It was early for the fire, but she lit it anyway, for comfort as well as for warmth. Then she checked the phone for a message from her husband and when there was no light blinking to tell her he’d phoned, she decided to ring him another time. She pressed the numbers slowly, the way one does when hoping a previously engaged line will now be unengaged. Before she finished, though, she finally heard him, his footsteps approaching along the uncarpeted corridor.
She hadn’t heard either his car or his entering the house. But she knew it was Nicholas just as she knew from the lightness of his step what mood he was in. She slipped her mobile into her pocket. Nicholas called her name and she said, “In here, darling,” and in a moment he was with her again.
He paused at the doorway. He looked cherubic in the diffused light, like an overlarge putto from a Renaissance painting, round of face with bright curls spilling over his forehead. He said, “You’re an impossibly gorgeous woman. Am I in the right house?” and he crossed the room to her. She was wearing flat-soled shoes for once, so they were of a height: both of them nearly six feet tall. This made it easier for him to kiss her, and he did so, enthusiastically. His hands went down her back to cup her bum and he pulled her close to him. He finally said with an engaging laugh, “I’m loaded, Allie, like you wouldn’t believe,” and for a terrible moment she thought he’d got himself high. But then he removed the pins and the slides that kept her hair in order and he loosened it to fall round her face and her shoulders. After that he began to unbutton her blouse and talk about “swimmers and there’re millions of them, and they’re perfect in form and let me tell you they’re ready to be perfect in function as well. Where are we in your cycle just now?” and his mouth went to her neck as his hands deftly unfastened her bra.
Her body responded even as her mind assessed. She sank to the carpet before the fire, pulled Nicholas down with her, and undressed him. He was not a man who coupled in silence. Rather, it was “Christ, the feel of you,” and “my God, Allie,” and “oh yes, just like that” and because of this, she knew every level of his rising excitement.
It matched her own. Even if her thoughts began in another place as they always did, in another time, with one or another man, they ended up centred on this man, here. Of its own accord her body met his and they created for each other a release born of pleasure that made everything else fade into insignificance.
This was enough for her. No. It was more than enough. Enough was the love and protection Nicholas afforded her. That in addition she should have found a man whose body met hers in such a way as to drive off memory and fear… This was something she had never expected that day behind the cafeteria till on a mountain in Utah when she looked up, accepted the money for his bowl of chili, and heard him say in wonder, “Jesus God, is it difficult for you?”
She’d said, “What?”
“Being so beautiful. Is it rather like a curse?” And then he’d grinned, scooped up his tray, and said, “Bloody hell. Never mind. What a line, eh? Sorry. I didn’t intend it to sound like that,” and off he went. But he was back the next day and the day after that. On the fourth time through her queue, he asked her if she’d have coffee with him that afternoon, told her he didn’t drink alcohol of any kind, told her he was recovering from methamphetamine addiction, told her he was English, told her he meant to go home to England, told her he meant to prove to his father and his mother that he was finally through with the devils that had ridden him for so many years, told her… There was a queue behind him, but he didn’t notice. She did, however, and to get him to move along she’d said, “I will meet you, yes. There is a place in the town, across from the town lift. Its name…” And she couldn’t remember the name. She stared at him in some confusion. He stared at her in much the same way. He’d said, “Believe me, I’ll find it,” and so he had.
Now they lay on the carpet before the fire, side by side. He said, “You should tilt your hips, Allie. They’re brilliant swimmers but it’ll be easier if they’re going downhill.” He rose on one elbow and observed her. “I went to Lancaster,” he said frankly. “Did you try to phone me? I switched off the mobile because I knew I wouldn’t be able to lie to you.”
“Nicky…” She heard the disappointment in her voice. She wished she could have hidden it, but at least the sound of it was better than acknowledging the sudden fear that stabbed her.
“No, listen, darling. I needed to check, just to make sure. I did such a job on my body for so many years, it was logical for me to want to know… I mean, wouldn’t you want to? In my position? With nothing happening yet?”
She turned as well, her arm stretched out over her head and her head resting upon it. She looked not at him but rather over his shoulder. The rain had begun. She could see its pattern on the bay windows. She said, “I am not a machine for babies, Nicky, how do you call it? This thing that grows them?”
“Incubator,” he said. “I know you’re not. And I don’t think of you that way. But it’s only natural… I mean, it’s been two years now… We’ve both been anxious about it… You know.” He reached out and touched her hair. She didn’t have the kind of hair a man could run his fingers through. It was kinky and disordered, the gift of one of her progenitors, and God only knew which one because they represented a mixture of races and ethnicities too varied for logic to explain how they had all ended up reproducing with each other.
She said, “That is it, Nicky. The anxious part, you know. My magazine says that anxiety alone can make this difficult for a woman.”
“I understand. I do, darling. But it could be something else, and it’s time we found out, don’t you think? That’s why I went and it’s also why you can— ”
“No.” She shook his hand off her hair and sat up.
“Don’t sit! That’ll— ”
She cast him a look. “In my country,” she said, “women are not made to feel this way: that they exist for one purpose only.”
“I don’t think that.”
