“Things happen.”

“I understand. And I would have come to understand that then if you’d allowed me the time to-”

“It wasn’t only a single discussion, Ray.”

“Yes. All right. I won’t claim it was. But I will say that I was wrong. In every discussion we had, I was wrong, and I’ve grieved over that…that wrongness, if you will, for years. Fourteen of them, to be exact. More if you include the pregnancy itself. I didn’t want it this way. I don’t want it this way.”

“And…them?” she asked. “You had your diversions.”

“What? Women? For God’s sake, Beatrice, I’m not a monk. Yes, there were women over the years. A whole bloody succession of them. Janice and Sheri and Sharon and Linda and whoever else, because I don’t remember them all. And I don’t remember them because I didn’t want them. I wanted to blot out…this.” He indicated the kitchen, the house, the people within it. “So what I’m asking you is to let me back in because this is where I belong and both of us know it.”

“Do we?”

“We do. Pete knows it as well. So do the bloody dogs.”

She swallowed. It would be so easy…But then again, it wouldn’t. The stuff of men and women together was never easy.

“Mum!” Pete was shouting from upstairs. “Where’d you put my Led Zepppelin CD?”

“Lord,” Bea murmured with a shudder. “Someone, please, get that lad an iPod at once.”

“Mum! Mummy!”

She said to Ray, “I love it when he still calls me that. He doesn’t, often. He’s becoming so grown-up.” She called back, “Don’t know, darling. Check under your bed. And while you’re at it, put any clothes you find there in the laundry. And bring old cheese sandwiches down to the rubbish. Detach the mice from them, first.”

“Very funny,” he shouted and continued to bang about. He said, “Dad! Make her tell me. Make her. She knows where it is. She hates it and she’s hidden it somewhere.”

Ray called to him, “Son, I learned long ago that I can’t make this madwoman do anything.” Then he said to her quietly, “Can I, my dear. Because if I could, you know what it would be.”

She said, “That you can’t.”

“To my eternal regret.”

She thought about his words, those he’d just said and those he’d said before. She said to him, “Not really eternal. Not exactly that.”

She heard him swallow. “Do you mean it, Beatrice?”

“I suppose I do.”

They looked at each other, the window behind them doubling the image of man and woman and the hesitant step each of them took towards the other at precisely the same moment. Pete came pounding down the stairs. He shouted, “Found it! Ready to go, Dad.”

“Are you as well?” Ray asked Bea quietly.

“For dinner?”

“And for what follows dinner.”

She drew a long breath that matched his own. “I think I am,” she told him.

Chapter Thirty

THEY SPOKE LITTLE ON THE DRIVE BACK FROM ST. AGNES. And when they did speak, it was of mundane matters. She needed to stop for petrol, so they’d take a diversion from the main road if he didn’t mind.

He didn’t mind at all. Did she want a cup of tea while they were at it? Surely there was a hotel or tea shop along the way where they might even have a proper Cornish cream tea. Scones, clotted cream, and strawberry jam.

She remembered the days when it was difficult to find clotted cream outside of Cornwall. Did he?

Yes. And proper sausages as well. Not to mention pasties. He’d always enjoyed good pasties, but they’d never had them at home, as his father had considered them…There he stopped himself. Common was the word of choice. Vulgar in its most precise usage.

She supplied it for him, using the former term. She added, And you weren’t that, were you?

He told her his brother was a narcotics user, because that was the truth of the matter. Tossed out of Oxford, his girlfriend dead with a needle in her arm, himself in and out of rehab ever since. He said he thought that he’d failed Peter altogether. When he should have been there for the boy-present, he meant, present in every possible way and not just a warm body occupying a sofa or something-he hadn’t been.

Well, these things happen, she said. And you had your own life.

As you have yours.

She didn’t say what another woman in her same position might have said at the end of the day they’d just spent together: And do you think this levels the playing field, Thomas? but he knew she was thinking it, for what else could she think upon his mentioning Peter in the midst of nothing vaguely related to the topic? In spite of that, he wanted to add more life details, piling them up so that she would be forced to see similarities instead of differences. He wanted to tell her that his brother-in-law had been murdered some ten years earlier, that he himself had been suspected of the crime and had even been carted off to gaol and held twenty-four hours for a grilling because he’d hated Edward Davenport and what Edward Davenport had wrought upon his sister, and he’d never made a secret of that. But to tell her that seemed too much a begging for something that she wasn’t going to be able to give him.

He deeply regretted the position he’d put her in because he could see how she would interpret his reaction to everything she’d revealed that day, no matter his declarations to the contrary. There was an enormous gulf between them created first by birth, second by childhood, and third by experience. That the gulf existed only in her head and not in his was something he could not explain to her. Such a declaration was facile, anyway. The gulf existed everywhere, and for her it was something so real that she would ever fail to see it was not equally real to him.

You don’t actually know me, he wanted to tell her. Who I am, the people I move among, the loves that have defined my life. But then, how could you? Newspaper stories-tabloids, magazines, whatever-taken up from the Internet reveal only the dramatic bits, the heartrending bits, the salacious bits. Those elements of life comprising the valuable and unforgettable everyday bits are not included. They lack drama even as ultimately they define who a person is.

Not that that mattered: who he was. It had ceased to matter with Helen’s death.

Or so he had told himself. Except that what he felt now indicated something different. That he should care for another’s suffering spoke of…what? Rebirth? He didn’t want to be reborn. Recovery? He wasn’t sure he wanted to recover. But a sense of who he was at the core of who he appeared to be prompted him to feel at least something of what Daidre herself was feeling: caught out in the spotlight, naked when she’d worked so hard to fashion clothing for herself.

I’d like to turn back time, he told her.

She looked at him and he saw from her expression that she thought he was talking of something else. Of course you would, she said. My God, who wouldn’t in your position?

Not about Helen, he said, although I’d give nearly anything to bring her back to me if I could.

Then, what?

This. What I’ve brought you to.

It’s part of your job, she said.

But it wasn’t his job. He wasn’t a cop. He’d walked away from that part of his life because he couldn’t bear it a moment longer, because it had taken him away from Helen, and had he known how many hours upon hours he’d be away from her and each of those hours trickling through a glass in which the remaining days of her life were contained… He would have called a halt to all of it.

No, he said. Not part of my job. That’s not why I was here.

Well, they asked you to. She asked you. I can’t think you did it all on your own. Came up with the plan, whatever.

I did. He said it heavily and he regretted having to say it at all. But I want you to know that if I’d known…because, you see, you don’t seem like…