‘I wasn’t offended. More surprised. Very surprised. But listen, we can just forget it. Put it down to the champers.’
‘Is that what you want?’
‘Is that what you want?’
The course of life, such a long, large thing as life, can have a simple yes or no change it. One tiny syllable and it’s changed, or gone.
‘No,’ I said. The certainty of the sound was itself emboldening. I repeated it. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I do not retract what I admitted to feeling.’
Donna let out a whistly exhaling. ‘I see. Wow. Are you sure?’
‘Yes.’
‘I mean really sure. Take a moment to think before answering.’
‘I have.’
‘Truly?’
‘Yes. I’ve thought of nothing else.’
‘Nor have I.’
‘Really?’
‘Someone says what you said and you don’t sleep. You just think.’
‘Good.’
‘Listen. Let me say this: I have no wish to be a roll in the hay. I have no wish to be a…mistress or something. Some grubby affair.’
‘Of course not.’
‘You sure?’
‘Yes. I understand.’
‘Obviously the big question for me is, what’s the state of your marriage?’
‘I am dying from it.’ The words came out like a plea. What relief to say them! A light breeze of truthfulness blew through my chest. I said, ‘I don’t know if any of us has the right to say we deserve a shot at joy. But I want to say a shot at joy is what I crave. I don’t have it now. I have the opposite. But I want that shot.’
‘But Tilda is a…very pleasant woman. I like her. She isn’t a good friend, but a friend nonetheless.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘I’m saying I feel very uncomfortable. Naturally I feel very uncomfortable.’
‘If I wasn’t with her then you’d be interested in me?’
‘Yes. I would. I have thought to myself: What an attractive man. But I have not let myself think it in a serious way because you are with Tilda.’
‘Would you prefer I hung up and we dropped this, cast it from our minds?’
She hesitated. I heard her sucking her lips, troubled. ‘No. No I don’t want it cast from my mind.’
‘Good.’
She hesitated again. ‘What are we going to do, though?’
‘I want to see you.’
‘We need to talk this through.’
‘This afternoon I could swing it.’
‘This afternoon? Where?’
‘I could come to you?’
‘Okay. Just to talk, though.’
‘Yes.’
‘Let’s be clear about that.’
‘We are.’
‘Come on, are you sure?’
‘I promise.’
‘Talk and nothing more.’
Chapter 69
I arranged a job in Watercook. It’s more a sheep town than grains but I figured I could concoct an article with a herbicide-resistance angle—I’d heard resistance in rye grass had become a problem in Watercook. It was common in Scintilla. My story would say it was now spreading eastward.
I arrived at Donna’s a little after 3pm. Good timing for Ruth to be posited at the living room television. We had the kitchen table to ourselves. We sat opposite each other like negotiators. She began proceedings with an offering of coffee and a formal introduction to her house, as if it were people. ‘Over there is my own handiwork—I designed the stovetop area and glued the benches together myself.’ She stood up, nervous. ‘This is the porch. Gets the west sun from midday. Great in winter; hot as hell in summer. The cupboards were Cameron’s doing. He liked to bang in a nail when he was up to it. See how the hall kinks to the right in the middle? That’s deliberate—the previous owners had some eccentric notion about it being eye-catching.’
Talking on the phone was easy. There we were in the flesh and avoiding everything but house and land chatter.
‘It’s a very nice place you have,’ I said. I really thought it spartan. I had been spoilt by our big Scintilla building—two storeys and a forest for a town fringe. Here the brownlands were dealt out in buckle-fenced rectangles: two or three acres with a mudbrick dwelling in the middle. ‘It’s pleasant here,’ I said. ‘Bit of country life, bit of suburban feel all in one.’
The important thing was that we were taking every opportunity to look at each other. Doing it while the other wasn’t noticing, though of course we were noticing. You don’t need eyes for noticing. You watch each other with your skin. I scanned for her every blemish, any petty reason to criticise her. A final excuse to curb my deranging. I could not find a single problem. Nor could she in me, going by our hour together. We did not touch. We did not kiss. There was no embracing. We were standoffish in a courting way, quaint old-fashioned courting. There was no chaperone but might as well have been.
Two issues were most on Donna’s mind: if we wanted to take our attraction further there was Ruth to consider. ‘As I’ve said, I won’t do a cheap casual fling. If I was twenty and childless…But I am not twenty and childless. I don’t want a daughter who grows up thinking her mother entertained men.’
‘Fair enough.’
‘If, say, we went further with this, are you okay with taking on a child? Ruth comes with me, to state the obvious. Are you sure about that?’
Ruth had not crossed my conscience. Donna’s ‘taking on a child’ had a forbidding ring. But the deranging doesn’t consider anything except its own immediate needs. ‘I’m sure. Absolutely,’ I said, turning up my palms as if never so certain in my life.
The second issue was Tilda. Donna did not like the prospect of another woman being hurt. A woman who has never harmed her, never done her wrong. ‘Has she ever harmed you?’ She asked me this as if hoping for yes.
‘No.’ I was tempted to make up something, some lie about Tilda being unfaithful to me. There was no time to construct a credible tale complete with lover’s name and sordid details. Nor did I fancy the image of me as victim: a heartbroken man did not appeal to me as manly. What’s more, I did not want to fill her pretty ears with ugly lies. I mumbled off a list of marital complaints, trying not to sound too whiney. I was locked into a life of lovelessness, I said. I was far too young when I settled down. I told of the abortion and said it was all my doing. I hoped my honesty would impress her as brave, a full airing of dirty laundry. In a modern world only the welfare classes and the dumbest boys father children when they’re not much more than children themselves.
She nodded agreement at my reasoning. She said she’d never had an abortion but would if necessary.
I did mention Tilda’s rifle and weedkiller moments. Donna shook her head and said, ‘That must be difficult.’
I avoided mentioning Tilda’s cancer directly. It could only make my courting Donna sound disgraceful. But she wasn’t about to let it pass. ‘It does add another dimension,’ she said.
‘It’s in remission.’
‘Even so.’
‘Yeh. You’re right.’
‘Who knows what would have happened if Cameron had lived. Would we have lasted? I presume so. I was content with him. He bore his disease lightly. He was not a complainer and I loved him. I never felt the desire to stray. Therefore I was never tested. But you have been tested. And I’m in the position of being the accomplice, if that’s the word.’
‘Does it put you off?’
‘It makes me take a breath. Then I think: It would be preferable, of course, if there was never mess or pain when two people are drawn together. But it’s not always realistic.’
‘So you are definitely drawn to me?’