“It seems unlikely.”
“A far-off dream.”
“Happy birthday,” she said.
He slipped out.
Maxi’s hair was damp from his bath. She tried not to chat to him during his last feed of the day. Nighttime was supposed to be nighttime, that’s what all the books said. They also said not to feed a baby to sleep, but his eyes soon shut, and his fists flopped back to his ears. She blew on his long eyelashes. They fluttered, but he didn’t wake up. When she got to her feet, she couldn’t hear any milk inside him. (Usually he sloshed like a hot-water bottle.) Her left breast was still full; if he didn’t wake up in a few hours, she’d be in pain and have to hook up to the dreaded pump. But Max always knew what to do. They were a team. She laid him in the cot. He looked enormous in it, dwarfing his toy sheep. She leaned down to kiss him and tiptoed out, pulling the door shut softly behind her.
As she stood in the hallway, her ear to the door, her father came to her, and the black hole of growing up. She felt herself sitting to attention in her bedrooms in Brisbane, Canberra, Jakarta, Darwin, waiting to be given her orders for the day; tiptoeing around, always silent and ideally invisible; arranging her face to be attentive, alert, polite. Never sad, never angry, never happy; it wasn’t worth it. To have an emotion (bad or good) was to make yourself a parent’s problem. To make yourself a parent’s problem was simply begging for trouble. She learned the lesson of The Look. The Look was all it took with Coralie, but Daniel never learned it, he had to have the smack. (That must have been what Barbie had meant about the good one and the bad one.) All this still churned inside her. But it wouldn’t touch her children. She was the wall, between the past and the future, and they were safe on the other side.
For as long as she was alive, she would protect them.
•••
Swept up inUntitled 2019 Campaign Book, Adam nonetheless devoted three days over the New Year’s break to record test radio shows forThe Timesand theSunday Times. Partly based on the popularity of his podcast, the idea was to launch an “audio product” to drive print subscriptions for the paper. The spontaneity of radio appeared to suit him (less slogging, more blagging). Now he was the front-runner to get his own politics variety show: a mix of hard and breaking news, lighthearted quizzes, premade packages, interviews long and short, and a potential phone-in segment. It would go out live, between 5 p.m. and 8 p.m. Monday to Thursday, from the studio in London Bridge. If it went ahead (the launch date was late spring) Coralie would be dealing with four pickups, children’s dinners, and solo double bath and bedtimes minimum every week. She’d be a widow without the sympathy.
But Lydia was an actual single mother. And when Nicky went away, or was busy at the studio, Alice was on her own for months at a time. Coralie couldn’t trouble them with her despair.
When she complained to Adam, he immediately said he’d turn it down—“You’re the boss! Just say the word!” An easy offer to make, since he knew she’d never do it. Ask an ambitious show-off to refuse high-status work? She wasn’tmad.
Besides, there were other things to worry about. A third person in Britain was diagnosed with the novel coronavirus, and (while getting a packet of biscuits from the pantry) Adam had seen the mouse.
19
Pandemic
Brexit, Donald Trump, even climate change—aside from the very hot days when she was pregnant, so far not a single catastrophe had befallen her personally as a result of these apocalyptic harbingers. Privilege alert! But it was true. All the stress and psychic energy of monitoring their daily developments had been an absolute waste of time. The fact was, no amount of vigilance about “the news” did anything to alter or control it. That was the hard-won insight she’d been left with. She was reluctant to give it up.
Sadly, developments in 2020 meant she had to.
In February, her father had canceled his trip to what he called “Europe” (London and Paris).Observe, Orient, Decide, Act (OODA)read the subject line of the email he sent to both Coralie and a Hotmail address Daniel hadn’t used since he was twenty. The body of the email was devoted to what he called his “sitrep.” The upshot was that he didn’t want Jenny exposed to “the virus, now formally designated Covid-19” as they transited through Singapore, where eight new cases had been reported, bringing the total to fifty-eight.I realize that this may be a disappointing email to receive, but I must actdecisively given the available data. Regards, Roger, he concluded, helpfully adding, in brackets,Dad.
