by Joy Richards
She hated that house. Florence’s heart sank as she heard herself say it, but it was true. She was spending more and more time outside, allegedly “for Tim” but really so she wouldn’t have to look at it. What was so heartbreaking was that until very recently she had loved her house. It had been her source of pride and joy, her secret obsession. The day she’d found it, she knew that was “it”. She and John had been recently engaged and looking for a place to buy together after sharing a flat for a little over a year. She would go on exploratory viewings and weed out weak candidates, reserving only the really promising properties for a second viewing with John, who was putting in long hours at the firm.
She had loved the look of the house online, and she’d come early to scope it out. In the middle of a long row of Victorian terraces it stood, a baby-pink house with the bright white door, clad in wisteria with a front garden full of pebbles. The wisteria had not actually been in bloom when she first came, but the lime-green leaves surrounded the front door like a magical passageway to Narnia. Over the door, a panel of what she was pretty sure was an authentic, 1920s stained-glass panel: an intricate pattern of purple iris flowers and leaves, glistening in the sun. She didn’t even wait for the estate agent to come and show her the inside: she got out her phone and texted John straight away. “This is it,” she said, in the dramatic tone he used to find so funny. “I’ve found it.”
After they moved, Florence took a whole month of unpaid leave (does it still count as unpaid leave if the art gallery where you work barely pays you?) to sort out the house. It was, in many ways, the best month of her life. She would wake up at six and slowly drink her coffee while wandering the rooms, her eyes and mind filled with projects for the new day. She resisted the temptation to knock down the wall between the front room and the kitchen-diner and, instead, turned it into a cosy snug for two. She scoured the flea markets for vintage tiles and for period furniture: a crushed velvet love seat, a Victorian dining table with Eau-de-Nil legs, a claw-foot white bathtub that barely fitted in the only bathroom. The tiny garden, miraculously, had needed no work. It was pure perfection. Entirely paved in natural stone, with a thick border of overgrown lush roses that filled it with a heady scent July through October. She found a small wrought-iron garden table and matching chairs for it, and her work was done.
For their first three summers in the house, Florence and John spent every evening sat on the impractical garden chairs, drinking very cold white wine and savouring the scent of the roses. They had friends over for huge meals of succulent lamb tagine or just delivery pizzas, everyone piling around the dining room table and laughing at stories from mishap holidays and grotesque bosses. It was their love nest, where they came to find each other in their crazy London lives. When they came back from their many honeymoons (only one was actually called a honeymoon, but they all felt like it), they would shake the sweat and tiredness at the door and sigh, glad to be home. Fresh off the plane from Morocco, Colombia, Nepal or “just” Berlin, they would giggle like teenagers as they took all their clothes off and recuperated in bed, often for a whole afternoon that slowly turned into a late late night.
An insistent whining brought Florence back to reality. Tim had finished his juice and wanted some more. The large expanding stain on the nursing chair seemed to suggest a spillage, but she chose to ignore it. She filled up his plastic sippy cup with sugary orange liquid and returned him to the kaleidoscopic world of his tablet. Not how she thought she’d parent her two-year-old, but she did not have the energy to do anything else. She had to get the house at least a little under control, and she could feel her swollen feet throbbing underneath her large belly.
“Leave the housework,” said the mummy blogs. “Sleep when the baby sleeps. Let others help you”. This advice seemed to conjure the image of a whole village of long-haired, soft-spoken women coming over with pots of steaming stew and staying for an hour or so to clean your house, while you napped upstairs with your tender child. Of course, that was all bullshit. People may bring over some brownies and offer to run the hoover around for you the week your baby is actually born, but nobody will offer to tidy your disgusting house on a boiling Wednesday afternoon twenty-four months down the line. And living in a disaster zone is not as restful as the mummy bloggers seemed to suggest. In fact, it sucks. I need to snap out of it, Florence told herself.
