The Varana-Child

The dinner table had been silent since it was laid out. Despite a pleasant summer evening breezing through the opened glass doors, the candlelit centrepiece and a perfectly delectable meal set before them, the Varanas were in ill spirits. The Lord Varana had stared across the long distance at his ailing wife for a good five minutes, watching her pick at her favourite poultry with her painted lips downturned beneath a wave of mahogany that seemed as despondent as she did.

“Do you have to look so damn sad all the time?” he eventually demanded, reaching for his wine glass and taking a sizable swig.

“If it bothers you, don’t look at me,” she answered, her attention still focused on her plate and her silver fork descending for a half-hearted poke at a tree of broccoli.

“It does bother me,” he answered. “I don’t have to look at you to know it’s there. You act like I asked you to do something entirely unreasonable.”

“I haven’t once said that it was unreasonable,” she answered, lifting the broccoli to slot it behind her teeth. He didn’t answer, waiting for her to continue, which she didn’t until she’d finished chewing. “If it was unreasonable, I’d not be sad.”

He looked at her for a long moment, and sighed, practically throwing himself back into the backrest of his chair and lifting a napkin. “Arthur thinks you’re angry with me,” he stated.

“I am,” she answered, poking around her plate for another small-and-edible. “But not about what you think.”

“God, woman, do I have to drag everything out of you? If you carry on being so cryptic we’ll never get anything resolved. Do you want this marriage to fail?”

“I don’t know,” she answered, russet pair looking up and levelling a slightly accusatory glance across the table. “Do you?”

“Excuse me?” he answered, brows furrowing and his tone sharp. He straightened, crumpling the napkin and tossing it onto the tabletop. “Is it me gallivanting off for months on end to see the woman I’m in love with?”

“No,” she answered, her tone placating, whilst she reached for her own wine glass. She took a long sip, and flicked her eyes across the table at him a second time. “It is, however, you who’ve holed your mistress up at my family manor whilst she incubates your illegitimate ankle-biter.”

He stared at her.

She laughed lightly, shaking her head some and leaning back in her own chair. One arm crossed across her stomach, and she propped her other elbow on the chair arm. “Did you honestly think I’d not find out?”

“I...” he began, pausing in disbelief and his posture adjusting to one more defensive than aggressive.

She lifted one hand. “I don’t want to hear it, Remus,” she told him. “You’ve been sat getting so angry with me for my attachment to Violet, and my sadness in having to cauterise my relationship with her for you. But I’ve done it. Sadly, but you’ve not heard me complain. Whilst all along, you use my home to break the rules yourself. I fell in love. You found yourself another woman. What part of this marriage do you think isn’t broken? You’re using my resources to handle some other woman’s child. Tell me, darling, when’s she due? I might as well send her a congratulatory bouquet whilst I’m paying for her to live in my bed, in my luxuries, and to harbour the child my husband is so incapable of begetting me with.”

He sighed, rubbing the developed stubble over his chin and cheeks for one long moment, as though it might help him in his hunt for a solution. “I’ll give her up,” he eventually mumbled. “And send her away.”

“You will give her up,” she answered, firmly. “I am your wife. But you won’t send her away. There’s no point having another fatherless child wandering around the world. You’ll continue paying for it, and seeing it, and going on with your responsibilities. You will write in your will that after your death I am to continue paying said stipend should I still live. I don’t hate the child, Remus.”

He looked up at her, fully expecting the words that came next, and cringing in advance as she swept past the table, heading for the square ‘archway’ that led out to the rest of the house.

“I hate you.”