I’ll have her arrested. His first thought. Then, What has she done?
He clawed the ground, his fingernails scraping the dirt as if tilling the garden was a priority, his fingers aching, and his mind gone mad with the knowledge that she’d betrayed him.
I’ll have her arrested. I will.
He kept digging and digging until there was a hole. He knelt before it, staring into it as if he had no idea its purpose, clumps of asters nearby, waiting to be planted.
Did she think he would have stopped her? Yes, of course he would have. He would have told her they could never know for sure which one would take. He would have talked to her about the need to keep going, the need for one more chance.
What has she done? This question over and over, then, who has she become, this woman who would terminate her child. Their child. The child that could have been. All the imaginings: a girl sitting in the garden plucking petals from flowers he’d grown, flowers they’d grown together; a boy who would collect stamps, work a saw, identify birds the way Edmund had done as a boy. They were real to him, these imaginings, and now he realized how real the children were to him. Despite all their losses, the hope had been there, that one day they would have a child and this would make their family complete. He thought back to that first time, four months into the marriage and neither aware what the relationship was aside from desire and awkward habits, then Miriam got pregnant. The assumption was there from the start, a healthy baby, one of many, and looking back he saw that there was a feeling of having accomplished something in having so much happen in such a short time. The cradle with hand-hewn maple he’d started back then still unfinished. Sometimes he wondered whether in not completing the cradle there was something in him that knew the baby would not survive.
Who has she become?
It was the flying business and that Audrey Wentworth, they were changing his Miriam, changing her into someone who wanted something other than just their quiet life. Their routine was eroding. On days she was flying she raced out after breakfast and was barely home in time to make tea. Even with her at his side listening to the wireless each night, she was not fully there, drifting to places that had nothing to do with him.
He held his hand before him, the skin torn, battered, feeling as if the core of him had dropped, like an anvil set inside him.
She didn’t mean him to find out, but he’d been lying in the bushes tying up his arum lilies, their elegant flowers like faltering swans, anchoring them to the fence, to give them a more respectful pose.
Then voices. Miriam had been out for the day, a vague explanation of helping the doctor’s wife. And he, too, was meant to be out, training for his air raid warden duties, but it had been cancelled at the last minute and so he found himself lying in the garden, trying to give dignity to the arum lilies.
“You must take it easy,” he heard, “there might be bleeding.”
Bleeding?
He’d propped himself up on one elbow, thinking about whether he ought to see what was wrong, why his Miriam would be bleeding, then he heard Miriam, her voice halting as she thanked the woman he thought to be Audrey Wentworth. Procedure. Rest. Recovery. Wicked words surfacing in explanation. There was gratitude in the murmurings, not regret, and this shook him. He lay back down, his hair in the soil now, and listened to the nightingale as if there were some message in the singing.
His anger rising, listening to low whispers, deceit taken further than he could imagine. He lifted himself, feeling his fury pooling inside, feeling that he might pounce on her, accuse her of what they both knew to be true.
Who had he become?
But the whispering continued, fraying him, making him feel less a man than he ever was, knowing that he would not have her arrested, knowing that he would not accuse her, knowing that this anger would be folded up inside him, unable to be released.
Why? The question that torments. What was stopping him?
This he could hardly face. Did he still have hope? No, it was no longer that. It was fear. Of what they would become, what he would become if this all came out. Would she feel remorse? Regret? That would be unbearable, having her admit she’d made a mistake.
He clutched a rock, his hand gripping it, pushing it into the dirt, working it through the loose soil, his brow gritty with sweat and grime. How could he forget this, how could he erase this? How could they see out their future together with this deception between them? He was pounding the rock now, pounding it into the loose gravel with such force that his nail cracked, his fingers bled, rage like acid running through him.
Then later, spent: she mustn’t know I know.
It would be the end of them, he knew. He would have to bury this anger, not let it grow into a wild thing. This was something he knew, this demolishing of loss. He’d been doing it since he was a child, first with his mother, then his father. Back then he had pretended that his pain was an actual physical thing he could remove from his heart. He imagined putting the pain in a wooden crate they kept in the cupboard, so that it didn’t belong to him anymore. When he would feel the pain, he would correct himself. That is not my pain, he’d say, that belongs in the crate.
He loved Miriam, and that filtered everything. He had no idea how he could live his life as he’d done till now but he knew he must. They would continue their relations, but he knew now that no child would come of it. They would eat their meals, repair the back gate, paint the windowsills, sit by the wireless each night, plan a holiday at the seaside as they’d intended, and speak nothing of a child. Their lives taken up with the world around them, he in his garden, she with her flying.
He would suggest she inquire about birth control devices, no longer able to trust that she would not deceive him again. She might wonder if he knew of the abortion, wonder if someone in the village had found out and let him know. They would both be withholding.
Lying there listening to the nightingale broke something in him so that he was unable to move, unable to hear the women’s voices. Then, it was quiet. Miriam now in the house on her own.
He should go to her, he thought, but still he did not move. He should go to her to make sure she was recuperating. He should go to her and make her a cup of tea. He lay there listening to the nightingale, listening for something that might be a sign for what he ought to do. The sun dipped in the sky, the nightingale sang, and Edmund lay in the bushes. He blinked a lone tear that slipped into his hairline.
The cold ground finally forced him out, and he crawled into the late-day sun filling his garden with that mystical light he loved, long shadows and dark spaces. It was time to put his garden tools away. He dropped the asters into the hole, patted the earth around it, tied the twine around the arum lilies, gathered his secateurs and garden waste, and went to the shed. When he’d put everything in place he turned to go back to the house. A cup of tea, that’s what he wanted. And to see Miriam.