by Julie Cohen
‘She’s curious. I’m a biologist.’ Romily resumed her search for her mints, found a packet, and passed him one. ‘You’d thought about what she should call you beforehand, hadn’t you?’
‘Yes. Why does she call you Romily, anyway?’
‘It seemed to suit me more than “Mum”. Do you – you don’t have kids? I mean, any other kids?’
‘No. I have nieces and nephews, but this is all new to me.’ Posie beckoned to him from the swings, where she’d nabbed a free one. ‘Is she just going to accept me, like that?’ he asked.
‘It comes out later sometimes, in unexpected ways,’ Romily said. ‘She’s had quite a bit to think about lately.’
Jarvis glanced down at her stomach. His face tightened, and he got up to join Posie. Within a few minutes, her shrieks of joy reached Romily.
She put her hands on her stomach. This little thing growing inside her wasn’t going to have these issues. Right from the start, there would be no doubt about who its parents were. Posie might get over-excited and try to claim it as a brother or sister, but that wouldn’t be a problem. It wasn’t possible for a baby to have too many people loving it.
Romily’s own father, William, had died ten years ago of heart failure. He was an accountant. She wished Posie could have met him. Romily remembered long weekends fishing with him, listening to cricket on the radio, examining the ecology of the riverbank. An amateur biologist, he had a little notebook wrapped in oilskin in which he wrote down the scientific names of the creatures they spotted, the measurements of the fish that they caught and released. Romily still had it somewhere. One year, they had caught the same brown trout seven times.
She tilted her head back and closed her eyes, letting the sun warm her face and the sounds of children pass around her. She saw her father in Posie: the concentration and abstraction, the quick turn of her head sometimes, the throwaway facility in calculation. Her mother had died when Romily was young, and was nothing more than a warm memory and photographs, but Romily knew she was there in Posie’s sharp chin, the same as Romily’s.
Jarvis must be finding these similarities too. He’d said Posie looked like his sister Sally. Strange that Romily’s own daughter could resemble someone whom Romily didn’t know, that this little girl who was wholly familiar to her, whose body she had borne and bathed and tended, still contained some secrets.
Maybe this baby she was carrying would look like Ben. Or maybe it would look like Romily’s own lost family.
Under her hand and inside her, the baby shifted. A stretching, an adjustment.
Romily opened her eyes. She looked down at her belly. ‘Do it again, Thing,’ she whispered.
For a minute, two minutes, nothing happened, while the sun shone and the children laughed and Romily’s daughter ascended and descended the arc of a swing. Romily heard and saw none of it. She pulled the material tight against her stomach and concentrated on this being inside her, half of her and half of Ben, who was alive.
It somersaulted. Fleetingly she saw a ripple moving near her hand.
A bubble of joy burst inside Romily and she laughed.
It was four days later when she was dragging a complaining Posie around the supermarket that it came out.
Romily couldn’t find the tofu. This happened on a regular basis, as the supermarket seemed constantly to reclassify tofu as a ready meal, or a salad, or a meat substitute, or a sandwich ingredient, or a World Food, or a type of pasta, and moved it around the store accordingly. She had a theory that every time a frustrated vegetarian turned to bacon, the supermarket got a kickback from the meat industry.
‘I want to ride inside the trolley,’ said Posie for the eighteenth time.
‘You’re too big to ride in the trolley and besides, it’s full of food. Let’s look over here with the chilled food.’
‘It’s cold over here.’ Posie rubbed her bare arms in her sundress.
‘It’s only for a few minutes, Pose, just calm down.’ The smell of the rotisserie chickens reached her from across the shop floor. The tofu wasn’t here, either. ‘Maybe I should just get more eggs. Will you eat eggs for dinner?’ She tried to do a mental inventory of her refrigerator. There was about a tonne of organic beetroot and something called kohlrabi which she hadn’t figured out what to do with yet. From Claire’s organic box scheme, of course.
‘Eggs make the house smell funny. I want pasta. Can I have jelly?’
