“Modern, unconventional—I like it. No wedding! Book, house, baby.”
It was unclear whyhisbook had to be written forherto gestate their baby. But it would all be over by May. Five more months. That she could handle. She let out a long, relieved breath. “Book, house, baby.”
Adam pulled her in to his chest.
“All I have for birthday dinner are the oysters,” she mumbled after a while.
“You wouldn’t be allowed to cook anyway. I’m going to run you a bath. You can choose a cup, a duck, a Barbie, or a Ken, whatever you like to have in there with you. No? Okay, I’ll get you a glass of wine. Then while you’re in the bath, I’ll cycle to a little place we like to call…”
“Bella Vita.”
“Bella Vita, for pizza, and when I come back, it will be just us, together, no more visitors, no more birthday, nothing left to do. And when we wake up, Christmas is a lovely day with no work emails. It’s a No Pressure Day. Okay?”
“Okay.”
He went downstairs to the bathroom. Slowly, she followed him. She heard him wrench on the hot tap. He opened the linen cupboard and got her a fresh towel. He pressed it into her arms and cried in a gently satirical voice: “He’s doing the new flagship store for Yohji Yamamoto!”
“Stop!”
“I love you so much,” Adam said.
“I love you.”
6
2015
Adam viewed his house as practically and nonjudgmentally as he viewed his own body. Bit rough around the edges! Does the job! As long as he had one—he was fine with it! He couldn’t stand in a three-dimensional space, take stock of it, and visualize something better. He didn’t have Coralie’s sense of a home as something plastic, dynamic, constantly changing, a delicate ecosystem, responsive to intervention, something alive. (Incidentally, this was not how Coralie viewed her own body. Something to think about!)
By February, she’d packed the entire ground floor of the Wilton Way house into storage, except for the toaster, the kettle, and one box of kitchen stuff. She’d bought a two-burner electric hob, borrowed a bar fridge from Stefan, and set it all up in her study. Clothes they’d take to Greenwood Road Laundrette. The dishes they’d do in the bathroom. The builders shrouded the stairs in diaphanous plastic to keep the dust out. Aside from a week or so when the house had no back, they’d be living on the top two floors till May. May, her perfect house. May, her perfect life!
Adam, however, very regrettably, was hating what he called “thisfucking renovation.” Almost as soon as he’d handed in his Boris bio, he’d landed another book contract, this time embedding with Ed Miliband and Labour to cover the 2015 “GE” (general election—Coralie had to google it). When the campaign kicked off properly, he’d be doing eighteen-hour days to capture it in minute-by-minute detail. Before then, he was trying to focus on what his editor termed “backfill”: preprepared chunks of well-reported background to be distributed throughout the book.
Coralie hadnotplanned for another book to take over Adam’s (and, by extension, her) entire life. Everything Adam said he needed was in storage—the paper copy of Labour’s 2010 manifesto; Ed Miliband’s father’s books; the giant pine dining table that was revealed (in its absence) to be the “linchpin” of Adam’s “writing life.” Coralie had bought him a membership to the London Library, which he liked for quiet work, but every time a source phoned, he had to run outside to call them back. “If only there was somewhere I could write, talk, make a coffee, and take a shit whenever I wanted,” Adam said. “Oh yeah, there was—my fucking house!”
Thatmyreally stung. She didn’t mention it, but neither could she forget it.
Unfair of him to complain, because the renovation was going as well as it was possible for a horrifically expensive and disruptive project to go. By the time Coralie left for the office each morning, Oneal and his core team of builders had arrived, four nearly silent men of large stature and mature years. The tallest and most silent one made them all a cup of tea with their own kettle. Then they gathered round the camp table so Oneal, like a general, could lead them through his plans for the day. Coralie was beginning to think she would miss them when they left. Unlike Adam, they at least seemed happy to see her.
“Just got to get through it,” Adam would say, through gritted teeth, about the renovation and his book.
“Just got to get through it!” Coralie agreed, meaning his book, delaying her dreams, and his attitude.
•••
One day,before the formal beginning of the election campaign, Ed Miliband was pictured with his wife in a charmless, fluorescently lit gray prison cell or psych ward. Staring awkwardly beyond each other, they seemed on the verge of divorce.
“Don’t say anything boring like ‘I wish I had a kitchen,’ but…” Coralie angled her phone toward Adam in bed. “Look at Ed’s shit kitchen.”
“I wish I had a kitchen.” He searched for it on his own phone. “Oh dear, theDaily Mail’s onto it.”
Coralie found the article. “ ‘Not much prospect of a decent meal emanating from that mean, sterile, little box inside Ed Miliband’s home,’ ” she read out loud. “ ‘Miliband’s kitchen is as bland, functional, and humorless as a communist housing block in Minsk.’ ”
“That’s so odd,” Adam said. “I’ve been to their house, and I was sure they had a big kitchen in the basement.”
Coralie sighed. “I wish I had a kitchen.”
The next day, she was working late in the office when she received a subjectless email from Adam. It contained a link to a tweet from a journalist and Miliband family friend:Ed Miliband’s kitchen is lovely.TheDaily Mailpictures, she’d clarified, were ofthe functional kitchenette by sitting room, which wasfor tea and quick snacks.