Four days was nothing. He was going to have to move fast, push things along.
“He said you’ll be staying on for a bit, maybe moving in with the Reynolds in Saint Julian’s.”
“Not anymore. The sea transport officer has booked me on a seaplane from Kalafrana the next day.”
“So what’s this, then? Goodbye?”
“I suppose. And I couldn’t leave without telling you.”
“Sounds intriguing.”
“Oh, it’s more than that.”
She lapsed into an unnerving silence.
“Mitzi …?”
She took his hand and placed it gently on her belly. The negligee had long since been discarded, and his palm was rough against the soft skin around her navel.
He was about to speak when it dawned on him.
“I’m thinking something.” He twisted onto his side to face her. “Am I wrong?”
“No. It’s yours.”
“Are you sure?”
“It can’t be his.”
“He was away on patrol?”
“Even if he’d been here.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s very simple.”
They had tried and tried to have a child, Mitzi explained, but it hadn’t worked. Leaping to the assumption that she must be to blame for their fruitless efforts, Lionel had dispatched her to a doctor in London just before the war, unaware that she’d already visited two Harley Street specialists, both of whom had given her a clean bill of health. The third was of exactly the same opinion: that everything was in fine working order, and that the fault most likely lay with her husband. She still wasn’t sure why she had lied to Lionel, presumably to protect his over-heightened sense of masculinity, but that’s what she had done, casting herself as the barren wife to spare him the shame.
Conveniently, the war had come along soon after, allowing them to ignore the issue. Neither of them wished to bring a child into a turbulent world. But that, it seemed, was exactly what was about to happen.
“It’s early days still, but it’s the real thing. I know it is.”
Max struggled to find the words. “What do you want to do?”
“I want to have a child, Max.”
“My child? Or any child?”
“It’s probably my only chance.”
“Not if you take another lover.”
“That’s not fair. I didn’t set out to get pregnant by you.”
“An unfortunate slip, then?”
“Rationing.”
“Rationing?” he scoffed.
“Malnutrition. It messes with our menstrual cycles. If you don’t believe me, ask Lilian.”
He had never heard Mitzi mention Lilian’s name before. In fact, he’d had no idea she was even aware of Lilian’s existence.
“From what I hear, you know her well enough to ask,” Mitzi added archly.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means please don’t play the saint with me. For all I know, you were seeing her at the same time as me.”
“Well, I wasn’t. And I’m not ‘seeing her.’”
“Call it what you will, I don’t blame you, not after the way I treated you. I hurt you, I know that, but I was confused.”
“And now?” he asked.
“Now? Now I’m wishing I hadn’t told you.”
“Why not?”
“Because you didn’t need to know.”
He lay beside her in silence, absorbing the meaning of her words.
“I’m not ready to throw my family, my friends, and my reputation to the wind.”
“You might find you have no choice.”
“That depends on you.”
“Mitzi, it’s going to look like me.”
“Not if it’s lucky.”
“I’m being serious. I’m dark. Lionel’s fair, and so are you. Two blonds can only produce a blond child—remember your biology lessons?”
“Yes, I remember my biology lessons.”
“So what happens when it pops out with a mop of black hair?”
“Your father’s fair-haired.”
“My father?”
“You showed me a photo of him once. If he’s fair-haired, then the child can be too.”
It was a moment before he responded. “My God, you’ve really thought this through, haven’t you?”
“Of course I’ve thought it through. It’s not the sort of thing to be taken lightly.”
She was getting angry now, and so was he.
“What happened to dying with me inside you?” he asked.
“You know how I talk when I’m aroused.”
“Don’t I have any say in this whatsoever?”
“You do now, but only because I told you when I didn’t have to. And if you have any respect for me, you’ll go along with my wishes. When you’ve thought on it, you may find they’re your wishes too.”
“Don’t count on it,” he said, swinging his legs off the bed.
His shorts were still in the hallway, but he remembered his shirt on the floor only after feeling the soft crunch of eggs underfoot.
“Bloody hell!” he snapped.
Mitzi misinterpreted the expletive. “Okay. I’ll ask Lionel for a divorce and marry you. Is that what you want to hear? Because I don’t think it is.”
He groped around for his socks and desert boots.
“Tell me I’m wrong,” she insisted.
He couldn’t, so he didn’t. He just left the bedroom with his clothes bundled beneath his arm.
Sleep was out of the question. All he could manage was a kind of limbo, a restless tug-of-war between exhaustion and wide-eyed wakefulness, a contest punctuated every half hour or so by another cigarette. He thought back to his student days and the cramped ground-floor flat in Waterloo, when anything less than nine hours of full and proper slumber would have had him snoozing happily on his drawing board come three o’clock in the afternoon.
How simple life had been back then. A morning lecture on Piranesi; half a day given over to tweaking a floor plan or an elevation; the Northern Line home from Tottenham Court Road station; three pints and a slice of pie in the King’s Arms on Roupell Street, followed by a short stagger to his front door. What had his concerns been at the time? They must have existed, but he struggled now to recall them. They certainly couldn’t hold a candle to his current predicament, he ruminated wearily.
The news that he had fathered a child—the very fact that he was capable of doing so—had touched him at some deep, primordial level that defied words. It was as if the lens through which he viewed the world had been shattered and then hastily repaired. He could make out the rough shape of things, but it was a fragmented picture, one of refractions and reflections and unexpected associations—an alien landscape where past, present, and future somehow coexisted.
He saw himself screaming at the top of his newborn lungs in the arms of his dying mother, and for the first time he saw the logic of her sacrifice. He watched it playing out before his eyes, with Mitzi standing in for his mother and the ending rewritten. Try as he might, though, he couldn’t write himself into the scene.
He wasn’t wanted at the bedside, where his father had once stood. Mitzi had made her feelings clear on that score, and he couldn’t see her changing her mind. It was easy to resent her, and more than a little unfair. There was no denying the sudden clutch of fear he’d experienced when she had tested him, confident of his reaction, proposing that she seek a divorce from Lionel and marry him. It just didn’t fit with the future he’d envisaged for himself: the architect, the man about town, looking to leave his mark on the world. He couldn’t find a place for the young child and the disgraced ex–navy wife in his dream. And he thought less of himself for it.
He tried to console himself with the alternatives. He would be the mysterious gentleman watching the Colts’ football match against the rival school, stifling his cheers as his son broke free in the dying seconds of the game to score the winning goal. That didn’t work. Lionel barged his way into the fantasy, sidling toward him along the touchline.
“Hello, old boy. What brings you here?”