She followed him as he reckoned she would. He heard her say to her sister, “Gwyn, I must—”
But he heard nothing else because, at that juncture, what he could hear mostly was the blood roaring inside his head. He wanted to tell himself he wasn’t angry. He wanted to say how petty a thing it was to be angry over . . . what? A slight? An omission? An embarrassed inability to reveal a relationship with a man? He didn’t know what it was. But he did know that he’d not been so angry, disappointed, or whatever he was with a woman in years. Indeed, he couldn’t remember ever feeling about a woman’s actions what he was feeling in the moment.
“Tommy.” She’d come up behind him. “Try to understand, please.”
He held his hand up to stop her. If they were to have this conversation, he thought, they weren’t going to have it with her sister sitting in the next room. He went to the garden door. When he opened it, Wally dashed inside. The presence of the cat—his previous supplanter—made him want to laugh rather too insanely.
“Would you prefer to feed him?” he asked Daidre.
“Don’t,” she said. “That’s not worthy of you.”
She followed him into the garden, still very much a work in progress. He heard her shut the door. She came down the steps behind him. She placed her hand lightly on his back as if to urge him to turn, which, at the moment, he did not want to do.
“You did know I was going to bring her to London,” she said. “I couldn’t leave her there. She was frightened to stay at the cottage alone. I didn’t want her to go back to the caravan. There was no other choice. And besides . . .”
In her long pause, he turned to her. The light from the kitchen window fell upon the side of her face, but the rest of her was in shadow as was he. “Besides?”
“I wanted to bring her, Tommy. It was the right thing to do. And I must do what I decide is the right thing to do.”
“Have I stopped you from that in some way?” he asked her.
“You’ve . . .” She sighed. She unclipped her hair, which bought her time. The gesture was habitual with her and it generally didn’t bother him because he knew she needed and wanted to sort through her thoughts.
Normally, he couldn’t blame her for this. Her life was complicated in ways his wasn’t. Tonight, however, he found in her hesitation a truth that she didn’t want to admit and he didn’t want to see. But she was going to have to speak that truth. He couldn’t and he wouldn’t do it for her.
“You’ve made it clear,” she said. “What you want. How things ought to be. What you need. You’ve made it all clear.”
“Have I?”
“Tommy, you know you have. There’s something you want from me, some quality you think you sense within me, something that you believe I can give you if I only . . . You see, I don’t know. If I only try harder? If I only open up to you? If I only pour out my heart, spill out my soul, cut open a vein? And I can’t do any of that because I don’t know how and I don’t know if there’s anything else inside of me anyway. I keep trying to tell you: Here, here, right here, standing in front of you . . . This is Edrek Udy. This is Daidre Trahair. This is who I am and what I have to give. And you and I know it’s not enough. I’m not enough. I’ll never be enough.”
“Is bringing Gwynder to London like this . . . ? Was that particular action supposed to give me that message?”
“No, of course not.”
“Then why did you not simply tell me?”
“I’ve tried to tell you. You can’t possibly say I’ve not tried to tell you.”
“You misconstrue. The part of this that’s you and I? That’s not what I’m talking about, and I think you know that. Why didn’t you say ‘This is how it has to be. Gwynder must come with me to London’？ I could have lived with that. We could have worked with that. But this . . . Daidre, you must see how it seems.”
“I couldn’t,” she said, and her voice broke on the second word. “And that goes to the core. I couldn’t.”
She began to weep and he took a step towards her. But at the same instant she took a step away.
That movement on her part created the separation from her that he needed. Had she allowed him to do what he wanted to do, which was to take her into his arms, he would have neither seen nor understood what she was trying to say. He realised then that allowing him to hold her, to find a way to soothe her, was, for Daidre, taking the easy route, and she was not a woman who did that. He realised then that by defining her rather than allowing her to define herself, he was asking her to live the image he had of her instead of living as who she was.