‘What?’
‘Why you raped her.’
He stared at her, faintly amused that she could be so unworldly. ‘All right. She was beautiful and I desired her and everything else got blotted out. That’s the way it happens.’
‘I know about desire. But if you really thought she was beautiful…’
‘Yes?’
‘Why rape her?’
They were looking at each other across a desert of hostile incomprehension. We were back at the beginning.
‘I’ll tell you something I’ve never said to anyone. When we were on the ground I was trying to calm her. I really was. If she’d just seen that moment in a different way, if she’d looked at me instead of twisting away, it could have been something—’
‘What?’
‘If she could have just relaxed a moment, I think we would’ve crossed into… you know.’
Miranda was pushing herself up from out of the soft clammy sofa. Her voice trembled. ‘Don’t you dare even think it. Don’t you dare!’ Then, in a whisper, ‘Oh God. I’m going to…’
She hurried from the room. We heard her yank the front door open and then, her retching and the liquid sound of copious vomit. I went after her and Adam followed me. There was no question, this was a visceral response. But I was sure she had the door open before she started to be sick. She could easily have turned her head to the left or right and thrown up on the lawn or the flower bed. Instead, the contents of her stomach, the colourful buffet lunch, lay thickly over the hall carpet and the threshold. She had stood outside the house and vomited in. She said later that she was helpless, out of control, but I always thought, or preferred to think, that here, at our feet as we left, was the avenging angel’s parting shot. It was tricky, stepping over it.
NINE
The journey home from Salisbury, again in heavy traffic and rain, was mostly in silence. Adam said he wanted to make a start on the Gorringe material. Miranda and I were, as we told each other, emotionally drained. The sherry and wine were bearing down on me. The windscreen wiper on my side was mostly lifeless. Intermittently, it smeared the glass. On the slow crawl through outer London, towards what I was beginning to think of as my former life, my mood began to slip. My life transformed in a single afternoon. I was trying to take the measure of what I’d agreed to – so easily, so impetuously. I wondered if I really wanted to become a father to a troubled four-year-old. Miranda had been pursuing the matter for weeks – privately. I’d had a few minutes and made my delirious decision out of love for her – nothing else. The responsibilities I’d assumed were heavy. Once we were home, my thoughts remained dark.
I slumped in the kitchen armchair with a mug of tea. I didn’t yet dare confide my feelings to Miranda. I had to admit it, at that moment I resented her, especially her old habit of secrecy. I had been bounced or bullied or lovingly blackmailed into parenthood. I would have to tell her, but not now. An argument was bound to follow, and I didn’t have the strength. I brooded on a fork in the path of our lives, the directions we might take: a bad but passing moment, common to all lovers, which we would talk ourselves through, find and seal a solution with a round of grateful lovemaking. Or: withdrawing, we would each go too far and, like inept trapezists, slip out of each other’s grasp and fall, and as we nursed our injuries, slowly become strangers. I surveyed these possibilities dispassionately. Even a third path didn’t trouble me much: I would lose her, regret it bitterly and never get her back, however hard I tried.
I was disposed to let events slide past me in frictionless silence. The day had been long and intense. I’d been taken for a robot, had my proposal of marriage accepted, volunteered for instant fatherhood, learned of self-destruction among one-quarter of Adam’s conspecifics, and witnessed the physical effects of moral revulsion. None of it impressed me now. What did were smaller things – the heaviness in my eyelids, my comfort in a half-pint of tea, in preference to a large Scotch.
Becoming a parent. It was not that I could claim to be too busy, pressured or ambitious. Mine was the opposite problem. I had nothing of my own to defend against a child. His existence would obliterate mine. He’d had a vile beginning, he’d need a lot of care, he was bound to be difficult. I hadn’t yet started my life, which was marginal, in fact, childish. My existence was an empty space. To fill it with parenting would be an evasion. I had older women friends who had got pregnant when nothing else was working out. They never regretted it, but once the children were growing up, nothing else happened beyond, say, a poorly paid part-time job, or setting up a book group, or learning holiday Italian. Whereas the women who were already doctors or teachers or running a business were deflected for a while, then went back and pressed on. The men weren’t even deflected. But I had nothing to press on with. What I needed was the strength of mind to refuse Miranda’s proposal. To agree to it would be cowardice, a dereliction of my duty to a larger purpose, assuming I could find one. I needed to be responsible, not cowardly. But I couldn’t confront her now, not when my eyes were closed, perhaps not for a week or two. I couldn’t trust my own judgement. I tipped back in the chair and saw the road from Salisbury spooling towards me, and white lines flashing under the car. I fell asleep with my forefinger looped through the handle of my empty cup. As I plunged down, I dreamed of echoing voices clashing and merging in angry parliamentary debate in a near-empty chamber.
When I woke it was to the sound and smell of dinner cooking. Miranda had her back to me. She must have known I was awake, for she turned and came towards me with two flutes of champagne. We kissed and touched glasses. In my refreshed state, I saw her beauty as if for the first time – the fine, pale brown hair, the elfin chin, the mirthfully narrowed grey-blue eyes. The matter between us still loomed, but what luck, to have dodged a retraction and a row. At least for now. She squeezed into the armchair beside me and we talked about our plans for Mark. I pushed aside my concerns in order to enjoy the happy moment. Now I learned that Miranda had been to Elgin Crescent with Mark. We would live together there as a family. Wonderful. Assuming the process of fostering and adoption could be completed within nine months, a good local primary school in Ladbroke Grove had a place for ‘our son’ – I struggled with the phrase, but I remained outwardly pleased. She told me that the adoption people had been unhappy with her living arrangements. A one-bedroom flat was not sufficient. Here was the plan: we should remove the outer doors to our flats and make the hall our shared space. We could decorate and carpet it. We needn’t trouble the landlord. When it was time to move to the new place, we would put everything back. We would convert her kitchen into a bedroom for Mark. No need for disruptive plumbing. We would cover the cooker, sink and work surfaces with boards that we could drape with colourful fabrics. The kitchen table could be folded away and stored in her – ‘our’ – bedroom. Our lives would be one and, of course, I liked all this, it was exciting. I joined in.
It was almost midnight when we went to the table to eat the meal she had prepared. From next door came the rattle of Adam at the keyboard. He wasn’t making us richer on the currency markets. He was typing up the transcript of Gorringe’s confession, including his self-identification. The transcripts and the video and accompanying narrative would make up a single file that would go to a named senior officer at a police station in Salisbury. A copy would also go to the Director of Public Prosecutions.
‘I’m a coward,’ Miranda said. ‘I’m dreading the trial. I’m frightened.’
I went to the fridge for the bottle and refilled our glasses. I stared into my drink, at the bubbles detaching themselves as though reluctantly from the side of the glass then rising quickly. Once the decision was made, they seemed eager. We had talked about her fears before. If Gorringe was charged and pleaded innocent. To be in court again. To suffer cross-examination, the press, public scrutiny. To confront him again. That was bad, but it wasn’t the worst of it. What terrified and sickened her was the prospect of Mariam’s family in the public gallery. The parents might give evidence for the prosecution. She would be with them as they learned, day by day, the details of their daughter’s rape and of Miranda’s wicked silence. The omertà of a silly teenage girl that cost a life. The family would remember how she had deserted them. As she repeated the story from the witness stand, she would struggle and fail to avoid the gaze of Sana, Yasir, Surayya, Hamid and Farhan.