Believing the Lie

there’re millions of them, and they’re perfect in form and let me tell you they’re ready to be perfect in function as well. Where are we in your cycle just now?” and his mouth went to her neck as his hands deftly unfastened her bra.

Her body responded even as her mind assessed. She sank to the carpet before the fire, pulled Nicholas down with her, and undressed him. He was not a man who coupled in silence. Rather, it was “Christ, the feel of you,” and “my God, Allie,” and “oh yes, just like that” and because of this, she knew every level of his rising excitement.

It matched her own. Even if her thoughts began in another place as they always did, in another time, with one or another man, they ended up centred on this man, here. Of its own accord her body met his and they created for each other a release born of pleasure that made everything else fade into insignificance.

This was enough for her. No. It was more than enough. Enough was the love and protection Nicholas afforded her. That in addition she should have found a man whose body met hers in such a way as to drive off memory and fear… This was something she had never expected that day behind the cafeteria till on a mountain in Utah when she looked up, accepted the money for his bowl of chili, and heard him say in wonder, “Jesus God, is it difficult for you?”

She’d said, “What?”

“Being so beautiful. Is it rather like a curse?” And then he’d grinned, scooped up his tray, and said, “Bloody hell. Never mind. What a line, eh? Sorry. I didn’t intend it to sound like that,” and off he went. But he was back the next day and the day after that. On the fourth time through her queue, he asked her if she’d have coffee with him that afternoon, told her he didn’t drink alcohol of any kind, told her he was recovering from methamphetamine addiction, told her he was English, told her he meant to go home to England, told her he meant to prove to his father and his mother that he was finally through with the devils that had ridden him for so many years, told her… There was a queue behind him, but he didn’t notice. She did, however, and to get him to move along she’d said, “I will meet you, yes. There is a place in the town, across from the town lift. Its name…” And she couldn’t remember the name. She stared at him in some confusion. He stared at her in much the same way. He’d said, “Believe me, I’ll find it,” and so he had.

Now they lay on the carpet before the fire, side by side. He said, “You should tilt your hips, Allie. They’re brilliant swimmers but it’ll be easier if they’re going downhill.” He rose on one elbow and observed her. “I went to Lancaster,” he said frankly. “Did you try to phone me? I switched off the mobile because I knew I wouldn’t be able to lie to you.”

“Nicky…” She heard the disappointment in her voice. She wished she could have hidden it, but at least the sound of it was better than acknowledging the sudden fear that stabbed her.

“No, listen, darling. I needed to check, just to make sure. I did such a job on my body for so many years, it was logical for me to want to know… I mean, wouldn’t you want to? In my position? With nothing happening yet?”

She turned as well, her arm stretched out over her head and her head resting upon it. She looked not at him but rather over his shoulder. The rain had begun. She could see its pattern on the bay windows. She said, “I am not a machine for babies, Nicky, how do you call it? This thing that grows them?”

“Incubator,” he said. “I know you’re not. And I don’t think of you that way. But it’s only natural… I mean, it’s been two years now… We’ve both been anxious about it… You know.” He reached out and touched her hair. She didn’t have the kind of hair a man could run his fingers through. It was kinky and disordered, the gift of one of her progenitors, and God only knew which one because they represented a mixture of races and ethnicities too varied for logic to explain how they had all ended up reproducing with each other.

She said, “That is it, Nicky. The anxious part, you know. My magazine says that anxiety alone can make this difficult for a woman.”

“I understand. I do, darling. But it could be something else, and it’s time we found out, don’t you think? That’s why I went and it’s also why you can — ”

“No.” She shook his hand off her hair and sat up.

“Don’t sit! That’ll — ”

She cast him a look. “In my country,” she said, “women are not made to feel this way: that they exist for one purpose only.”

“I don’t think that.”

“These things take time. We know this where I come from. And a baby is something to cherish. A baby is not…” She hesitated. She looked away from him. She knew the truth of the matter, far beyond what her body was and was not doing. That truth needed to be spoken between them, so she finally said, “A baby is not a way to win your father’s approval, Nicky.”

Another man would have responded in outrage or denial, but this was not Nicholas’s way. Part of her love for him derived from his absolute honesty, so strange in a man who’d given years of his life to the worship of drugs. He said, “You’re right, of course. I do want it for that reason. I owe him that much for what I put him through. He’s desperate for a grandchild and I can do that for him since my sisters didn’t. We can do that for him.”

“So you see — ”

“But that’s not the only reason, Allie. I want this with you. Because of you and because there’s an us.”

“And if I have these tests. If what comes out of it is that I am not able…?” She dropped into silence and in that silence she could feel — she would swear it — his muscles become quite tense. She didn’t know what this meant, and that fact pounded the blood down her arms and into her fingers so that she had to move. She got to her feet.

He did as well. He said, “Is that what you actually think?”

“How can I think otherwise when this” — a gesture towards the carpet, the fire, where they had lain, what they had done — “becomes only about a baby? Your little swimmers, as you call them, and how they are shaped and how they can move and how I should position myself afterwards to make certain they do what you want them to do. How am I meant to feel, faced with this and with your insistence that I visit some doctor and spread my legs and have instruments thrust into me and whatever else?”

Her voice had risen. She bent, picked up her discarded clothing, began to dress. “All this day,” she said, “I miss you so much. I worry when I phone you and you do not answer. I long for you because it’s you, while — ”

“It’s the same for me. You know that.”

“I know nothing.”

She left him. The kitchen was at the other end of the house, down the long panelled corridor, through the main hall and the dining room. She went there and began their dinner. It was far too early for this, but she wanted something to do with her hands. She was mindlessly chopping onions when Nicholas joined her again. He too was dressed, but he’d buttoned his shirt incorrectly and it hung drunkenly from his shoulders in a way that made her soften towards him. He was, she knew, a lost boy without her, just as she would be lost without him.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “The last way on earth I want you to feel is like a baby machine. Or whatever.”

“I am trying,” she said. “The vitamins. All the pills. My temperature. My diet. Whatever will make it easier, possible…” She stopped because she’d begun to weep. She used her arm to brush the tears from her face.

“Allie…” He came to her, turned her to him.

They stood together, in each other’s arms. One minute, two. At last he said, “Just to hold you like this, I feel a kind of awe. D’you know how lucky a man I am? I know it, Allie.”

She nodded and he released her. He cupped her face in his hands and studied it in that way of his that always made her feel that the thousand truths she had hidden from him were there, openly displayed, and he was reading them all. But he made no mention of anything but, “Forgive me?”

“Of course. And I will do as you ask. Just not quite yet. Please, Nicky. Let us wait a few more months.”

He nodded. Then he grinned and said, “Meantime, we’ll give those swimmers some exercise, all right? Firm up their sense of direction?”

She smiled in turn. “We can do that.”

“Good. Now tell me why you’re chopping a mountain of onions, because my eyes are stinging like the devil. What’re you making?”