She raised a hand to her hair and tried to refasten a wisp. Between them were two overnight bags, both remarkably small. She had packed hastily, without much thought. Her case contained a change of underwear and stockings, a different blouse. They entered London proper and began to pass through pleasant residential areas. The taxi pulled abruptly to a curb.
Through the rain, Kathryn saw a street of white stucco town houses, an immaculate row of almost identical facades. The houses rose four stories tall and were graced with bow-front windows. Delicate wrought-iron fences bordered the sidewalk, and each house bore a lantern hanging from a columned portico. Only the front doors spoke of individuality. Some were thick, wood-paneled doors; some had small glass panes; others were painted dark green. The houses closest to the taxi were identified with discreet numbers on small brass plaques. The house they’d parked in front of read Number 21.
Kathryn sat back on the upholstered seat.
“Not yet,” she said.
“Do you want me to go instead?” he asked.
She thought about the offer and smoothed her skirt. Like the steady hum of the engine, the driver seemed unperturbed by the wait.
“What would you do when you got there?” she asked.
He shook his head, as if to say he hadn’t given it any thought. Or that he would do what she asked him to.
“What will you do?” he asked.
Kathryn felt light-headed and thought she could no longer predict with any accuracy the actions and reactions of her body. The difficulty with not thinking about the immediate future, she decided, was that it left one unprepared for its reality.
The drive to the hotel was brief, the block on which it stood eerily like the one they had just left. The hotel had taken over seven or eight town houses and had a discreet entrance. The upper floors were ringed with pristine white balustrades.
Robert had booked two adjacent, but not adjoining, rooms. He carried her bag to the door.
“We’ll have lunch downstairs in the pub,” he said. He checked his watch. “At noon?”
“Sure,” she answered.
“You don’t have to do this,” he said.
Her room was small but perfectly adequate. The walls bore an innocuous wallpaper, brass wall sconces. There was a desk and a bed, a trouser press, an alcove where one could make a cup of coffee or tea.
She showered, changed her underwear and blouse, and brushed her hair. Looking into the mirror, she put her hands to her face. She could no longer deny that something was waiting for her here in this city.
Sometimes, she thought, courage was simply a matter of putting one foot in front of another and not stopping.
The pub was dark, with wood-paneled alcoves. Irish music played from overhead. Prints of horses, matted in dark green and framed in gold, were hung upon the walls. A half-dozen men sat at the bar drinking large glasses of beer, and pairs of businessmen were seated in the alcoves. She spotted Robert across the room, comfortably slouched against a banquette cushion. He looked contented, perhaps more than contented. He waved to her.
She crossed the room and lay her purse on the banquette.
“I took the liberty of ordering you a drink,” he said.
She glanced at the ale. In front of Robert was a glass of mineral water. She slipped in next to him. Her feet brushed his, but it seemed rude to pull away.
“What happened to you?” she asked suddenly, gesturing toward the water. “I mean with the drinking? I’m sorry. Do you mind my asking?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “My parents were both professors at a college in Toronto. Every evening, they held court for the students — a kind of salon. The tray with the bottles on it was always the focal point of the gathering. The students loved it, of course. I started joining them when I was fifteen. Actually, now that I think of it, my parents probably created a lot of alcoholics.”
“You’re Canadian?”
“Originally. Not now.”
Kathryn studied the man beside her. What did she know about him, except that he had been kind to her? He seemed good at his job, and he was undeniably attractive. She wondered if accompanying her to London was somehow part of his job description.
“We might have come here for no good reason,” she said, and could hear the note of hope in her voice. Like finding a suspicious lump in your breast, she thought, and then having the doctor tell you it was nothing, nothing at all. “Robert, I’m sorry,” she said. “This is nuts. I know you must think I’m out of my mind. I’m really sorry to have dragged you into it.”
“I love London,” he said quickly, seemingly unwilling to dismiss their joint venture so quickly. “You need to eat something,” he said. “I hate Irish music. Why is it always so lugubrious?”