‘If they have the right kind. And we’ve already had pasta three times this week.’ Romily put yoghurts in her trolley, although she had a sneaking suspicion that they hadn’t eaten the last ones yet and that they were merely hidden behind the kohlrabi. Did they need margarine? What about toilet paper?
Exactly when had her life become made up of these burning questions?
‘I think that we should all live in Sonning,’ said Posie.
‘What?’ asked Romily, reaching for the milk.
‘At Ben and Claire’s. It’s big enough. Jarvis doesn’t have anywhere to live in England, so he could live there. He could have the spare bedroom. And you could have the other bedroom, and Thing could share with me. I wouldn’t mind the crying. I could cuddle it.’
Romily put the milk in her trolley. Then she squatted so she was face-to-face with Posie, who was still rubbing goose-bumps on her arms.
‘That’s not going to happen, Posie. I know you would like it, but this baby in my tummy is going to belong to Ben and Claire. Not to us. And they don’t know Jarvis well enough for him to live with them.’ Let alone that Ben would probably try to knock Jarvis into next week if he saw him. ‘And besides, we have our own flat, you and me.’
‘But it’s not big enough for Jarvis to stay there if the two of you get together.’
‘Why,’ said Romily, ‘do you think that Jarvis and I are going to get together?’
‘It makes sense. You must have cared about each other once, right, or you wouldn’t have made me. Because you only have sex with people you care about. That’s what Claire told me.’
‘When did Claire tell you this?’
‘Oh, ages ago.’ Posie waved her hand. ‘Anyway, I know you haven’t seen him for a long time, but now that he’s back you probably will fall in love again.’
‘Posie,’ said Romily.
‘And then we can be a family.’
Romily dropped her head into her hands. She tried to sort this out, to understand the right thing to say, something that would let her daughter down gently, that would crush her dreams without crushing her. But they were in a supermarket, and a part of her brain was still dwelling on toilet paper.
‘It’s not as easy as that,’ she said, finally.
‘Yes, it is.’ Posie smiled at her, serene. Then she pointed over Romily’s shoulder. ‘And look, there’s the tofu.’
22
B Flat Major
SUMMER DAYS WERE too long.
Claire had made an orange chiffon cake for the village fête, and several lemon drizzle cakes while she was at it, for the freezer. She left one out for the IVF support group. She hadn’t been for months now, not since she’d miscarried and decided to give up on treatment, but she was thinking she might go on Thursday. She was just about ready to face the group in person, rather than via email, and she knew that they would all be happy for her. Or at least they’d act as if they were happy for her. The ones who had succeeded with IVF would probably feel sorry for her, and the ones who were still trying would thank God that they weren’t that desperate just yet.
On second thoughts, she put the extra cake into the freezer with the others.
She did her yoga, and she washed the curtains in the spare bedroom and hung them out on the line to dry in the sunshine. She wrote a letter on proper paper, and put it aside for later. She made herself a salad for lunch. She weeded the garden and sprayed soapy water on her roses, which had shown signs of a few aphids. She squinted at the little green insects and tried to see the honeydew Romily had said they made, but she couldn’t see anything and she wasn�
�t going to taste to find out. She thought about ringing Ben, but they’d already chatted this morning and besides, he was busy. Helen and Andrew were on holiday with the kids. She rang her mother, who wasn’t home. She picked up the novel that her book club was reading, a complicated story about several generations. She hadn’t been to book club in months, either; after a few glasses of wine, they spent too much time talking about their children. She put the novel down and went for a walk instead, on her usual route through the fields south of the village to the Thames. She watched the ducks squabbling and the swans not deigning to notice anything.
By the time she got back, it was only quarter past two.
She shook out her hands to loosen them, fluttered her fingers and sat down at the piano. The piece on the music-stand was a Bach fugue with melody and counterpoint twisting in mathematical perfection, and she hadn’t practised enough. She never had time to practise, although she had all the time in the world.
