Infidelity (21 page)

27

O
n the second of our new Fridays, to my amazement, Sarah had suggested we meet for a late lunch at the Ritz.

‘You once told me it would be a cliché to come here,' I said, gazing in admiration at the splendour of a place that had established the gold standard for hotel dining rooms – the chairs upholstered in red leather, the pendant clusters of tiny shaded lamps, the tall windows with their sumptuous drapes flowing to the floor, the perfectly judged carpet, the discreet statuary, the tables immaculately laid. The only unexpected note was the warmth and informality of the staff. I couldn't have claimed to be feeling at home, but who wouldn't have felt personally enhanced simply by being in such a place?

‘I actually have been here once before,' I confessed, ‘before I met you – I was passing by on the way to the Royal Academy and asked the doorman if I could have a look around, but I was too embarrassed to linger long enough to take it all in. It's the only time I've felt like a gauche colonial.'

We ordered lunch – I chose the Dover sole and Sarah the fillet of beef – and she told me it was time for us to have a serious talk.

My heart was too light to be disturbed by that suggestion. ‘I thought our life together was one long serious talk,' I said. ‘Have I been missing something?' I broke my bread roll in half and smiled at her expectantly. She had never looked more beautiful to me, nor more elegant, eclipsing even these immaculate surroundings. But she didn't return my smile.

‘Tom, I think you might be living in a fool's paradise. You don't seem to have any idea of the complexities of our situation. It was bad enough before, but now –'

‘Bad enough?
Bad
enough?
I thought our situation, as you call it, was the most brilliant thing that had ever happened to either of us.'

Sarah reached across the damask cloth and patted my hand.

‘Tom . . .
How do I love thee?
'

‘
Let me count the ways
,'
I said on cue. ‘
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach.
'

‘I especially love the fact you don't snore. But I'm not talking about any of that. I'm talking about . . .' Sarah placed her hand on her belly.

Fresh from her triumphant Friday morning lecture and the one o'clock tutorial, Sarah was in authority mode. There was clearly an agenda – the way this was shaping, possibly even a prepared speech.

‘Simple joy is all very well,' she said, not unkindly, ‘but we're going to have to face some unpalatable facts and make some big decisions quite soon.'

‘Decisions? What decisions?'

She looked squarely at me and I knew immediately what she thought one of the decisions was going to be. I felt sick at heart and reached out for Yeats: ‘
Tread softly
,'
I said, ‘
because you tread on my dreams.
'

‘Oh, Tom. I know, I know.' She touched my hand again. ‘We manage to live, when we're together, as if we're a couple taking our rightful place in the world of couples. But we've always known we're not a couple. Or not quite a couple. Not yet. We're a couple-in-waiting. Perry exists, however much you might try to ignore that fact, and however much I might want to wish it away.'

I said: ‘You've always been frank with me about that, right from the start. I knew what I was getting myself into.' Though, in truth, I had had no idea what I was getting myself into – Perry or no Perry. I'd had no experience of intimacy as intense, as overwhelming as ours. I fell for Sarah when I met her, but I had much, much further to fall.

‘You have two advantages over me, Tom. One is that you've never met Perry, you've never set foot in Whitman House, you've never caught
the
stench
of that whole desperate set-up. It's so easy for you to leave that scene out of your script.'

That was true, of course. The only image in my mind of Perry, and of Whitman House, was a construction entirely of my imagination. Sarah had never shown me a photograph of either the man or the house, and I had always assumed that was a deliberate omission.

‘Okay,' I said. ‘What's my other advantage?' (Though ‘advantage' didn't feel like the right word. It struck me that being in the dark put me at a distinct disadvantage in this conversation.)

‘You're a potential father, not a potential mother. You won't develop a bump that will have women speculating behind their hands –
Is Sarah putting on weight? Could Sarah possibly be . . .? At her age?
– until it eventually grows into a balloon and puts everything beyond doubt. You won't be announcing to the entire world that you're expecting a child.'