She smiled. “Have you been here before?” she asked, acquiescing to the change in subject. “To this hotel?”
“I come here fairly often,” he said. “We liaise, I believe the word is, with our British counterparts.”
She studied the menu, laid it down on the polished but slightly sticky veneer of the table.
“You have a beautiful face,” he said suddenly.
She blushed. No one had said that to her in a long time. She was embarrassed that she had colored, that he could see it mattered. She picked up the menu again and began to reexamine it. “I can’t eat, Robert. I just can’t.”
“There’s something I want to tell you,” he began.
She held her hand up. She didn’t want him to say anything that would require her to respond.
“I’m sorry,” he said, glancing away. “You don’t need this.”
“I was just thinking about how enjoyable this is,” she said quietly.
And she saw, with surprise, that he couldn’t hide his disappointment at the tepid offering.
“I’m going to go now,” she said.
“I’ll go with you.”
“No,” she said. “I have to do this alone.” He leaned over and kissed her cheek. “Be careful,” he said.
She went out onto the street blindly, moving now with a momentum she didn’t dare to question. The taxi dropped her in front of the narrow town house she had seen little more than an hour before. She surveyed the street, studied a small pink lamp in a ground-floor window. She paid the driver and was certain, as she stepped out onto the curb, that she had given the man too many coins.
The rain poured over the edges of her umbrella and soaked the back of her legs, spotting and then running down her stockings. There was a moment, as she stood on the steps in front of the imposing wooden door, when she thought: I don’t have to do this. Though she understood in the same moment that it was knowing that she would positively do this that had allowed her the luxury of indecision.
She raised the heavy brass knocker and rapped on the door. She heard footsteps on an inner staircase, the short impatient cry of a child. The door opened abruptly, as though the person behind it were expecting a delivery.
It was a woman — a tall, angular woman with dark hair that fell along her jawline. The woman was thirty, perhaps thirty-five. She held a child on her hip, a child so astonishing that it was all Kathryn could do not to cry out.
Kathryn began to tremble inside her coat. She held the umbrella at an unnatural angle.
The woman with the child looked surprised, and for a moment quizzical. And then she did not seem surprised at all.
“I’ve been imagining this moment for years,” the woman said.
THE FEATURES OF THE WOMAN IMPRESSED THEM-selves upon Kathryn’s consciousness, like acid eating away at a photographic plate. The brown eyes, the thick, dark lashes. The narrow jeans, long-legged. The ivory flats, well worn, like slippers. The pink shirt, sleeves rolled. A thousand questions competed for Kathryn’s attention. When? For how long? How was it done? Why?
The baby in the woman’s arms was a boy. A boy with blue eyes. The hues were slightly different, though the difference was not as pronounced as it had been in his father’s eyes.
<
br /> The envelope of time ripped open, and Kathryn dropped in. She struggled not to have to lean against the door with the shock of the woman, of the boy’s face.
“Come in.”
The invitation broke the long note of silence that had passed between the two women. Although it was not an invitation at all, not in the way such offers are normally made, with a smile or a step backward into a hallway to allow entry. It was, rather, a statement, simple and without inflection, as though the woman had said instead: Neither of us has a choice now.
And the instinct was, of course, to enter the house, to get in out of the wet. To sit down.
Kathryn lowered the umbrella and collapsed it as she stepped over the doorsill. The woman inside the house held the door with one hand, the baby with the other arm. The baby, perhaps having noted the silence, looked at the stranger with intense curiosity. A child in the hallway had stopped her playing to pay attention.
Kathryn allowed the umbrella to drip onto the polished parquet. In the several seconds the two women stood in the entry-way, Kathryn noticed the way the woman’s hair swayed along her chin line. Expertly cut, as Kathryn’s was not. She touched her own hair and regretted doing so.
