She smiled. “I think he’s smitten. They only met three days ago. And he’s seen her every night since.”
“What’s your point?”
“Oh, come on, Howard. Don’t you want to know who this girl is who’s swept him off his feet?”
“You obviously do.”
“Maybe I’ll text him.”
“Don’t you dare,” he whip-cracked.
Hurt, she paused, with the fork midway to her mouth. “I’mjoking.”
“Leave him alone. Just because for the first time in his life, you don’t know every detail. Don’t interfere.”
“I’m not interfering,” she said quietly, and suddenly wanted to leave the room. She put her napkin down on the table and got up. She was about to take her plate to the kitchen when—
“You’re obsessive”—it was sudden, blunt—“possessive.”
She stopped dead.
Neither of them said anything for a moment; then he got up from the table and left.
Laura stood there, her plate in her hand. Tears pricked at her eyes, not just at the shock of the accusation, but because of the look he’d given her as he left. It was a look of deep resentment. She sat for a moment, and then as if to stop his words settling on her somehow, she stood again quickly and walked into the kitchen. She knew better than to follow him; he’d gone to the den and, anyway, she didn’t feel like confronting him, wasn’t in the mood for an argument.
The plate clattered on the counter and then the anger and indignation at what he’d said came out. He was the one who had made himself absent all those years. What did he know about the mammoth job of bringing up a child? The all-encompassing care when they were tiny, the lack of sleep, the wiping of cheeks, hands, bums, tables, high chairs, wipe, wipe, wipe. The inability to go to the bathroom by yourself, the absolute knowledge that one hug from you would soothe the bumps and bruises, and those hugs had to be always available. The constant reverse psychology /humor/diversion tactics required to get through an average day with a toddler. He’d never had to deal with, or suffer, the heartrending tears when they didn’t want to go to nursery school or try to work out why, when their four-year-old reasoning couldn’t explain they found it difficult to have the confidence to make friends. He hadn’t had to make the decisions over sports, clubs, and parties, or work out how to strike the balance between encouraging independence, without making their son feel he was unsupported, or solve the night terrors after the sudden death of his grandfather from a heart attack. What did he know about any of this? She felt a rage at his appalling shortsightedness; and then with a glass of wine, the anger subsided. Nobody knew any of this, nobody but a mother.
She picked up her wine and found her book by the fridge and took them into the darkening garden. The jasmine was beautifully pungent, its hundreds of tiny white starlike flowers just breaking out now that June had arrived. She lit the citronella candles and soon the moths came to investigate. As she sat in the swing seat, she let her mind drift. It was funny thinking back—it had been practically just the two of them for years, and now Daniel was on the verge of moving out permanently. She was suddenly reminded of something he used to say when he was three. He’d pretend to be a puppy and bound around her.
“Woof!” he’d say. “Do you like him?”
“He’s gorgeous.”
“You can keep him if you want.”
“Can I?”
“You can keep him forever.” And he’d throw his arms around her neck tightly.
The cat came mewing pitifully, his tail like a toilet brush, and she saw a fox sniffing around the large opaque window in the middle of the lawn that formed part of the ceiling of the subterranean pool room. Moses jumped onto her lap and stood there, still meowing and waiting for salvation. She’d originally gotten him for Daniel when her son was nine, to teach him about looking after pets. He was a small silver-gray Burmese and she’d ended up growing quite fond of him. Picking up a small stone, she threw it in the direction of the fox; she disliked them, was wary of their capabilities and lack of boundaries. Recently she’d heard a distraught, incredulous woman call into a radio breakfast show talking about how a fox had brazenly walked in through the open back door and climbed into her baby’s cot in the middle of the day. She shuddered. If that had been Daniel when he was small, she would have probably smashed the fox’s head against the patio. Three nights in a row, she thought with a smile. Who sees someone three nights in a row right off? What did this girl have that was so special?
