he said. ‘There’s something I have to tell you. I didn’t want to, but you’re going to know sooner or later. God…I can’t believe I’m doing this to you.’
‘Wait a minute,’ Laura said.
‘No, let me finish,’ Dan cut in. His hands were clammy against her cheeks. ‘I didn’t want to tell you tonight, I just wanted to see you, for us to have a nice evening, one last night.’
Laura’s stomach clenched and she felt sick again.
‘What?’ she said quietly. ‘Dan, what is it?’
‘Amy’s pregnant, Laura.’
Dan released his hands, and Laura could feel the sweat on the sides of her face. He was quite sweaty in general, she thought, as if watching this scene idly from another room, another life.
‘Laura, are you listening?’ Dan said sharply.
‘Yes…’ Laura cleared her throat. ‘You…’
Her eyes filled with tears, and one ran down her cheek. She gave a tiny cough, almost a gasp, and sat up straight. No, she wouldn’t cry. She would not cry.
‘Laura…I wanted to tell you, I’ve been trying to…’
‘How pregnant?’ Laura said calmly. ‘When’s it due? It’s yours, I presume?’
‘Yes, of course,’ Dan said. ‘Of course it’s mine.’ He wiped his hair off his forehead. ‘It’s…it’s due in January.’
‘Three months,’ Laura said after a moment, calmer still. ‘She’s three months’ pregnant. How long have you known?’
‘About a month. Laura, I’ve been trying to find a way of telling you. I couldn’t…’ Dan punched his fist into his thigh, quietly. ‘I – fuck. Look, it’s a mistake, she did it on purpose, I – I don’t know what to do, but I’ve got to – we’re going to make a go of it, I have to. Of course I have to.’
Amy. Of course it wasn’t a mistake, Laura thought. Amy was as likely to accidentally get pregnant as hippogriffs and unicorns were to be found wandering in Hyde Park. She had planned this down to the last letter and Dan, Dan – oh god, Dan was the sacrificial lamb, and she, Laura…she had to leave. She had to leave, or else break down completely.
Dan was wringing his hands, quite literally clutching them in an agony of inaction. He touched her arm. ‘Laura,’ he said. ‘I know you must hate me. But believe me, I hate myself more. I can’t – I’ve completely screwed this up, my whole life up, and hers. And yours, and that’s – that’s worst of all, because – oh god…’
He broke off, and buried his head in his elbow.
‘I’m going to go,’ Laura said, and again she had the sensation of watching herself from another room, from afar, and that other person was cheering her on, saying, Well done, girl, you’re doing well.
Dan grabbed her arm as she reached for her bag. ‘Listen, Laura. Listen to me, just one thing before you go. Please.’
Laura turned to face him, and looking at him nearly broke her composure, but she steeled herself.
‘Look, Laura,’ Dan said. ‘I realise…it’s over now, you and me.’
‘Well, I kind of assume so now,’ Laura said, repressing all emotion and taking refuge in heavy sarcasm. She removed his hand from her arm, shaking slightly. ‘It’s one of my rules. Practically the last one left that I haven’t broken, actually.’ She laughed bitterly, feeling the breath catch painfully in her throat as she did. ‘Don’t carry on shagging someone who tells you he’s in love with you and that he’s going to leave his girlfriend, then gets his girlfriend who he was supposed to be dumping six months ago pregnant, and makes you realise the whole fucking thing was a pack of fucking lies.’
She stood up, and pulled her bag slowly up onto her shoulder. ‘Bye, Dan,’ she said. ‘Bye.’
‘It wasn’t a pack of lies,’ Dan said, as she turned to go. ‘If you want to punish me, you’ve got your punishment. I love you. I always will. I never lied to you, Laura.’
He put his hands flat down on the table. The left one had a scar across the back, where he’d sliced it in a powerboat when he was six. Laura looked at it, and thought, I knew that. I know he got that scar in a boating accident when he was six. I don’t know anything else. Nothing at all.
She tried to think of something to say back to him, something grand, something great, something worthy of Carrie Bradshaw or Barbra Streisand in The Way We Were. But there was nothing to say, and the moment wasn’t about that any more. There was nothing for her to do but leave, and as she stood in the frame of the doorway, she half-waved at him, and turned and quietly walked down the stairs again.
Laura’s other granny, who had died ten years previously, was very much like her son George. Deidre Foster was a paragon of respectability, her home a shrine to suburban living. When the neighbours put their house on the market in 1980, the potential crisis of unruly or undesirable new people next door almost sent her into a decline. Hers was the only home in which Laura had ever seen a knitted toilet-roll holder. She had vases screwed into the walls with dried flowers in, a tasteful landscape photograph printed on canvas and framed in gold above the (fake) fireplace, and two tea services: one for everyday, and one for Sundays and special occasions.
Deidre had a saying for every occasion, it was her stock-in-trade. This one predictable trait offset the others, made her more likeable, more human sometimes. It was an instinctive emotion in an otherwise reserved woman, this desire to soothe, to mend, to make things better. ‘Hold your head up high, and don’t let them see you cry.’ ‘It’ll all come out in the wash.’ ‘Better safe than sorry.’ ‘A stitch in time saves nine.’ ‘More haste less speed.’ (That one, in particular, had never made any sense to Laura.) ‘Too many cooks’ and so on. As Laura and Simon grew older, they had become squirmingly predictable, a sign for each of them to avoid the other’s eye and stuff their fists in their mouths so as not to laugh. They had never seen the point of them, never listened between each of those lines to what lay beneath – their grandmother’s desire to help, to give advice, to rationalise a world she sometimes found baffling and could not talk about for fear of breaking down and betraying herself and everything she had built up to be important.
As Laura marched briskly out of the pub, she paused for a split second at the door, clutching the old brass handle, her hand smearing the metal with perspiration. Her vision blurred as her eyes filled with heavy, painful tears. She knew he would be watching out of the window as she left. She had to hold her head up high. She couldn’t let him see how hurt she was. This wasn’t Mary and Guy, and their early morning moment in the pyramids, this wasn’t it at all. It was all a lie. She was Granny Deidre’s granddaughter; she would repress all her natural urges, bite down her feelings and walk calmly under the window where Dan would be watching, away from the moonlight glow of the lamppost on the corner, up Rathbone Street till she could safely turn the corner. And then she could collapse, and scream. Hold your head up high, and don’t let them see you cry. Granny Deidre had said that to Laura when Laura was being bullied by a particularly vicious girl at junior
