by James Flint
‘So everyone says. Bit premature, isn’t it? Same day as the funeral?’
‘I think that’s what Caitlin thought. I think she thought she’d leave them to it.’
—————
Back in Chelsea, Mia’s belly had started hurting again, just as it had in the early stages of her previous pregnancy. In becoming a mother she’d sacrificed any sense that her body fitted together. What had once been a lissom machine, the fleshed-out flux of a girl, was now a collection of disparate parts – and faulty, leaky parts at that. Add pain to the mix, mysterious pain that could signify an almost limitless range of possible horrors – or else nothing at all – and it seemed to take all of her energy just to hold on to any even vaguely coherent sense of who she was.
The discomfort woke her later that night. She slid out of bed, felt her way to the bathroom, lifted the seat, and slumped over the void. Another thing familiar from her previous pregnancy, this: the small-hours slash. Purge complete she wiped herself, rose to her feet, and let her nightdress fall back down round her knees.
Behind her the toilet floated like the stern of a small yacht. It wasn’t set into the floor like the toilets of the houses she’d grown up in, but was cantilevered out of the wall behind it, a wall which – like the bath housing, the shower base, the two sinks and the medicine cabinet – had been cast in situ from concrete of the very finest quality, concrete that flowed around the room in a single, extruded mass from which the various fixtures and fittings emerged.
The construction had always reminded Mia of a French cartoon she used to watch as a child in Senegal. The cartoon was called Barbapapa, named for the father of a family of amorphous shape-changing beings who lived in a house of a similar nature. Inside it the various bits of furniture swelled from the walls and floors just as they did, in their way, in this room. When Mia had been small she’d wanted to live in a house just like that, just like the Barbapapa residence. And now, she supposed, she did. Except hers was even nicer.
Two sinks. Yes. They had two sinks. Barbapapa didn’t have two sinks, though of course he didn’t need them, as he or Barbamama could make a sink by extending their stomachs into bowl-like shapes whenever they chose. The question of what the Barba family did regarding drainage and sewage hadn’t of course occurred to the childhood Mia. She looked at Alex’s sink, on whose generous surround his razor, shaving dish, bottles of deodorant and aftershave had been tidily arranged by the cleaner. It was a little like living in a hotel, she thought. The notion made her happy: she’d always been very fond of hotels. And she loved this house. The young black architect they’d commissioned to do the renovations on the recommendation of a friend of a friend of Mia’s who’d studied at the Architectural Association in Bedford Square had turned out to be an inspired choice. He’d gone on to become a media darling – a ‘young Turk’ – famous mainly for his open-plan layout of the tent that housed London’s new art fair, held each October in Regent’s Park.
‘A miracle of topology,’ The Times’s architecture critic had called it. ‘It seems to actually fold the space in on itself.’ Mia wasn’t sure that she entirely agreed with this analysis even before Alex had quoted it to the point of irritation at their dinner parties. The art fair seemed to her little more than a very large marquee divided into cubicles, no more special than the layout of Ikea. But then Mia had not thought long or deeply about the endless time and motion studies that had gone into the design of Europe’s favourite furniture outlet, which had parlayed the science of consumer behaviour into a cost/distribution ratio of which the most ruthless communist state would have been proud. Nor, for that matter, had she ever been to any other kind of trade fair. Her looks and natural poise had ensured she’d been steered well clear of such humdrum environments, where cheery businessmen swapped business cards and soft-shoed hacks hauled bulging, branded shoulder bags between the pit-stop smiles of the PRs and marketeers, all to squeeze a few more precious drops of green elixir from the cogs of capital as collectively they hauled them round.
Turning on her own hot tap, Mia rinsed her hands, looked into the mirror, and squeezed some rehydration gel onto the tips of her fingers – just under a hundred pounds a tube, from a specialist clinic in Belgravia. Carefully she massaged it into the skin around her eyes. What did she see? Did she see what Alex saw? Just what did Alex see, these days? She couldn’t remember the last time he’d looked into her eyes. These days Rufus took all of their attention. They both looked at Rufus, Rufus looked back at them, and this was the way they’d come to communicate.
