IX

They ended up wandering down to the local park, because Mrs. Landingham had Views about what was and what wasn't appropriate, and visiting young men in their homes most definitely wasn't, regardless of whether they had their brothers in residence. Jed spent much of the walk down there babbling excitedly about Abbey.

"So, did you make a decision about London?" Mrs. Landingham asked shrewdly.

"Uh, yes, we did." She didn't fail to notice how it had suddenly become a 'we' there. "I'm gonna go for it, and Abbey's going to look at maybe transferring to a medical school in England when I go, and... we'll see."

"Girls don't generally cross international borders with boys they're not serious about," she noted.

"I sincerely hope not," he agreed.

"So when are you going to ask her to marry you?"

He choked slightly on the directness of the question. "I, um... I've been thinking about it," he admitted honestly. "But I'm not sure if... I mean, it seems too soon. I don't think it is, but it seems too soon." He smiled slightly to himself. "And, you know, there's always the possibility she might beat me up and say no."

Mrs. Landingham raised an eyebrow. "That's an option?"

Abbey had never been exactly one to bow down and do things just because they were traditional or expected. "It might be."

"I like her already."

Jed smiled, and stopped to watch two boys ride past on bikes. He realised talking now with Mrs. Landingham that he didn't feel half so much like a little boy as he'd used to. Somewhere along the line, he'd grown up. It was a strange feeling.

"You never did tell me," he realised. "Why are you in New Hampshire? Are you going to be staying a while?" He tried not to sound too pathetically hopeful, but wasn't sure he succeeded. This was the first time he'd felt relaxed since he'd come home for the summer, and going back to lonely misery really didn't appeal.

"You remember Mrs. Baskin from the school?" He nodded, a vague memory of a horse-faced woman in a floral dress floating to mind. He'd never been much of a one for remembering names. "Her boy Alan was killed overseas a couple of months ago. It's been pretty hard for her back here by herself, so I'm going to be staying with her for a while, to see how I can help out."

"Oh." He was abruptly sobered. "That's terrible. She probably doesn't remember me, but... tell her I'm so sorry."

Mrs. Landingham gave him a quiet smile. "Everyone remembers you, Jed."

He looked at the ground, hands in his pockets. All this fighting going on across the world... there were plenty of worse places he could be right now than stuck in New Hampshire with his father and without Abbey. It was time he stopped feeling sorry for himself. He looked up. "Is there anything I can do? I'd... I'd like to help."

She smiled at him approvingly. "Well, why don't you come along and visit tomorrow and we'll see. I'm sure there are some jobs around the place that need a strong young man to do them, and I know she'll be glad to see you."

Jed nodded, accepting the responsibility, and paradoxically felt lighter. If he couldn't be enjoying this summer vacation, then at least he could be helping somebody else. As usual, Mrs. Landingham had stirred him out of his self-indulgence, and reminded him that sitting around dwelling on his own problems wasn't helping anybody.

"I'm glad you're back, Mrs. Landingham," he said earnestly, and, impulsively, gave her a hug. She seemed somewhat surprised by the gesture, but not entirely displeased, patting him on the back slightly.

"Now, what's got into you?" she wondered. "When did you become such a huggy person?"

"Love has made a new man of me, Mrs. Landingham," he said airily, the light tone concealing the deeper truth beneath it. His upbringing had not accustomed him to gestures of physical affection, and it had taken Abbey and her family to gradually teach him there was a whole world out there where it was perfectly acceptable to be just as demonstrative as you liked.

Or at least, as demonstrative as Mrs. Landingham was prepared to let him. "All right now, that's quite enough of that kind of silliness," she chided, but affectionately. "Now you run on back home, and I'll see you tomorrow."

He headed back to the house with a smile on his face.

Jed's newfound spirit of determination, perhaps inevitably, didn't sit well with his father. He was less than thrilled to learn of his son's continuing contact with Mrs. Landingham, and probably would have banned Jed from seeing her entirely if it wasn't for the outpouring of praise Mrs. Baskin had heaped on the headmaster for sending 'such a fine boy, so willing to help out' to come and see her. As it was, Jed endured the punishments for his 'inappropriate friendships' and 'unseemly behaviour' without comment.

After all, he was used to it.

