Miriam put down her hand and looked at him steadily but didn’t speak.
He repeated: “I asked you, whose child is she carrying?”
His voice was clearer now, but Theo could see that his whole body was shaking. Instinctively he moved closer to Julian.
Rolf turned on him. “Keep out of this! This is nothing to do with you. I’m asking Miriam.” Then he repeated more violently. “Nothing to do with you! Nothing!”
Julian’s voice came out of the darkness: “Why not ask me?”
For the first time since Luke had died he turned to her. The torchlight moved steadily and slowly from Miriam’s face to hers.
She said: “Luke’s. The child is Luke’s.”
Rolf’s voice was very quiet: “Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
He shone the torch down on Luke’s body and scrutinized it with the cold professional interest of an executioner checking that the condemned is dead, that there is no need for the final coup de grace. Then, with a violent motion he turned away from them, stumbled between the trees and flung himself against one of the beeches, encircling it with his arms.
Miriam said: “My God, what a time to ask! And what a time to be told.”
Theo said: “Go to him, Miriam.”
“My skills aren’t any use to him. He’ll have to cope with this by himself.”
Julian still knelt by Luke’s head. Theo and Miriam, standing together, stared fixedly at that dark shadow as if afraid that, unmarked, it would disappear among the darker shadows of the wood. They could hear no sound but it seemed to Theo that Rolf was rubbing his face against the bark like a tormented animal trying to rid itself of stinging flies. And now he was thrusting his whole body against the tree as if venting his anger and agony on the unyielding wood. Watching those jerking limbs in their obscene parody of lust reinforced for Theo the indecency of witnessing so much pain.
He turned away and said quietly to Miriam: “Did you know that Luke was the father?”
“I knew.”
“She told you?”
“I guessed.”
“But you said nothing.”
“What did you expect me to say? It was never my practice to inquire who fathered the babies I delivered. A baby is a baby.”
“This one is different.”
“Not to a midwife.”
“Did she love him?”
“Ah, that’s what men always want to know. You’d better ask her.”
Theo said: “Miriam, please talk to me about this.”
“I think she was sorry for him. I don’t think she loved either of them, neither Rolf nor Luke. She’s beginning to love you, whatever that means, but I think you know that. If you hadn’t known it, or hoped for it, you wouldn’t be here.”
“Wasn’t Luke ever tested? Or did both he and Rolf give up going for their sperm test?”
“Rolf has, at least during the last few months. He thought that the technicians had been careless or that they’re just not bothering to test half the specimens they take. Luke was exempt from testing. He had mild epilepsy as a child. Like Julian, Luke was a reject.”
They had moved a little apart from Julian. Now, looking back at her dark kneeling shape, Theo said: “She’s so calm. Anyone would think she’s having this child under the best possible circumstances.”
“What are the best possible circumstances? Women have given birth in war, revolutions, famine, concentration camps, on the march. She’s got the essentials, you and a midwife she trusts.”
“She trusts in her God.”
“Perhaps you should try doing the same. It might give you some of her calm. Later, when the baby comes, I shall need your help. I certainly don’t need your anxiety.”
“Do you?” he asked.
She smiled, understanding the question. “Believe in God? No, it’s too late for me. I believe in Julian’s strength and courage and in my own skill. But if He gets us through this maybe I’ll change my mind, see if I can’t get something going with Him.”
“I don’t think He bargains.”
“Oh yes He does. I may not be religious but I know my Bible. My mother saw to that. He bargains all right. But He’s supposed to be just. If He wants belief He’d better provide some evidence.”
“That He exists?”
“That He cares.”
And still they stood, eyes watching that dark figure, hardly discernible against the darker trunk of which he seemed to be part, but quiet now, unmoving, resting against the tree as if in an extremity of exhaustion.
Theo said to Miriam, knowing the futility of the question even as he asked it: “Will he be all right?”
“I don’t know. How can I know?”
She moved from his side and walked towards Rolf, then stopped and stood quietly waiting, knowing that if he needed the comfort of a human touch, there was no one else to whom he could turn.
Julian got up from Luke’s body. Theo felt her cloak brush his arm but he did not turn to look at her. He was aware of a mixture of emotions, anger which he knew he had no right to feel, and relief, so strong that it was close to joy, that Rolf wasn’t the father of the child. But the anger was for the moment the stronger. He wanted to lash out at her, to say: “Is that what you were, then? Camp-follower to the group? What about Gascoigne? How do you know the child isn’t his?” But those words would be unforgivable and, worse, unforgettable. He knew that he had no right to question her but he couldn’t bite back the stark accusatory words nor hide the pain behind them.
“Did you love them, either of them? Do you love your husband?”
She said quietly: “Did you love your wife?”
It was, he saw, a serious question, not a retaliation, and he gave it a serious and truthful answer. “I convinced myself I did when I married. I willed myself into the appropriate feelings without knowing what the appropriate feelings were. I endowed her with qualities she didn’t have and then despised her for not having them. Afterwards I might have learned to love her if I had thought more of her needs and less of my own.”
He thought: Portrait of a marriage. Perhaps most marriages, good and bad, could be summed up in four sentences.
She looked at him steadily for a moment, then said: “That’s the answer to your question.”
“And Luke?”
“No, I didn’t love him, but I liked having him in love with me. I envied him because he could love so much, could feel so much. No one has wanted me with that intensity of emotion. So I gave him what he wanted. If I had loved him it would have been…” She paused for a moment, then said: “It would have been less sinful.”
“Isn’t that a strong word for a simple act of generosity?”
“But it wasn’t a simple act of generosity. It was an act of self-indulgence.”
It wasn’t, he knew, the time for such a conversation, but when would there be a time? He had to know, had to understand. He said: “But it would have been all right, ‘less sinful’ are the words you used, if you’d loved him. So you agree with Rosie McClure, love justifies everything, excuses everything?”
“No, but it’s natural, it’s human. What I did was to use Luke out of curiosity, boredom, perhaps to get back a little at Rolf for caring more for the group than he did for me, punishing Rolf because I’d stopped loving him. Can you understand that, the need to hurt someone because you can no longer love?”
“Yes, I understand that.”
She added: “It was all very commonplace, predictable, ignoble.”
Theo said: “And tawdry.”