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.
