Pete took a step backward. He chewed thoughtfully and watched her.

She said, “Answer me at once. Why aren’t you at school?”

“Half day,” he said.

“What?”

“Half day today, Mum. There’s a conference or something. I don’t know what. I mean, I knew but I forgot. Teachers’re doing something. I told you about it. I brought home the announcement.”

She remembered. He had done, several weeks ago. It was on the calendar. She’d even told Ray about it and they’d discussed who’d fetch Pete when the shortened day ended. Still, she wasn’t ready to apologise for the suspicious leap she’d made. There remained fertile ground here, and she intended to till it. She said, “So. How’d you get home?”

“Dad.”

“Your father? And where is he now? What’re you doing here alone?” She was quite determined. There had to be something.

Pete was too astute for her, his parents’ own son, possessing their ability to cut to the quick. He said, “Why’re you always so mad at him?”

That wasn’t a question Bea was ready to answer. She said, “Go say hello to your animals. They’re wanting you. We’ll talk afterwards.”

“Mum…”

“You heard me.”

He shook his head: a teenager’s black movement that signaled his disgust. But he did as she told him although the fact that he went outside without a jacket telegraphed his intention of not remaining long with the Labradors. She had little enough time, so she ran up the stairs.

The house had two bedrooms only. She made for Ray’s. She did not want her son exposed to photos of Ray’s lovers posed suggestively, with backs arched and pert breasts thrust skyward. Nor did she want him looking at their discarded bras and flimsy knickers. If there were coy notes and gushing letters lying about, she intended to find them. If they’d left smears of lipstick playfully on mirrors, she would wipe them off. She intended to absent the premises of whatever souvenirs his father kept of his conquests, and she told herself it was in Pete’s best interests that she do so.

But there was nothing. Ray had swept the place clean in advance of Pete’s arrival. The only evidence of anything was evidence of his fatherhood: on the chest of drawers Pete’s most recent school photo in a wooden frame, next to it their daughter, Ginny, and her daughter, Audra, and next to that a photo from Christmas: Ray, Bea, their two children, Ginny’s husband with Audra in his arms. Playing happy extended family, which they were not. Ray’s left arm around her, his right arm around Pete.

She told herself it was better than displaying a photo of Brittany or Courtney or Stacy or Katie or whoever she was, coyly smiling on a summer holiday, bikini clad and tan of skin. She checked the clothes cupboard but found nothing there either and she went on to slide her hands under the pillows on the bed in a search for a few bits of lace that would go for night clothes. Nothing. All to the good. At least the man was being discreet. She turned to head for the bathroom. Pete was watching from the doorway.

He was no longer chewing. The bag of his carefully prepared guaranteed-to-be-nutritious snack dangled from his fingers. His jaw looked slack.

She said hastily, “Why aren’t you with the dogs? I swear to you, Pete, if you insist on having pets and you don’t take care of them-”

“Why d’you hate him so much?”

The question stopped her dead this time. As did his face, which bore an expression of pained knowledge that no fourteen-year-old boy should carry round on his shoulders. She felt deflated. “I don’t hate him, Pete.”

“Yeah, you do. You’ve always. And see, I don’t get it, Mum, ’cause he’s a decent bloke, seems to me. He loves you, as well. I can see that, and I don’t get why you can’t love him back.”

“It isn’t as easy as that. There are things…” She didn’t want to hurt him, and the truth would do that. It would come at this point of his delicate dawning manhood and it would tear it to pieces. She began to move past him, to get to the bathroom, to complete her futile investigation, but he was in the doorway and he didn’t move. It came to her how much he’d grown over the last year. He was taller than she now although still not as strong.

“What’d he do?” Pete asked. “’Cause he must’ve done something ’cause that’s why people get divorced, eh?”

“People get divorced for lots of reasons.”

“Did he have a girlfriend or something?”

“Pete, that’s really none-”

“’Cause he doesn’t have one now, if that’s what you’re looking for. And it must be ’cause it can’t be drugs or something like that ’cause you know he doesn’t take drugs. But is that it? Did he? Or drink or something ’cause there’s this bloke at school called Barry and his parents are splitting up ’cause his dad broke the front window in a rage and he was drunk.” Pete watched her. He seemed to be trying to read her face. “It was double glazed,” he added.

She smiled in spite of herself. She put her arms around him and pulled him to her. “Double glazed,” she said. “Now that’s a reason to throw a husband out.” But he jerked away from her.

“Don’t make fun.” He went to his room.

She said, “Pete, come on…”

He didn’t reply. He shut the door instead, leaving her looking at its blank panels. She could have followed, but she went to the bathroom. She couldn’t stop herself from a final check even though she knew how ridiculous she was being. Here, like everywhere else, there was nothing. Just Ray’s shaving gear, damp towels hanging lopsided from a towel bar, across the tub a sky blue shower curtain drawn to dry. And in the tub, nothing other than a soap tray.

A clothes hamper stood beneath the bathroom window, but she didn’t go through this. Instead, she sat on the toilet seat and looked down at the floor. This was not to study the tiles for evidence of sexual malefaction, but to force herself to stop and consider all the ramifications.

She’d done that more than fourteen years ago: She’d considered the ramifications. What it would mean to stay with a man and have his child when day after day what he so plainly told her he wanted was a termination to the pregnancy. An abortion, Beatrice. Do it now. We’ve raised our child. Ginny’s grown and left the nest and this is our time now. We don’t want this pregnancy. It was a stupid miscalculation and we don’t have to pay for it the rest of our lives.

They had plans, he told her. They had great and wonderful things to do now Ginny was grown. Places to go, sights to see. I don’t want this kid. Neither do you. One visit to the clinic and it’s behind us.

It was odd to think now how one’s perception of a person could change in an instant. But that was what had happened. She’d looked at Ray with eyes newly born. The passion of the man, and all of it about killing off their own child. She’d just gone cold, right to her core.

While he’d spoken the truth-she had given up on the idea of a second pregnancy when it hadn’t happened within a reasonable period after Ginny’s birth and with Ginny at university and engaged to be married, she and Ray were free to plan a future-it wasn’t a truth carved in stone for her. It never had been. It had, instead, been a quiet acceptance that had bloomed from initial disappointment. But it wasn’t meant to be interpreted as the end all and be all of her life. She couldn’t come to terms with how Ray had arrived at the belief that it was.

So she’d told him to leave. She’d done it not to shake him and not to make him see things her way. She’d done it because she’d believed she’d never really known him at all. How could she have known him if what he wanted was to end a life they had created from their love for each other?

But to tell Pete all this? To let him know his father had wished to deny him his place on earth? She couldn’t do that. Let Ray tell him if he wished.