I had, in fact, often imagined myself announcing to the entire world that we were expecting a child. I had privately decided I would quite like to start with a call to Maddy. But I could see Sarah's point. This was about Perry and the Littleton connection, Mrs Hepworth included, along with Sarah's friends in Compton and at the cathedral. Her London friends and colleagues would have simply been pleased for her, no questions needing to be answered.

‘Won't people down there assume Perry is the father?' I knew that was an appalling thing to say; I knew I was being mischievous. But in that instant, I wanted the truth about ‘cohabitation' out in the open, though I had no confidence that it ever would be.

‘Tom! Stop! That is possibly the most naive thing I've ever heard you say. Naive and offensive. Please think about what you just said. Who in their right mind would assume that?'

‘Sorry. I thought we were having a hypothetical discussion. You've said he's sexually –'

‘Stop!
Stop!
You'll make me sick if you go on. Just put yourself in my position, please. For one moment?'

I desisted, despising myself for having tried to light that fuse.

There was a more immediate question, anyway. It had begun to dawn on me that the logical conclusion to this conversation would be that Sarah would tell me she wanted to terminate the pregnancy, but I needed to believe the question was more nuanced than that, even for her. And she must have realised I was ready to fight for the survival of this foetus.

Our food arrived at the table, and we concentrated on getting started. We had been sipping our wine without a toast. (‘Should you be drinking?' I had asked; ‘Oh, Tom,' was all Sarah said in response.) Now, before we picked up our cutlery, we clinked glasses, looked into each other's eyes, and . . . neither of us could think of the right toast to carry us through this fragile moment.

‘To the here and now,' Sarah said eventually, playing her usual faultless hand.

We ate; we drank; we talked about the food; we were playing for time. We tried guessing who everyone else in the restaurant was and why they were there. The thought that came to both of us, I had no doubt, was that other people's guesses about who
we
were or why
we
were there would have been wildly inaccurate.

Eventually, Sarah came to the point. ‘Tom, you remember how you once asked me – or almost asked me – if I was on the pill? You felt as if we should have been a bit more rational even about something as delicious as jumping into bed together.'

I mostly feel as if I know where a conversation is heading. Like any reasonably experienced adult, I can usually locate the stepping-stones beneath my feet. Not that time, though.

‘I do,' I said, nervous as a bridegroom.

‘That's what this is about. I just want us to be a little bit rational about our situation. About our
total
situation. We can't just drift along in this dreamy state, thinking how clever we are and how exciting it all is. Proper couples can do that. They're doing it all over the world, all the time.'

I was finding the very idea of rational talk about our child abhorrent. We had known for just twelve days that Sarah was pregnant. Was there to be no period of grace longer than this?

‘Please tell me exactly what's on your mind,' I said, longing to disentangle myself from that sticky web of reasonableness.

‘It's not hard, is it?' Sarah said. ‘Not complicated. We weren't planning a pregnancy, so if we lost the foetus, by natural means or through an intervention, we'd be back exactly where we were before this . . . this accident happened.'

‘Accident?'

‘That's what it is, isn't it? An accident. A fluke. What else is it?'

I shrugged. She was right, but I still resisted the word. I had always felt desperately sorry for children whose parents had told them they were an accident. Some of them never recovered.

‘Anyway, let me finish. So that's one option. We could decide to terminate just because we'd never planned for this to happen. Never even talked about it. We were never . . .' Sarah performed the fashionable gesture of creating quotation marks with her fingers in the air and said, with heavy sarcasm, ‘. . . “trying for a baby”.'

I nodded. ‘There's another option?'

‘Well, we
could
say, yes, this is an accident, but it's a lovely one. Nature has stepped in and given us the chance to have a family. That's something you've always wanted – I know that now – though it's not something I've ever
wanted. Not really.'

‘May I say something?'