Yes. She supposed that’s exactly what it was. Having a child. That’s why you did it. That’s how it worked. It was a kind of improvised theatre, everyone cast in roles they only half understood, trying to do what was expected of them, trying to reinvent themselves on the fly, trying to cope. It wasn’t exactly what she’d planned for herself, that was for sure. If it hadn’t been for Rufus, who knows? She might have had a lead role at the RSC by now and have brokered that into something sizeable in telly or even film. Her agent had been devastated – in the nicest possible way – when she’d told him she was pregnant. He’d always had such ambitions for her, but in the space of a few seconds she had seen that interest drain completely from his face. There had been talk of picking things up in a couple of years’ time when the early stages of motherhood were out of the way – there followed a (short) list of famous actresses who’d managed this – but they both knew that her best chance of a breakthrough role was now, not later. Still, she hadn’t given up hope just yet, if she could keep the wrinkles at bay. And if the gel didn’t work, well, there were other things she could do. They could afford them.
The door swung open and a small figure came tottering in, rubbing his eyes with one hand and tugging at the soft fabric of his pyjama top with the other. It was Rufus, awake and out of bed. Mia bent to him and as she did her knees cracked.
‘I can’t sleep.’
‘Nor can Mummy, darling. Come here now. Come on.’
She scooped him up and, rising, set him on her hip. He was getting bigger. It wouldn’t be long before she couldn’t do this any more.
The child sank his face into the shelter of her neck and began to whine. She brushed the dark curls – her curls – back from his ear.
‘Viens, mon petit chou. Shush now. Mummy’s here.’
Leaving the bathroom light on so that she could see her way, she carried the child through the bedroom, across the landing and down the stairs to his room, where she coaxed him back into his bed. But she couldn’t escape, not yet. He wanted her to read to him.
‘Okay,’ she agreed, ‘but just five minutes.’ And she reached over to the oiled oak bookshelves for the second volume of the Harry Potter saga and settled herself down beside him, arranging his Buzz Lightyear duvet so that it covered her legs as well as his.
‘The next day, however, Harry barely grinned once,’ she read, picking up where she’d left off earlier.
‘No. Not that bit. The bit where Harry and Ron take the flying car to Hogwarts.’
‘But we read that already.’
‘But it’s the good bit!’
Mia sighed and flicked forward to the page in question. A generation of kids growing up desperate to go to boarding school. Well, they had that covered. Rufus was already on the list for Winchester. That also wasn’t quite what she’d envisaged when she’d been younger. The general idea then had been to bring children into a more open and equitable world. But somehow that ideal had got lost along the way, somewhere back with the modelling contracts, and the acting ambitions, and the need to find a husband who was capable of providing at least the basics of civilised living and security in a world that was far more off-balance and terrifying than she’d ever realised at sixteen.
Harry finally worked his magic and Rufus nodded off, although by this point Mia was wide awake. She ran her finger around the hairline of her sleeping son and wondered if that particular and ineffably perfect combination of mahogany
curls and caramel skin would actually have existed if it hadn’t been for the events of September 11, 2001. It was impossible not to have been transformed in some way by an event of such extraordinary intensity, and when Alex had called her a few days after their return from Brazil she’d had no hesitation in giving him permission to come and visit her precisely because of what they’d just been through. And when they’d ended up spending the night together, wrapped tightly like students in the single bed in her digs, their lovemaking had seemed a kind of affirmation in the face of all the lives that had been lost.
This fervour, of course, soon faded, but Alex came back again, and again, and as their situation began to renormalise Mia found that she really rather liked him. Then six weeks into her run at Stratford she had discovered that she was pregnant. She wanted children – she’d always wanted children – but now? With Alex? In the middle of the best job of her career? Even though the baby would arrive after the season was over, if she kept it then she would by then be starting to show. Hopefully it wouldn’t be more than the seamstresses could cope with, but it was still going to be bloody embarrassing.