“These things take time. We know this where I come from. And a baby is something to cherish. A baby is not…” She hesitated. She looked away from him. She knew the truth of the matter, far beyond what her body was and was not doing. That truth needed to be spoken between them, so she finally said, “A baby is not a way to win your father’s approval, Nicky.”
Another man would have responded in outrage or denial, but this was not Nicholas’s way. Part of her love for him derived from his absolute honesty, so strange in a man who’d given years of his life to the worship of drugs. He said, “You’re right, of course. I do want it for that reason. I owe him that much for what I put him through. He’s desperate for a grandchild and I can do that for him since my sisters didn’t. We can do that for him.”
“So you see— ”
“But that’s not the only reason, Allie. I want this with you. Because of you and because there’s an us.”
“And if I have these tests. If what comes out of it is that I am not able…?” She dropped into silence and in that silence she could feel— she would swear it— his muscles become quite tense. She didn’t know what this meant, and that fact pounded the blood down her arms and into her fingers so that she had to move. She got to her feet.
He did as well. He said, “Is that what you actually think?”
“How can I think otherwise when this”— a gesture towards the carpet, the fire, where they had lain, what they had done— “becomes only about a baby? Your little swimmers, as you call them, and how they are shaped and how they can move and how I should position myself afterwards to make certain they do what you want them to do. How am I meant to feel, faced with this and with your insistence that I visit some doctor and spread my legs and have instruments thrust into me and whatever else?”
Her voice had risen. She bent, picked up her discarded clothing, began to dress. “All this day,” she said, “I miss you so much. I worry when I phone you and you do not answer. I long for you because it’s you, while— ”
“I
t’s the same for me. You know that.”
“I know nothing.”
She left him. The kitchen was at the other end of the house, down the long panelled corridor, through the main hall and the dining room. She went there and began their dinner. It was far too early for this, but she wanted something to do with her hands. She was mindlessly chopping onions when Nicholas joined her again. He too was dressed, but he’d buttoned his shirt incorrectly and it hung drunkenly from his shoulders in a way that made her soften towards him. He was, she knew, a lost boy without her, just as she would be lost without him.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “The last way on earth I want you to feel is like a baby machine. Or whatever.”
“I am trying,” she said. “The vitamins. All the pills. My temperature. My diet. Whatever will make it easier, possible…” She stopped because she’d begun to weep. She used her arm to brush the tears from her face.
“Allie…” He came to her, turned her to him.
They stood together, in each other’s arms. One minute, two. At last he said, “Just to hold you like this, I feel a kind of awe. D’you know how lucky a man I am? I know it, Allie.”
She nodded and he released her. He cupped her face in his hands and studied it in that way of his that always made her feel that the thousand truths she had hidden from him were there, openly displayed, and he was reading them all. But he made no mention of anything but, “Forgive me?”
“Of course. And I will do as you ask. Just not quite yet. Please, Nicky. Let us wait a few more months.”
He nodded. Then he grinned and said, “Meantime, we’ll give those swimmers some exercise, all right? Firm up their sense of direction?”
She smiled in turn. “We can do that.”
“Good. Now tell me why you’re chopping a mountain of onions, because my eyes are stinging like the devil. What’re you making?”
She observed the pile she’d created. “I have no idea.”
He chuckled. “Mad woman.” He walked over to the day’s post, which was in a neat pile near the kitchen phone. He said, “Did you speak with that bloke about restoring the stained glass?”
She had, she told him. He thought he could match the glass in the other windows in the main hall, but it would take some doing. He could either take the original out for a while or he could bring glass to them, but in either case, it would be expensive. Did Nicky want…?
Their conversation found its way back to normalcy: compromise reached and tension gone. They went on to other matters that concerned them till Nicholas found the phone message that Alatea had forgotten she’d written, so intent had she been on getting past babies, doctors in Lancaster, and what Nicholas wanted and expected of her.
“What’s this, then?” he said, holding up the paper she’d torn from a notebook earlier in the day.
“Ah. You’ve had a call. A television film is being made and a woman phoned. She would like to speak with you about it. She is a… I think she called it a scout of research, something like that.”
He frowned. “What kind of film?”
“Alternative treatments for drug addiction. This is a documentary, she said. Interviews with addicts and doctors and social workers. The involvement of a film crew and someone with them— a celebrity? a presenter? I do not know— to ask the questions. I told her it is not likely you would be interested, but— ”
“Why?”
“What?”
“Why’d you tell her that?”
She went for one of her cookbooks. Nicholas had created for her a recessed shelf for them above the cooker hob, and she grabbed one at random, wondering what she could possibly do with three onions chopped into tiny bits. She said, “This sort of thing… this is what feeds the ego, Nicky. We have talked about that, you and I. It cannot be good, because of where it leads. Because of all the things you must guard against.”
“Right. Right. But it’s not about me, Allie.” He looked again at the paper he held. “Where’s she from? Where’re the filmmakers from?”
“I did not ask. I did not think…” She looked at the cover of the cookbook she was holding. She gathered her thoughts, considered her approach. She said, “Nicky, you must take care with this sort of thing. You always said that your part is quiet. Behind the scenes. This is best.”
