I said, “Darling, you hit the jackpot! Just looking at you brings me joy. A year ago I might have felt a slight soupçon of jealousy. But no more.”
“I know — I guess I found myself a real mensch, and a randy one. And so cute!”
“Do you plan to go on seeing him?”
“I don’t know. We made comforting noises to that effect. Nothing definite. What’s your take on replays of unforgettable . . .”
“The pits.”
“That bad?”
“Not objectively; but by comparison, that bad. What about Geoff?”
“He won’t be a problem. I’ll never tell him. I won’t love him any less.”
“Please don’t!”
I went to the Hydes’, with Andreas, the Sunday of that week. Andreas noticed that Margot looked exceptionally pretty. As for Geoffrey, who knows?
Margot began her scheduled story with apparent aplomb. “Our first story was the story of a man told by a woman. The second was the story of a man told by a man. Tonight, and none too soon, it will be the story of a woman told by a woman.” Margot made this announcement with such bravado I apprehended a replay of her tryst with John. I needn’t have worried.
“I met her when my parents brought me to England, when I was fifteen years old. Meredith was my age; we were classmates in the school I was sent to, both of us lonely souls happy to have found each other. We shared our pulp novels and our favorite singers — Randy Newman, Dionne Warwick (Meredith pronounced her name without the w in ‘wick’). We dated local boys together — we were living in Hull for some reason, at the time a total dump. Meredith became involved with a thirty-year-old docker, a tall, blackhaired man, nice enough I thought, with an incredibly virile body — a hunk. His name was Shanks. In time he got her pregnant. When Meredith found the courage to tell her parents, they couldn’t handle the news. One day they’d make her swear not to have an abortion, two days later they’d tell her not to worry, they’d arrange one for her. I remember there being talk about a kind gynecologist in Geneva. In the end, however, he wasn’t needed. Mr. Shanks stepped up and offered to marry ‘his lassie.’ Five months later their son was born and baptized a proper Anglican.
“So far so good. Shanks treated Meredith with a tenderness I hadn’t expected, all through her pregnancy and during the sometimes difficult times afterwards. He treated the boy less warmly — I assumed that having been an orphan himself he’d never experienced the comforts of family affection and wouldn’t know how to reinvent them now. That turned out to be too kind a view. Shanks’s attitude gradually turned into open resentment, as if his generosity and affection in marrying Meredith had provoked a slow backlash of brutality. He used to curse his son or yell at him when he’d done nothing to warrant this abuse — when he’d done nothing at all. Apparently Shanks loathed the boy for simply existing.
“Meredith couldn’t find any way to counter such unreason. Her only recourse was to keep the little boy out of Shanks’s sight, something she did ever more frequently after the father moved on from verbal to physical chastisement. He started slapping and spanking him when he was three. At four Shanks used a cane, a hairbrush, or a strap. I begged Meredith to find a counselor or a specialist to attend to Shanks, or convince a doctor to prescribe some sedative she could dope him with, but she kept taking the blame for what was happening, and he started threatening her with violence if she tried to get medical or legal help. But when her son was six years old, and Shanks took a small board to him, and ended up breaking his hip . . . I finally came to my senses. I couldn’t take any more of it.”
Andreas looked at me incredulously. Why wasn’t I more surprised? I wasn’t at all. Geoffrey, crouching by her chair, kissing her hand: “Why didn’t you warn me that you were going to tell them?” Margot: “I’m all right. Of course — it’s my story. I’ve very much wanted to tell it ever since Geoff came clean. Only I didn’t want your sympathy to muddle the story line. It doesn’t matter.”
“Thank you, Margot, for telling it,” I said.
She smiled at me: “Some things have to be told. Others, better not.”
Andreas: “But then what happened?”
“What happened was that I took Timothy in the dead of night and drove fifty miles to a trustworthy and highly reputed center that I’d had the brains to inquire about long before that ghastly accident. We were at its gates when it opened the next morning. By then I was at university where I could call on a few eminences to vouch for me, and others in the medical profession whom I’d consulted privately and who were ready to certify the urgency of my predicament — I was courteously received and attended to. I assented to the formality of putting the boy up for adoption as the best way to bypass bureaucratic delays (the institution was famous as an adoption center, as well as an orphanage and school). I was encouraged to take rooms nearby and spend my days with Timothy while he became accommodated to his new life.
“The boy was a perfect angel through all of this — he sensed that his new mentors were animated by kindness and concern, and they in turn were touched by his sweetness, his openness, no doubt