She cleared a spot from a cluster of Duplo blocks and lay down on the floor, the wooden floorboards cool under her skin. There were piles of clean laundry on the dining table chairs, spluttered with sauce from the previous night’s dinner. Just behind that was an even more depressing sight, the conservatory. They used to refer to it as the “conservatory” in quotation marks, with an amused chuckle, because it was so small it was unclear why it had ever been built. Maybe it was vanity on behalf of the owners – who thought it would sound grand to have a conservatory, no matter how small. Who knows. They had thought it charming when they’d first moved in, yet another little quirky mark of their little quirky house.
For a while, John thought it could be his “home office”. He soon discovered it was freezing in the winter and horrifyingly hot in the summer. To make matters worse, the only table they could fit in there was too small for John to sit comfortably. The idea of the home office was abandoned, and it soon turned into a receptacle of various rubbish they were too busy to bring to the charity shop. It was overcome with baby clothes that were too small, adult clothes Florence was too pregnant for, a spare kitchen mixer, a broken tricycle, and the hoover.
Past the conservatory was the garden. Once an oasis, it was now marred by a bright yellow mud kitchen Tim hated to play with (no mummy bloggers mentioned what to do if your toddler has a veritable horror of getting dirty) and a very expensive paddling pool, complete with inflatable flamingo and palm tree, which stood flaccid, chewed on by the dog.
Of course, the dog. The dog was John’s idea after three years of marriage. They had talked about having babies, and he wanted to “test it out” with a dog first. Plus, wouldn’t it be great for the kids to grow up with a pet? Florence was so giddy at the idea of having a baby, so broody and so desperate for John to be broody too (you’re not allowed to be desperate when you are twenty-seven, so she had no leverage) she would have agreed to a pet tarantula. She was more of a cat person herself, but she liked dogs well enough. However, there was one thing she would not compromise on: it had to be a rescue dog, from the shelter. John’s heart was set on a chocolate Labrador from a breeder. Uncharacteristically, she would not budge. In the end he caved, and they spent an amazing afternoon at the Battersea Puppy Home, playing with puppies until they found their guy. He looked just like a chocolate Labrador, but with a shorter stoutier snout. They fell in love instantly, or rather, Florence fell in love and John agreed to give the dog a chance. “You can always come back if the adoption doesn’t work out,” said the friendly volunteer at the shelter who sensed a difference in opinion. So they stocked up on leashes and bowls at the shelter shop and brought the dog home.
They named him Spencer, and he took up residence under the kitchen table. John started taking him on long runs in the morning before work and no mention was ever made again of purebred Labradors. Curiously, the more Spencer stayed, the more John grew to love him and the less Florence liked him. He was a good dog, friendly and well trained, but he was nothing like a baby and that’s what Florence was aching for. John seemed so content with the dog, he stopped talking about children and she could not help but wonder, as she watched her husband wrestle Spencer on the floor, whether the dog had filled a child-sized hole in his heart.
Spencer came in from upstairs and loudly lapped up some water from his bowl. Tim let out a shriek of delight at the sight of his shaggy friend. In spite of her general sense of feeling overwhelmed, Florence couldn’t help but smile. They were so sweet: the patchy shaggy dog and the yellow-haired angelic child, looking at each other with untold fondness. Neither of them could speak properly, but they both knew
they were best friends already. Untold adventures awaited. Between the two of them, they had already destroyed her Moroccan rug, which had been replaced by a soulless IKEA number with yellow squiggles on it. What a team. She slowly got up, wary of her second-trimester heftiness, and made her way over to Tim. She stroked his hair as he returned to watching his show.
“Will the baby like my shows?” Tim asked without looking away from the screen. He had immediately internalised the idea of a baby growing in Mummy’s tummy, and talked about it as though it was already an established fact of life. He’d studied the book they’d got him. “I’m going to be a big brother!” and decided the whole thing was going to be fun. He had no interest in how the baby was going to get out of Mummy’s tummy, and frankly it was just as well. After labouring in that very kitchen and needing a last-minute hospital transfer when the home-birth plan did not pan out as well as she had hoped, Florence was going to cool it slightly with the hippie-dippie stuff. She had rehired the same doula out of politeness and a fear of awkwardness: she ran her mummy-and-me group and would definitely notice as Florence started turning up more and more pregnant.
