The Night Book by Charlotte Grimshaw Page A

that.’
    She didn’t answer.
    ‘Tell me you’ll never leave me.’ He was squeezing her hand.
    ‘Let go. You’re hurting me. What’s wrong with you?’
    Looking into his lean face, the penetrating eyes, she’d got the sense of the hard man, who’d been hurt as a child, who’d lost both his parents and grown up poor, who’d lived with relatives who were dutiful but cold, and who had buried all his pain somewhere and lived on the surface of it, a thin crust with rage underneath.
    He was clutching her satirically; he always made a show of parody when he was serious.
    ‘I love you,’ he’d said. ‘Never change.’
    She’d looked up and seen Michael at the window, watching.
    Now she thought, I say I don’t like politics, but really I don’t like his politics. But I don’t care enough for it to matter.
    She remembered what he’d said next. ‘I want us to have a baby.’ She’d looked at him without expression. He’d said, ‘It would make me happy, and you too. I know it’s what you want. And you’ll be all right,’ he’d added.
    ‘Yes,’ was all she’d said in reply.
    People had often told Roza: ‘Live one day one at a time’. And she had done just that. She’d become expert at living in the here and now, had come to relish it, to enjoy each day, mindful of what she had. But now something much larger was being asked of her. To adjust to a life under the public eye, to consider having a baby; to plan for great things that lay ahead. It was this contemplation of the future that made Roza frightened, and that caused her to turn her mind to the past. And then there was the question of Simon Lampton.
        
    David had grown up poor and she had grown up rich. Her father, Antonin Danielewicz, was a businessman who’d owned interestsin more companies than Roza could name. He was a humourless man, religious and authoritarian. When Roza was disobedient he’d smacked her on the legs with a belt. Roza had been an obedient girl until she was fifteen, when she’d woken up to the idea of rebellion. She’d met a boy called Myron Jannides, who had dropped out of school, and together they’d launched into freedom. She was expelled, went to another school, and was expelled from there. Her parents were beside themselves; there were ugly scenes, recriminations. She accused them of repressing her, of forcing their Catholicism down her throat. She told them they were both cold, that all they cared about were money and God, and that Father Tapper had groped her and her friends in the back courtyard after Mass. This was a lie, but it was also an approximation of the truth: she’d felt that Father Tapper had played obscene games with her mind. He had made everything innocent and good seem dirty.
    When she was still a teenager her father had died of a stroke, and her mother had accused her of killing him by breaking his heart. She’d left home, and drifted away from contact with her mother. After that, what she thought of as the dark days began. She’d had no idea of self-preservation. She knew now how innocent fun could turn ugly, how it could hurt you if you weren’t careful. By the time she was twenty, she was an alcoholic, and her days and nights were a giddy mix of euphoria and terror, laughter and shame.
    She remembered the crisis, the lowest point: one morning, sitting on the back steps of her rented flat. She had just been fired from her job. The landlord would be looking for rent, and she had no money and nowhere to go. She sat looking at the light shining on the leaves and the birds swooping between the trees, and she seemed to be looking at the end of her life. Her hands shook. She was too thin. She couldn’t lie straight at night, because she felt that knives would come up through the mattress. She slept curled up in a ball with herhands jammed between her legs, and had nightmares that people were cutting her there. There was a black space inside her. She had lost part of herself and she was afraid all