himself with infinite slowness. "Boys at school?" he said. "Boys at school were having Jemima when she was eleven? Who? How many?" Because he would find them, he thought. He would find them and he would sort them even now, so many years after the fact.
Meredith said, "I don't know how many. I mean, she always had boyfriends, but I don't expect ...Surely not all of them, Rob."
But he knew she was lying to protect his feelings or perhaps because she believed she'd betrayed Jemima enough, even as he was the one who'd betrayed her by not seeing what was in front of him all along.
"Tell me the rest," he said. "There's more, isn't there?"
Her voice altered as she replied and he could tell she was crying. "No, no. There's really no more."
"God damn it, Merry - "
"Really."
"Tell me."
"Rob, please don't ask."
"What else?" And then his own voice broke when he said, "Please," and perhaps that was what made her continue.
"If there was a boy she was doing it with and another boy wanted her ...She didn't understand. She didn't know how to be faithful. She didn't mean it as anything and she wasn't a tart. She just didn't understand how it looked to other people. I mean what they thought or might do or might ask of her. I tried to tell her, but there was this boy and that boy and this man and that man and she just couldn't see that it really had nothing to do with love - what they wanted - and when I tried to tell her, she reckoned I was being - "
"Yes," he said. "All right. Yes."
She was quiet again although he could hear the rustle of something against the phone.
Tissue likely. She'd wept the entire time she'd spoken. She said, "We used to quarrel.
Remember? We used to talk for hours in her bedroom. Remember?"
"Aye. Aye. I remember that."
"So you see ...I tried ...I should have told someone, but I didn't know who."
"You didn't think to tell me?"
"I did think. Yes. But then sometimes I thought ...All the men and perhaps even you ..."
"Oh God, Merry."
"I'm sorry. So sorry."
"Why did you ... ? Did she say ... ?"
"Never. Nothing. Not that."
"But still you thought ..." He felt a laugh bubbling in him, one of simple despair at so outrageous an idea, so far from the truth of who he was and how he lived his life.
At least, he thought, with Gordon Jossie had come an alteration in his sister. Somehow she'd found what she was looking for because surely she'd been faithful to him. She had to have been. He said, "She stuck with Jossie, though. She was true to him. I mean like I told you before, he wanted to marry her and he wouldn't have done if he had the slightest suspicion or indication that - "
"Did he?"
Something about the way she asked the question stopped him. "Did he what?"
"Want to marry her. Really."
"'Course he did. She left because she wanted time to think about it and I expect he worried it was over between them because he phoned her and phoned her and she got herself a new mobile. So you see, she'd finally got to the point ...I told you all this, Merry." He was fairly babbling at this point, and he knew it because he reckoned there was something more to come from his sister's friend.
There was. Meredith said, "But, Rob, before our ...what do I call it? Our breakup? Our row? The end of our friendship? Before that, she told me Gordon didn't want to marry at all. It wasn't her, she said. He didn't want to marry, full stop. He was afraid of marriage, she said. He was afraid of getting too close to anyone."
"Blokes always say that, Merry. At the beginning."
"No. Listen. She told me it was all she could do to talk him into living together, and before that it was all she could do to talk him into letting her spend the night with him, and before that it was all she could do to coax him into having sex. So to think he was mad to marry her ...What would have changed him?"
"Living with her. Getting used to that. Seeing that there was no big fear to being with someone. Learning that - "
"What? Learning what? Truth is, Rob, if there was something to learn ...something to discover ...wouldn't it likely be that he discovered that Jemima - "
"No." He