“Of course she will, my love,” Florence replied, feeling dizzy at the thought of another baby, an actual baby girl strapped to her chest, coming along on their daytime adventures. Unlike her son, Florence still struggled to comprehend she was going to have another baby. The first time round, she got pregnant after months of trying, hoping, inspecting endless pregnancy tests and analysing every little twinge in her stomach. The thought of being pregnant had been on her mind for so long, the feeling of the baby growing inside her was but a mere extension of that. She felt as though she had willed him into existence from thin air, a miracle effort of love and determination. This baby was different. This baby was a mistake.
What woman gets pregnant the same week she is going to leave her husband? She had a whole list of excuses in her head, but she never felt any of them were good enough. Sex had been so infrequent after Tim was born. It had not been easy, through the long nights of co-sleeping, the fifteen months of breastfeeding, and her deep embarrassment at her once very slender frame now clouded in odd lumps of fat. The idea of getting pregnant by accident had seemed ridiculous: it had taken them seven months to get pregnant the first time, in spite of Florence scientifically tracking her cycles and them having sex every other day, religiously, like an act of faith. John thought of it as a matter of certainty, like finishing a puzzle, completing their incomplete perfect family with another child or two. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to, but she simply couldn’t imagine it. Contraception had seemed like a problem for someone else, women with healthier marriages, smaller tummies and generally a more buxom disposition. And yet, there it had been, in the bathroom of a Starbucks with no toilet paper, her baby girl waving at her through two thin pink lines.
Florence had been at one of her many mummy-and-me groups. This one was informal, five mums who had met at antenatal class still bonded by their shared experiences of motherhood and love for the NCT. Hilariously, they now mostly discussed husbands. Their petty squabbles, how they forgot instructions, or didn’t listen, or spent too much time on their phone. Today, in Starbucks, it’d been the turn of Olivia, a fat cheerful woman with two-under-two whose husband had, bewilderingly, bought a PlayStation. While the other women sipped their drinks and ate their cookies and reacted with the expected coos of disbelief and righteous rage (“what IS wrong with him?”), Florence had sat back and resisted the urge to scream. That’s annoying for you, Olivia, she’d thought. My husband fucks his receptionist and doesn’t even respect me enough to text her on a secret phone. It’s all there, for anyone to see. All I had to do was pick up his phone to google how long chicken should be in the oven.
I thought we were going through a scheduled tough time, me absorbed in motherhood, him in his career. Everyone told me this was to be expected, that he may sleep on the sofa for a few months to get some rest while I stayed up with our baby. That he may feel a little left out, but that deep down he understood and loved me. That I may not feel close to him now, but that I would again as soon as the baby would start sleeping through the night. But he wasn’t “getting rest”. He was up all night texting her, and not just about where to meet and how horny he was, but about his hopes and dreams. His little triumphs and bad days, his worries about his dad’s diabetes and John’s funny stories about his weekend away with his brother. His whole inner life, of which I knew nothing, like a stranger. And now I’m pregnant. So sorry, Olivia, but I win. Go me.
Florence had never much cared for a career. She’d had jobs, obviously, and a degree. But that was not the long-game. She had always seen herself as a mum, her employment a short footnote in the “before” section of her life, and perhaps in the “after”, when she may pick up a couple of days working in a lovely shop. Like her own mother before her, she was furiously cultured, a declared feminist and very much of a housewife at heart. A homemaker, as she liked to think about it. A maker of home, of happiness, of calm. Of cakes, even. The idea of getting divorced wasn’t just unappealing, it threatened the existence of her very identity.
