Her happiness made her almost too open, and some things that weren’t Adam but shared some DNA with him were let in by mistake, like loose-leaf tea in a pot with a tea cozy, hot puddings (disparaged by the old version of herself as “second dinners”), listening to Radio 4’sTodayandPM, and watchingChannel 4 NewsandNewsnight. Her love, too, overflowed and spilled out, and—having previously not made even the slightest impact—she was suddenly hailed at both her work coffee shop and Climpsons as an adored and favorite regular.
“I like it,” her boss said one day.
“Oh?” Coralie blushed. “Like what?”
“Whatever you’ve done.” Antoinette waved an elegant hand. “With your”—in a French accent—“visage.”
London wasn’t unfriendly! London wasn’t cold!
“I’m sorry, so sorry to interrupt.” An older woman came up to them on Columbia Road. “But I just wanted to tell you how beautiful you are—both of you! Together.”
And Adam and Coralie smiled, thanked her, and took it as their due.
•••
The drafts ofher manuscript stayed under the seat cushion of the sofa. After a while, she moved them to an IKEA bag. Then she put the bag under the bed. Then she forgot about her writing entirely.
3
Despite being nearly thirty and a woman, Coralie had always existed in a child-free world. No younger cousins, no babysitting, certainly no peers with kids. As for her own childhood, it was a closed book—one she had no desire to open. She knew from both literature and popular culture that being a mother was all joy and no fun, that the days were long but the years were short, that making art was incompatible with having babies, and that if a man was present in the delivery room and saw you giving birth, your sex life would never recover. (“It was like my favorite pub burning down”—Robbie Williams.)
Being a stepmother was famously even more difficult. You barely heardstepmotherwithout the wordevilbefore it. (Bzzt!Getting ahead of herself! She and Adam werenotmarried!) Children seemed, on the one hand, a lot of work, and on the other, terrifying: What vulnerabilities might they glimpse? Without the veneer of civility that governed the behavior of adults, what unpleasant truths might they utter? Before her first planned meeting with Adam’s daughter, Coralie found herself studying her face anxiously in the mirror. She had a hormonal blemish on her chin—what if Zora pointed it out?
The first part of the meeting, the coffee (and babyccino), passedby in a haze of politeness and nerves. It was only when they got up on their hind legs and strode out into the street that Zora assumed her correct proportion in relation to Coralie: not a giant, sinister opponent but a young, small, very appealing person. She had a long plush toy snake lashed to the front of her scooter with a hair ribbon. “Is that your most special toy?” Coralie inquired.
“Ha,” Zora darkly laughed. “N-Ospellsno.”
“We no longer take the most special toys out of the house,” Adam said.
“Because Mummy’s boyfriend,Tom, lost myowlat thezoo.” Zora turned her little face toward Coralie. “What do you call a snake who works for the government?”
“This was also a present from Tom,” Adam murmured.
Oh, it was a joke. “What?”
“A civil serpent.” Zora dashed her sneaker on the pavement and scooted off.
Of course, it would’ve been hard for Zoranotto be clever. Soon after meeting Adam, Coralie had searched for the barrister profile of his ex, Marina Amin. She was familiar with super-academic legal high-achievers from her time with Josh. He and his friends never did anything unless it could go on their CVs. Even so, she’d been shocked by Marina’s top-tier intellectual credentials: with honors; with distinction; first in year; winner of this, winner of that; her Spanish merely “conversational,” she was fluent in Italian and French. “Pfff!” Adam had scoffed when she raised this. “Marina’s Spanish is just French in an Italian accent.”
At Hackney City Farm, in its charming cobbled courtyard, Adam slipped on some sort of animal poo. “Yuck!” he whispered, horrified. “Yuck, yuck, yuck.”
As he gingerly cleaned his shoes in a puddle, Coralie and Zorawandered over to the pigpen. There, three crossbred Piétrain sows reclined luxuriously as if taking the mud for their health.
“Cora-nee,” Zora said. “I have a question.”
“Oh, um.” Coralie blanched, preparing for something about feelings, or Adam, or their arrangements, or her intentions, or marriage. She wouldalwaystake her seriously, she vowed then. For as long as she knew Zora, she wouldn’t lie. “Go for it!”
“Are pigs waterproof?”
She didn’t know what she had expected a child to be like, but it was never as great as this.
•••
Not long after,on a beautiful warm day, Coralie and Adam were lying in Coralie’s bed in the oblong of sun from the skylight. Adam had collapsed on top of her, still inside her (though not hard), and her hips were aching, but she didn’t want to move. “Half term” was starting soon, whatever that was, and he’d be going to the seaside with Zora. He invited Coralie along, but (from some old instinct about fathers and daughters, entirely gleaned from novels) she said no. Soon the reality of not seeing him for at least seven days overtook her, and she found herself almost in tears.
There had been lots of country boarders at her school, in their chambray shirts and Tiffany heart chains, and one of them had told her a fact about farm dogs. This girl, who was frankly weird, although she had more friends than Coralie, said you should never separate animals who were having sex, because pulling the penis out roughly would bring out all the other animal’s insides and guts with it, eviscerating it and killing it. Coralie relayed the memory to Adam. “That’s exactly how I feel,” she said.
She was being serious, almost hysterically so. Adam had a serious face on when he replied, “Like…a dog?”