‘Of course, Tom. This is supposed to be a discussion. I haven't got some proposition to ram down your gorgeous throat. Everything's possible. I'm just . . . confused, I guess. Trying to approach it properly.'

I didn't believe for one moment that Sarah was confused. ‘Okay,' I said, ‘the thing that constrains you – us – is, of course, Perry. If you did not have a husband – albeit a miserable, monstrous, vandal of a husband, a husband in name only – we could make a straightforward choice like thousands, millions of couples do. We could say, at this stage of our lives – okay, do we want to be parents?'

‘That's right. It's simply not like that for us. That's my whole point.'

‘Okay, but if it were. If it were. What do you think we'd be saying?'

‘Well, I know what you'd be saying.'

‘And you?'

‘I honestly don't know, Tom. That's what I said to you the night we found out. I honestly don't know. I was taking steps to prevent conception, not to facilitate it.'

‘Were you, though? Really? Might there not have been some significance in your haphazard attitude to taking the pill?'

‘Oh, Tom. Please. Give me more credit than that. I never finish a course of antibiotics either. Does that mean I really
want
to stay sick?'

‘You stop taking antibiotics because you feel better, I'm guessing. You don't skip the pill because you've successfully warded off pregnancy.'

‘Stop trying to make it sound so
Jungian
, Tom. Anyway, even Jung distinguished between things that moved into the unconscious because they lost their intensity and those that were repressed into unconsciousness. I remember that much. Maybe the idea of pregnancy simply lost its intensity for me, somewhere along the way. Or maybe I'm just hopeless about taking pills, okay? So I'm a bit reckless. I admit it. Quite reckless, actually. In lots of ways.'

Having made my token bid for deeper explanations, rational or otherwise, it was time to retreat. ‘Go on. You were actively trying to avoid conception . . .'

‘So it was a shock. I'm sure that's the word I used last week. Well, it's true. I'm still in a state of shock. I walk down the street, teach my classes, have coffee with my colleagues, ring up my friends, iron my clothes, clean my teeth, sit on the loo . . . the way I always have. But I'm not really doing those things the way I always have, because I'm not the way I've always been. Everything's different. I've got this – this . . . foetus inside me. And in a few more weeks, everyone will know.'

‘Not necessarily everyone.'

‘How do you mean?'

‘People who don't see you won't know. Unless you choose to tell them.'

‘My mother will know. Mrs Hepworth will know.' And, in her quietest voice: ‘Perry will know.'

It was one of those moments when to say what you're thinking can send the whole house of cards flying, or it can clarify a situation and even help resolve it. I had no idea which way this might go.

‘Perry is a dying man,' I said, and left it at that.

We lapsed into silence, clinging to our secrets. One of Sarah's secrets was that she had a cohabitation contract with Perry. One of mine was that I knew it (though I also knew I would never discover its precise terms, nor how Sarah might have been obliged to fulfil them).

At the next table, three young women were engaged in an animated discussion about the ingredients for a perfect salsa. A great deal of trial-and-error evidently lay behind their assertions, though no consensus had been achieved before they were distracted by the sighting of a man three tables away who was identified by one of the women as a judge on a television talent show and by another as a Hollywood actor.

Sarah and I glanced as discreetly as possible in the man's direction. Neither of us recognised him.

‘This is probably a great place for celebrity-spotting,' Sarah said, ‘as long as you have the requisite knowledge of the celebrity scene. The place is probably teeming with people who've spent a lifetime wanting to be noticed and now have to hide behind dark glasses. All wasted on us, I fear.'

‘Are we cultural dinosaurs, do you think?'

‘I hope so.'

Our neighbours' conversation had moved on to the impossibility of a novel-based film ever meeting the expectations of anyone who had loved the book.

Perhaps grateful for the distraction, Sarah decided that was a question worth pursuing. I let her speculate, smiling but not joining in, still wanting to discuss the only question that really mattered at that moment. Actually, that's not quite right. I didn't really want to discuss it at all. I didn't want there to be any
need
to discuss it.