Free The Ice is Singing by Jane Rogers Page B

What? WHAT?’ She scrambled to her feet. She was shouting at me, and I felt my stomach turn over, although I knew I shouldn’t be able to feel it yet.
    ‘Don’t shout. Go on then. Tell me what’s upsetting you.’
    She sat on the windowsill, her back to the outside, blocking my view of the fireworks. Her face was in shadow, I could see nothing but an occasional flicker of her eyes.
    ‘Jackie ran out of butter for the jacket potatoes. I went down to the off-licence to get some. I was just walking along – I don’t know – not even thinking – and I
looked up and saw the car. Parked. Just parked in the row of cars lining the road, the back of our car, with Ruth’s ‘Save the whale’ and my trainers I left on the window ledge. I
just – I started – I went over to it to see if –’
    I waited.
    ‘Dad was in it. With someone.’
    ‘Vi, it’s all right. I know.’
    ‘You don’t know! They were –’
    ‘I know, Vi. He’s got a girlfriend. I know. It’s all right.’ I was feeling queasy, not balancing very well on my raft. I could hold out a hand to her, but I
couldn’t pull her out of the shocking cold water.
    ‘What do you mean, you know? What do you mean?’
    ‘Vi. Look, I’m sorry this has happened. It’s stupid and careless of him. But it’s not a major tragedy. It’s not like you think.’
    ‘You know about her?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Don’t you care?’
    I might have laughed. If I did I shouldn’t have done. ‘Look, listen Vi. I’ll try and explain it to you. It’s something I – or Gareth – would have explained
to you both, fairly soon anyway, now you’re big enough to understand that no one is being hurt. OK? Will you listen?’
    She snuffled, wiping her nose on the back of her hand. Behind her the sky seemed to throb as the flames leapt and dwindled in the darkness.
    ‘It’s hard for you, you’ll understand it better as you get older. People – adults – don’t stay the same. I mean, they change. You can be in love with someone
and marry them and then find out a year later, or ten years later, that you don’t love them at all.’
    I had rehearsed it in my brain often and saying it was like lines in a play: I had no idea what it might mean to her, nor indeed what I meant by it.
    ‘Are you going to get divorced?’
    ‘Let me finish. No. Of course not.’
    ‘Whose is it?’ Pointing at my belly.
    That shocked me. Then I was shocked, in my placid queasy invisible cow-bubble. When my daughter asked me if the baby I was carrying (the twins, had we both but known it) had the same father as
herself.
    ‘Gareth’s of course. Stop interrupting me. You asked and I’ll tell you – the least you can do is listen quietly. We changed all right? We were married, we had you both,
we loved you both – we cared for each other, but still part of us had changed. You – you and Ruth – are the most important things to us. You know that, to both of us. But having
said that – having put that first – there is still room – there has to be space for other things in our lives.’
    ‘Do you?’ she snapped.
    ‘What?’
    ‘Screw other people in the back of cars? Do you?’
    I wanted to ask her if it was necessary to put it like that, but I didn’t. ‘No.’
    ‘Have you got anyone? A boyfriend?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘I don’t want one, Vi, I’m perfectly content with life as it is – with you two, and now this baby’s coming – I’m not interested in that.’
    ‘But he is.’
    ‘Yes, he is.’
    ‘And you don’t mind.’
    ‘No.’
    ‘You’re married to someone and you don’t mind them sleeping with someone else.’
    ‘No, Vi, I don’t. You’ll understand it better when you’re older. It’s nothing to do with me, and it’s not really anything to do with you. It’s his
private life, and as long as it doesn’t impinge on us or hurt us, then . . .’
    She was quiet, sitting on the windowsill, fingers clasping the ledge beneath her thighs, face bent