No more.
The surfaces are clear apart from a wooden bowl of fruit, the blender. He still likes smoothies. My heart pounds. Will I get away with this? How much do I want to stop my hurt? How much do I want to hurt him?
I push those thoughts aside, I can’t think of them now. I fill a jug, take a glass.
He is in the same position when I return.
I hand him the water. ‘Drink.’
He takes a small, pained sip.
‘Come on,’ I say tenderly, like I’m talking to Millie. ‘All of it.’
He stares at the water’s skin. ‘I don’t feel good.’
‘I know.’ I sit on the captain’s chair opposite him. ‘You won’t until you drink.’
He looks at me, that molten navy. ‘One of my favourite memories of you was how you’d look after me when I got my migraines. Sometimes, I think you’re the only person who knows me.’
He’s right.
Amber light floods in through the window, a horn sounds from the avenue, but in the dark heart of his house, no one else exists. We are the only people in the world.
He drinks obediently; I hear each swallow. He puts down the glass. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘For what?’
‘Hurting you. I never wanted you to go through anything like that.’
I shut my eyes. It’s happening now, isn’t it? A reverse alchemy. The transformation of the gold of our past into lead, the dismantling of our fairy tale, and although this is what I’ve come for, my heart is cracking.
‘When I think of you taking a pregnancy test, going to the clinic, staying in that tiny room at Wyatt with a teacher—’ He breaks off. ‘I would have done anything to take that from you.’
I turn my face to the wing of the captain’s chair.
‘Lauren,’ he whispers. It’s coming, we can both feel it, we’re edging closer to the precipice now, hand over hand on the rockface until even that disappears, the drop below us sheer. ‘Did you know you were pregnant at the cottage?’
I nod.
He lets out a small, terrible laugh. ‘I spent all my time in prison turning over every single day we spent together, trying to figure out how I lost you, how he could have lured you away.’
Lost. Lured. Eighteen years on and he’s still making the same mistake, to him, I’m no more than a butterfly, baited away by smashed bananas and sugar water, precious but stupid.
‘I know I behaved badly towards the end.’
Is that what he’s calling what he did to me the day before I left him?
‘But I didn’t foresee this.’ He runs his hands over his face. ‘Why didn’t you tell me? We could have dealt with it together. You didn’t have to be alone.’
I think about how he looked after me after Mama died, the meals he made for me here in this house, the walks in Holland Park, the extravagant set of drawing pencils. Is he right? Would it have been better staying with him, going to the clinic, getting better on his couch? I’d have never felt the hot shame of strangers knowing. Then, I remember why I didn’t tell him. Why I left. ‘That’s a lie.’ My voice – raw, hoarse – cuts the velvet dark between us. ‘You knew what you were doing. You wanted me pregnant.’
‘What?’
I stare at his clean, almondine nails, his powerful fingers and then, I stand up, flick on the wall switch. The room floods with light. He gives a low moan, covers his eyes with his arms but I prise his arms from his face, I want him to hurt, I’m so tired of the civility of this. Slap him, slam his skull against brick, wrap my fingers round his throat, that’s the way it should be, no tenderness. Because what he did to me is violence. Everything else is pretend.
‘All those times we had sex, you never wore a condom, never once talked to me about contraception! You knew what was going to happen! You were a scientist, Daniel, a fucking biologist! So don’t tell me it wasn’t something you wanted. Planned even. You made it happen. And I wasn’t going to be like my mother, pregnant and trapped. I wasn’t.’
He is blinking rapidly. ‘That’s what you think?’ he whispers.