Lovesong by Alex Miller Page B

river Eure in Chartres. It was the only child she cared about. It was her little daughter she dreamed of.
    When John asked her if she knew Bruno had eleven children, Sabiha had been thinking about her moment of panic in the market on Friday, an image in her mind of the young woman running away from the ageing woman. She stopped eating and looked at him in astonishment. When he placed his hand over hers and said, ‘I’m sorry, darling, that was a really stupid thing to say,’ she wanted to hit him in the face with her plate of food.
    She withdrew her hand from his and, instead of hitting him, she laughed. It was the laugh of decades of frustration, injustice and anger. Then she reached for her tumbler of wine.
    ‘Yes!’ she said. ‘He has given her one child for each year oftheir marriage!’ And she laughed again, the same loud, coarse laugh that was not her laugh but was the laugh of some other, fiercer woman than she. She drank all the wine in her glass and set the empty tumbler on the table. She sat a moment, her fingers gripping the empty glass as if it were a grenade and she was considering tossing it through the window, or at John’s head. Then she looked at him and smiled.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. He was unnerved by the peculiar smile on her face.
    She said, ‘Bruno’s is a perfect score, John!’
    It seemed to him that Sabiha said this with a malicious emphasis. It was so unlike her he didn’t know what to say. Perhaps it
was
his fault. They would probably never know. Sabiha was waiting for him to say something. ‘Well?’ she said. ‘Is it, or isn’t it?’
    ‘Bruno and Angela have been married a good few years longer than we have, darling,’ he said, trying to make it sound as if everything was normal between them. ‘Eleven is not nearly one child for each year of their marriage. It’s a lot of kids, but it’s not a perfect score.’
    ‘You can be so pedantic,’ she said, as if the thought fatigued her.
    His mind had gone blank when she gave that dreadful laugh. The laugh had made him feel lonely.
    ‘Eleven! Fifteen! Twenty!’ Sabiha said, as if she might howl or burst into tears or strike him in the face if he said another word, her patience exhausted. ‘What difference does it make? Bruno’s is
a perfect score,
John! Face it!’
    She reached for the jug and refilled her tumbler with the red wine. She lifted it to her lips and took a long drink, then set the glass back on the table with exaggerated care.
Now
there were tears in her eyes. A pin had come loose and Sabiha’s hair had fallen forward over her face. She raised her hand and pushed it back.
    John wanted to take her in his arms and tell her:
Somehow, one day, my darling, you will have your child. I promise you, with my life, with all I am and all I have, I promise you, you will have your child.
But of course he could promise her nothing of the sort.
    ‘You’re right,’ he said meekly. ‘Yes, you’re right.’ He sat gazing unhappily at the food on his plate, unableto look up and meet her eyes. He felt guilty, wronged, unhappy and alone. He could think of nothing to say.
    With exacting deliberation he cut a small piece of lamb and speared it on his fork, lifted the fork to his mouth and put the meat in his mouth and chewed it. Sabiha was still looking at him. His mouth was dry and he realised he was not going to be able to swallow the lump of meat. He chewed on the thing and looked out at the street. The afternoon sun was reflected in the window of the Kavi boys’ grocery store on the corner, the mean building opposite transformed into a golden temple. Sabiha had never called him John before. Not even in the earliest days of their life together. He had always been dearest, or darling, or my love, or my Hercules. My hero. Even my lovely Aussie man. Never John. Despite everything, he felt he was in the right.
    He reached for his glass and washed down the dreadful thing in his mouth. He felt it go down his gullet and thought of