Believing the Lie - Elizabeth George [51]
He did as well. He said, “Is that what you actually think?”
“How can I think otherwise when this”— a gesture towards the carpet, the fire, where they had lain, what they had done— “becomes only about a baby? Your little swimmers, as you call them, and how they are shaped and how they can move and how I should position myself afterwards to make certain they do what you want them to do. How am I meant to feel, faced with this and with your insistence that I visit some doctor and spread my legs and have instruments thrust into me and whatever else?”
Her voice had risen. She bent, picked up her discarded clothing, began to dress. “All this day,” she said, “I miss you so much. I worry when I phone you and you do not answer. I long for you because it’s you, while— ”
“It’s the same for me. You know that.”
“I know nothing.”
She left him. The kitchen was at the other end of the house, down the long panelled corridor, through the main hall and the dining room. She went there and began their dinner. It was far too early for this, but she wanted something to do with her hands. She was mindlessly chopping onions when Nicholas joined her again. He too was dressed, but he’d buttoned his shirt incorrectly and it hung drunkenly from his shoulders in a way that made her soften towards him. He was, she knew, a lost boy without her, just as she would be lost without him.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “The last way on earth I want you to feel is like a baby machine. Or whatever.”
“I am trying,” she said. “The vitamins. All the pills. My temperature. My diet. Whatever will make it easier, possible…” She stopped because she’d begun to weep. She used her arm to brush the tears from her face.
“Allie…” He came to her, turned her to him.
They stood together, in each other’s arms. One minute, two. At last he said, “Just to hold you like this, I feel a kind of awe. D’you know how lucky a man I am? I know it, Allie.”
She nodded and he released her. He cupped her face in his hands and studied it in that way of his that always made her feel that the thousand truths she had hidden from him were there, openly displayed, and he was reading them all. But he made no mention of anything but, “Forgive me?”
“Of course. And I will do as you ask. Just not quite yet. Please, Nicky. Let us wait a few more months.”
He nodded. Then he grinned and said, “Meantime, we’ll give those swimmers some exercise, all right? Firm up their sense of direction?”
She smiled in turn. “We can do that.”
“Good. Now tell me why you’re chopping a mountain of onions, because my eyes are stinging like the devil. What’re you making?”
She observed the pile she’d created. “I have no idea.”
He chuckled. “Mad woman.” He walked over to the day’s post, which was in a neat pile near the kitchen phone. He said, “Did you speak with that bloke about restoring the stained glass?”
She had, she told him. He thought he could match the glass in the other windows in the main hall, but it would take some doing. He could either take the original out for a while or he could bring glass to them, but in either case, it would be expensive. Did Nicky want…?
Their conversation found its way back to normalcy: compromise reached and tension gone. They went on to other matters that concerned them till Nicholas found the phone message that Alatea had forgotten she’d written, so intent had she been on getting past babies, doctors in Lancaster, and what Nicholas wanted and expected of her.
“What’s this, then?” he said, holding up the paper she’d torn from a notebook earlier in the day.
“Ah. You’ve had a call. A television film is being made and a woman phoned. She would like to speak with you about it. She is a… I think she called it a scout of research, something like that.”
He frowned. “What kind of film?”
“Alternative treatments for drug addiction. This is a documentary, she said. Interviews with addicts and doctors and social workers. The involvement of a film crew