Susanna ignored my tone. “The thing was,” she said, “after a while I started noticing that it felt like what I did mattered. Like it had weight. I’d never felt that before. All those campaigns I got involved with in school, writing millions of letters for Amnesty and fundraising for places that had droughts, and they never changed anything; the guy was still stuck in some hellhole jail, the kids were still starving to death. I used to cry about that.” To me: “You caught me once. You thought I was a total idiot, but you were nice about it.”
“Right,” I said. “That’s good.” It occurred to me that I should be feeling some kind of sense of achievement. I had got what I was after, detectived my way to the answer that even big bad Rafferty hadn’t been able to get his hands on. I couldn’t work out why all of this felt like such an enormous letdown.
“In a way you were probably right. I mean, yeah, I genuinely was crying for the guy being tortured in Myanmar, but I was also crying because it felt like I was nothing. Made of fluff. Feathers. I could bash myself to death against things and they wouldn’t budge an inch; they wouldn’t even notice I was there.” She took a sip of her wine. “Killing Dominic, though. Whatever you think about the moral issues, you have to admit it made a difference. A concrete one.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That it did.”
“I wanted to do more stuff like that—I mean, not like that, but stuff that made a solid difference. Stuff with weight. Smoking Athelstan’s hash and singing around campfires was too fluffy. It was light. I’d met Tom a month or two before I headed off to Cornwall, and he was obviously mad about me, but I hadn’t even had room to think about whether I was into him. Except when I did think about him, he felt like he had weight. Getting together with him would be serious; it wouldn’t be like snogging Athelstan for a laugh. I pretty much knew if I snogged Tom, I’d end up marrying him. So I came home and rang him.”
“Thank God,” Leon said. “He was hanging off me like a puppy. Great big moony eyes, asking me over and over when you were coming back. I’d have been a lot nicer if I’d known you were into him. I told him you’d married Ethelbert in a naked Wiccan ceremony at Stonehenge.”
“I know. He didn’t believe you.” Susanna gave him the finger. “Same for having the kids: not that it felt more important than getting a PhD or whatever else I could have done; it just felt more solid. A difference I could see, right there in front of me. We made two whole new people. It doesn’t get more concrete than that.” To me: “I know you always thought I was insane for getting knocked up so young. And I know you’ve never been crazy about Tom. But it made sense to me.”
Leon was watching her curiously. “God, I never had any of that. The exact opposite, actually.”
“But you did stuff that mattered,” Susanna said, turning towards him, surprised. “You came out, that autumn. I always thought it was because of Dominic. No?”
“Oh, totally. I’d probably still be in the closet, if it wasn’t for that. I’d been agonizing for years.”
“It wasn’t 1950,” I said. “You weren’t going to get shunned and, and, tarred and feathered.”
“I know that, thanks,” Leon said, with a flick of asperity. “I knew exactly what would happen. I’d hear even more shitty stereotype jokes, I’d lose a couple of friends, and Dad would try to convince me it was a phase. I could handle all that. It was the thought of people seeing me as something different. Not being just a person to them any more, not being just me, ever again; being a gay. If I said something snotty, it wouldn’t be because I had a point or because I was in a bad mood or because I’ve always been a stroppy bastard; it would be because gays are bitchy. If I was upset about something, it wouldn’t be because I had a good reason, it would be because they’re so dramatic. I’m sure this seems like a non-issue to you”—me—“but it wasn’t to me. On the other hand, I wasn’t mad about the idea of spending the rest of my life