“Sam’s sick,” he muttered.
“She won’t leave him.”
Roz shrugged unsympathetically.
“Then I’ll call a cab.”
“No.” He reached down and jerked the jack plug from its socket.
“I’m staying.
There was a raw edge to his voice which was a warning, if she had chosen to heed it, that he was in no mood to be trifled with. But they had been married too long and had had too many bruising rows for her to allow him to dictate terms. She had only contempt for him now.
“Please yourself,” she said.
“I’ll go to a hotel.”
He stumbled to the door and stood with his back to it.
“It wasn’t my fault, Roz. It was an accident. For God’s sake, will you stop punishing me?”
EIGHT
Roz closed her eyes and saw again the tattered, pale face her five-year-old daughter, as ugly in death as she ad been beautiful in life, her skin ripped and torn by the exploding glass of the windscreen. Could she have accepted it more easily, she wondered as she had wondered so many times before, if Rupert had died too? Could she have forgiven him, dead, as she could not forgive him, alive?
“I never see you,” she said with a tight smile, ‘so how can I be punishing you? You’re drunk and you’re being ridiculous. Neither of which conditions is any way out of the ordinary.” He had an unhealthy and un cared-for look which fuelled her scorn and made her impatient.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” she snapped, ‘just get out, will you? I don’t feel anything for you any more and, to be honest, I don’t think I ever did.” But that wasn’t true, not really.
“You can’t hate what you never loved,” Olive had said.
Tears slithered down his drink-sodden face.
“I weep for her every day, you know.”
“Do you, Rupert? I don’t. I haven’t the energy.”
“Then you didn’t love her as much as I loved her,” he sobbed, his body heaving to control itself.
Roz’s lips curled contemptuously.
“Really? Then why your indecent haste to provide her replacement? I worked it out, you know. You must have impregnated your precious Jessica within a week of walking away unscathed from the accident.” She larded the word with sarcasm.
“Is Sam a good replacement, Rupert? Does he wind your hair round his finger the way Alice used to do? Does he laugh like her? Does he wait by the door for you and hug your knees and say: “Mummy, Mummy, Daddy’s home”?” Her anger made her voice brittle.
“Does he, Rupert? Is he everything Alice was and more? Or is he nothing like her and that’s why you have to weep for her every day?”
“He’s a baby, for Christ’s sake.” He clenched his fists, her hatred mirrored in his eyes.
“God, you’re a fucking bitch, Roz. I never set out to replace her. How could I? Alice was Alice. I couldn’t bring her back.”
She turned away to look out of the window.
“No.”
“Then why do you blame Sam? It wasn’t his fault either. He doesn’t even know he had a half-sister.”
“I don’t blame Sam.” She stared at a couple, lit by orange light, on the other side of the road. They held each other tenderly, stroking hair, stroking arms, kissing. How naive they were. They thought love was kind.
“I resent him.”
She heard him blunder against her coffee table.
“That’s just bloody spite,” he slurred.
“Yes,” she said quietly, more to herself than to him, her breath misting the glass, ‘but I don’t see why you should be happy when I am not? You killed my daughter but you got away with it because the law said you’d suffered enough. I’ve suffered far more and my only crime was to let my adulterous husband have access to his daughter because I knew she loved him and I didn’t want to see her unhappy “If you’d only been more understanding,” he wept, ‘it would never have happened. It was your fault, Roz. You’re the one who really killed her.” She didn’t hear his approach. She was turning back into the room when his fist smashed against her face.
It was a shabby, sordid fight. Where words had failed them -the very predictability of their conversations meant they were always forearmed they hit and scratched instead in a brutish desire to hurt. It was a curiously passionless exercise, motivated more by feelings of guilt than by hate or revenge, for at the back of both their minds was the knowledge that it was the failure of their marriage, the war they had conducted between themselves, that had led Rupert to accelerate away in frustrated anger with their daughter, unstrapped, upon the back seat.
