TWO KITCHENS!another journalist had immediately replied.
I wish I had two kitchens, Coralie wrote back to Adam.
This will be a massive prob, he gloomily replied.
It was unfortunate, because obviously Coralie wanted Labour to win. First, because she wasn’t a bad person, and second (well—equal first), so Adam would sell more books.
•••
But soon after,by the time of Zora’s seventh birthday party, Labour appeared to be gently, marginally, taking the lead. In the garden at Bartholomew Road, Tory Tom struggled to keep up with hordes of frenzied Year 2s, all screaming for water as though ten minutes bouncing on a trampoline had dehydrated them to the point of death.
“Did you see YouGov?” Adam nudged him. “Cameron’s down four percent.”
“God, I wouldn’t mind losing at this point.” Tom dabbed his damp brow with his sleeve. “Court five days a week is a holiday compared with everything I’m doing in Eastbourne.”
“Despoiling its environment? Taking food from the mouths of its babies?”
Tom gave Anne a cheery thumbs-up. “Lovely to see you too!”
Part of the myth, thelegend, of the Whiteman–Amin divorce, “the most mature divorce in England,” was that any Zora-related event, from nativities to gymnastics displays, was open to all family members from both sides. Coralie had been dreading seeing Marina’s dad again, the Hon. Mr. Justice Amin, retired now and working on a compendious history of cricket. (“And are you a barrister too?” he’d asked at Marina’s wedding. Coralie had admitted she was not. “Oh,” he’d replied mournfully. “That’s a shame.”) Fortunately, the Amins spent most of their time in Donegal, where Marina’s Northern Irish mother, Geraldine, had spent idyllic, if rainy, childhood summers. They’d be down for weeks when the baby arrived, Tom had explained, so they were giving Zora’s birthday a miss.
“Tom: the baby,” Anne said. “When’s it due?”
“Ten days to go. Zora came on her due date, apparently.” He shot a look at Adam, who nodded. “And second babies are supposed to be quicker. Could be any minute.”
“Hopefullynoton Zora’s birthday,” Adam murmured. “Therapy bills dot-com.”
Although Coralie wouldn’t put it past her, Anne wasn’t being rude by calling the baby “it.” Tom and Marina didn’t want to know if it was a boy or a girl in advance. One of the things that hurt Coralie most about Marina being pregnant was her seemingly endless casualness about it. The gap between having a baby and not having one yawned so large. Not having one: Your longing made you silly, at the mercy of fate, a clichéd figure of fun, mockable. Having one: Unassailable right to a baby, demanding of respect, instantly A Mother. When had she crossed from normal life into constant painful yearning? A few years earlier she’d been entirely ambivalent and fine.
Marina had made the party a drop-off but had invited the parents to join for cake. Coralie watched as she spun elegantly around the garden, a word of greeting for each person, or a joke. She almost looked like a beautiful actor playing a pregnant woman, as if she could reach under her elegant, roomy man’s business shirt, unclip a fake belly, and walk away. Soon she brought out the cake, four store-bought caterpillars with ghostly white chocolate faces, all laid out on a large oak chopping board.
As Zora took her place in front of them, surrounded by her school friends, her face lit up by the candles, Coralie saw with a pang that the little girl she’d come to know was gone forever. In the space of a few months, she’d grown up. No dresses anymore, not even the velvet one from Christmas. Leggings only, no pink. She refused to do ballet on Saturdays or to eat sausages “made of pig.” (“What didyou think they were made of before?” Adam had asked. “Ingredients!” Zora had replied.) Marina was videoing the singing—Coralie should have offered so Marina could be in the footage too. It was too late now. She was suddenly overwhelmed by the noise, the shouts, the people, and the terrible feeling of time having gone by. Tears almost came to her eyes—God, what was wrong with her?
“I’m going to eat some cake, and then we’ll go straightaway,” Adam said. “Remember last year at ours? They left on the dot of four. They’re the hosts this time—cleaning up is their problem!”
Coralie ducked back into the house for the loo. In the big family bathroom upstairs, she took her time having a wee, scrolling her phone, washing her hands, and taking a peek in the mirrored cabinet. (Marina used Clarins skin care and Chanel makeup? She was thirty-seven—not sixty.) The Bartholomew Road terrace had been redecorated, before Marina had bought it, by someone who’d made it look modern. It wasn’t Coralie’s style, but she could tell there were no water pressure problems or sudden heating failures in the luxe, all-white bathroom. Like in a hotel, there was even a shaver socket.
The only other room on the first floor was the big main bedroom. The door had been closed on her way up. Now it was half open. As she crept past, she caught a sudden glimpse of Adam’s ex-wife. Sitting on the end of the bed, slumped, eyes closed, Marina was gray in the face and haggard with exhaustion.
Downstairs, Coralie located the plastic bag filled with other plastic bags under the sink. She found one that didn’t have a hole in it and went out to clear up the garden.
•••
Despite Tom’s talkabout the baby arriving early, the due date approached with no action. On Thursday, Adam was planning topick up Zora for the Easter holidays, drop her at Coralie’s office, and catch the train up to Salford for the leaders’ debate. But after lunch, he texted to say that, if she could pick up Zora, he’d head to the debate early. Ed, or Ed’s team, had invited him to join the run-throughs.
In the big corner office of the agency’s Clerkenwell building, Coralie’s boss was writing in a Moleskine at her £1,200 marble Tulip table. “Antoinette? Knock, knock.”
“Mmm?”
“Oh, you had it framed!” Coralie nodded at her boss’s cherished photograph of herself with Idris Elba, marking the occasion of Antoinette being named number 89 on a list of the most influential Black Britons. (Idris Elba had been number 5.)
“Yes, soon I’ll have to…” Antoinette trailed off modestly as she gestured toward an open copy ofThe Gentlewoman, where, above a profile of herself as a groundbreaking creative director, she’d been pictured wearing Look 3 from Céline’s 2015 ready-to-wear collection months before it became available to the public.
“Oh yes, you have to,” Coralie said.
“And what can I do for you?”
“I think I have to leave early today. To pick up Zora from school? But Stefan has everything he needs.”