Roger’s canceled his visit because of the coronavirus, Coralie WhatsApped Dan, adding a restrained seven emoji thumbs-up.
Pussy!her brother replied.
But Coralie redownloaded Twitter and followed every journalist she could think of.
She had her Brexit stockpile still—the pasta and so on—and began adding to it every week. She wasn’t some kind offreak, like a prepper! She wasstrategically forward-purchasingthings she had planned to buy anyway. What difference did it make if it was stored in her pantry (and the spare room) instead of the Ocado customer fulfillment center? She imagined, sometimes, a sparkly magnet, like Daniel and Barbie’s:
It’s not a warehouse
It’s a warehome
“Got any vitamin C in the stocky-p?” Adam asked one day. A forwarded message had gone round both his university friends’ WhatsApp groupandhis Liverpool Football Club WhatsApp group saying it was clinically proven to halt progression of the disease. “That’s directly from doctors in Lombardy,” he said. (The news at that time was dominated by footage of overflowing Italian hospital wards where older people, mainly men, lay on their fronts hooked up to machines.)
At Montessori, the children were playing Corona, a version of tag where, if someone breathed on you, you lay on the ground and “died.” In the second week of March, a parent in the pickup line said it was time to shut the schools. The words resounded in her head like a hit gong. She swayed, faint. Disease she could handle,sickness, even death. Butno school? No drop-off and pickup, nine and three thirty, the unalterable rhythm of her days? The unknowns were so vast, and the terror suddenly so great, that—on the pavement, at the front gate, with Florence’s scooter ready and Maxi sleeping in the buggy—she found herself flying into the air; for a moment, she was a ghost, or an angel, weightless, shimmering, a vapor of pure fear. Then she dropped back down to earth, Coralie again, a mother in a puffer coat with a tote bag full of snacks.
On March 18, a day when 33 people died of Covid in Britain, bringing the death toll to 104, it was announced that the schools would close on Friday. Glastonbury was canceled. Forty Tube stations were shut down.Just confirmed at lobby briefing, Adam texted.London WON’T be sealed off.That was good to know!
On Friday, New York and California residents were ordered to “shelter in place.” When Coralie picked up Florence for the last time, the teachers handed over a pile of her (bad) art, as well as her Crocs, and all her spare knickers and clothes. “She might have grown out of them by the time we see her again,” Miss Sarah said. Coralie cried silently all the way home.
Adam, meanwhile, his draft finished and nothing to do until the edits came back, or hisTimesshow started, urgently texted colleagues and special advisers to work out who was taller, him or the chancellor Rishi Sunak? A chilling official message from a hospital in Harrow went viral on UK WhatsApp:We currently do not have enough space for patients requiring critical care.Finally, at 5 p.m., the prime minister declared that all pubs, gyms, theaters, and restaurants were to close.
Over the weekend, which was sunny, Broadway Market and Columbia Road Flower Market were both heaving. Angry people posted pictures of the crowds on Twitter: It was okay for them to bethere, breathe the air, and take crowd pictures—but it wasnotokay for others to be there, breathe the air, and be IGNORANT of the danger the nation faced.
There was huge support for the formal lockdown, announced by Boris Johnson in his most serious, gravelly voice on March 23. It seemed to make people feel good to know that no one in the United Kingdom could enjoy themselves. Members of the new Wilton Way WhatsApp group (description field:In a World Where You Can Be Anything, Be Kind) competed with one another to be theleastfree.My dog needs walking twice a day for his arthritis. Do you think I can take him on my government-sanctioned exercise and my government-sanctioned shop?In what world would thatnotbe okay? Why ask? Even so, a few people gently tut-tutted, one stating they’d “erected an agility course” for their “doggo” in their garden, using low-cost, environmentally friendly materials available from Argos.