If she kept it? Was this even a question? She’d turned thirty that March. There was still time on the clock, but it seemed a little late in the day to have a termination. Two years before: maybe. Five years before: for sure. But not when she’d almost certainly be wanting to try and start a family before long anyway. Her mother and grandmother had both had an early menopause; she didn’t want to be one of those older mums who had one child late on and then couldn’t have another. And she certainly didn’t want to be mucking about with IVF.
In the end, she decided that she wouldn’t know until she told him. His reaction would be her gauge; by that she’d be able to calibrate her own decision. She waited until the next time he drove up to see her and told him in bed, right after they’d made love, making sure she watched his expression while she gave him the news. And the thing his face did, the very first thing, before there were words or thoughts or any of that ambivalent stuff, was to smile. Sure, later on there were hesitations, and qualifications, and manoeuvrings and misunderstandings, on her side as well as on his. But the first thing was that smile: that was the thing she would always remember, and that was the thing that sealed it. She would let him ask her to marry him, which before long he did. He couldn’t not; not after the spectacular series of blowjobs she’d given him.
They tied the knot during a long weekend in New York right after her show came down, just the two of them, a gesture intended to both make up for lost time and to somehow symbolically close the circle opened for them on that terrible September day. They had a miniature ceremony in Central Park then the next day drove out to Long Island to visit the graves and the families of Alex’s friends Carlos and Lucía. It was very poignant, but nonetheless getting hitched like that did manage to annoy both sets of parents, particularly Mia’s mother, who still moaned to her at intervals about the need for them to have a proper party to celebrate. And now here she was, a yummy mummy in an extravagantly large Barbapapa townhouse in Chelsea with two sinks in the master bathroom en suite and a second child on the way, living a part rather than acting one.
The pain in her belly was subsiding and now, unbelievably, she was feeling horny. Typical. The long hours Alex worked combined with Rufus’s constant need for attention meant that sex, once a near-nightly delight, now seemed to happen about once a month. When they did make love she had to gear herself up to it and didn’t really enjoy it very much. And now, all of a sudden, at two in the morning with her husband a hundred miles away, what she wanted more than anything was a really comprehensive fuck.
Sod it. She wasn’t going to sit around at home all weekend. She’d drive up tomorrow and join him, maybe get Margaret and Miles to look after Rufus while she dragged him out for a sexy walk in the woods. It would be cold but they could take blankets. They used to do that kind of thing all the time. It was important to hold on to that stuff. It helped keep you young.
—————
Caitlin did not appear for breakfast the next morning, so the four Wolds found themselves eating as a family. While he was making toast Alex’s phone rang. It was Mia – she was missing him, and thought she’d bring Rufus for a visit.
‘It’s pointless us being in London, we’ve got nothing planned. We might as well all be together.’
‘We could have all driven up together yesterday.’
‘I didn’t think about it then.’
Alex turned to his mother. ‘Is it okay if Mia and Rufus come and stay?’
‘Yes, of course it is,’ said Margaret, as he’d known that she would. Alex sighed inwardly. He’d been looking forward to a child-free weekend. And with Caitlin in the house as well … it just might have been simpler if Mia wasn’t around. He lifted the phone back to his ear.
‘Sure. That’d be great.’
‘Do you want us to come?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Because it sounds like you don’t.’
‘Not at all – it’ll be nice. I was just worried you’d be bored. Caitlin’s here too, by the way.’
‘Caitlin? Really? At your parents’ house?’
‘Yeah. Some kind of family tension over at her place. Jamie’s back and apparently it’s all kicked off between him and Sheila. She’s hiding in her room though – I haven’t even seen her yet. Maybe you can find out a bit more from her when you get here.’
He ended the call, took his toast to the table, and reached for the Companies and Markets section of the Saturday Financial Times, which was muddled in with the various components of that day’s Telegraph. No sooner had he sat down than the house landline rang. Miles tutted, got up from the table, and walked over to the sideboard to answer it.
