‘Ill? I’m not ill.’
‘I know about this too. Your refusal to see a doctor. She’s been begging you to see—’
‘Oh, for heaven’s—’ He struggled to get to the end of the sentence; the bright light in his head was becoming unbearable … but he couldn’t stop her. Not if she knew something he needed to know. He tried to speak calmly. ‘I did see someone. About the insomnia.’
‘Yes, but you didn’t tell him the truth, did you? You just said you had “the odd bad night”. You said—’
‘How the hell do you know all this?’
‘Because your wife had no one else to turn to. She didn’t dare speak to her parents. She knew how much you resented them for—’
‘Resented them?’
‘—for the help they had given you.’ His puzzled expression prompted her to be more explicit. ‘Resented the money they had given you.’
‘Look,’ he said, his voice firm and steady. ‘All I want is to know what information you have. You need to tell me that. Now.’
She paused, looking out over the river unwinding ahead, gazing at the top of Christ Church Cathedral in the middle distance. ‘All right,’ she began. ‘The important thing is Harry. Florence wanted to protect him.’
‘From what?’
‘From you, of course. Initially.’
He was about to object, but the throbbing in his head was getting too insistent. It was easier to be quiet, to walk and to listen.
‘She said she had almost got used to you being angry all the time. After the—’ she glanced at his shoulder. ‘After the, um, accident. But once Harry was born, it began to worry her. The truth is, she was frightened.’
‘Of me,’ he said quietly.
‘Yes, James. Of you. Of what you might do. She was worried that you might hurt Harry.’
At this, his heart seemed to cave in, a physical sensation, felt in the muscle and blood. He could say nothing.
‘You once left him by a boiling kettle. Do you remember that, James?’
He shook his head, unsure.
‘Well, you did. You’d left the boy on his own, in the kitchen. You’d put the kettle—’
‘That’s enough,’ he said softly.
‘That’s what I said,’ Rosemary said, sardonically. ‘I told her it was enough. That she should leave you. Several times. Especially after you hit her.’
‘After I did what?’
‘Oh, don’t pretend you don’t remember that. You’d had an almighty row. And you slapped her, clean across the face. Her cheek was stinging. I had to soothe it with cool flannels all evening.’
‘That’s a damned lie!’
‘Don’t shout at me. All I am—’
‘It’s a damned lie and you know it.’ He felt giddy, as if he were about to topple over. It could not be true. It could not. Could it?
Everything else she had said had sounded some distant bell in his head, a distant but undeniable ring of truth. But not this. Yes, he had a temper, that was a fact. But the target of his rages was always himself. It was his own wrist that had been slashed when he punched his fist clean through the French windows onto the garden, his own head that had been bruised when he had rammed it into a bookcase in an eruption of fury. But he had never harmed his wife. No real man would ever do such a thing. His voice quieter now, he said once again, ‘It’s a lie.’
‘So you keep saying. But how can you be sure? Your memory seems a touch unreliable in my book.’
‘And you say she came to you?’
‘Straight away.’ The pride with which this was declared sent the rage surging through him once more, rising like mercury in a thermometer.
‘But she’d never do it. Leave you, I mean. Absurdly loyal, Florence. I hope you appreciate that.’
‘But she’s left me now.’
‘For Harry’s sake. She feared for his safety with you in the house. That was at first. Florence no longer sees you as the biggest threat to her son. Not directly anyway.’
James spoke quietly, more to himself than to her: ‘It’s the war.’
‘Yes. She’s been getting gradually more terrified since the day the war started. The sirens, the air-raid shelters, the gas-masks, that thing you’ve just built in the garden—’
‘The Anderson shelter.’
‘All of it scares her. She feels like it’s getting closer.’
‘They bombed Cardiff last week.’
‘Exactly. She was convinced Oxford would be next.’
A dozen times Florence had expounded her belief that Oxford was a natural target, not only because of the car plant at Cowley now converted into a munitions factory but also because of the university. ‘London is the nerve centre, but Oxford is the brain,’ she had said.
Rosemary was still talking. ‘I explained to her the statistical probabilities. As you know, mathematics is my subject: my specialism is statistics. Actually, you almost certainly don’t know: typical man, you probably think I’m a secretary. Anyway, I explained the probabilities, but it was no use. She kept torturing herself with the thought. “What if, Rosemary? What if?”’
The haze was beginning to clear in James’s mind. It was so obvious he couldn’t fathom how he had been unable to see it, why he had not thought of it till now. Still, if even half of what this woman was telling him were true, there was so much he was not seeing, so much he was forgetting, so much he had – what was the phrase in that book Florence had requested at the library? – blacked out.
Rosemary had not stopped: ‘It made no sense, of course. If I told her once I told her a hundred times, Oxford is not an evacuation area. Children are being sent to Oxford, aren’t they? We were entertaining some of them just yesterday, lively little things from London. A few of the girls from Somerville went out to cheer them up …’
But James was not listening. He was remembering the conversation – the row – he and Florence had had … when was it? A month ago? They had just come home from an evening at the Playhouse, watching a top-drawer play: the West End theatre, like so much else of London, had sought sanctuary in Oxford.
‘I won’t hear of it,’ he had said.
‘What do you mean, you won’t hear of it. You do not have sole authority over our child. We are both Harry’s parents.’
He had tried to get out of the kitchen, walking past her as if to signal the discussion was over. But Florence had stuck her arm out across the doorway, barring his way. ‘You need to listen to me,’ she had said in a low voice, her teeth gritted. ‘I will do whatever it takes to protect him.’
‘It’s a surrender, Florence. You’re asking me to surrender to the fascists.’
‘“Surrender”? We’re not talking about a bridge or a railway line, James. This is not some strategically important piece of land. This is a child.’
‘If people like us run away, Hitler will have won, won’t he?’
‘Don’t ask a two-year-old boy to do your fighting for you, James.’
‘What did you say?’
‘You heard what I said. You want