He saw that she hadn't expected a response of that kind. She'd come without a line of defence. He pressed the advantage.
'You were seventeen. I was twenty-eight. Can you try to understand what it was like for me then? I'd cut myself off from caring about anyone for years. And all of a sudden I was caring for you. Wanting you. Yet all the time believing that if we made love-'
She spoke quickly, lightly. 'All that's passed, isn't it? It doesn't matter really. It's much better forgotten.'
'I told myself that I couldn't make love to you, Deborah. I manufactured all sorts of mad reasons why. Duty to your father. A betrayal of his trust. The destruction of our friendship – yours and mine. Our souls couldn't bond together if we became lovers, and I wanted a soulmate, so we couldn't make love. I kept repeating your age over and over. How could I live with myself if I took a seventeen-year-old girl to bed?'
'What does it matter now? We're beyond that. After all that's happened, what does it matter that we didn't make love three years ago?' Her questions weren't so much cold as they were cautious, as if whatever careful reasoning she'd gone through in her decision to leave him were under attack.
'Because if you're going to make this leaving of yours a permanent arrangement, then at least you'll leave this time knowing the truth. I let you go because I wanted peace. I wanted you out of the house. I reasoned that if you were gone I'd stop feeling torn. I'd stop wanting you. I'd stop feeling guilty for wanting you. I'd get the whole issue of sex driven out of my mind. You'd been gone less than a week when I saw the truth of the matter.'
'It doesn't-'
He persisted. 'I'd thought I could exist quite nicely without you, and my own hypocrisy slapped me right in the face. I wanted you back. I wanted you home. So I wrote to you.'
As he was speaking, she'd kept her attention on the river, but now she turned to him. He didn't wait for her to ask the question.
'I didn't post the letters.'
'Why?'
And now he had come to it. So easy to sit alone in the study and rehearse for a month all the things he had needed to say to her for years. But now that he had the opportunity to say them he found himself faltering all over again and he wondered why it had always been so frightening that she should know the truth. He drew in air like resolution.
'For the same reason I wouldn't make love to you. I was afraid. I knew that you could have any man in the world.' 'Any man?'
'All right. You could have Tommy. Given that choice, how could I expect that you might want me?'
'You?'
'A cripple.'
'So there it is, isn't it? We end up at
'We do. Because it's a fact of who I am and we can't ignore it. I've spent the last three years considering all the things I could never do at your side, things that any other man – Tommy – could do with ease.'
'What's the point of that? Why keep torturing yourself?'
'Because I had to work through it. It had to stop mattering so much that I couldn't even hold you if I were unattached to this cursed brace. It had to stop mattering so much that I'm crippled. And that's what you need to know before you leave me. That it doesn't matter any longer. Crippled or not. Half a man. Three-quarters. It doesn't matter. I want you.' And then he added unfairly but without a regret since there are no rules that govern affairs of the heart, 'Once and for life.'
It was done. In whatever fashion she would judge them, the words had been said. Three years too late, but said all the same. And, even if she chose to leave him now, at least she chose knowing the worst he was and the best. He could live with that.
'What do you want of me?' she asked.
'You know the answer to that.'
Peach moved restlessly at their feet. Someone shouted from the patch of green across Cheyne Walk. Deborah watched the river. He followed the direction of her gaze to see that the swans had cleared the final piers of the bridge. They were floating unchanged as they had done before, as they always would do, seeking the safety of Battersea.
'Deborah,' he said.
The birds gave her the answer. 'Like the swans, Simon?'
It was more than enough. 'My love, like the swans.'
ELIZABETH GEORGE
