‘Kevin sounded interested,’ he said at last, ‘affected, I might say.’
‘I should hope so. He’s intelligent, and fully aware of what goes on.’
‘But he’s only eleven. It’s up to us to give him the protection he needs. I give it to him, at any rate.’
‘Hasn’t it occurred to you, after all these years, that you and I have different standards?’
‘But we have the same son. We ought to have some common policy for his upbringing.’
‘Perhaps,’ she retorted, ‘but whose? Yours or mine?’
‘Both. Maybe we can talk about it.’ He felt the initiative on his side. ‘I didn’t come here specially for that, though. I simply took off, on impulse, and ended up here. I wanted to see you. There must be a meaning to something like that.’
‘Oh no there mustn’t. You’re just craving after the past.’ This stupid, irrelevant, chance-meeting (which was what he made it out to be) had too much importance because of a unifying fatigue, and even this much in common she did not like. It coloured and thickened the atmosphere, made her doubt herself when she should have been decisive and brusque enough to send him away at once.
He lit a cigarette — the same blue packet. Wasn’t it still chic in his job to buy a case? ‘We had a rough time,’ he said, ‘when we were together. Too rough for either of us. It was perfectly natural that we split up. But it’s more than two years since those battles.’
There was a pause, in which he felt foolish that no one was talking, and until she felt the pity of so much wasted time: ‘I’d forgotten about it. Even when I remember, it doesn’t mean anything.’
‘Maybe it’s as well,’ he said, encouraged. ‘Instead of taking up where we left off, perhaps we can start even from beyond nothing. It’s not Kevin’s future that matters, but you and I. Things would simplify if we lived together again. It would solve all our problems.’
‘You were always so concerned to solve problems. That’s what made half of them. When you pull out you see that there aren’t any. At least, you do after a while.’
‘I don’t understand that,’ he said.
‘That’s honest, anyway.’
‘I love you, have ever since we separated, even when we were together. I still don’t know why you left. We could have survived that storm.’
‘And gone into others,’ she said.
‘And weathered those also. That’s what life is. One big storm after another. You go on and on, but you can’t let your-self sink under them.’
‘At one time you were the one to sink. Have you forgotten? You see it all in a rosy light now, but I’ve got a sharper memory. These so-called domestic storms eat the middle out of you. They were a way of destroying you, taking up your life when you’d got no job to do. You went off to the office each day no matter what happened, but I was left at home in that dead, miserable house. You thought I should be happy in it, imagined I was unhappy because I wanted to be, because I was born like that, because I had nothing else to do. But nobody is born like that. People are made by themselves and other people. You wanted me to work for some charity or other in my spare time, something which would leave me free for you but still not get at the core of what was eating me. And now you have the nerve to ask me to go back to the same thing. You can keep your image of a storm and a ship for a new brand of tobacco, but I’m on my own feet now, and you’ll never know how much it cost me to get here. And as for going back, I’m not that sort of person.’
He heard her out: ‘Suppose we forget all that? I still don’t see why there can’t be some advantage in us living together again. You can do the same useful job: there’s plenty of need for you in North Kensington. I know we’ll be more tolerable to each other after all this time apart. It will have been good for both of us.’
Every word scraped against the carefully-built edifice of her self-esteem. ‘I know,’ she said, ‘every disaster is a blessing if you’re spineless and lack imagination. But you underestimate me. I could never live with you again.’
He lost patience in a passionate way that he thought might appeal to her by its intensity. ‘Pat, why are you so bloody cold towards me? We have a son, remember?’
Everything he said seemed out of context, unconnected, yet from it she tried to disentangle the threats he was making in his subtle faint-hearted way. ‘I don’t even loathe you,’ she said. ‘It’s not that. I just dislike you at times when you cross my memory. Seeing you doesn’t make things any better.’
He was encouraged by the mounting force of her attacks, though they hadn’t yet attained that pristine viciousness of the final days before their break-up. Still, he hoped that at last he might be getting somewhere. ‘Even to say that means that I affect you.’
‘I don’t see any use in your wanting to recreate the holy family with me at the middle of it. The family is all right for the man perhaps, but it’s no use for the woman. I refuse to be tied up in that way. Don’t think my life’s easy up here, either. It’s harder than it ever was, but funnily enough, I like it. I actually like it, because I’m more myself than I ever was, and I don’t care how many times I say it.’
‘Even with your boy friend living here?’
‘That has nothing to do with you.’
‘Hasn’t it? But why can’t you still have this life, but with me in London? Come back, and I swear we can make a go of it. I’m not the same person as before, and you aren’t the same, either. We’ve grown out of all that frightful quarrelling that puts you off so much. It puts me off as well, but we’ll be able to manage with each other now.’
‘Would you be prepared to give up your job and everything else in London, and come to live with me here?’
‘I can’t, you know that.’
‘So neither can I,’ she said.
‘Why not? There’s no real argument against it.’
‘Not to you. To me there are dozens. Also I’m in love. Do you think I could live with someone without being in love? That shows how little you know me. Do you think it was because I was lonely and needed a companion?’
It stopped him too sharply, and he recognized it as being the end. His fatigue had changed to a pallor she had never seen before in him, a whiteness at the side of the mouth, a flexing of hard veins at his temples. She couldn’t believe that her blow had been so desperate, nor that he could simulate such pain. ‘I see,’ he said, ‘and this is the person you were in bed with when Kevin went into your room one morning, having innocently made breakfast for you both?’
‘Why make so much fuss of that? Kevin knew us well enough by then.’
‘It won’t happen again.’ He smiled, in spite of his loud words. She was near to tears, iron control needed to dam them back: ‘You must have been playing with that piece of blackmail all the way up. Not that I didn’t suspect. I only hoped you’d never have the vileness to use it.’
‘Do you think I’m a complete fool?’ he cried, standing up. ‘I mean what I say. That’s real life, that you pride yourself on leading. The real life! These are the real facts of life. Simple and hard. What you think is real life is the fool’s paradise that you’ve made for yourself up here. It never solves anything, to cut yourself off.’
‘Real life isn’t that,’ she said, ‘it isn’t what the world says it is, but what you feel to be inside yourself.’ He was harder, more direct than years ago. He didn’t display miles of innuendo any more before coming to the point — in order to make the storm more violent and bitter when it burst. His skill and patience had gone, and the result was ugly to her. She didn’t know how to deal with it.