adoption society. It must all have sounded so bad, so like a lie-’

‘But there are records, aren’t there, official records?’

‘There are now, but things were less formal then, and there wasn’t any law about children having the right to know who their parents were. Of course there must have been records I suppose, but by the time Ben wanted to know the details the adoption society had ceased to exist, and I think a lot of papers had been destroyed in a fire, so someone said anyway. Ben never believed any of it, and no one would answer letters. I did try to find out, I went to London, he wouldn’t come, and I stayed in a hotel-’

‘Oh Hartley, Hartley-’ I was picturing this journey, and the return home.

‘I did try, but I couldn’t find out, and somehow even then I didn’t want to.’

‘But I still don’t understand, what did he think had happened? What did he think we’d been doing?’

‘He thought we’d been going on seeing each other, perhaps not all the time, but on and off, secretly. He thought I’d become pregnant and-’

‘But he was living with you!’

‘That was another odd thing. Just before the adoption was finally fixed up I was away for quite a long time, it was about the only time I was away. I went to my father who was ill, he died then-and in this time away Ben thought the baby had come. I wasn’t slim any more at all, I could have been pregnant, you see it all fitted in. And he thought I had invented all the adoption business so as to bring your child into his house.’

‘But he saw the papers-’

‘Well, I could have got hold of the papers somehow, he didn’t read them anyway. And the visitor from the society could have been an accomplice.’

‘Your husband is a most ingenious man. A vile hateful cruel half-mad ingenious torturer.

Hartley, staring now at the candle flames, simply shook her head.

‘But Titus himself, he didn’t know, I suppose, I mean what Ben thought?’

‘Well, he did know,’ she said, ‘later on, I mean when he was about nine or ten. Of course we’d always told him that he was an adopted child, like you’re supposed to. But then Ben started telling him that he was the child of his mother’s lover and that his mother was a whore.’

‘What perfectly monstrous wickedness-’

‘Ben did go through a phase of knocking Titus about. Some neighbours called the prevention of cruelty people. I couldn’t do anything, I couldn’t defend him, I had to sort of take Ben’s side, it was an awful time, everything was broken, as if one could still stand up but all one’s bones were broken, all the bones and the little joints were broken, one wasn’t whole any more, one wasn’t a person any more.’ Slow tears came and still staring at the candles she blindly felt about on the table for the towel. I pushed it towards her.

‘But why couldn’t you defend him-oh, stupid question. Hartley, I can’t bear this-’

‘He felt it was all my fault, and it was all my fault, I ought to have told him at the start, he asked me if there had ever been anyone else, and I lied really because there had been you although we weren’t lovers, and later on when I told it, it sounded so mysterious and big. And I married him because I was sorry for him and I wanted to make him happy-and then-and then-’

‘Oh Hartley, stop.’

‘And I somehow got into a kind of fatal way of getting everything wrong, doing everything wrong, and hurting him, as if I were doing exactly the thing that would make him angry. One night when he was out at an evening class I accidentally put the chain on the door and went to bed and slept and he couldn’t get in till I woke up at three and it was raining and then he started hitting me and wouldn’t let me go to sleep-’

‘Hartley, don’t tell me any more of these horrors please. I don’t want to hear them and anyway it’s all over.’

‘Oh I’ve been so stupid, so stupid, and of course Titus never settled down at school and everything went wrong, everything, and I’m not even sure that Ben believed it all at the start or that he always really believed it later, only everything I did seemed to make things worse, it was as if he hypnotized me into acting as if I was guilty. And I’m not sure what Titus believed or what he believes. Titus used to sit there hearing Ben saying one thing and me saying the other, it was like a sort of litany, an awful poem-and I don’t know whether he knew what the truth was or whether there was any truth, it was all a kind of fog of awful senseless argument and row. It all got ravelled up into a nightmare and in the end he blamed me for it and in a way he was right, sometimes I think he blamed me and resented me more than he did Ben. Of course when Titus was small he was frightened all the time and he kept quiet and he’d sit all the evening on his little chair against the wall, all white and tense and quiet, dreadfully quiet. Later on when he was about fifteen he used to pretend sometimes that he was your child, and once or twice he told Ben that I’d told him he was. But I think he did this just to spite Ben when Titus was too big for Ben to hit him any more.’

‘Hartley, stop. Just tell me more about Titus now. When did he go away? Where do you think he is?’

‘When he left school he went into the poly, you know, the polytechnic, where we used to live, he had a student grant, he was studying electricity. He lived at home, but he sort of ignored us, he sent us to Coventry. I sometimes felt he really hated us, both of us. And he could never forgive me for not protecting him when he was small. Then just before we moved down here he went into digs, and then he just vanished. He left the digs and never let us know or sent an address. I went round there and asked about him but no one seemed to know or care where he’d gone, and he never wrote. He knew we were coming here. I think he went to look for his real parents, he always said he would. He went on and on about them sometimes and how perhaps they were rich. Anyway, he’s gone now. Gone.’

‘Don’t be so tragic, Hartley, he’ll turn up again. He knows where you live, doesn’t he? He’ll turn up. He’ll come home when he’s short of money, they always do.’

She shook her head. ‘Sometimes I don’t want him to come back. Sometimes I believe he’s dead. Sometimes I almost wish he were dead, and that I could hear that he was dead, so that the anguish of the hope and the fear and the dread could just stop, and we could be at peace. If he came back-it could be- terrible-’

‘You mean?’

‘Terrible.’ The slow tears were coming and she kept drooping her eyelids to make them slide down her cheeks. She said, ‘I wish we’d never adopted a child, it was my fault, Ben was quite right, we were better without. I could have managed then and Ben would have been-like I wanted-’

In spite of the pain and horror of her story my mind was leaping ahead into a bright land, into all sorts of almost detailed vistas of sudden hope. I would take Hartley away and together we would find Titus. In some strange metaphysical sense it was true, I would make it true: Titus was my son, the offspring of our old love!

‘Hartley, my little one, stop crying, you’ve had your orgy of horrors, now stop it. You’re mine now and I’m going to look after you and protect you-’

She began shaking her head again. ‘And I married him to make him happy! But you mustn’t think it’s been all bad, it hasn’t. What I’ve told you is the bad part, but I’ve probably given you a quite wrong impression.’

‘Now you’re going to tell me you’ve had a happy marriage!’

‘No, but it’s not been all bad, Ben wasn’t always awful with Titus. Ben’s a bit of a Jekyll and Hyde, perhaps all men are. It was just that you kept cropping up and that always set him off, and we couldn’t just forget you because you were so famous, but we’ve had better times too-’

‘What were they like?’

‘Oh just ordinary times, you might think it was dull, we had a quiet life-’

‘A quiet life!’

‘Ben didn’t much like his job but he liked doing things about the house, he likes DIY.’

‘DIY?’

‘Do It Yourself. We went to London once to the exhibition at Olympia. He used to go to evening classes.’

‘What was he learning at the class on that quiet evening when you left the chain on the door?’

‘He was learning to rivet china.’

‘Oh-Lord-! Hartley, what did you do all the time? Did you entertain, have friends?’

‘Well, Ben didn’t like social life. I didn’t mind. We don’t really know anybody here either.’

‘And did you go to evening classes too?’

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