One Day in May - Catherine Alliott [144]
‘Not even if I’d gone out with Cassie?’ His eyes challenged mine.
I nodded. ‘Yes. Yes, that… would have driven me.’
‘Which was why Seffy was not so very displeased with creating that illusion,’ Hal observed quietly.
‘Forcing my hand,’ I said numbly.
‘Yes.’
No one spoke. Silence flooded the room. It roared in our ears as we all digested the past: how it had caught up with the future. How the past always catches up, eventually.
‘Tell us about Bosnia,’ said Hal, eventually, and that ‘us’ caught me. Yes, we were us, now. The three of us. Why should that disconcert me? I wanted to ask how often Seffy had seen him. Just that once in London? Or more regularly? Time would tell. Right now, it was my turn.
‘I went out there, to Split, not knowing I was pregnant. It didn’t occur to me, so much else had happened. But I knew I had to get away. Letty had come up to London to congratulate Dom, had come into the office and no, she hadn’t found us. An hour or so earlier she would have done, but she walked in just as I’d leaned over his desk to kiss him goodbye.’ I remembered her face as she’d stood there in her black and white dress, eight months pregnant.
‘So I went away. And because Kit was there, Bosnia seemed like a very good idea. I wanted… a difficult place. Not an easy, sunny beach. I wanted to prove to myself that I wasn’t a thoroughly unpleasant person.’ I remembered Hal’s note on my bed. I swallowed. Went on: ‘So I went to join Kit. And it was grim, of course it was grim. It was a war zone, and people were in far direr straits than me. That, at least, helped. I felt I was doing some good, even if it was minuscule. And then after a few months, I realized I was pregnant.’ I breathed out shakily. ‘And I was horrified. And if you want the whole truth, Seffy, if you want it warts and all, full disclosure, I thought – well, if I work my cotton socks off, heave heavy boxes into lorries, drive across mountains until I’m too tired to see, negotiate rocky paths in trucks with no suspension and bounce about savagely enough, well, then maybe I’ll lose it.’ I looked up. ‘I was very young. Pregnant with a married man’s baby.’
Seffy acknowledged this, I could see. He nodded.
‘But you clung on in there. You were persistent. You weren’t going anywhere.’
‘But didn’t it show? People must have known. What about Kit?’
‘I hid it for as long as I could – baggy tops, that sort of thing – and of course people didn’t know me, didn’t really know my size. But yes, it did eventually. But by then Kit had gone away. He left almost as soon as I arrived. I was in Croatia, on the coast, and he was right in the middle of the country, in Sarajevo, incarcerated in the siege. We had no contact with each other for five months. By the time we saw one another again, you’d been born.’
‘Where?’
‘In Dubrovnik.’
He waited. The big empty house waited too. Ticked on. I licked my lips. ‘The place… I went to find with you, the little house in the village, in the foothills, that was where I’d lived when I’d worked at the depot. With a family called the Mastlovas. Refugees themselves. The daughter, Ibby, and I were pregnant together.’
‘They knew you were?’
‘Oh, yes. In time. And that was our bond, mine and Ibby’s. We talked about it a lot, with our limited language. She was due just a few weeks before me. And very happy about it.’ A sudden, vivid picture of the pair of us sitting together in the dusty front yard, stomachs swollen, children playing, chickens pecking in the dirt, Ibby knitting a tiny shawl. She’d tried to make me as happy as she was about my unborn child. I remembered her passing me the needles with a laugh, telling me to knit on, then getting up to go back into the house to start supper: but my eyes had filled; one hand on my huge bump, tears spilling, a ball of creamy wool tumbling off my lap, unravelling on the ground.
I cleared my throat. ‘When Ibby went into labour they all went to the hospital – the whole family – and the car was blown up by a shell.