‘Did you really?’ said Luc.
‘For about five seconds.’ As we bowled along the motorway, in the warm, womb-like interior of the old Citroën, I gave a sudden shudder. ‘But even though it was a very brief thought, to have had that thought at all makes me feel physically sick now when I look at Carl.’
‘Yes, doesn’t it just?’ Luc said with feeling. He glanced sideways at me. ‘Esther had exactly the same idea when she found out she was expecting Emma. Esther was very young; she’d only just graduated and there was so much she wanted to do, so much she wasgoingto do. But this wasEmmawe were thinking of aborting! God! It revoltsme now to think of the world without Emma.’
‘I know, it’s shocking. But do you know, I once read somewhere that Thomas Hardy’s mother considered getting rid of him? I mean, can you imagine the world without Thomas Hardy?’
Luc snorted. ‘Actually, I can imagine that quite well.’
‘Oh, don’t you like him?’
‘Not really, but that’s purely on account of being obliged to studyJude the Obscurein the sixth form at school. It still haunts me.’
‘It is a bit depressing.’
‘Depressing? It’s slit-your-throat stuff.’
‘I don’t think Hardy was a very happy man.’
‘Neither was I once I’d readJude the Obscure.’
I laughed.
‘But go on,’ prompted Luc. ‘What happened next with you and Giancarlo?’
‘Once we’d decided to keep the baby, I moved in with him a month or so later. He owns a flat in London for when he’s on business there, so I gave up my job and moved in there with him.’
‘Were you planning on getting married?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘I’m not quite sure. There’s stuff I can’t remember clearly from that time. I know I wasn’t that bothered about getting married, but I also know I fully expected that we’d stay together. I remember that, just as I remember how it all began and how it all finished. I’ll remember how it finished forever.’
It was an evening in late February, a bitterly cold, miserable evening, the sort of evening when everything seems so dark and dreary you feel like going to bed at sixo’clock. I was into my eighth month of pregnancy by then and tired all the time. For some days, the baby seemed to have been lying awkwardly, which meant I could not get comfortable at night. Giancarlo was away on business. He was away on business a good deal, every week shuttling between Milan and London as well as on stopover trips to places like Manchester or Bristol. Exhausted and feeling a bit sorry for myself, I had decided to turn in early, fixing my mind on the next day when he would be home. And that’s when the entry phone buzzed.
At first I thought the woman standing on our doorstep was mad – a madwoman. Then I saw that, not much older than me, she simply looked tired and depressed as well. And she looked something else; she looked heavily pregnant – like me. She started to tell me something, but it was difficult to understand what she was saying. She was Italian, I realised straightaway, and her English was not good. Quite quickly, however, I did understand. She was telling me she was carrying Giancarlo’s child. She was telling me she was his wife.
‘Oh my Christ,’ murmured Luc at this point.
‘Yeah,’ I breathed and paused for a long moment. ‘Well, that was it,’ I said at length. ‘End of.’
‘What did he say when you taxed him with it?’
‘He tried to explain, to mitigate it. He said he had never loved his wife, that his marriage had been a mistake from the outset, that he hadn’t wanted her to get pregnant. He said he loved me.’ I shrugged. ‘And in a way I believed him. But, you see, it wasn’t that. It sounds odd but it wasn’t that.’
‘It was the fact that he hadn’t told you.’
‘Yes.’
We drove on through the dark for a while without speaking. Then Luc broke the silence.
‘He can’t have known you very well.’
‘No, he can’t have, can he? Even though we’d been together for nearly nine months. And that was the whole point. Oh, I know they say if a man can lie to his wife he can lie to you, his lover, and yes, he’d lied to me all along or lied by omission, I suppose I should say. But what ultimately destroyed us was not that. It was his inability to know me, to know in any sense how I would feel about his… hisnot telling me. I can’t explain it very well, but ultimately that was what finished us. I knew I’d never feel the same way about Giancarlo again. I couldn’t stay with him after that. It was all over – without any hint of a fat lady singing.’
‘What did you do?’
‘Went home to Mum and Dad. I’d given up my flat, my job, I was on the point of having a baby. It was the only thing I could do.’
‘Thank God you had them.’
