He was almost too distracted to answer. He was puzzling perplexedly over whether she would have the audacity to say this to him if she knew he hadn’t fathered it at all; then he thought of how inventively and inveterately those girls in that little bedroom must have had to lie in order to protect their secret lives from one another.
He could have asked her, in the dark, Is it mine?
But the words would not quite form themselves into real sounds in the air between them. And anyway, he never felt sure any longer that anything was his, definitely his.
* * *
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT depended upon an extraordinary coincidence. Graham had a problem with the car; the engine was missing and dying at traffic lights. Stan, who had fixed his cars for him for thirty years, had moved location recently; or, rather, he had semiretired and now was just doing a few jobs as favors for old customers in the garage at the back of his house. Graham arranged to take the car out there one morning at eleven for Stan to have a look. Stan lived in Stoke Upton, which although it must have been part of the city for a hundred years somehow clung on to a few signs of rusticity: a scrubby patch of grass like a village green in front of a row of failing-looking shops, a field with horses in it beside the Texaco garage, and — between the fifties council housing and the modern estates — a few little old streets that meandered lazily according to some other logic than town planning. It was a place people came out to walk with their dogs by the river on Sundays: dog shit everywhere.
Graham discussed this very subject with Stan while he was revving the engine and Stan was looking under the bonnet.
— I stand there and watch them, said Stan. I say to them, This is my front garden, you know. But they’ve got no shame. I’ve taken to carrying a plastic bag in my pocket. I offer it to them, to take it home with them or put it into one of those bins. Some do. But some of them just look right through you, as if they weren’t even connected to the bloody dog at the other end of the leash they’re holding.
Stan was somewhat diminished, Graham thought, working from home and on his own: he remembered the racier and more anarchic repartee at the place in town. Mrs. Stan was just visible, spraying something on her roses, through the trellis that firmly separated the oil-dark garage from the garden.
The problem was spark plugs, Stan decided. He’d have to order some. He’d have them by Tuesday.
As Graham was waiting to turn out of the end of Stan’s road, Linda passed him in her red Fiesta. There was something almost comical, that first instant, in the sight of the so-familiar face in the unfamiliar place, frowning intently, and leaning forward over the steering wheel as usual. He hadn’t known that Linda had ever heard of Stoke Upton, let alone knew how to get there; she was notoriously blank about directions and places. He’d told her he was taking the car to Stan’s, but there hadn’t been any reason to mention it wasn’t to the usual garage in town. And hadn’t she said she was going to spend all day at the unit? He turned out of Stan’s road and followed her. Really, for a moment he was only going to catch up with her, to share the surprise of the coincidence, or in case she was looking for him. Then suddenly instead he was following her, even dropping back so she wouldn’t catch sight of him.
She turned right, then left, without hesitation, as if she knew her way: as if she’d been here before. Now they were on the road that ran past the shops and the green; there was more traffic, he’d had to let a couple of cars turn out in front of him, he was afraid he’d lose her. She pulled into a space in front of the row of shops. He had no choice but to pass her; then he managed to stop about thirty yards farther on, just past a video rental place that was the last of the little row. Throwing himself around inside his seat belt with the engine still running, he looked for her through his rear window: he felt so conspicuous, he couldn’t believe she hadn’t seen him. She was locking her car; she wasn’t looking at him. Her hair was pinned up and she had makeup on and dangling earrings: she was wearing black leggings and some sort of stretchy shiny shirt he hadn’t seen before, with her suit jacket. She looked odd, as if she had made an effort to dress up but had chosen wrong things that subtly betrayed her. Perhaps her shape was already beginning to change.
She was parked in front of a hairdresser’s called A Cut Above. He wildly entertained the thought that she was going to cut off her hair. But she crossed the pavement quickly to a bright red-painted door beside the shop that must be the front door to a flat upstairs; she found a key, not on her key ring but from somewhere in her bag, opened the door, and disappeared inside. Graham waited for her to reappear. The windows of the flat above the shop were blanked out with bamboo blinds: he stared up at them but they relayed no sign of what might be happening behind them.
It was midday.
Graham sat in his car. He felt as if the world quietly came to rest about him. The traffic seemed to ease off, and the desultory shoppers dwindled: was there somewhere left in the world where people still had lunch at twelve o’clock? A couple of young stylists came twittering out of the hairdresser’s and returned at the end of ten minutes with sandwiches and bags of cakes, their blond hair in their eyes and their skirts blowing against their brown bare legs in the wind. One ancient-looking little cavernous sweet shop and newsagent even shut its door and put up a CLOSED sign. The video store of course didn’t work to that old rhythm; young well-fed men and women came and browsed and went away with their next glitter-fix in its anonymous covers, and Graham repressed a twinge of rage at the prodigal unimaginable waste of afternoons spent in front of the television.
He waited. She might have been visiting a client, a difficult client, who for some reason couldn’t come to the door and had given her a key: perhaps wheelchair bound, or (more Linda’s line) agoraphobic.
After about half an hour he got out of the car. It was quite a nice day, sunny, although with a cold wind that pasted litter up against tree trunks and car wheels and streamed through the scrappy little trees that had been planted in an effort to make the place vaguely continental. He walked up and down past the shops a couple of times, past the red door, which had a bell but no name; he bought some cigarettes in a convenience store although he didn’t really smoke. There were two empty shops, a butcher and an electrical retailer; they showed no signs of having been re-let and their windows were thickly pasted with posters as though they had been closed for a long time. The baker sold sandwiches and even had a couple of tables squeezed between the counter and wall at the far end of the shop where presumably you could order coffee.
He was afraid at first that if he went into any of the shops he would miss Linda coming out: he didn’t know how long she was going to be. Then it occurred to him that she might take hours, that she might never come out. Finally he realized that he knew she would reappear at about three o’clock: she had to pick Daniel up from nursery school at half past three to take him to the doctor’s for his measles-mumps-rubella vaccination, and she would need to leave half an hour to get from Stoke Upton into town. Linda had to take Daniel to the doctor’s because Graham took Anna to ballet after school on Thursdays; what Linda didn’t know was that Chloe’s mother had offered to take Anna to ballet, so that he could take Daniel and Katie to the surgery. He had been going to phone Linda on her mobile phone to tell her she needn’t come back early. He supposed her phone would have rung here, in Stoke Upton, in the flat above the hairdresser’s, if it hadn’t been for the extraordinary coincidence of his sighting her, and they would have exchanged practicalities without his having any clue that she spoke to him from another side of the world. She would have reached for her phone, he thought, out of a tangle of sheets: for an insane moment he had the sheets vividly in front of his eyes: a bright flowery type with a little trim of pink and yellow braid (she had had some like this years ago that he had replaced with plain blue ones from Habitat). Then he took firm hold upon himself.