It was hot in the hallway, excessively hot and airless. Kathryn could feel the perspiration trickling inside her blouse, which was under her suit coat, which was under her wool coat.
“You’re Muire Boland,” Kathryn said.
The baby in Muire Boland’s arms, despite the different sex, despite the slightly darker hair color, was precisely the baby that Mattie had been at that age — five months old, Kathryn guessed. The realization created dissonance, a screeching in her ears, as though this woman she had never met were holding Kathryn’s child.
Jack had had a son.
The dark-haired woman turned and left the hallway for a sitting room, leaving Kathryn to follow. The child in the hallway, a beautiful girl with enlarged pupils and a cupid mouth, picked up a handful of construction blocks, pressed them to her chest, and, eyeing Kathryn the entire time, edged along the wall and entered the sitting room, moving closer to her mother’s legs. The girl looked like her mother, whereas the boy, the son, resembled the father.
Kathryn put down the umbrella in a corner and walked from the entryway to the sitting room. Muire Boland stood with her back to the fireplace, waiting for her, although there had been no invitation to sit down, wouldn’t be.
The room had high ceilings and had been painted a lemon yellow. Ornately carved moldings were shiny with glossy white paint. At the front, the curved windows had long gauzy curtains on French rods. Several low chairs of wrought iron, cushioned with oversized white pillows, had been placed around a carved wooden cocktail table, reminding Kathryn of Arab rooms. Over the mantle, behind the woman’s head, was a massive gold mirror, which reflected Kathryn’s image in the doorway, so that, in essence, Kathryn and Muire Boland stood in the same frame. On the mantle was a photograph in marquetry, a pinkish-gold glass vase, a bronze figure. On either side of the bow window were tall bookcases. A carpet of muted grays and greens lay underfoot. The effect was of light and air, despite the grand architecture of the house, despite the dark of the weather.
Kathryn had to sit. She put a hand on a wooden chair just inside the doorway. She sat heavily, as though her legs had suddenly given out.
She felt old, older than the woman in front of her, who was nearly her own age. It was the baby, Kathryn thought, that somehow testified to the newness of love, certainly to the relative proximity of sex. Or the jeans in contrast to Kathryn’s dark suit. Or the way Kathryn found herself sitting, her pocketbook primly in her lap.
Beneath her coat, her right leg spasmed, as though she had just climbed a mountain.
The baby began to fret, uttering small impatient cries. Muire Boland bent to pick up a rubber pacifier from the cocktail table, put the nipple end in her own mouth, sucked it several times, and then put it into the baby’s mouth. The boy wore navy corduroy overalls and a striped T-shirt. The dark-haired woman had full, even lips and wore no lipstick.
Moving her eyes away from the woman with the baby, Kathryn caught sight of the photograph on the mantle. When the picture came into focus, she started, nearly rose from her seat. The photograph was of Jack, she could see that even across the room. Unmistakable now from where she sat. Cradling an infant, a newborn. His other hand ruffling the deep curls of another child, the girl who was in the room with them. In the picture, the girl had a solemn face. The trio appeared to be on a beach. Jack was smiling broadly.
Visceral evidence of another life. Although Kathryn had needed no proof.
“You’re wearing a ring,” Kathryn said almost involuntarily. Muire fingered the gold band with her thumb.
“You’re married?” Kathryn asked, disbelieving.
“I was.”
Kathryn was confused for a moment, until she understood the meaning of the past tense.
Muire shifted the baby to her other hip.
“When?” Kathryn asked.
“Four and a half years ago.”
The woman hardly moved her mouth when she spoke. The consonants and vowels rolled from her tongue with a distinctive melodic lilt. Irish, then.
“We were married in the Catholic Church,” Muire volunteered. Kathryn felt herself backing away from this information, as if from a blow.
“And you knew . . . ?” she asked.
“About you? Yes, of course.”
As though that were understood. That the dark-haired woman had known everything. Whereas Kathryn had not.
