Johnnie Walker, one Baileys – her face was differently lit and he saw that the fine-texturing, high-blooming first- trimester hormones had been working on her skin. Already? He had no idea, but he had never seen her look so pretty or young. When she stopped close in front of him he had to remind himself that he had just, and justly, accused her of deception. He could not allow her to seduce him. She had been dishonest. On the other hand, a measure of sexual release would give him immunity, let him think more clearly and make his life-denying case with more brio.
She said, 'I wasted years thinking I shouldn't have a baby until the right man came along. A lot of idiots and bastards took up my time – my fault as much as theirs. I think you're the right man, but Michael, if you don't think you are, it doesn't matter. I'm going ahead anyway. It'll be sad without you, but not as sad as having nothing. You don't have to decide tonight or next month. You can say no and change your mind later. Perhaps you'll change your mind when you see the baby. That can happen. But one thing I'm sure of – I'm not going to have an argument with you. If you're dead against it, you're free to go. And free to come back.'
'I'll be almost seventy when this child is only ten. What use is that?'
'Fine. Don't get involved. But I think you'd count yourself blessed at seventy to love a ten- year-old and be loved by one.'
Blessed? Where had she got a word like that? He had never heard her use it before.
'And there's another thing.'
She said it mellifluously, she was that sure of her ground. She had smoothed out the crags and precipices of this new landscape and he was wandering through it – completely lost, but not in harm's way, or so she seemed to be suggesting.
'You didn't ask to become a father. I'm not asking for financial support. I've got savings and I've got the shops. If you want to contribute, all the better. If you want to be with us, better still.'
Us. Already this pinhead-sized entity had moved in, it had a social presence. Beard felt both wronged and outmanoeuvred. He was too heavy-footed to articulate whatever general principle Melissa was defying with such efficiency. Did he have no rights? He could not command this child's early annihilation. So what did he want? He attempted a return to basics.
'Whether I stay or go, pay or don't pay, I'll have become the father of your child. Against my will. You didn't ask me because you knew what I would say.'
'If you never see the child and contribute nothing, I don't see how much will have changed for you.'
'That's not for you to say, and besides, you're wrong, dead wrong. Do you really think there's no difference between having a child you never see and having no child? You're forcing choices on me that I never wanted to make.'
He pronounced this with some heat and he believed what he was saying, but it seemed too abstract. His real objections, still without verbal form, lay in a fog.
She must have anticipated his reaction. She seemed untroubled as she turned away from him and began to set the table. When she spoke, she put her hand impersonally on his arm and her voice was conciliatory, even though she was not actually looking at him.
'Try to see it from my side, Michael. In love with you, wanting a baby, not wanting anyone else, seeing you only occasionally and never knowing when, knowing you were seeing other women, and you not making any move to come closer or to leave, and four years drifting by like this. If I did nothing, I'd be at the menopause. And that would be the quiet choice you would have forced on me.'
It sounded a rotten deal. But she had been free to kick him out. He placed his hand over hers where it rested on his arm. A kind of apology.
She lifted the casserole from the stove onto a trivet on the table and gave him a bottle of wine to open. It was a CorbiA?res, a decent one, and he would be drinking it alone. Her two inches of white were barely touched. As he sat down he remembered her present, bath oil and bitter chocolate mints from Berlin Tegel. Exactly the wrong moment to hand them over. A silence settled as she served up the stew. She had neutralised his protest with a list of indictments. He had always assumed she knew about his affairs, but it shocked him, no, it stirred him, to hear her say it so calmly. As he lifted his fork he saw vividly, as though back-projected, brain to retina, a tableau of Melissa and a girl he had known briefly in Milan, kneeling up together, companionably naked on a four-poster against a moraine of sheets and pillows, tenderly expectant, in the low-lit style of a pornographic spread. He even saw the centrefold staples. He blinked this arrangement away and began to eat. But his daydream had tensed the walls of his throat and the first mouthful was difficult to swallow. She had made her reasonable case, and he was struggling, he was in the wrong when he knew he was right, he was in knots even while he suspected that the matter was simple: she had changed the subject.
He let a minute or so pass and then, determined to sound grave rather than querulous, he said, 'The point is, Melissa, there wouldn't really be a choice for me if you went ahead with this. How am I supposed to ignore the existence of my own child? Not possible for me. I guess you were counting on that, and this is what I object to. It's a form of blackmail €¦'
The word hung over them, and he thought that at last they would have the liberating row. But she remained calm, the serene mother-to-be, reflecting while she chewed. She was eating more than usual.
'I wasn't counting on you being unable to ignore our baby. If it's true, I'm happy. I knew you'd be angry, and I don't blame you. I thought of saying it was an accident, but I couldn't live with that.'
Not after she had lived with the contraceptive deceit. But he did not feel like saying that, and nor could he bring himself to say that he saw the future well enough. After a happy interlude, and assuming he did not succumb to marriage, he would become, by degrees, a worthless, unreliable pseudo-husband, and this was what would make a worthless, unreliable father of him. It was what she was choosing, it was her right to choose. This was what women had marched for, birth as well as abortion. Perhaps there was nothing he could do. She was absolving him of responsibility, but this was not how it would unfold, this was not how she would feel when their lives had been transformed, when they repeated the tired, angry scenes, with shouting, the baby wailing, a slamming door, his car starting up with a roar. That was when she would know it was all his fault, whatever she said now, while her unsuspecting brain was soused in optimistic hormones, one of evolution's tricks for getting this child past the first post.
As he refilled his glass he felt the fight, his accusatory sting, give way to light-headed fatalism. He wanted to set the problem aside and direct the evening towards its proper course – by way of amiable conversation with this beautiful, nearly young woman, her generous cooking and the dark wine, towards lovemaking, sleepy embraces, sleep. Was he lazy and sybaritic, or was he affirming a decent appetite for life? He knew the answer. He reached across and put his hand on hers.
'I'm glad you were straight with me. Thank you.'
Keeping his hand in place, he told her that he was sorry for his sharp words, that she was certainly no blackmailer, that he was profoundly happy to be with her again, and that she was right, they must not quarrel. She gazed into his face while he talked as she might a hypnotist's. Her eyes glistened again. She got up and came and kneeled by him and they kissed deeply. By the time she went back to her chair, all seemed well, and they continued with the meal. He put away three portions of chicken and chilli stew while he talked about his work and travels, the conference in Potsdam, the latest from New Mexico, how a team at MIT was working on an artificial photosynthesis process similar to his own, but was eighteen months behind. He talked of design simplicity, of the beauty of no moving parts, of an Oxford team's calculations for the optimal shape of a solar reflector, which was not the parabola he had expected.
He was boring her surely, talking to put distance between himself and the baby, to replace it in her thoughts with his own ideas, his own baby. Sometimes she prompted him with a question, but mostly she was silent, gazing at him with deeply irrational forbearance. She was in love with a bald fat man who seemed to her the essence of seriousness and high purpose, who was the father of her child as well as the father she longed to care for, the father who had not yet fallen in love with his fate, but who, she calmly knew, was bound to yield.
In what he considered layman's terms, he explained the recent excitement – not one electron for every photon, but two, and one day perhaps, even three! As she listened, she adopted the expression he always liked, a wry smile puckered into a pout that barely contained the pressure of a delighted laugh. But nothing he was saying was faintly amusing. She deserved better. So he began to tell her about his adventure on the train,
