“It’s a very scary time,” Fiona said. “Next!”
•••
Back home,Adam had made spaghetti Bolognese. The kitchen smelled of burned garlic. The outline of each piece of onion was clearly visible, which meant they hadn’t been cooked long enough. The tinned tomatoes were still chunky and vivid red. But the meat was properly brown, and he’d grated a lot of Cheddar. Starving, she asked for seconds. He served it to her, gratified.
She waved her phone. “Just updating Alice.”
“Did you find your new Hackney wife?”
“A woman called Lydia, maybe? A single mum. Hang on, who’s that?”
There was a tiny TV in the kitchen, which Adam used to watchNewsnightwhen he was “doing the dishwasher” (his main item of housework, much mentioned by him). On-screen, a beefy white man was pushing through throngs of other beefy white men. He waswearing a homemade T-shirt that said, in white letters on a black background,Convicted of Journalism.
“That’s Tommy Robinson.” Adam turned the volume up on Sky News. “The far-right guy.”
“To the judges at the Old Bailey, he’s Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, and they’ve already found him to be in contempt of court….” the journalist said over the footage. “Arrested outside Leeds Crown Court last year, he was broadcasting live on social media about a sex abuse case.”
On the screen, the reporter held the microphone up to Robinson in the crowd. “I’m telling you!” His face was red with fury. “I am being sent to jail for doing what you just done!”
Adam pressed the mute button. “He’s asked Donald Trump for asylum.”
“Um, why?”
“He says he’s being persecuted as a citizen journalist.”
Coralie put her arms around him. “I’m getting you that shirt for your birthday.”
Adam laughed, and they hugged for a long time, but when they separated, he looked rueful, gray, and tired. When he opened the dishwasher, it was with the grunt he used to signal that something was not okay, and that it was probably her fault, or at least required her attention.
She paused on her way up to the bath. “Do you want to talk to me about anything?”
Adam was blank.
“Because you’ve got your blank face on and you’re making your little resentful grunts.”
Adam grunted. “I’m not resentful,” he said in a resentful voice.
“Is it the dishwasher? You hate it?”
He wedged the pasta pot into the bottom tray. “No onelikesdoing the dishwasher.”
“This is your last chance…” She was walking backward. “To reveal your emotions…” She had reached the pantry. “Or stay forever silent.”
“Journalism,” Adam said. “I don’t really feel like I do it. Bits and bobs. The newsletter. The podcast. It’s not exactly Woodward and Bernstein.”
“You writebooks,” Coralie said. “People would kill for your career.”
“It doesn’t seem veryserious.”
Coralie had read lots of novels about this—Updikes, Roths, that one where Leonardo DiCaprio couldn’t move to Paris because Kate Winslet got knocked up (at least, that was the movie version). She could all too easily inhabit the mind of a man in his forties, one who felt disappointed, stymied, perhaps—cockblocked. Men were supposed to pursue, hunt, fight, and excel. Cooking for his pregnant wife, loading the dishwasher—constraints on his freedom, any at all, restrictions on his God-given rights and ability to go out and do anything he wanted at any time. It lowered his testosterone, made him less of a man, could actuallykill him. Domesticity! That was to blame, that was behind the so-called stalling of his career, that was what his tsks and sighs were conveying to her in the kitchen. Nothing to do with the changing media landscape, that all the old certainties had been torn away and that unprecedented access to behind-the-scenes info had revealed every job in the world to be shit. It washerfault, that’s what he was saying.
“Actually,” she said, “I think you’re doing really well.”
He shrugged, but not angrily.
And it was a measure of some new maturity, as well as of how tired she was, that she simply left it at that.
•••
