Free You by Joanna Briscoe Page A

surely, yet barely believably, hinted at a future with him.
     
    ‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ said Dora at the end of the month. She was pale-faced as she entered Patrick’s pottery barn. He was sitting on his stool embellishing a grotesque-featured creature with claws which seemed guaranteed never to sell. Why does he have to make them ugly? Dora thought absently.
    ‘Yes,’ said Patrick, looking up, then returning his gaze to his clay.
    ‘It’s cold in here,’ said Dora, her voice weakening.
    ‘It’s OK.’
    ‘Do you want –’
    ‘What do you want to tell me?’
    ‘I’m – I’m. I’m pregnant,’ said Dora.
    Patrick paused. His hands stiffened on the animal’s torso. He began dousing it with water. He fetched more water and wrung out a cloth. Clay was smeared over the side of his chin, nestling among his hair.
    ‘Whose?’ he said, colouring.
    ‘No. No . It’s not like that. No. It’s –’ said Dora abruptly, blushing a fiery red. Tears came to her eyes.
    Patrick turned his back to her.
    ‘Yours. Ours,’ said Dora. She felt her mouth tremble as she said the words. She feared she might cry. The glazing chemicals made her nose water. ‘Really, Patrick, there is no – no –’
    He waited. ‘No –?’
    ‘No other man.’
    Patrick hesitated, his jaw working. His mouth was set and remained motionless. Then its rigidity crumbled and he smiled.
    ‘There never has been –’ she said, tailing off, the hypocrisy of her words boring into her. She blushed again.
    ‘Ah, girl,’ he said warmly, as he had said to her a long time ago, and she pictured him coming over to her and holding both her hands and then embracing her with a big kiss on the mouth.
    He almost stood, then sat back down.
    ‘Girl,’ he said again, manifestly at a loss for anything further to say. He stood up, stumbling a little, and embraced her.
    ‘Yes,’ she said, and for a brief hot moment there in the cold in his arms she almost said, I love you, come and save me , but she couldn’t because she had had what she had had.
    ‘I’m, I’m,’ he said, shaking his head, ‘I’m delighted. It’s crazy. What a thing. Are you sure, now?’
    Dora nodded, not looking at him, and she thought about the hasty compromised coupling that had produced this state: the one time in months: a cunning trick played by fate and biology. It had been her resigned attempt to rescue a marriage. In truth, it had also been a competitive act, undertaken in both retaliation and perverse empathy because if Elisabeth was still unthinkably physically involved with her husband, then so would she be. She would do what she did.
    Dora gazed at Patrick through the clear light that bore clay dust, and even though she could not anticipate anything more terrifying at this moment than having another child; even though she spent nights recalculating how many more lodgers she could accommodate if she put up partition walls in some barns and what their rent would come to, she gazed at his old shaving nicks, the clumps of clay stuck to his sleeves and fumbling skilled hands, heard his coughs and bodily rearrangements, saw decades of unbreakable patterns in a gesture, and knew that despite the reality of three children and the prospect of a fourth, she would never really love him again as she once had. His growing passivity made her want to howl in protest. She perceived him as forever the bawling penultimate child in a huge clan: forever a spoilt toddler born to a droit de seigneur charm, strutting through the semi-neglect endemic to large families. She would in effect have five children, she thought.
     
    Patrick had never met Elisabeth, and Dora had carefully omitted to mention her name, assuring herself by rote on sleepless nights that a woman didn’t count, that kissing a woman did not amount to infidelity. Caught unawares, however, she could be felled by guilt; it seemed the strictures of her girlhood remained. The terror of discovery was always