“Raising money to keep the project going is best,” he countered. “This could be what we need to make that happen.”
“And when it does not?”
“Why d’you say that?”
“The other thing… that newspaperman who was here so many times… what came of that? Nothing. And all the hours you spent with him, the talking, the walking round, the working at the pele tower with him, and what then? More nothing. He promises a story and what comes of his promise? Nothing. I do not wish to see the disappointment in your face,” she told him. Because of where it might lead was what he would add in his own head. But that could not be helped.
His expression changed, but not to hardness. Rather, he seemed to glow at her and the source of the glow was his love. He said, “Darling Allie, you’re not to worry. I do know what’s at risk for me every day.” He picked up the phone but didn’t punch in the number. “This isn’t about ego. This is about saving lives, like mine was saved.”
“You always have claimed I saved your life.”
“No,” he replied. “You made it worth living. I’d like to see what this is about”— he gestured with the phone— “but I won’t do it without your agreement.”
She saw no other way. He was asking very little. After all that he had given to her, there seemed no course available but to say, “All right, then, Nicky. If you will have a care.”
“Brilliant,” he replied. He looked at the paper and punched in the number. As he did so, he said to Alatea, “What’s the surname, Allie? I can’t read your writing.”
She came to look over his shoulder at what she’d written. “St. James,” she said.
GREAT URSWICK
CUMBRIA
When the gates of Margaret Fox School opened, Manette Fairclough McGhie sighed in relief. She’d thought there was a very good chance that Niamh Cresswell wouldn’t have phoned the school to inform them that her son would be fetched on this day by someone not on the previously approved list. It would have been exactly like Niamh to have done so. Niamh knew that Manette had been close to Ian, which in Niamh’s eyes made Manette a post-divorce enemy. But it seemed that Ian’s former wife had decided that the convenience of having an additional someone willing to fetch her son outweighed her need to avenge all putative sins committed against her. She’d said, “I’ll let Gracie know. She’ll be upset if Tim doesn’t show up at his regular time,” and this made Manette feel that she ought to be taking Gracie as well as Tim, but it was Tim she wanted to see today, Tim whose face at his father’s funeral still haunted Manette’s nights. This would be her tenth attempt to get through to her cousin Ian’s son. She’d tried at the reception immediately following the funeral. She’d tried with phone calls. She’d tried by e-mail. And now she was going for the direct approach. Tim could hardly avoid her if she had him in the car.
She’d left work early, stopping by Freddie’s office to tell him she’d see him at home. “I’m fetching Tim,” she said. “Thought he might like to spend the evening with us. Dinner and a DVD. You know. Perhaps stay the night?” Freddie’s reply had somewhat surprised her. Instead of an absent-minded, “Oh, right, Manette,” her erstwhile partner in life had turned the red of a very bad sunburn and said, “Oh yes. As to that… ”, and after a bit of uncharacteristic stumbling round, had gone on with, “I’ve a date, actually, Manette.”
She’d said, “Oh,” and tried to hide her surprise.
He’d hurried on with, “I rather thought it was time. I probably should have told you before now, but I didn’t quite know how to put it.”
Manette didn’t like the way she felt about this, but she forced a smile and said, “Oh. Lovely, Freddie. Anyone I know?”
“No, no. Of course not. Just someone…”
“How’d you meet?”
He moved back from his desk. On the monitor behind him, she could see a graph and she wondered what he was working on. Profits and losses, probably. He was also due to analyse wages and benefits. And there was the not small matter of formally going through the books following Ian’s death. When on earth had Freddie even found the time to meet someone? she wondered. He said, “Actually, I’d rather not talk about it. It feels a bit uncomfortable.”
“Oh. Right.” Manette nodded. He was watching her earnestly to gauge her reaction so she was careful to give him a cheerful one. “P’rhaps you c’n bring her by, then. I’ll want to see if I approve. You don’t want to make a second mistake.”
“You weren’t a mistake,” he told her.
“Ah. Thanks for saying that.” She fished in her bag and brought out her car keys. She said brightly, “Still my best friend, then?”
“Still and always,” he replied.
What he didn’t say was what she knew: that they couldn’t go on forever as they were, divorced but housemates, everything the same in their lives save where they slept and with whom they made love. What remained was the deep friendship that had always existed between them, which was, at the end, the root of the problem. She’d often thought since the day they’d agreed to divorce that things might have been different had they been able to have children together, that their relationship wouldn’t have deteriorated to the point of their dinnertime conversation being all about the benefits of a self-cleaning and self-deodorising lavatory and how to market it. One couldn’t go on like that indefinitely without waking up one morning and wondering where the magic had gone. A friendly divorce seemed the best solution.
Well, she’d known Freddie would find someone else eventually. She intended to do the same herself. She just hadn’t thought it would happen so quickly. Now she wondered if the truth was that she just hadn’t thought it would happen at all.
She eased her car through the gates of Margaret Fox School. She’d not been here before, but Niamh had told her where Tim would be waiting. There was a supervised holding area near the administration building, Tim’s mother had said. Manette’s name would be on a list matching to Tim’s name. She was to take her identification with her. A passport was best if she had one. There would be no quibbling over that.
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