Afterwards, Boyd insists that they go and rest in their bedroom, though Clare wants to dress and sit outside in the shade. He uses water from the ewer to rinse the sheath in the wash bowl. Clare used to hate the sight of the thing. Once she thought about sabotage – she held it between her fingers, pinching it, assessing its strength and noting how easy it would be to put a few holes in it with the pin of a brooch. Now she feels that that would be cheating. If she’s to defeat the thing, and be rid of it, she must do so fair and square, by convincing her husband. But she has less and less heart for the fight – the fire has gone out of her hatred of it; it’s more a kind of detached dislike now, a resigned antipathy. The implications of that aren’t lost on her, and they worry her. She doesn’t want to be ready to give up yet. She pictures life at home with Boyd, in years to come, when he has retired and won’t go out to the office every day; when Pip has left home, and will call when he remembers to. She pictures the slow march of time like this, and the terrible weight of her impending solitude. Letting these thoughts coalesce steels her to speak up again.
When the sheath is hanging next to the linen towel, drying, Boyd comes to lie beside her, like spoons.
‘How do you find Gioia, really?’ he says.
‘It scares me,’ says Clare. ‘It felt like we shouldn’t be here. Like it’s no place for tourists.’
‘We’re not tourists.’
‘What are we, then?’ she says, but he doesn’t reply. ‘Marcie hates it here,’ she adds.
‘You think so?’
‘I’m certain of it. Boyd,’ she says carefully, ‘will we never have a child? I so very much want to have one.’
‘We have Pip, don’t we?’
‘Yes, but… it’s not quite the same. Not for me. I’m not Pip’s mother.’
‘You’re as good as a mother to him. You’ve raised him.’ He kisses her hair. ‘And made a splendid job of it.’
‘You know what I’m asking, Boyd.’ She takes a steady breath to keep hold of her nerve. ‘Why don’t you want us to have a baby?’
‘Haven’t we been over this, darling?’
‘No, not really. You’ve told me you’re afraid – but what’s to be afraid of? I’ve waited and waited… I thought in time you’d be ready. But it’s been ten years, Boyd. I’m almost thirty… There’s not that much time left for it. You can’t still be afraid, surely?’
‘Clare, darling…’ He trails off; she waits.
‘Did… was Emma damaged by childbirth? Is that it? Did she… not quite recover from it?’
‘No.’ His voice is rough with strain. ‘No, she was never the same afterwards. It was never the same afterwards. I… I started to lose her the day Philip was born, and I… I couldn’t bear to lose you in the same way.’
‘I’d be fine, I know I would. And I-’
‘No, Clare,’ he says, and now his voice has a hard edge. ‘No. I just can’t allow it.’
‘You can’t allow it?’ she echoes desperately. But Boyd says nothing else.
Through the closed shutters Clare stares at incandescent bars of sky, and it seems wrong to banish the day. With a sudden itch of claustrophobia, she longs to be outside, even in the heat and the sunshine, because the air in the room feels stale and used up. She’s hot beneath Boyd’s arm; sweat blots her blouse in the small of her back, and his breath on her neck is stifling. She worms away slightly, shuffling her head across the pillow, but Boyd’s arm tightens.
‘I think I’ll go out for a walk. Just a short one,’ she says.
‘A walk? Now? Don’t be silly – it’s the hottest part of the day. You can’t.’
‘But I don’t feel like lying down.’
‘Nonsense. You need to rest.’ He kisses her hair, tugging a single strand that sticks to his lips. ‘Why did you marry me, Clare?’ he asks. This is another of the things, heard a hundred times before, that she wishes he wouldn’t say. There’s self-loathing underneath it, which turns the question into an accusation. She knows the answer she must give and says it quickly, to have it done, because silence won’t do.
‘Because I loved you. I loved you straight away.’
Perhaps it’s only half a lie, really. She did fall in love with him – a tall, handsome, older man with an air of sadness, and a hunted expression. At once she wanted to ease his pain. She wanted to be a reason for smiles, and optimism. Her parents introduced them at an afternoon tea in the back garden of their modest Kent home, on a fecund late June day when the borders were alive with bees and white butterflies; she’d already been told about Emma, and warned of his grief. As though that was the only thing about him worth mentioning. It seemed to Clare that he was a man who had lived one whole lifetime already; a man with a wealth and depth of experience that made him steady, and safe. His age reassured her. He struck her as kind but sad, and she wanted to make him happy; and in making him happy, she would make herself happy. His grief was proof of sensitivity, and she wanted to mend his broken heart. He was not overtly demonstrative but she came from a family of undemonstrative people, and she admired the quiet restraint of his grief, and the tender way he looked at her. Her father told her that Boyd wanted a young woman as his second wife; he wanted somebody untouched by grief, unscarred by life. Someone clean of heart and mind with whom to start afresh.
She hadn’t found out about Pip’s existence until after Boyd had proposed and she’d accepted. When she was told that Emma had died in childbirth, she’d assumed that the child had also been lost. You needn’t have anything to do with him, if you really don’t want to, said Boyd. I’d understand; and he has his nanny, after all. Clare had been so terrified at the idea of instantly becoming a mother that she hadn’t time to be upset with Boyd for not telling her about him sooner. She thought about pulling out of the wedding, though it had already been announced in the newspaper; she suddenly, and for the first time, had the feeling of being rushed into something, of careering headlong with her eyes shut. But when she met Pip, sitting down to tea in a hotel in Marylebone, all her fears vanished. Aged just five, Pip said nothing, kept his eyes on his cake and ate it a crumb at a time. Clare had been certain he would hate her on principle, but there was none of that. He looked so frightened and lost that on instinct she reached under the table and took his hand; his expression mirrored exactly what she herself was feeling. She simply couldn’t bear the thought that the small boy should be afraid of her, or of what her intrusion might mean for him. Pip didn’t snatch his hand away, he looked at her in silent confusion – and immediately she wanted to stay with him; with them. She felt an instant affinity with him, and also sensed the gulf between him and his father, and she decided that she would bridge that gap. It all clicked into place, and she relaxed.
Later on, after dinner, Clare finds Pip in the very library where she and Boyd made love that afternoon. She’s glad he’s chosen a chair and isn’t sitting at the desk, which she can’t quite bring herself to look at. There was no shame in what they did, only impropriety, but somehow shame is what she does feel – shame not at the memory of them together, but of the minute she spent there alone, bare-breasted, while Boyd went out of the room for the sheath. She’s ashamed of the controlled way he was able to stop himself in the midst of the moment, and of her own dispassion. Pip has an illustrated atlas of birds open across his knees, and is flicking through it without paying much attention.
‘All right there, Pip? Are you bored to tears?’ she says. He has already caught the sun, and in the lamplight he has a subtle glow. Beneath his shirt his shoulders and elbows are sharp angles.