He had come up to stand just behind her right shoulder, she realized. She turned her head and smiled at him, only to find that he was closer than she had thought. She swallowed and turned back to the window. But there was no cliff to climb and no hill to run down this time to break the tension.
“You must be looking forward to getting back to Bath,” he said.
“Yes.”
There was a silence that pulsed with discomfort.
“You must be looking forward to getting your quiet life at Glandwr back,” she said.
“Yes.”
There was another silence in which even breathing was uncomfortable because it was audible.
She turned determinedly to face him. She thought he might take a step back since she could not do so without going through the window, but he stayed where he was.
“I want you to know,” she said, “that you arenotugly. I know you must sometimes see people flinch when they first set eyes on you. I actually ran away from you. But it is because people instantly understand that you have endured something unspeakably painful and will never be quite free of it. When people see you for a second and third and thirty-third time, they no longer really notice. You areyou,and the person shines through the appearance.”
She felt horribly self-conscious then and wished he would step back or turn away.
“I wish,” he said, “we did not live in a society that is so ready to judge others on one single fact concerning their life. I wish you were not judged on the fact that, through no fault of your own, you are an unwed mother. I wish you were not lonely.”
“Oh, I am not,” she protested, feeling the heat rise to her cheeks. “I have friends. I have my son. I have—”
“Too late,” he said. “You admitted to me weeks ago that you are lonely.”
Just as he had admitted to her that he was. She drew a slow breath.
“For ten years,” he said, “there has been no man in your life—merely because one scoundrel forced himself on you and destroyed your dreams before he died. It is an empty feeling, is it not—knowing oneself untouchable but wanting to be touched?”
It was even worse, she thought, to be afraid to be touched. But she would not say it aloud. And perhaps there was a way to get past her fears. Perhaps there was.
She blinked her eyes and swallowed against the telltale gurgle in her throat.
“You are not untouchable,” she said.
“Neither are you.”
“I will…remember you after I have left here,” she said.
“And I you.”
She swallowed again. He gazed steadily at her. She shut her eyes tightly suddenly and mustered all her rash courage.
“I do not want to be lonely any longer,” she said almost in a whisper. “I do not wantyouto be lonely.”
She kept her eyes shut until he answered, his voice as low as her own.
“I cannot comfort you, Anne,” he said. “You can look at me without revulsion, perhaps, but…what we are talking of is intimacy. I cannot inflict myself on you for that.”
She opened her eyes and looked at him. How could she know if he was right? How could she know what it would be like to be touched by any man—but especially by him?
She raised her hand to touch the right side of his face, but instead she laid it flat against his shoulder—and even then she wondered what disfigurements lay beneath his clothing. But there was something in her more powerful than the physical reluctance to touch him—or the reluctance to be touched.
Life, she realized, so often became a determined, relentless avoidance of pain—of one’s own, of other people’s. But sometimes pain had to be acknowledged and even touched so that one could move into it and through it and past it. Or else be destroyed by it.
“I am someone to arouse revulsion too,” she said. “I have been raped. I have borne another man’s child without ever having been married to him. I am not a virtuous woman. I haveseenmen cringe from me when they discover the truth.”
“Anne,” he said. She saw his eye brighten with unshed tears. “Oh, Anne, no. But the same consequences might happen again, you know. Though I would, of course, marry you. Imagine if you will what a dreadful fate that would be for you.”
