‘The boy…’ The face he turned towards her was white now… not with exhaustion but with a bitter savage fury, the expression in his eyes one that made her shiver; one which she thought would always haunt her.
‘The boys, not the boy,’ he corrected her thickly. ‘Sharon told me that she isn’t sure just who is the father. And of course the stupid bitch has left it far, far too late to have an abortion. Mum can look after it, she told me. Either that or the council can rehouse her.’
Not knowing what to say, Zoe reached out and touched his arm gently.
‘It might all work out for the best,’ she began unsteadily, only to recoil in shock as Ben threw her hand off his arm so violently that she fell back against the settee. His eyes blazed fury and, even worse, contempt.
‘What the hell do you know about it?’ he demanded savagely. ‘It might all work out for the best.’ She winced at the hatred in his voice as he mimicked her voice, her accent. ‘How? Like it did for my mother, with three kids under five by the time she was twenty, an unfaithful husband… no income, no home, and no hope of ever doing anything but watching your life slide away from you, with no hope of ever getting out of the mess you’re in; with no hope of anything, just the sickening reality of snotty-nosed kids dressed in other kids’ cast-offs, and perhaps the odd few days of sex from some man you might happen to meet in the pub, who if you’re lucky won’t leave you with another unwanted and unsupported brat on your hands when he walks out on you. Is that what you call things working out for the best?’
‘She… she could have the baby adopted,’ Zoe suggested shakily, trying not to let him see how much his reaction had hurt her, how much it had excluded her… how much the starkness of the picture he had drawn for her contrasted with the home she had just left, the life and world her parents inhabited.
‘She could, but she won’t… girls like “our Sharon” don’t. They haven’t got that much sense… they love them, you see, the poor bitches, or at least they believe they do, and they can’t even see that by loving them they’re destroying them, submitting them to empty, wasted, dragged-out lifetimes of sterility and apathy. If they really loved them, they’d have them aborted.’
The ugliness of his comment took Zoe’s breath away.
‘And if they really loved themselves they wouldn’t get pregnant in the first place. And who’s to blame for that, do you think, Zoe…? The stupid little tarts for whom sex is about the only pleasure, the only excitement they’ll ever have in their lives, if in fact it does give them any pleasure, or the middle-class liberals like your parents whose liberality took away the only things that used to protect them.
‘Before your parents and their destruction of “the rules”, girls like Sharon got married when they fell pregnant, or at least most of them did.’
‘And was that any better for them?’ Zoe asked him in a low voice. ‘To be married at sixteen to someone they probably didn’t love and to have to stay in that marriage for the rest of their lives? Were they really any happier?’
‘Happier?’ He looked at her in disgust. ‘People like us, like me… like Sharon… like my mother… all my family… happiness doesn’t come into our lives, Zoe. It isn’t an option or a choice. No, Sharon might not have been “happier”, but she’d have been a darn sight better off. She’d have a husband to support her, her child would have had a father… her children would all have had the same father. She wouldn’t have been living alone in some grotty tower block isolated from her friends and family, driven to drink or depression, to drugs and sex… driven perhaps to abusing her children as much as she would be abusing herself.’
‘It doesn’t have to be like that,’ Zoe cried out, horrified.
‘No, it doesn’t have to be,’ Ben agreed. ‘Maybe some fairy prince will ride up on a white charger and sweep her off to happy-ever-after land. Is that what you think?’ he asked her in disgust.
There was nothing Zoe could say, no comfort she could offer.
‘Do you know that when she was eleven Sharon was the top of her class… a clever girl, her teachers said, capable of going far, doing things; and then came puberty and suddenly Sharon wasn’t clever any longer. Clever girls don’t get pregnant and ruin their lives and the lives of everyone around them with unwanted babies. Only stupid, selfish girls do that.’
‘And boys,’ Zoe pointed out huskily to him without looking at him. ‘It does take two, you know.’
He gave her a thin, bitter smile. ‘She was supposed to be on the Pill, remember…’ He got up abruptly, turning his back on her. ‘I’m tired. I’m going to bed.’
As he walked into the bathroom, Zoe realised that she hadn’t shown him the letter. She picked it up and stared at it and then slowly put it down again.
Perhaps tomorrow, when he felt a bit better. Tomorrow, when she had had time to forget how suddenly and frighteningly he had become a stranger to her, a stranger who it seemed almost hated and despised her.
But Ben didn’t hate her and he didn’t despise her. He loved her. She knew that.
Right now he was upset and shocked. She looked at the letter again and sighed quietly, blinking back the tears threatening to fill her eyes.
ELEANOR frowned as she thought she heard a sound coming from the boys’ room. She put down the text she had been studying and got out of bed, reaching for her robe. The Vivaldi tape she had been playing in the background as she worked was not on loud enough to have disturbed her sons, and, still concerned about Tom’s bout of sickness, she hurried into their room.
Both of them were fast asleep and when she leaned over to place the back of her hand against Tom’s forehead it felt reassuringly cool.
Straightening up, she watched them both for several seconds.
Both of them had been much wanted and dearly loved, by her at least. Allan, her first husband, had not really snared her joy in their conception, and had certainly never wanted her to have a second child. He had deeply resented their claims on her time and attention, half wanting to be mothered himself.
Things were very different now, and he was a far more responsible and participating father to his daughter with his second wife than he had ever been with his sons. But then, when they had married, he had been very young, and very ambitious, and with hindsight, and the calm detachment that came from recognising that both of them in their separate ways had been victims of their totally different perceptions of what marriage should be, she acknowledged that he had perhaps been justified in claiming that she had put the children before him, had loved them more intensely and more exclusively than she had him.
He still kept in touch with them, and she had been scrupulous about ensuring that they saw as much of him as was feasible. His new wife, Karen, was a maternal woman who made it clear she had enough love for everyone, and she and Eleanor got on very well, surprisingly. In fact, it had been Karen’s idea that Tom and Gavin come to them during the day in the school holidays now that she was at home with her young baby, instead of rather impersonal childcare arrangements. Eleanor had even begun to pride herself a little on the way things had worked out, on the way both her sons had adapted so easily and contentedly to her marriage to Marcus.
But today, with his one brief sentence of accusation and unhappiness, Tom had totally destroyed that complacency.
‘You don’t want to be with us any more,’ he had told her. ‘You just want to be with him.’
And even allowing for a certain amount of childish exaggeration; even allowing for the fact that he had been feeling extremely sorry for himself, and possibly subconsciously