‘Kenneth, I can’t… I’m… I’m married.’ Her voice wobbled slightly, betraying her so much that her face flushed and she couldn’t look at him. Would he guess from her voice how much she longed to put aside the burden she was carrying and to be cosseted and cherished for a little while?
‘I’d never let a man support me—I like my independence,’ one of the younger nurses had said robustly earlier, but what she had wasn’t independence, Sally recognised; what she had was in its way just as restrictive and imprisoning as being dependent on someone else. Being the one who had to go out to work, who had to pay the bills did not confer freedom and independence, she was beginning to realise—instead it brought worry and responsibility.
‘And you and I have already established that we are friends and that you have a right to your own life. There can’t be any objection to friends spending a few hours in one another’s company, Sally… I’m sure that husband of yours spends time with his friends.’
‘Yes, but they’re… they’re men…’
‘So am I,’ Kenneth pointed out, laughing.
Sally laughed too—she couldn’t help it, and, after all, wasn’t Kenneth right? She did deserve something of her own, some reward for all the hard work she was doing… some pleasure of her own.
‘I… I don’t think Joel would like it…’ she appeased. ‘He…’
/> ‘Tell him you’re working another double shift,’ Kenneth suggested.
Sally stared at him. His words had stripped what lay between them of any pretence. Her mouth had gone dry. She touched her tongue-tip to her lips nervously, panic stirring inside her.
‘Kenneth, I can’t,’ she protested. The clock on the dashboard showed that it was gone nine. She had been with him nearly an hour and yet it felt like only five minutes… less.
‘Please take me home, Kenneth… the children… they’ll be wondering where I am.’
‘The children?’ Kenneth frowned. ‘I thought they were teenagers.’
‘They are, but…’
‘Then they’re almost adult… almost independent,’ he told her lightly. ‘Stop worrying about them and worry about yourself instead.’
‘Don’t you worry about your children?’ Sally asked him. Beneath the lightness of his voice she had sensed a hardness that disturbed her slightly. ‘Don’t you miss them?’
‘I hardly know them to miss them,’ he told her. ‘They look on my wife’s second husband as their father, not me, and, as I told you, they are already adults.’
As he heard the small distressed sound she made Kenneth acknowledged her naïvete. He did not miss his children simply because he had never really formed any kind of attachment to them, had never really wanted either of them in the first place. His concern for what others would think and the social mores of the times had been what had led him into marrying in the first place. A young man in his position, striving to establish himself in the academic world could not abandon his pregnant girlfriend, especially when that girlfriend was as strong-willed and verbal as Rebecca.
In his haste to cover up his… their error he had not thought as far ahead as the effect the child they had conceived might have on his life; had even convinced himself that as a young lecturer the gravity that a wife and family would add to his life would only make his older and more senior colleagues view him with greater approval.
The actual reality of what having a child, a baby in his life meant had come as an unpleasant shock.
The small house he had bought—and furnished—with an eye to the kind of effect it would create both on his colleagues and his students was totally unsuitable for a baby, so Rebecca had claimed.
The dark, stern, polished wood furniture, the plain white walls, the bare polished floorboards—Rebecca had wanted all of them banished and replaced with hideously jarring modern colours and materials which he had instantly loathed.
The sheer havoc the small screaming bundle of humanity that was his son had brought into the previous calm of his well-ordered life had brought him to the point where he could scarcely bring himself even to look at the child. The noise, the mess, the smell… He gave a small shudder, which Sally totally misinterpreted.
‘That must have been so hard for you,’ she commented sympathetically. ‘Knowing that another man was bringing up your children…’
There was no point in telling her the truth. After all, how could his dislike of small children affect them? That was another plus point about Sally. She was no foolish young girl who would be irrationally tempted to spoil the perfect harmony of their relationship, their closeness, with children.
He made a small non-committal sound while Sally repeated anxiously, ‘I really must go home, Kenneth. Joel…’
‘It’s all right, we’re on our way,’ Kenneth soothed her, turning the car round and then pausing to look into her face and watch as the soft colour crept over her skin at his scrutiny of her.
‘I’m not going to let you go, Sally,’ he told her softly. ‘You’re far too important to me. I respect your loyalty towards your husband but we both know that he just isn’t worthy of you. If he were, you wouldn’t be here with me like this.’
Sally shivered slightly as she listened to him. She wanted to deny what he was saying but she couldn’t. This time she had spent with him was such a solace to her after all she was enduring at home, a bright, warm patch of clear blue in an otherwise dull, heavy grey sky. Kenneth understood her and what she was feeling in a way that Joel didn’t… And didn’t want to?
‘I’ll ring you,’ Kenneth told her as he turned the car into the main road leading to her home.
Sally panicked. ‘No… you mustn’t do that,’ she protested.