how at moments like this, when your mind ought to be filled with one thing to the exclusion of everything else, it distracted itself with incidentals. Not just the discord ringing in her ears, but the flickering of the ceiling light and the sweet, astringent scent of the rhubarb stalks on the table. Anything to avoid taking in what her mother was saying.
‘I’m sorry, Kitty,’ Flora said. ‘This isn’t the way t
o tell you. I’m sorry to have . . . to have . . .’
Kitty could feel her mother’s eyes on her, waiting for a response. She cast about for a part of her brain that would commit to rational dialogue.
‘Did Henry know?’ she asked, at length.
‘No,’ said Flora. ‘At least – he had no reason to suspect.’ She took a deep breath, a shuddering sort of sigh. ‘He loved you so much,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t have . . . Was that very wrong of me?’
Kitty didn’t answer. The rationality she had summoned a few moments before had retreated again.
‘I thought and thought about it,’ Flora said. ‘I couldn’t do it in anger. And then when he was ill, when he was dying . . . I couldn’t tell you without telling him, Kitty. You do see that?’
‘Does Landon know?’ Kitty asked.
‘I’ve never told him,’ Flora said. ‘And he’s never asked.’
She was still looking at Kitty, fearful, beseeching. Between them they were bungling this horribly, Kitty thought. The insoluble cadence was fading at last and in its wake she could hear a swirl of words, but none of them seemed to belong to her: they were simply offering their services, proposing themselves as fitting to the occasion. The trouble was, she knew more than Flora after all, and she couldn’t, absolutely couldn’t reveal her part of it now. But it meant – it was like a prism, diffracting what Flora had told her into two separate beams. Henry wasn’t her father, and so Daniel wasn’t her brother. Kitty could see the two pinpoints of light they made, but she couldn’t say, just yet, what they signified. She couldn’t seem to feel anything at all.
‘It wasn’t an affair,’ Flora was saying. ‘It was just . . .’ She looked dismayed again, as though she’d realised this wasn’t the right thing to say; that there was no right thing she could say.
And then, quite suddenly, Kitty couldn’t bear any more. Flora’s hand reached towards her, but before her mother could touch her she pulled herself away and turned tail up the stairs.
The Things You Do for Love Page 30