A housewife implies a husband. She might have hesitated to leave him if it had just been the sex. After all, the sex in their marriage was now bad and rare. More often than not, they both kept their T-shirts on and the light off. But in those texts was a whole life, a whole person she did not know anymore. The thought of his emotional infidelity made her feel repulsed by her own sad existence, her ships-in-the-night marriage.
She had to leave. She made plans: where to go, what to do. She could stay with her parents for a few months. There was a great local childminder some of her friends had used; that could free her up to look for part-time work. It was a comforting plan, one that gave her strength. And then she got pregnant again, and felt all the choices being taken away from her.
She’d thrown the pregnancy test in the bin. After the mummy group had ended she’d gone home and cooked chicken piccata for dinner from one of her collection of beautiful recipe books. When John had made it home, they’d exchanged a pleasant few words and then had eaten quietly while watching TV. They were binge-watching famous shows they’d missed, and had only just tackled the second season of The Wire. After dinner he’d watched some rugby highlight videos on his phone, while she’d tidied. They’d watched another two episodes of The Wire and she’d gone to sleep, with Tim. “I’ll do some work and catch up with you,” he’d said, and she’d marvelled at herself for ever believing him. He didn’t even have his laptop. Like a magic trick, once you know where the cheese wire is, you can no longer believe in the floating top hat.
And there she was, four months later, clearing up her downstairs and feeling the numbness rush through her toes. John had been, she had to make herself believe that, genuinely thrilled about the pregnancy. What was upsetting was that he was not surprised. He had always taken the next baby, like the rest of his scripted life, as a matter of course. That’s just what happens next. You date a girl for a few years in your twenties, so you propose. You propose, so you get married. You get married, wait a few years, go on trips, maybe get a pet. Then you have a baby, no sooner than twenty-eight and no later than thirty-four. Then you have one more, possibly of the opposite gender. If you cannot manage the right gender, you may have one more. You move to the countryside and commute in, so there is enough room for everyone. Trade the cramped dwellings designed for pint-sized Victorians for a “forever home”.
Florence thought about their neat life, correctly. Life is easy, you just need to do what’s next.
3
Claire
“Oh dear,” Claire said out loud to no one in particular, a note of melancholy in her voice. “I love this house.” Marmalade the cat jumped down from the kitchen counter and scurried off in a hurry, the long hair on his erect tail swishing around like a flag in the wind. Claire dunked her empty mug in the soapy water while looking outside. The garden glistened with the morning
dew. Beyond it, the fields of Surrey, arranged like in a Turner painting, blushing in the mist of the early morning.
“What did you say?” her husband, Michael, asked as he limped into the kitchen.
“Oh, nothing,” she said, startled. She hadn’t heard him come down the stairs. While in generally great shape for seventy-one, her hearing on the left side was not good. “Just that I love this house.”
He reached over and put his arms over her shoulders, dressing gown against dressing gown. “I know,” he said, “I love it too.” His speech impediment had got worse over the years and made it hard for some people to understand him, but she could barely notice it.
“Do you remember when we moved in here?” he asked, although that was rhetorical. They had a framed and rather faded photo of that day in the hallway, he with a dark bushy beard, she with long straight unruly hair bleached by the sun. A tiny baby in a white romper in her lap.
“We were so young,” she replied, turning round and nestling in his hug. “I was probably pregnant with Aaron and didn’t even know it.”
“Were you?” he leaned slightly back to look her in the eyes. After forty-some years together, he still couldn’t get enough of her symmetrical, perfectly oval face.
“I must have been! We moved in July, Jacob had just turned one. Aaron was born in March, so I must have been pregnant and not known it.” How had Michael not figured this out by now?
“Was he? Wait, how old was he when we left for Kenya?”
She giggled. Her absent-minded man, one of the sharpest minds she’d ever known, but unsure of his son’s birthday. “He was six months old, dear.”
“Blimey. We were slightly irresponsible, weren’t we?”
