So I bravely resisted the temptation to tell all and generally felt very miserable, but somehow also very virtuous at the same time. In fact, Kay appeared relieved to see me. She needed someone to talk to just as much as I did. Despite all her talk of wanting to deal with this on her own, she seemed to be glad of my company. I didn’t ask whether she had decided what to do. I didn’t want to spoil the most enjoyable encounter we’d had for some time. It almost felt as if we had regained the pleasure in each other’s company that we had experienced in the first weeks of our relationship.
I left in optimistic mood. It seemed to me that I had been mysteriously rewarded for my acts of penance over the last week. All this contributed to my confidence that things would work out between us – that there was some divine providence at work which would ensure that my relationship with Kay would be strengthened by this experience rather than destroyed by it.
My anxiety before the meeting had been all the more acute because I knew that Pete was due to visit her over the weekend. She had already put him off on numerous occasions previously and had been adamant that this particular visit couldn’t be put off without making him suspicious.
At times like this, my lack of knowledge about their relationship led me to speculate all the more about what might happen between them. But my own meeting with Kay left me reassured that she was not about to rush back into his arms.
When the Monday morning came though, Kay wasn’t at lectures. I wasn’t overly surprised. She had frequently complained to me of morning sickness, so I wondered if she had stayed in bed. But I felt sufficiently concerned to go round to her room after lectures, by which time it was about midday. There was no answer. I asked one of her friends if she knew where Kay was. The girl told me that Kay had seemed really upset about something, but wouldn’t tell anyone what it was. She had mentioned something about her family and that she had to go home to see them. She had left about an hour ago with all her stuff. The girl said that she thought Kay hadn’t really settled in and hadn’t liked the course she was on. She certainly hadn’t been going to lectures very much and seemed to have been spending a lot of time in her room on her own.
Why had she gone? Was it that she had finally decided in favour of Pete, rather than me? I cursed myself for not getting her home telephone number. Some further enquiries of her friends enabled me to extract a home number and address, on the pretext of her having borrowed some lecture notes which I needed back before the end of term. I called her at home. Kay answered the phone.
“Can we talk?” I asked.
“Yes, my parents can’t hear in this room.”
“Why didn’t you tell me you were going?”
“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I just couldn’t stand it .”
“But why did you just take off like that? Why not talk to me first?”
“I don’t know. I just couldn’t stand keeping up a front any longer. It was all too much.”
“Have you told your parents about it?”
“No, I haven’t. Not yet.”
“So...what have you told them? I mean, about why you’ve come back before term’s finished?”
“I just said it wasn’t working out with the course and I needed some time to work things out before carrying on.”
“Is that true? Is that the real reason you’ve left?” I felt a bit stupid asking the question. I guessed the answer was probably “no”, but I wasn’t sure what to believe anymore and I needed to hear it from Kay herself.
“No, not really,” came the reply. “I mean, I’ve had some problems with the course, but it’s not really that. It’s what I just told you. I just couldn’t stand it any more, so I had to get out.”
There was a silence. I asked: “Is it to do with Pete?”
“No. Look, I just told you, that’s not why I’ve come home. Nothing happened between us at the weekend. I just pretended to him that I wasn’t happy with the course and that’s why I was no fun to be with. But this morning, the whole thing just got to me. I couldn’t carry on with going to lectures and pretending to everyone. That’s all it is, Miles.”
“But what are you going to do now? I mean, about the abortion?” I blurted out. I knew as soon as I said it that it was completely the wrong thing to say. But I had to know. The weeks of uncertainty had made me long for a definite answer.
“I don’t know,” said Kay quietly. She paused and then said, “I suppose I’ll have to have the operation.”
“But won’t that mean telling your parents?”
“Um, no, not necessarily. I think I can get away with it by telling them that I’m going to stay with a friend while I’m in hospital.”
I sighed inwardly. It all sounded a ridiculously complex subterfuge. But there was nothing I could do about it.
“Look, I’m upset that you left without telling me,” I said. “I understand why you’ve done it, and maybe I would’ve done the same in your position, but I wish...well, I still feel responsible, I still feel it’s my fault and I wish you’d let me help instead of shutting me out all the time. I’m not asking for anything else.”
“I know you’re upset,” said Kay, “and I’m sorry I didn’t talk to you before I left. But you’d have tried to talk me out of this. I really think I would have gone crazy if I’d stayed on.”
Reluctantly, I was forced to acknowledge once again that there was nothing I could do. It was out of my hands. But the sudden change in her mood away from the optimism of our last meeting made me wonder whether I had (not for the first time) completely misjudged the direction things were going in.
When I phoned her later that week, she was reticent and difficult to talk to. She told me that she had, at long last, made an appointment to have the abortion. She mentioned a date a couple of weeks from now. I should have felt relieved, but sensed that she was withholding something from me. When I asked if I could see her at some point, maybe after the operation, she made excuses, saying it would all be very difficult and she was still trying to keep the whole thing a secret. Finally, she said:
“Look, Miles, there’s something I’ve got to talk to you about. There’s no easy way to tell you.” My stomach tightened the way it had done the last time she had adopted this coded way of warning me that bad news was on the way. “I’ve been thinking about us...and I think it would be better if we stopped seeing each other. I’m sorry, but that’s my decision.”
“But – can’t we – can’t we at least discuss it?” I said. “I mean, why? Why are you doing this? I don’t understand.” I felt helpless, standing there in the cold phone box, watching the traffic go past as my money slowly counted down.
“Look, it really doesn’t matter why I’ve done it – it’s just what I’ve decided. I still care about you, and I’d like to stay friends, but we can’t go on seeing each other.”
“Have you got back together with him?”
There was a silence. “That’s it isn’t it?” I said. “You have, haven’t you? Tell me! Have you got back together with him or not?”
“Yes.”
I slammed the receiver down.
That was not our last conversation, but it may as well have been. I phoned her several times after that. These exchanges consisted largely of me either pleading with her in the vain hope of resurrecting our relationship or berating her in an equally vain attempt to make her feel so overcome with guilt that she would relent and have me back. I had usually spent most of the day (and previous night) rehearsing the arguments in my head. But the eventual conversation hardly ever followed the path I expected it to and my carefully engineered ploys always came to nothing.
The more I thought about it (which was virtually all the time), the more bitter I became about the way that I had been treated. I felt that she had strung me along, used me as an emotional prop and then dumped me when it suited her. I was certainly in no mood to be sympathetic to – or even to appreciate – the state that Kay must have been in whilst waiting for the abortion. So it was probably inevitable that things would end with a blazing row; we said some very unpleasant things about one another and I vowed never to speak to her again. This turned out to be an easy vow to keep, because Kay never came back to university after Christmas. I heard that she was getting married to Pete later that year. But no one that I knew from university was invited to the wedding.
Part of me was glad that she hadn’t come back. But part of me hoped that we might meet again at some point, on the off-chance that seeing me in the flesh would somehow be sufficient to change her mind. For months, I entertained fantasies along these lines, always ending with her recognising the error of her ways and with me magnanimously accepting her profuse apologies for the way that she had treated me. But I neither saw nor heard anything from her until she phoned me after Pete had disappeared, all those years later.
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