His heavy brows drew together as he frowned at her. “Of course I could,” he answered, and the unquestioning simplicity of that statement nearly brought a lump to Juliet’s throat.
“Well. Good.” She cleared her throat. “I’m glad to hear that.”
“What needs doing?”
For a horrified second Juliet pictured exactly what needed doing and suppressed a near-hysterical laugh. “Umm. Well, I’ll get to that. The thing is, I actually . . .” She lowered her voice. “I’m actually trying to have a baby. Well, I’d like to try. I haven’t tried yet.”
Peter went very still, which was saying something for him. He was usually such a still, silent man anyway, yet now he seemed utterly immobile.
“I mean, as a single parent,” she hastened to explain. “On my own.”
“Oh, aye?” he said, and Juliet couldn’t tell anything from his voice. He took a sip from his pint of bitter, waiting.
Juliet swallowed; her throat felt constricted, the words hard to get out. “Yes. You know, I’m thirty-seven, and I suppose my biological clock is ticking, as clichéd as that sounds.” Still nothing. “And so I’ve been looking into options. I’ve done a fertility assessment, and while a pregnancy isn’t going to be easy for me, it’s possible.” She waited for him to say something, and he finally did.
“Seems as if you’ve got yourself sorted, then.”
“Well, a bit,” she agreed, latching on to his words like a drowning woman reaching for a life preserver. “But I’m also aware—you see, I never knew my father. My mother refused to name him. And Lucy doesn’t know hers, either. Fiona—our mother—decided to go with a sperm donor with her. We’ve both disliked that, the not knowing, in different ways.”
“Aye,” Peter said after a moment, his voice definitely wary.
“So I realized,” Juliet continued, relentless now, “that I want my child to know his or her father. And so that brings me to—” She swallowed convulsively, the gulping sound audible, she feared, even over the din of the pub. “—to you.” No response, but Juliet knew she could hardly expect one. “I wanted to ask you, Peter, if you—if you would donate your sperm.”
What a cringingly awful, awkward question, and yet how else could she have phrased it? Peter had gone rigid, his pint glass raised halfway to his lips, his eyes widening as he stared at her.
“Donate—,” he began, and then stopped. “You want me to be the father of your child?”
“Well—yes. I think you’d make a good father, Peter.” Too late she realized how that sounded. “Not that you’d actually be involved, of course. I wouldn’t expect anything from you but—well, the obvious. I mean, just the sperm.” In case there was any question.
“Let me get this areet,” Peter said, and his voice was low, thrumming with emotion. Bad emotion. “You want me to wank off into a paper cup so you can have my sperm for your baby, and then raise that baby in front of my nose, but not have me involved?”
Was there any good way to answer that? “I just don’t want you to feel beholden,” Juliet finally said.
“Beholden?Beholden?” Peter’s voice had risen so a few people nearby started shooting them openly curious glances. Out of the corner of her eye Juliet saw Maggie Bains, recently backfrom Newcastle and a terrible gossip, turn towards them. She definitely should not have chosen the pub for this conversation.
“I only meant,” Juliet said coldly, retreating into hauteur, “that I wouldn’t expect you to actually act as a father. I’m going to do this on my own, but I wanted to be able to tell my child who his or her father was—”
“And you could also say,” Peter cut across her, his voice low but intense, “that you can go up the road and see him anytime you like. The man who fathered you but can’t have aught to do with you.” He shook his head, clearly disgusted.
“Don’t overreact,” she snapped. “I didn’t mean it like that—”
Peter shook his head again, the movement so vehement, so scornful, that any retort she’d been going to make stopped with the breath bottling in her lungs.
“I know how you meant it, Juliet,” he said. He placed his pint glass on the table with a final-sounding clink. “And I’ll tell you this. If I bring a child into this world, it will be to love and cherish it, not just walk off as if I hadn’t a care in the world.” Juliet opened her mouth and nothing came out. “And I’ll tell you this, as well,” he added, thrusting his face close to hers. “If I decide to have a barney, I’ll go about getting it the old-fashioned way!”
And with that startling pronouncement, he got up and stalked out of the pub.
Chapter seventeen
Lucy
Lucy straightened the chairs in front of the two rather rickety tables that Alex had brought into the school’s old resource room and tried to pretend she hadn’t noticed her hands were shaking. It had been a week since Alex had asked her to teach an art class, a week since she’d agreed, and in precisely three minutes twenty-four Year Six children would be coming in for their first art lesson.
She was terrified.
She’d spent endless evenings on her laptop, garnering ideas from the Internet, going over lesson plans. She’d spent an enjoyable afternoon with Diana Rigby, sorting through the school’s craft supplies, joking and laughing as they discarded ancient bottles of poster paint with dried-up drips down the sides, and tried every felt-tip marker in a box of five hundred to make sure they worked.
Diana had seemed more cheerful; she’d told Lucy she was taking her two boys down to Manchester for the half-term break at the end of October, to see Andrew and look at properties.
