Page 75 of A Good Heart is Hard to Find
The slap echoed like the crack of doom around the graveyard, but fortunately none of the residents took it as a wake-up call.
I stared up at him, horrified and suddenlyafraid, because according to all the films I’ve ever seen he should either chastise me in a humiliating and totally unforgivable manner or drag me into his arms and kiss me senseless. Or one followed by the other.
Dante can’t have seen the same films, because he just stood there looking naturally grim and said levelly: ‘So I’ll take that as a resounding no, then, shall I?’
‘You can take it anyway you like!’ I snapped, although I noticed some innate survival instinct had caused me to put more space between us.
He shrugged. ‘You can’t blame me for wondering. Rosetta tells me you’re so desperate to get pregnant you’re even thinking about using your friend Jason to father it, so I thought perhaps your lover was past it and you might be distributing your favours generously in the hopesone of us might do the trick for you?’
‘No he isn’t – I’m not – I didn’t!’ I cried hotly and incoherently. ‘That was all a mistake, and I’m certainly not going to sleep with Jason even if – and Max isn’t—’
I stopped, and glared at him: ‘Why am I even tryingto explain things to you? It’s got absolutely nothing to do with you!’
‘It is if that was why you wantedme? Don’t think I’m complaining,only if you are using me for your own ends I’d like to know about it.’
He was angry: coldly and furiously angry, I could see that now. I took another step or two back and nearly fell over a gravestone.
‘No, I wasn’t! I didn’t want you, it was just the drink and the nightmare—’
‘If it didn’t work, perhaps you’d like me to try again? Only you might like to remember my track record: a wife leftto cope with pregnancy on her own, dead by the time I got back.’
‘I wouldn’t touch you again if you were the last—’ I began, then broke off as what he’d just said sank in and I realized at last that he was far, far angrier with himself than with me. I stared at what I could see of his hawk profile, now half-turned away.
‘But it wasn’tyourfault that you got kidnapped, was it?’ I said. ‘Andyou weren’t there when she died, so that isn’t your fault either.’
‘She hated being left alone when I was off on assignments, and she hated being pregnant: she only did it because she thought it would keep me at home.’
‘But it didn’t, did it?’ I said. ‘That was your job, surely she knew that?’
‘I suppose I expected my life to go on pretty much the same after I was married as before, but I mighthave found work nearer home once there was a baby on the way, if I hadn’t found out she’d had an affair last time I was away. I told her I needed time to think about things and left her alone and pregnant in London.’
‘Then you got taken hostage and couldn’t get back,’ I prompted, since he seemed to have come to a brooding halt.
‘Emma was complaining of headaches when I left, and it turns outshe had an aneurysm, a weak blood vessel in her brain that ruptured. They couldn’t save her, but if I’d been home and made her see a doctor perhaps something might have been done. Her mother was there, and all she did was take her to some faith healer!’
‘But you couldn’t have guessed what would happen when you left, and perhaps she couldn’t have been saved anyway?’
‘Who knows?’ he sighed. ‘AfterPaul was killed I thought things couldn’t get any worse, and then I was told Emma and the baby had died months before.’
‘Well, I still don’t see why you need to feel guilty about any of it, and it’s really nothing to do with me, after all: I mean, it’s not like you’ve just confessed to galloping syphilis, is it?’
‘No,’ he said gravely. ‘I don’t have anything like that.’
‘And I don’t know whyyou’re telling me anyway, because I wouldn’t have touched you with a barge pole the other night if you hadn’t made me hideously drunk with that brandy, let alone want you to father my child! Getting pregnant was the last thing on my mind.’
‘Was it? How about your subconscious? What’s the scenario in there, Cass? Is the biological clock ticking, your lover won’t or can’t father a child, and noone else is in the offing except poor old Jason?’
Summed it up in a nutshell, the bastard.
‘I love Jason like a brother,’ I said with dignity. ‘I might desperately want a baby, but logically I don’t need one, it’s just Nature trying to con me into reproduction. I’m going to fight the urge and get a nice dog instead.’
He laughed at me, and I so nearly hit him again that I had to step right awayout of arm’s reach.
‘Haven’t you got a faithful old dog already? One called Max?’
‘I’ve given him up,’ I said, like he was a bad habit. (Which, come to think of it, he was.) ‘His wife has started to come between us.’
‘I thought his wife was dead?’
