“Don’t count on it,” he said, swinging his legs off the bed.
His shorts were still in the hallway, but he remembered his shirt on the floor only after feeling the soft crunch of eggs underfoot.
“Bloody hell!” he snapped.
Mitzi misinterpreted the expletive. “Okay. I’ll ask Lionel for a divorce and marry you. Is that what you want to hear? Because I don’t think it is.”
He groped around for his socks and desert boots.
“Tell me I’m wrong,” she insisted.
He couldn’t, so he didn’t. He just left the bedroom with his clothes bundled beneath his arm.
Sleep was out of the question. All he could manage was a kind of limbo, a restless tug-of-war between exhaustion and wide-eyed wakefulness, a contest punctuated every half hour or so by another cigarette. He thought back to his student days and the cramped ground-floor flat in Waterloo, when anything less than nine hours of full and proper slumber would have had him snoozing happily on his drawing board come three o’clock in the afternoon.
How simple life had been back then. A morning lecture on Piranesi; half a day given over to tweaking a floor plan or an elevation; the Northern Line home from Tottenham Court Road station; three pints and a slice of pie in the King’s Arms on Roupell Street, followed by a short stagger to his front door. What had his concerns been at the time? They must have existed, but he struggled now to recall them. They certainly couldn’t hold a candle to his current predicament, he ruminated wearily.
The news that he had fathered a child—the very fact that he was capable of doing so—had touched him at some deep, primordial level that defied words. It was as if the lens through which he viewed the world had been shattered and then hastily repaired. He could make out the rough shape of things, but it was a fragmented picture, one of refractions and reflections and unexpected associations—an alien landscape where past, present, and future somehow coexisted.
He saw himself screaming at the top of his newborn lungs in the arms of his dying mother, and for the first time he saw the logic of her sacrifice. He watched it playing out before his eyes, with Mitzi standing in for his mother and the ending rewritten. Try as he might, though, he couldn’t write himself into the scene.
He wasn’t wanted at the bedside, where his father had once stood. Mitzi had made her feelings clear on that score, and he couldn’t see her changing her mind. It was easy to resent her, and more than a little unfair. There was no denying the sudden clutch of fear he’d experienced when she had tested him, confident of his reaction, proposing that she seek a divorce from Lionel and marry him. It just didn’t fit with the future he’d envisaged for himself: the architect, the man about town, looking to leave his mark on the world. He couldn’t find a place for the young child and the disgraced ex–navy wife in his dream. And he thought less of himself for it.
He tried to console himself with the alternatives. He would be the mysterious gentleman watching the Colts’ football match against the rival school, stifling his cheers as his son broke free in the dying seconds of the game to score the winning goal. That didn’t work. Lionel barged his way into the fantasy, sidling toward him along the touchline.
“Hello, old boy. What brings you here?”
“Oh, nothing much. That fine figure of a young man you have always assumed to be your son is in fact the product of a brief but passionate affair I conducted with your dear lady wife during our time on Malta.”
“Well, I say. I didn’t see that one coming.”
“Doubtless, dear fellow, but who can blame you? We were very discreet.”
Somehow all the scenarios he came up with collapsed into absurdity, leaving him lost and floundering in a future world of his own creation.
The past and present offered more of a refuge. He found himself drawing a strange kind of strength from the prospect of fatherhood. Just as his own father was the touchstone by which he tested himself, so it now fell to him to set an example, to light the path for the next generation—a mawkish sentiment, he knew, but at least it gave some small degree of comfort.
It had just passed five o’clock when he heard the knock. His first thought was of Mitzi, but she didn’t