As she mused about Cherry, she thought about another girl, a girl a tiny bit older than Daniel. Rose was Laura’s firstborn. She’d been the perfect baby, eating and sleeping right on schedule from day one. Which was why it had been so unusual when at only a few days old, Laura had had difficulty waking her to nurse. When it happened again three hours later, Laura was worried enough to take her to the doctor. He took one look at her and she was rushed to hospital. She was diagnosed with group B streptococcus, contracted from undetected bacteria in the birth canal. After twenty-four hours, the doctors told them Rose was going to die, and two hours later she did, in Laura’s arms. She was exactly seven days old.
The guilt had almost broken her, and their marriage. Laura was consumed with the thought of whether Rose would have survived if she’d gone to the doctors when she’d slept through her first feeding. The thing that saved them both was her gettingpregnant again. Ten months later, when Daniel was born, Laura had vowed to whichever presence might be listening that she’d devote her life to this tiny creature and never let anything happen to him. And in return, could he be kept safe?
The cat lowered itself onto her soft thighs, half-closing his eyes in relief at the fox’s disappearance and Laura stroked his fur. He watched the demented moths with occasional darting eyes, but was either too lazy or tired to actually do anything about them. As Laura swung gently in the seat, she thought fondly of this girl she’d not yet met, this girl who was the same age her own daughter would have been.
4
Saturday, June 7
IN HER LIFE, CHERRY HAD NEVER BEEN ON THREE DATES, ONE NIGHTafter the other. They headed into Hyde Park, past the golden Albert Memorial and across the Serpentine; Daniel was carrying a picnic hamper backpack, while she held the blanket. It was hot against her body and she moved it, trying to have as little contact with it as possible. The blazing heat of the day had subsided into a Mediterranean-like evening. It was still light, and would be for at least another four hours, and the park was full of people filled with a spontaneous holiday-like zest and optimism.
Cherry was starting to enjoy herself. They’d gotten past the first couple of dates, with their potential for awkwardness and bouts of extreme politeness, and invisible ties had started to form. She knew he was extremely focused on becoming a cardiologist, liked cycling and white-water rafting, and wrote using his left hand, but ate with his right. He knew she liked strawberries, but not strawberry jam, her father had died when she was young, and she’d lived in a flat with her mum, whom she’d rarely seen because her mum had had to work.
She’d kept to herself that the flat was in a run-down part of Croydon, in the midst of streets that were constantly littered with debris: empty beer cans, discarded soft furnishings and generaldetritus, unidentifiable sodden rags that looked as if they still contained something misshapen inside their dirtied casings. There was little money when Cherry was growing up, even less so when her father had died. He’d been so stupid, so selfish, as to not have life insurance. Her mother had had to increase her hours at the monolithic superstore on the edge of the town just to keep their tiny flat, and Cherry found her material world shrinking from low-budget fashion to hand-me-downs, no vacations except the occasional day trip to the beach, and embarrassments at school. No money for a copy of the annual photo when all her friends were crowded round, giggling over who stood next to whom in the yearbook picture, while Cherry stood aside, excluded and self-conscious. She had hated being poor. No, Cherry kept all this to herself and said something vague about coming from Surrey, which Croydon used to be part of, albeit many hundreds of years ago. More information changed hands and with familiarity came warmth, and gentle teasing reinforced those tender bonds. They’d also had their first kiss, a not unpleasant experience; in fact, Cherry knew she found Daniel extremely attractive.
They reached the fenced-off arena where tonight’s concert was to take place. Daniel handed over the tickets he’d miraculously managed to get hold of at such short notice and they were in. They followed the throngs to the grassy seating area and she let Daniel choose a place that had a good view of the stage. He laid out the blanket and she sat down, stretching her long, lightly tanned legs out in front of her. She noticed that quite a few people had brought portable chairs and was faintly aggrieved that they didn’t have the same. She suspected after a few hours her backside would feel the hard ground beneath it, but then the London Symphony Orchestra started to warm up and she made an effort to put it out of her mind.