‘Wold,’ he barked into the handset, and then proceeded to conduct an almost monosyllabic exchange with whoever it was that had called. ‘Ah … hmm … yes … right … yes … see you … bye.’
‘That was your brother,’ he said to Alex when he was done. ‘He’ll be at Warwick Parkway at half past eleven. You couldn’t spin over and pick him up, could you? I’ve got to pop out to a meeting this morning and it would save your mother a job.’
Alex nodded. Cast once more in the role of his father’s errand boy; proof, if any were needed, that he was home.
—————
After breakfast Alex retrieved his laptop from his bag and set it up on the kitchen table, figuring he might as well crack through some work emails before he set out for the station. But the house Wi-Fi didn’t seem to be working, so he spent half an hour in his father’s study hunting for the documentation belonging to the unfamiliar router and getting it to reconnect.
The study was on the ground floor at the front of the house, in between the dining room and hallway: it had doors that let onto both. The desk was in the large bay window, its chair positioned with its back to the view of the trunk and lower boughs of the cedar that sprang like a gigantic green toadstool from the needle-strewn expanse of the front lawn. At the other end of the room, which was decorated in something beige from Farrow & Ball and hung with a collection of framed prints and maps, a narrow archway let into a book-lined cubbyhole. This had previously been a tiny tool room, accessed from the stairwell via a peculiar little door inset with a leaded stained-glass window, but Miles and Margaret had knocked it through. The door had stayed, however, and had proved a source of irritation to all the Wold children, as its window allowed their father to see them from his desk whenever they slid down the rickety banister of the main staircase – one of their favourite activities, and one that was strictly forbidden.
Having got the router going again, Alex parked himself in Miles’s chair and wondered – not for the first time – how on earth his father managed to work in it. It wasn’t an office chair at all but a venerable oak armchair he’d picked up at some house auction or other, nice to look at but horribly uncomfortable to sit on. Miles had softened the hard, polishe
d seat with a thin slab of cushion – almost as old as the chair by the look of it – but that actually made matters worse, because it slid around and made it impossible to hold one’s position. Or maybe that was the point. Alex couldn’t fathom which.
So it was uncomfortable, unstable, and on top of that the arms prevented it from being drawn up close to the desk, and on top of that it was the wrong height. It was, in short, not fit for purpose. It wasn’t a surprise that what work Miles did in it was mostly done in his lap and that fact alone, Alex reflected, told you most of what you needed to know about the kind of working life he’d had. No one in Alex’s world could operate that way. Computers wouldn’t allow it, not even laptops, despite their name. The machines demanded sensible furniture and a sensible posture. Working like this, largely by hand, with piles of papers on every available surface, looked at best unprofessional, at worst chaotic.
Alex picked up the nearest of the piles and leafed through its contents. It was mostly particulars, mostly for houses in Redditch. This sort of thing was Miles’s meat and drink, had been all Alex’s life. His father’s firm must have helped its clients buy and sell thousands of these kinds of places over the years. He put it back and picked up another. Land this time, deals covering several quite big chunks of land northwest of Snitterfield, including, to his surprise, the woods at the back of their house in which he, Matthew and Emily used to play as kids. By the look of it the buyer was the same in all cases – Tony Nolan’s forestry project. That was more interesting. He hadn’t known that Miles had been acting as Nolan’s agent. But it made perfect sense.
Bored of the piles, Alex started on the desk drawers. The moment he opened the first one its rich musk of wood sap and linseed transported him right back to his childhood. Inside he found a collection of objects with which he’d long been familiar: a crappy 1980s solar-powered calculator that no longer worked, a magnifying glass he’d used a few times for torturing ants, a letter opener whose silver handle didn’t properly fit its ivory blade, a few boxes of staples and paperclips, a decrepit hole-punch that had belonged to his grandfather, and a razor-sharp penknife that in contrast to the other items had actual utility. In the other drawers there was nothing much of note: envelopes and headed letter paper, chequebook stubs and old passports, a couple of empty photo albums, a stack of letters from HSBC …