Kathryn put down her pocketbook, shook her arms free of her coat. The flat was overheated, and Kathryn was sweating profusely. She could feel the perspiration under her hair, at the back of her neck.
“What’s his name?” Kathryn asked, meaning the baby. She was astonished at her own politeness even as she asked the question.
“Dermot,” Muire said. “For my brother.”
The woman bent her head suddenly, kissed the baby’s pate. “How old is he?” Kathryn asked.
“Five months. Today.”
And Kathryn thought at once, as who would not, that Jack might have been there, in that flat, to share the small milestone.
The baby, pacified, appeared now to be falling asleep. Despite the revelations of the last several minutes, despite the unnatural relationship between herself and the baby (despite the very fact of the child’s existence at all), Kathryn felt an urge, akin to sexual, to hold the infant to her breast, to that hollow space that wants always to embrace a small child. The resemblance to Mattie at five months was uncanny. It might actually be Mattie. Kathryn closed her eyes.
“Are you all right?” Muire asked from across the room. Kathryn opened her eyes, wiped her forehead with the sleeve of her jacket.
“I have thought . . . ,” Muire began. “I have wondered if you would come. When you called, I was sure that you knew. I was sure when he died it would come out.”
“I didn’t know,” Kathryn said. “Not really. Not until I saw the baby. Just now.”
Or had she known? she wondered. Had she known from the moment she’d heard that transatlantic silence?
There were shallow wrinkles about the eyes of the dark-haired woman, the suggestion of parentheses that would one day form at either side of her mouth. The baby woke suddenly and began to wail in an uninhibited, lusty way that had once been familiar to Kathryn. Muire tried to comfort the child, bringing him to her shoulder, patting his back. But nothing seemed to work.
“Let me put him down,” Muire said over the cries.
When she left the room, the girl trailed after her, not willing to be left alone with the stranger.
Jack had been married in a Catholic church. The dark-haired woman had known that he was already married.
Kathryn tried to stand, then felt she could not. She crossed her legs in an effort to look not quite so shaken. Not quite so flattened. Slowly, she swiveled her head, trying to take in the entire room. T
he brass sconces with the electric candles on the walls. The magazines on the cocktail table, an oil painting of a working-class city street. She wondered why it was that she could not feel rage. It was as though she had been cut, the knife having gone so deep that the wound was not yet painful; it produced merely shock. And the shock seemed to be producing civility.
Muire had known, had imagined this day. Kathryn had not. Along one wall was a cabinet that Kathryn guessed would contain a television and a sound system. She thought suddenly of Pink Panther movies, the ones she and Jack and Mattie had rented, movies guaranteed to reduce Jack and Mattie to helpless giggles. They had prided themselves on being able to quote long passages of dialogue.
Kathryn turned her head at a sound. Muire Boland stood in the doorway, watching her from the side. She stepped into the room, crossed to one of the white chairs, and sat down. Immediately, she opened a wooden box on the cocktail table and took out a cigarette, which she lit with a plastic lighter next to the box.
Jack couldn’t tolerate being in the same room with a smoker, he had said.
“You want to know how it happened,” Muire said.
Though she was angular, she might be described as voluptuous. It was the baby, Kathryn thought. The nursing. Perhaps there was just the slightest suggestion of a belly, which would also be the baby.
Kathryn had another unexpected memory then, a picture, really, that Jack had taken. Kathryn was sleeping facedown in a quilted bathrobe on an unmade bed, her arms tucked under her. Jack, who’d been holding the five-month-old Mattie, had placed the sleeping baby, also facedown, on the hump made by Kathryn’s butt and the dip of the lower back. Kathryn and Mattie had together taken a nap, and Jack, moved by the sight of the mother and her papoose, had snapped the photograph.
Muire leaned back against a cushion, draped one arm along its back. She crossed her legs. Kathryn thought she might be six feet tall, nearly as tall as Jack. Kathryn tried to imagine what her body looked like unclothed, how she and Jack might look together.