Quintin Jardine - On Honeymoon With Death

‘When I did find out, I thought about keeping it, as one does. But it felt like nothing inside me and, try as I might, I couldn’t summon up a single maternal urge. I was afraid, no, I knew, that if I went ahead with it, I’d never have been able to give it the love it deserved, the depth of love I had as a child. It would have been difficult for Ramon too, trying to make things work with Veronique, yet having a baby by another woman in the next village. So I kept my secret, saw someone at the hospital where I worked, and did what I had to do.

‘Hell, I didn’t want Ramon’s child. Oz, the truth is, I didn’t want anyone else’s child but yours. Even then, though you had gone out of my life for good, or so I thought. Ironic, isn’t it?’

‘You don’t have to tell me about irony, love. Just tell me this. What do you feel for the bloke now?’

‘Nothing,’ she replied at once. ‘He’s a nice enough guy, but I never loved him, or anything approaching it. Okay, so he may have got involved with me to get back at his wife, but I’d nothing to complain about there. That was nothing to what I was doing with him, from the start. I was fucking to forget in a big way!

‘What you have to realise, Oz, is that after you left, and after he died, I was here on my own, doubly hurt, feeling bitter and sorry for myself at the same time. I had no one to talk to, no shoulder to cry on. Shirley had troubles of her own at that time, and the rest of the people you and I had got to know here are all so much older than us.

‘Then Ramon turned up, as if it had been planned. I needed someone like him as a friend if nothing else. But I decided that he’d serve a more practical purpose than that. Once I’d thought about it for a while. . like an hour or two. . I decided to screw you out of my life, boy; in our bed, too, yours and mine.’

She settled into her chair, and took a sip from her coffee, not looking at me; looking at anything but me. ‘The trouble was,’ she murmured, ‘my tactic backfired on me. . and I’m not talking about getting pregnant. When I was with him, there in the dark in the apartment, being ridden in our bed, and I was faking it for him, to make him feel a bit special. . which he wasn’t, by the way. . the face I always saw was yours …’

‘Not his ?’ I interrupted with a cruel emphasis, which I regretted, in the instant I saw her flinch.

‘That couldn’t be,’ she murmured, ‘not in that way, as you know well.

‘No, even as I was banging Ramon, I couldn’t erase you. It was your breath I felt on my neck, your prick I felt inside me, not his.’ Prim ground the words out, bitterly. She sounded like a stranger. She was punishing someone, but I wasn’t sure whether it was herself or me. ‘It was dispassionate, ’ she continued, ‘but I didn’t want passion anyway. I was cold inside, frigid, but that’s how I felt. Yet always, Oz, from the moment I helped him into me until the moment he slithered out again, I saw your face.’

She sat bolt upright and glared at me. ‘And. .’ she shouted, making me start for an instant. . then she stopped abruptly, as if afraid of voicing thoughts that might destroy everything. She slumped down again in her chair, her eyes misted suddenly.

I finished it for her anyway. ‘… and that’s more than I can say? Or is it what you want me to say? That when I was with Jan, I saw you?’

‘Well, did you? Were you thinking of me while you were fucking her?’

She had gone much further than she intended. I knew that, just as I knew that she couldn’t help herself. Why couldn’t I have left her that one secret, so I could hold on to mine? But no, once the ball was rolling it couldn’t be stopped; and after all, it was good old Oz who had started it on its way down the hill. I tried to put a foot against it, all the same.

I looked at the ceiling, and whistled. ‘Christ there’s a shit-load of worms in this can. Let’s put the lid back on it, eh?’

‘We can’t,’ she retorted. ‘You took it off with a tin-opener.

‘No, you didn’t think of little Prim while you were on the job, did you. Not once, I’ll bet.’ I opened my mouth, not knowing quite what I was going to say. She cut me off. ‘No, wait. There’s another begged question, isn’t there.

‘Are you picturing her now, when you’re on top of me?’

I looked at her for a moment, blankly, afraid that this was something I couldn’t control, afraid that it really would never be the same again. I didn’t feel any anger towards her, only pain within myself; but that was nothing new.

‘No: never: not once.’ I told her. I leaned back and closed my eyes.

‘Oh I see Jan, all right. Every time we go to Anstruther, where she and I grew up, I see her in the fields, in my dad’s garden, on the harbour wall. I see her at ten years old, at sixteen, at her twenty-first. But I’ll never see her at any older than thirty. How could I?

‘I see her every time I walk into that kitchen where she died, and my blood runs cold.’

When I opened my eyes, I saw that she was staring at me. For the first time, I was showing her all of me, even the darkest corner of my heart. ‘Yet you kept it,’ she exclaimed. ‘We live there now.’

‘Sure we do. It’s just a house.

‘Prim, I’ll see that fucking kitchen wherever I am, just as I’ll see the inside of that wee room in the Royal Infirmary mortuary, where they showed me her body. So there’s no point in selling the flat for the sake of it.

‘Anyhow, that’s the truth of it. That’s as far as it goes. She’s gone and you’re alive and I don’t mix the two of you up,’ I ventured a grin. ‘Neither horizontally nor vertically: honest. You want to sell the Glasgow flat? No problem to me.’

‘I like Glasgow.’

‘But not there?’

‘Not especially.’

‘That’s it then. Done deal.’

She smiled back at me, faintly.

‘Since it’s all coming out,’ I continued, ‘has there ever been a time since then when you’ve pictured him, Davidoff, in the same way?’

It was Primavera’s turn to examine the ceiling. ‘Honestly?’ she began. With some people that’s a sure sign that what you are about to hear will be anything but; not with Prim, though. . I thought.

‘Not when I’ve been with you: anyway, you know that it wasn’t physical with him. . not completely, that’s to say. He was my lover, yet I couldn’t be his, not in the same way.

‘Still there were times when I was alone, and I tried to imagine how it might have been if he had been there after you’d gone. I tried to convince myself that I could have made him whole again, and that I could have given myself to him properly, rather than taking all the time. I could never make it a happy scene, though. He wasn’t immortal; he’d have died eventually, and the best I’d have got would have been to watch him. I think he knew that too, that’s why …’

I nodded. ‘Yes, I think he told me as much, that last time I saw him.’

We sat for a while, gathering our thoughts; gathering our breath almost.

‘One last secret,’ I said eventually, ‘and then there are no more. Remember that time I went back to Scotland to see a potential client? I slept with Jan then. We couldn’t help ourselves, but then we never could. That was when I understood how it was.’

‘I know,’ she whispered. ‘I’ve always known that.’

I frowned at her, taken aback. ‘How?’

‘Same way you guessed about Ramon and me. I know you all too well.’

I beckoned to her. She rose from her chair, put down her mug, came to me and settled into my lap. I kissed her on each eye, tasting salt on her lashes.

‘Well?’ she asked. ‘Feel any different knowing you’re married to the village bike?’