Forbidden Fruit - 2

The row with Rhoda was the following Thursday. It started quietly; the worst rows often do.

“There’s a microlight festival in three weeks time, love. I thought I might go.”

“You do remember we’re booked to entertain Val and Brian on the fifteenth?”

“That had slipped my mind. Couldn’t we put them off?”

“I don’t want to put them off, Gilbert. I’d like to see them. I’d like us to see them together, because we haven’t done much together recently. In fact, I haven’t seen much of you at all.”

“Okay. Yes, sure. I’m sorry I’ve been neglecting you.”

“You could sound a little more enthusiastic. They’re our best friends.”

“I’m sorry, love. You know what I’m like when I start something new.”

“This is different, Gilbert. You’ve been a different person since the weekend. Distant. Not unhappy, in fact sometimes you seem positively exalted. But you never seem close.”

Gilbert spread his arms, expecting Rhoda to snuggle in as she usually did. She ignored the gesture.

“You don’t seem close now, Gilbert. In fact, you seem a mile away.”

Gilbert’s pulse raced. Had Mavis been talking? Had he better say something about Brendan?

“There is something, isn’t there, Gilbert?”

“I’m having a great deal of pleasure from flying. It…lifts me up, opens me to, I don’t know, new thoughts, new experiences.”

“Take me this Saturday. Let me share that with you.”

“I’d better check with Brendan. We…”

“Brendan! This is about Brendan, isn’t it? That must be what Sheila meant when she commented on how close the two of you seemed at choir practice! It’s not about flying, not really. What’s going on, Gilbert?”

Gilbert spread his arms.

“Nothing is ‘going on’, Rhoda. Brendan and I are good friends.”

“I don’t like it, Gilbert. I want you to stop seeing him. Go and fly from a different airfield. Take me with you. Let’s be together again. I’ll learn to fly too, and we’ll fly together.”

Gilbert froze.

“You want me to stop seeing Brendan?”

“Yes. I want you to stop seeing him altogether, before you…you do something you would regret.”

“But…he’s my best friend, Rhoda.”

“Yes. And I’m your wife.”

“Rhoda, let me try to explain. What I feel for Brendan is different from what I feel for you.”

“Oh, you feel for Brendan, do you?”

“Yes, I do.” Gilbert spoke quietly but firmly.

“I suppose you’re going to tell me that you love him?”

“I suppose, in a way, I do.”

“Have you…?”

“No. No, of course not. Of course we haven’t.”

“There’s something, though, isn’t there? Something happened at the weekend.”

“Brendan kissed me. He wanted more but I stopped him.”

“How could you, Gilbert, how could you?” Rhoda’s face worked with passion. “You’re my husband. You’re nothing to him. He doesn’t love you; I love you, I need you. Give him up – for both our sakes!”

“I don’t think I can give him up, as you put it. I think I’m in love with him.”

Rhoda was panting now, gasping for breath. “You bastard. You utter bastard. I’ve stayed with you even though you can’t give me children, the children I long for – the children I deserve!” The tears cascaded down her cheeks. Gilbert had never seen her weep before. It tore at his heart.

“My dear, my love, please stop. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know if there’s anything I can do; I feel as though I’m being washed away in a deluge.”

He reached for her, tried to make some physical contact that would tether him to reality, to the bedrock of their relationship.

She hit him.

Hard.

The marks of her fingers purpled his cheek.

She was screaming now.

“Don’t be under any illusions. If you have sex with someone else, if you betray me, I shall have my children. I shall have sex with the milkman, or the postman, or the…the vicar –  whatever it takes to get pregnant. And you, Gilbert, you will raise them as your own because when that predator has finished with you – used you up – wrung you dry – you’ll come to me on your knees, and that will be my price for taking you back.”

Gilbert stood, ashen.

Rhoda took several deep breaths, calmed herself, although the tears still flowed.

“I shall have a child with Brian!”

Gilbert recoiled from her. “Val is your best friend! Would you really do that to her?”

Rhoda’s lips twisted; her eyes were hard as stone. “Val will let me, when she knows what I’ve gone through. It’s only sex, when all’s said and done.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that I will tell Val and Brian that your low sperm count is why we’ve never had children. I shall tell them about your fancy-man, and throw myself on their mercy.”

Gilbert sank onto one of the kitchen chairs. He looked at the ground without seeing it.

Rhoda grabbed the kitchen roll, and mopped her face.

“Leave him, Gilbert. Ring him now. Tell him it’s finished, he’s never to see you again.”

As though hypnotized, Gilbert drew his mobile out of his pocket. He called Brendan.

“It’s over, Brendan. I’ve been thinking. I love Rhoda; I’m not going to betray her even for you. I’ll stay away from Kemble. Would you, please, stay away from the Choral Society?”

Gilbert imagined the little shrug that would have accompanied Brendan’s “Okay.” He thought his heart would break.

“Well, goodbye then, Brendan.”

He rang off and looked up at Rhoda.

“I really do love you,” he said.

“I know.” She reached out and touched his hair. “The pain will go, Gilbert. It will go.”

*       *       *

Rhoda was pregnant by Christmas. Four years later, Gilbert and Rhoda, watched hand in hand as their little boy, blond, blue-eyed and the image of Gilbert, set his pony at a low jump in the orchard – and cleared it.