“Maybe we should leave them to it,” Adam said. “I wouldn’t mind a tea, though.”
They started their teas. No sign of their hosts. Coralie checked her phone. “Past eleven, poor Miss Camilla. I’m going to creep up and say goodbye.”
“Dan?” she called. “Barbie?”
They weren’t in the library. In the hall, she mounted the stairs to the top floor, the floor she hadn’t seen yet. She became aware of a low murmur, a deep rumbling sound, that could only be intimate and private. Something drove her to find its source. In the acid-green front bedroom, Barbie lay on the massive bed like a pharaoh, towel around his waist like a skirt. The long scrape on his bald head was clean but looked quite sore. Dan was cuddled up to him, his eyes closed, face resting on Big Man’s rising and falling chest.
“To come to the end of a time of anxiety and fear!” Barbie said. “To feel the cloud that hung over us lift and disperse—the cloudthat dulled the heart and made happiness no more than a memory! This at least is one joy that must have been known by almost every living creature.”
He was reading fromWatership Down.
Coralie backed out silently and tiptoed down the stairs.
•••
The walk homewas strange, like she was inside Google Maps, clicking herself farther and farther down the road. “Don’t you feel like you’re in Street View?” She turned to Adam. “Clicking along the road.”
“But on Street View you don’t see the stars.”
“No, you’re right, Icansee them,” she said. “In the sky.”
Inside, Miss Camilla had the vacant eyes and messed-up hair of someone on a long-haul flight. Coralie pressed a wad of cash into her hand. “You’re wonderful,” she urged. “You’re a wonderful person.”
Upstairs, Flo was on her tummy, her mouth a perfect O where her thumb had slipped out.
On the top floor, Zora had fallen asleep with her night-light on. It had been years since she’d seen the stars and planets slowly revolving on the ceiling. Coralie stared up. A tremor of pure delight ran through her at the shadows made by her hands in the flickering light: flowers, birds, bees, just like the insect wallpaper at Big Man’s house.
She ran a bath, undressed, and watched the water pour from the taps. Steam billowed; the mirror fogged over. The window at Railroad, when she’d first told Adam about Richard. The waterfall plunging to the pool at Florence Falls. She sent a picture to Adam, to see if he remembered too. Before the two ticks had turned blue, he was in the bathroom with her.
“Did you see it?” she said. “Did you get it?”
“Your sext? I certainly did.”
It wasn’t a sext, but she could see how he’d made that mistake—she could see everything and suddenly realized there were no mistakes, that nothing and no one was inherently wrong and nothing and no one was inherently bad. “So funny,” she said. “I love you.”
She lay on the bed in her towel. Adam unwrapped her like a present. After a while, a realization dawned on her, literally rose in her mind like the sun: What ifshecould penetratehim? On top, she incorporated his penis inside her, where it became part of her body, and as she moved she focused on the sensation she imagined at the base, roots like tree roots, where the forest meets the sea, all the nerve fibers, electrical pulses, phosphorescent sea creatures, tendrils trailing. “You’re inside me,” he said. “You’re stirring me.”
They came, but she didn’t want to separate. “Don’t pull out,” she said. “You’re part of me.” They rolled extremely carefully onto their sides, still attached, facing each other.
“Why did you bring Zora’s night-light in?” she asked after a while.
“I didn’t,” he said. “Where has the roof gone?”
•••
Weeks later,Daniel still felt bad about the shroom truffles. But Coralie didn’t. She was pregnant.
15
2019
It was probably a bit of a tragedy she hadn’t done an NCT class the first time around. Or was it an NCTgroup? The National Childbirth Trust groups or classes were a rite of passage for middle-class mums—it was where they learned that having a C-section meant they’d failed birth and using a bottle meant they’d failed their baby. (Coralie had to work that out for herself!)
They were also a matchmaking service for women who lived locally with similar due dates. Alice had made two close friends in hers: one who worked in art PR and one who was so rich she had a utility-room shower for her dogs. The three of them went to Clissold Leisure Centre every week for postnatal yoga and smoothies. Coralie’d had no friends on her first mat leave—aside from Florence. But beyond the fact that she was an immigrant who hadn’t known about NCT, why hadn’t she joined a mothers’ group? “You’re a cat who walks alone,” Adam said. “Anyway, you were reading it all in books.”
At the time of Coralie’s first pregnancy, her own mother had recently died of a gruesome abdominal illness. There had therefore been no question ofoptimizingbirth; it was simply something tosurvive. Perhaps there’d been a little feeling inside her, too, that, as a stepmother, she wasn’t having a pure first-baby experience. Unlike other new mums, if she didn’t know how to change a nappy, she could ask Adam.
But with this second baby (last baby), she had a craving to do everything better and properly. She had googled “Hackney birth classes” to discover the Thursday-night classes on Eleanor Road. Birth, breastfeeding, and parenting were covered, and there was gentle pregnancy yoga too. Unlike most courses, which went on for the whole final trimester, this one took place over three ninety-minute sessions, which was good, because as the first Thursday approached she began to feel sick at the thought of missing Florence’s bedtime.
