Page 66 of The Elements

They turn to look at each other, and he retreats slightly in his seat.

To my surprise, she leans toward him and they kiss.

I turn away, noticing that not only are they holding hands but that they’re clasping them very tightly, their knuckles whitening against the skin.

My aversion toward him, which had diminished in recent times, immediately returns.

I find their behavior both boorish and disrespectful.

“How about you?” asks Rebecca, turning back to me when she’s finished molesting the poor boy. “Were your parents surgeons?”

“No,” I say. “My mother was an architect, and my father was a mathematics professor in Cambridge.”

Something in Rebecca’s expression tells me that she doesn’t believe a word of this and, of course, she’d be right not to.

“Are they still alive?”

“No, they died in a house fire when I was twelve.”

Aaron raises an eyebrow. “You never told me that,” he says.

“Why would I?”

“But a house fire. Is that why you… the burns unit, I mean?”

I try to recall whether I ever gave him a reason why I made this my speciality. He did ask me about it on our quasi-date, I recall, but I can’t remember what I said and am anxious about contradicting myself.

“It played a part in it,” I tell him. “But not the only part.”

“Was it arson?” asks Rebecca.

“That’s a strange assumption,” I say, turning to her. “Wouldn’t an accident be the more likely explanation?”

“It would, yes. But was it?”

“No, faulty wiring,” I say after a pause. “A spark in the garage where the fuse box was located ignited a dozen cans of paint. We were having the house renovated at the time. Putting in a pool, among other things.”

“How awful.”

“It was, yes.”

“But you escaped unharmed.”

“I was staying with a friend that night,” I tell her. “Otherwise, I would have died too.”

“And did they catch whoever did it?”

“No one did it,” I say, raising my voice a little. “I told you, it was an accident.”

“I mean, did they arrest whoever installed the wiring? Surely there’d be a case for manslaughter?”

I stare at her, baffled by her prying. I’m not prepared to discuss this any longer, not least because the more lies I tell, the more difficult they are to remember.

“You never answered my question,” I say.

“What question was that?”

“I asked what your father did. Or does.”

She doesn’t hesitate for a moment.

“He was the head of the National Swimming Federation in Ireland,” she tells me.

“He held that position for many years until it was discovered that he’d sexually abused eight young girls in his care.

Eight that we know of, anyway. There was a trial.

Quite a famous one in Ireland, actually.

And he went to prison. He’s still there, in fact. ”

I’m astonished by the frankness of this admission. She reaches for her glass and takes a drink.

“I see,” I say, a rather impotent response on my part, but I can’t quite think what else to say. “That must have been very painful for you.”

“It was, yes.”

“And are you still in contact with him?”

She shakes her head. “Of course not. Why would I be?”

“Well, I presume you loved him once.”

“When I was a child. But now? No. I wake every day hoping to learn of his death. I’ll never speak to Brendan again,” she adds, and I notice she refers to him by his first name, as I always did with Hannah and Beth, removing all sense of familial connection.

“Anyone who hurts a child forfeits all rights, in my opinion.”

“Did he admit his guilt?” I ask. “Or was it a jury trial?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because I’m interested. I served on a jury myself once.”

“To this day he refuses to take any responsibility for his actions. His victims have to live with it though. Well, some of them, anyway.”

“Some of them? What do you mean?”

“That there must be some who are dead. Girls who took their own lives.”

An image flashes into my mind.

Rufus seated by the side of my bed, barefoot and trembling.

Rufus on the gurney as it was wheeled into A&E, the purple bruises around his neck from where his school tie had choked him.

“I admire how willing you are to talk about this,” I tell her. “Utterly unashamed.”

“Why would I be ashamed? I didn’t hurt anyone. Don’t you think it’s the perpetrator who should feel shame?”

“Of course I do. But I suppose—”

“You suppose what?”

“Well, just from an intellectual standpoint, one has to wonder what happened to your father to make him do the things he did.”

“Does one?” she asks, stressing the one , as if I’m condescending to her. “Why?”

“In order to understand it.”

“It’s not something I want to understand.”

“Then how do we, as a society, learn from it? How do we stop it from happening again?”

“I don’t give a fuck about society,” she replies. “I only care about the lives he destroyed. Those girls’ lives, first and foremost. And my sister’s. And my mother’s. And mine.”

“Of course,” I say. “Look, I’m a surgeon, not a psychologist, but these things interest me, that’s all. And the fact that you’re so up-front about what your father did makes me—”

“It’s quite simple really,” she says. “Brendan was—is—a pedophile.”

“But do you think he was born that way or that something happened to him, somewhere in his own youth, that led him to do the things he did?”

She hesitates now. I don’t know how long she’s been struggling with her family history, but it’s clear that I’m asking her something she’s never properly considered before.

“It’s not impossible,” she says after a lengthy pause, her words coming out carefully, as if she’s judging the weight of each one, “that he was born with the sort of brain that meant that, one day, he would find himself sexually attracted to children. That can happen, I suppose. But surely the difference comes in the decision whether or not to act upon those urges. Right and wrong comes into it. A man—even a woman, for that matter—might have such impulses. But because most of us are moral human beings who don’t set out to hurt others, we do nothing to feed them.

We never would. Can a person be blamed for how they were born?

No, of course not. But it’s neither here nor there, is it?

It’s the committing of the act that matters.

A man, a regular heterosexual man, might have rape fantasies that he cannot control in his imagination but that he would never in a trillion years indulge.

None of us can be held responsible for the things that lurk in the darkest parts of our minds.

But in our lives? Yes, we can. So whether something happened to Brendan when he was a child or not, I genuinely do not fucking care, Freya.

If it did, he could have chosen to break the cycle.

If it didn’t, he could have chosen not to start one.

But he did do what he did. He made that decision.

So fuck him. Let him rot. I’ll open a bottle of champagne when he dies. ”

A lengthy silence ensues, and I glance at Aaron, who has remained silent throughout this exchange, but he’s looking at the floor, his brow furrowed.

The resulting awkwardness is broken by Louise approaching us and, in her drunken state, planting a kiss on my left cheek and one on Aaron’s right, before insisting on taking a photograph of the three of us on her smartphone.

“I knew you two would get along in the end,” she says, and Aaron smiles back at her.

“We’re not quite there yet,” he says.