Once, the hours had slipped away while she was at the piano. Other children had to be forced to practise; her own parents had had to force her outside to play, to get some fresh air, and even then, the music would spin through her. She would jump rope to its time, run to its cadence.
The melody tripped along. Her fingers didn’t feel light or deft enough. Claire closed her eyes and tried to let the music guide her hands. Fugue in G Minor, BMV 861. She told her students how this music had been written for clavichord, but how when you played it on a modern piano, it gave the piece its own haunting beauty and subtle warmth. Today, however, her fingers couldn’t convey it. She struggled for technical accuracy, tangled her notes together and stopped with her eyes still closed. This fugue ended in a B flat major chord. Uncertainty leading to resolution, solemnity to happiness.
By themselves, her fingers formed a tune from her memory. Soft, lilting, familiar, also in G Minor. For a moment she tried to place it – it was modern, something she’d heard on the radio? – and then she remembered. It was Max’s tune. The one he called the mother theme.
Poor Max. She wondered what sort of summer holiday he was having, and she played the tune again.
Abruptly, she stood up and shut the piano. She went up the stairs.
When they’d first moved into this house – her cottage in the country, close enough for Ben to commute to the city – they’d called the small, sunny south-facing room at the back of the house ‘the nursery’ and they expected it to be filled soon. They didn’t call it that any more. The other bedrooms were their bedroom, Posie’s bedroom, the guest bedroom. This room, with its single bed with the white duvet cover scattered with daisies, with its flowered wallpaper that they’d never bothered to change and its rag rug on the floor, was where her sister had set up her travel cot for her own children, where her brother’s son slept when they visited. No one ever said its true name.
Claire stood in it now. It smelled faintly musty, as rooms in old houses do when they’re not aired and used. She opened the window and looked out at the garden, at the pear tree that was waiting for its swing.
Birdsong would come through the open window. Even in winter, the light would shine in and make patterns on the wall. From their room next door, she and Ben would be able to hear the faintest snuffle, the most sleepy cry.
‘Yellow,’ she said aloud. Light sunshine yellow, the colour of delight. They would choose a cot in pale wood and hang a mobile from the ceiling. A single wooden chair stood against the wall; she climbed on it, stretched up her arm and took hold of a corner of the old flowered wallpaper where it had become unstuck from the wall. She tore it off in a great, satisfying strip and dropped it curling onto the floor. And a CD player on the chest of drawers, to play music. This baby should have sunshine and music all of its life.
She peeled off another strip, and another.
23
Quickening
POSIE WAS ALREADY in bed and Romily was flicking through the television channels and not finding anything when she heard the knock at the door. She recognized the sound right away as being Ben’s knock, but she paused to tie up her dressing-gown over her pyjamas before she opened the door.
He wore a still-crisp white shirt, with his tie loosened slightly. It had been ten days, with July moving into August, since they’d argued. The relief at seeing him was incredible. She nearly stumbled back with the force of it.
‘Hello stranger,’ she said, to cover up.
‘I came from work. Are you going to let me in, or am I too big an ass?’
She stepped back and let him in. As always, he filled the little room with his presence, carrying the faint scent of aftershave and of the outside summer air.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Posie is your daughter. It’s not my decision to make.’
‘You’re right.’ She pointed to the fridge. ‘I think there’s a bottle of lager somewhere in the back if you want it.’
‘Do you want something?’
‘Apple juice.’
He opened the bottle and poured her juice, everything looking smaller in his hands, and joined her on the sofa. ‘What you watching?’
‘I can’t find anything but reality shows.’
‘A Question of Sport is on in a minute.’
She flipped it over. He settled beside her, stretching his long legs out as if he were there for the duration. ‘Isn’t Claire expecting you home?’ she couldn’t help but ask.
‘She knows I’m working late. She’s pretty busy with all her little projects. She’s started decorating the nursery.’
‘She texted me a photo.’
Ben shot her a wry smile. ‘The two of you are pretty tight these days, aren’t you? Ganging up on the poor bloke.’