He found he liked Mrs. Baskin more than he had when she was teaching him to conjugate verbs, but it made him somehow sad how delighted she obviously was to see him each time. It wasn't right that her son should have been killed off in some battle he'd had no business ever being in. He wondered if when they'd decided to go to war, anybody had stopped to think about the Mrs. Baskins of the world, shuffling round the house in a kind of aimless daze and laying out plates of cookies for boys who weren't her son but could maybe give the house a breath of youthful life just for an hour or two.

He found it set him to thinking about children a lot, which was a strange and somewhat unnerving train of thought. His plans to join the priesthood had taken that aspect of life well out of the equation, and even after leaving that track he hadn't really stopped to put it back in. The idea of creating a little life that was partly him and partly Abbey - it never crossed his mind for a moment to think that the mother of his children would be anyone but Abbey - was a dizzying and also scary one.

The shadow of his father loomed large over everything. Would he be a good father? Could he learn from his own father's shortcomings, or would they somehow repeat themselves in him against his will? If he was a father, he'd want to be one like Dr. Barrington, but he wasn't sure he knew how to do that. Could you even choose that for yourself? Surely his father hadn't set out to deliberately be distant and impossible to please. Perhaps he didn't even know he was.

The trail of self-doubt his father awoke in him was hardly unfamiliar to him, but this was a new avenue of attack, and one he'd never bolstered his defences against. Uncertainty chewed at the foundations of the strength of his love for Abbey, asking himself if he was sure he was really good enough for her. He wanted to marry her... but should he? Could he ever be as good a husband as she deserved?

All his doubts and hesitations seemed to melt away whenever she was on the other end of the phone... but the moment that contact was lost, they came flooding back.

He wasn't sure how to broach the subject with Mrs. Landingham, suspecting it would only earn him a brush-off in the form of a brusque exhortation not to be stupid. Mrs. Landingham didn't believe in indulging crises of confidence. And most of the time she had a point, but... this was something far too important to trust to just a leap of faith.

Approachable sources of good advice being somewhat thin on the ground, he ended up trying to talk to his brother.

"Johnny," he asked thoughtfully one evening, massaging his wrist to dull the ache of working too hard with barely healed bruises, "have you ever thought about having kids?"

"Oh Christ, who's pregnant?" his brother asked immediately, looking slightly panicked.

"Nobody!"

Johnny placed a hand over his heart. "Then Jesus, don't scare me like that."

Jed gave him a sharp look, and wondered what the hell his little brother was getting up to these days. "It was just a question."

He shrugged shortly. "Kids? Why? Christ, I'm still a kid."

"Well, maturity-wise," Jed agreed dryly.

Johnny sat down on the edge of his bed and frowned at him. "You're thinking about having kids?"

"Yeah."

"Now?"

"Not right this minute, no."

Johnny gave him a look. "Next few years now."

He shrugged. His vague imaginings hadn't taken grasp of anything so concrete as a timescale, let alone one so fast, but laid out there the idea had a kind of terrifyingly mesmerising appeal. "I don't know. I was just... I was just thinking." He sighed. "Worrying, I guess."

"You're worrying about kids that don't exist yet? Jed, are you actually familiar with the concept of 'fun'?"

He flopped back onto his bed and looked at the ceiling. "Do you think I'd be a good dad?" he wondered.

He didn't have to look across at Johnny to know he was being stared at. "What the hell kind of question is that?"

"I just... I worry. With..." Things unspoken hovered on the outskirts of the conversation. "Everything. I worry."

There was a creak of bedsprings and, surprisingly, Johnny came over to sit beside him. He squeezed Jed's shoulder with perhaps something just a little softer than his usual see-what-a-manly-man-I-am bluster. "That's... really dumb. You do know that, right?"

"Is it?" Jed mumbled, eyes half closed.

"Um, yeah. You're good at everything," Johnny reminded him. "You're really irritating like that."

He gave a humourless half chuckle. "It's not quite the same."

Johnny was silent for a while. "You're a good big brother," he said very quietly. He quickly followed it up with "When you're not annoying. Which is, you know, generally about two minutes out of the whole year, but, you know, sometimes."

Jed smiled and struggled to sit up. "I guess," he agreed, feeling a little better. Maybe Johnny was right. He'd never managed to be like his father in all the ways he was punished for not being, so why should he assume he'd be like him in this? If he was going to marry Abbey, if they were going to have kids, he'd be the kind of husband and father he wanted to be. And maybe having a bad example to try and avoid was just as useful as having a good example to follow.

His brother, getting up, gave him one last piercing look. "Okay, and Abbey's definitely not pregnant?"

Jed threw a pillow at him.