What became of us

bathroom door, it would all become complicated again. She felt safe sitting staring at the door handle, wishing and wanting all on her own.
    Her first instinct on waking had been to flee, but she knew she could not do that to him again, or to herself.
    All the pent-up anger that had made her so tense in his company had gone. It was as if she had been walking along a beach on a bleak winter day with the wind blowing so strongly that her head and face had become numb, then suddenly the wind had dropped and a few thin rays of sunshine had begun to warm her features back to life.
    She smiled at the physical memory of making love with him, then frowned. If she was going to have a future with Roy, he would have to know about the baby. Sooner or later the question of contraception which had eluded them in passion would occur to him because he was a decent man. She could either not tell him and have the abortion, or risk everything by telling him. Or there was a third choice: to encourage a relationship and announce the pregnancy as soon as it was feasible, playing around with the dates when the baby was born. It was a seductive thought.
    Manon stood up suddenly and grasped the door handle.

    * * *

    Roy heard the click of the bathroom door. He held his breath as footsteps padded across the landing.
    ‘I was dying for a wee,’ Manon said, lying back down beside him, ‘I seem to want to go all the time now. I think it must be something to do with being pregnant.’
    In one mad second of joy that she was still there, he thought she meant with him: Women knew sometimes, didn’t they, straight away?
    ‘You’re pregnant?’ he repeated.
    ‘Yes,’ she said.
    She found herself smiling at him. It was such a relief to tell someone, such a relief not to have given in to the temptation of deception.
    ‘How many weeks?’ Roy asked.
    ‘I don’t know. Two or three?’
    He stared at her as if he was about to cry. The rims of his eyes were red, she suddenly noticed, as if he had been crying.
    ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked him.
    Then he did cry. And she put her arms around his shaking chest and held him tightly, so sorry for upsetting him.
    ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry... it’s all been...’ he tried to excuse the unmanly display of weeping.
    ‘It’s all right. I know,’ she said softly into his hair.
    His fast, dry shaking sobs became slower wretched gasps, and then he became calmer. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, looking up like a child. ‘You haven’t got a tissue, have you?’
    She got up from the floor and went back to the bathroom, returning with a wodge of toilet roll. He blew his nose with an unexpectedly noisy blast which made them both laugh.
    ‘These are new,’ he said, gently pushing the shirt off her shoulders, touching first the butterfly on her shoulder, then the heart tattoo on her outer thigh.
    ‘Not very new,’ she said.
    ‘This will have to go.’ He touched the ring through her belly button.
    She shrank away and pulled the shirt back on.
    ‘I thought you said you weren’t with someone,’ Roy said, very casually, as if he was now going to pretend that it didn’t matter to him.
    ‘I’m not really with him.’
    ‘What is his name?’ he asked, as if they were having a perfectly normal conversation.
    Her natural inclination was to deflect his efforts to extract further information. She did not want to talk about Frank, but she realized she must.
    ‘Frank,’ she said. ‘He’s one of the regulars at the club.’
    ‘Very trendy?’
    ‘A film producer.’
    ‘I see.’
    What do you see? she wanted to ask him. It was the response of a jaded tutor to a student’s excuse for failing to produce an essay.
    ‘Are you in love with him?’ Roy asked.
    ‘He’s married, very married. He fascinates me, but I don’t like him very much,’ she said.
    ‘Then why?’
    He pushed back the hair from his head in a gesture she remembered from long ago. It made her think of Huckleberry Finn, and she almost expected him to say ‘Aw shucks!’
    ‘I didn’t mean to get pregnant, if that’s what you mean.’
    ‘Oh.’
    He thought of the methodical way Penny had gone about the process of conceiving Saskia: no alcohol or soft cheese, and folic acid tablets on the bathroom shelf for weeks before. When it did not happen the first month after the ceremonial throwing-away of her cap, there had been a test to tell when she was ovulating. He didn’t know that grown women became pregnant by accident any