‘We didn’t gang up on you, and besides, you were wrong.’
‘Let’s not argue,’ he said. ‘I get enough of it all day at work. You’re my relaxing person, Romily. I don’t want to have to examine every word before I say it. It’s what I’ve always liked about you. You’re not complicated.’
‘No.’
Nothing complicated at all about how she breathed him in like a woman saved from drowning. How she was aware of the exact distance between his hand and her leg on the sofa cushion. How every time he raised his bottle of lager to his lips, she remembered that time, that one time, his lips had touched her own.
Inside her, a poke and a twist. ‘Oh,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘The baby just moved.’
Delight broke on Ben’s face, like the sun. ‘Really? What’s it doing?’
‘It sort of flips itself around. I’ve felt it more and more the past few days, especially when I’ve been sitting still.’
‘Is it doing it now? Can I feel?’
A pause, but maybe not long enough for him to notice. ‘Of course, you’re its father.’
She untied her dressing-gown and parted it, leaning back in the sofa to expose her belly. Her pyjamas were nothing special, a vest and loose cotton trousers, but they were a bit too small for her in the chest and the belly now. The vest had crept up a little, seeking the path of least stretching, and when Ben put his hand on her stomach his palm lay directly on her skin.
He was warm, warmer than the August night. She had to close her eyes for a moment because his touch was so intimate, so overwhelming, but opened them almost immediately, aware of her mistake. He wasn’t looking at her face. He hadn’t seen.
‘I can’t feel anything.’
Oh dear Lord, of course he couldn’t have seen. He had his hand on his friend’s stomach because he wanted to feel his child move. He had no idea he was touching Romily’s deepest desire.
‘It … might take a while before it does it again.’
‘Do you think it might help if I talked to it? They say babies can hear.’
‘I don’t know.’
Ben leaned over so his face was inches from her stomach. His hand stayed where it was. ‘Hello, little dear Thing,’ he said. ‘It’s your daddy speaking.’
H
is words made caresses of warm air on her skin. She had stretchmarks from Posie there, silvery-white, waiting to blossom again. She didn’t know what was worse: watching him with his mouth so close to her, or closing her eyes and merely feeling. She wished she’d pulled down her top. She wished she were a million miles away, up a tree somewhere, in a jungle – anywhere so she wouldn’t have to feel the thing she wanted most to feel in the world.
In the beginning, she used to dream about it. Ben would touch her, by mistake maybe, and the two of them would fall together, heedless, starving for each other. The dreams, during waking hours and during sleep, were so vivid that in reality, once he was Claire’s, she kept half a foot’s distance from him at all times. Six inches of clear air. No handshakes, no air-kisses, no embraces when their football team scored a goal.
Through years the dreams had faded. She had been able to be less strict about avoiding casual touches. She had felt safer, protected by the knowledge that he had no idea of what she really wanted.
They had still never touched like this. All alone, in her flat, with Posie asleep.
‘I can’t wait to meet you,’ Ben told the baby inside her. ‘I can’t wait to hold you and kiss you.’ He glanced up at Romily’s face, and she did her best to smile. ‘It’s funny, isn’t it, to think that it’s already a little person. But until we see the baby we won’t know who it is.’
‘Funny,’ agreed Romily. Her throat was dry, but she couldn’t make herself move enough to pick up her glass. She wondered if Ben could hear her heart beating.
‘There it is!’ His head shot up, his eyes wide with surprise and awe. ‘The baby moved!’
She hadn’t felt it. ‘The talking must have worked.’
‘Either that or it’s very interested in A Question of Sport.’ He addressed her belly. ‘That’s my kid.’
The baby distinctly kicked. Ben laughed.
‘That’s amazing,’ he said. ‘Will it do it any more?’
‘I don’t know.’
He straightened up. ‘I’m not taking my hand off it, then. I don’t want to miss a single bit.’ He arranged himself on the sofa beside Romily, so his arm lay alongside her and his hand stayed spread on her stomach. ‘Is that okay with you?’
