‘Reasonable access, my God!’ His voice rose. He felt sweat on his forehead. Reasonable access, he shouted, was utterly no good to him; reasonable access was meaningless and stupid; a day would come when they wouldn’t want to go with him on Sunday afternoons, when there was nowhere left in London that wasn’t an unholy bore. What about reasonable access then?
‘Please be quiet.’
He sat down in the armchair that he had always sat in. She said:
‘You might marry again. And have other children.’
‘I don’t want other children. I have children already. I want us all to live together as we used to –’
‘Please listen to me –’
‘I get a pain in my stomach in the middle of the night. Then I wake up and can’t go back to sleep. The children will grow up and I’ll grow old. I couldn’t begin a whole new thing all over again: I haven’t the courage. Not after Diana. A mistake like that alters everything.’
‘I’m going to marry Richard.’
‘Three weeks ago,’ he said, as though he hadn’t heard her, ‘you smiled at me.’
‘Smiled?’
‘Like you used to, Elizabeth. Before –’
‘You made a mistake,’ she said, softly. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘I’m not saying don’t go on with your affair with this man. I’m not saying that, because I think in the circumstances it’d be a cheek. D’you understand me, Elizabeth?’
‘Yes, I do. And I think you and I can be perfectly good friends. I don’t feel sour about it any more: perhaps that’s what you saw in my smile.’
‘Have a six-month affair –’
‘I’m in love with Richard.’
‘That’ll all pass into the atmosphere. It’ll be nothing at all in a year’s time –’
‘No.’
‘I love you, Elizabeth.’
They stood facing one another, not close. His body was still swaying. The liquid in his glass moved gently, slopping to the rim and then settling back again. Her eyes were on his face: it was thinner, she was thinking. Her fingers played with the edge of a cushion on the back of the sofa.
‘On Saturdays,’ he said, ‘I buy the meringues and the brandy-snaps in Frith’s Patisserie. On Sunday morning I make the sandwiches. Then I cook sausages and potatoes for my lunch, and after that I come over here.’
‘Yes, yes –’
‘I look forward all week to Sunday.’
‘The children enjoy their outings, too.’
‘Will you think about it?’
‘About what?’
‘About all being together again.’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’ She turned away from him. ‘I wish you’d go now,’ she said.
‘Will you come out with me on our birthday?’
‘I’ve told you.’ Her voice was loud and angry, her cheeks were flushed. ‘Can’t you understand? I’m going to marry Richard. We’ll be married within a month, when the girls have had time to get to know him a little better. By Christmas we’ll be married.’
He shook his head in a way that annoyed her, seeming in his drunkenness to deny the truth of what she was saying. He tried to light a cigarette; matches dropped to the floor at his feet. He left them there.
It enraged her that he was sitting in an armchair in her flat with his eyelids drooping through drink and an unlighted cigarette in his hand and his matches spilt all over the floor. They were his children, but she wasn’t his wife: he’d destroyed her as a wife, he’d insulted her, he’d left her to bleed and she had called him a murderer.
‘Our birthday,’ he said, smiling at her as though already she had agreed to join him on that day. ‘And Hitler’s and the Queen’s.’
‘On our birthday if I go out with anyone it’ll be Richard.’
‘Our birthday is beyond the time –’
‘For God’s sake, there is no beyond the time. I’m in love with another man –’
‘No.’
‘On our birthday,’ she shouted at him, ‘On the night of our birthday Richard will make love to me in the bed you slept in for nine years. You have access to the children. You can demand no more.’
He bent down and picked up a match. He struck it on the side of the empty box. The cigarette was bent. He lit it with a wobbling flame and dropped the used match on to the carpet. The dark-haired man, he saw, was in the room again. He’d come in, hearing her shouting like that. He was asking her if she was all right. She told him to go away. Her face was hard; bitterness was there again. She said, not looking at him:
