‘I did want it to be something more. But after I got pregnant, I found out …’ She rubs her thumb against her index finger, as if sifting for the right words. ‘Well. He already belonged to someone else.’
I nod, hoping my face is sympathetic. I mean it to be. I know she’s not the first to have an affair with someone who is taken. I try to affect a casual voice.
‘How did he react? When you told him about the baby?’
Rachel smiles sadly. ‘He doesn’t know.’ She sighs, tapping her nearly finished cigarette and pushing her pint of Guinness away. ‘I haven’t seen him in a while. I just … thought maybe it was better to leave it.’
I hesitate. ‘Don’t you think you should tell him?’
She looks at me, seriously. Then nods, slowly.
‘I probably should.’ Abruptly, her expression lightens. ‘Thanks, Helen,’ she says. ‘You know. For not judging.’ She takes a final drag of her cigarette, her lips pursed tightly. ‘Means a lot.’ She breathes smokily, closing her eyes again, stubbing it out. ‘A lot.’
I force a smile. ‘Don’t be silly.’ I try not to think about the fact that, actually, I was judging her a bit.
When I get home that night, I see Daniel’s trainers on the dust sheets in the hallway, where the builders have been traipsing in and out with drills and spades, preparing for the basement dig. Normally it would annoy me – how many times have I asked him to put them away? – but tonight, instead of being cross about it, I think, again, how lucky I am not to be Rachel. How grateful I should be to have a loving husband. Imagine being pregnant and going home to an empty house. The thought makes me shudder.
I put Daniel’s shoes in the cupboard under the stairs and head into the kitchen, rolling up my sleeves. I prepare some fish and roast vegetables for dinner. While they are cooking, the landline rings. I wipe my hands and snatch up the phone, wedging it between my ear and shoulder.
‘Hello?’
There’s silence for a few seconds, the click of the connection. Then a voice, faraway-sounding.
‘Mrs Thorpe, hello. I’m just calling with regards to your remortgage. Are you OK to go through a few things now, or should I call back?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘The remortgage on your property. We’re just putting the final details together for the application.’
I frown. Remortgage? Then the line crackles lightly. There is a delay. It’s obviously some dodgy call centre somewhere. I know these calls all too well.
‘I’m sorry,’ I tell her coldly, ‘you must have the wrong number. There’s no remortgage application.’
‘Mrs Thorpe …’
I hang up, shaking my head, putting the handset back. Ever since Mummy and Daddy died, we’ve had loads like this. Scammers, trying to trick us into giving away details. I think poor old Mummy had got herself onto some database – suckers lists, they call them. She was forever answering the phone to people. Daniel thinks we should just get the landline disconnected.
I wash up and put away all the dishes, clean the worktops until they are gleaming, and lay the table. I mop the floor, the water in the bucket turning black with building dust. But when it’s done, I feel better. I tip the dirty water away put some music on and open the windows to air out the house.
But the light drains from the sky, the windows darken, and Daniel is still not home. I check my messages. He is working late, again. I think about calling Katie, asking if she feels like coming over. But the food is ready now, and she lives miles away. And anyway, she is probably busy with Charlie. I take a fork from the laid table, and eat my dinner alone, picking the flakes of white fish from the bones.
29 WEEKS
SERENA
‘I can’t remember a summer like it,’ Helen is saying. ‘I can’t believe how warm it was today!’
We are sitting outside, the four of us. The air is cooler now, but it is still warm enough for outdoors, just about. Only a slight breeze blows, though it’s usually windy on this side of the park. The baby in my belly is snug and still, lulled by the rock of my hammock.
Rory is piling logs in the outside wood burner. He is kneeling as if in prayer, his hair flopping into his face. Daniel and Helen are sitting together, in the swing seat. I have put candles in glass storm lanterns, twisted strings of fairy lights through the branches of the cherry tree. The wooden decking glows silvery in the light. I must remember to take a picture for Instagram.
‘Well, I’m loving the heat. Can’t get enough of it,’ Rory tells her.
‘Yes, well, you’re not pregnant.’ Helen shifts in the swing seat. She is wearing an ankle-length dress with a flower pattern: it coats her enormous belly like a tent. She is so much bigger than me, already. Her hands rest on top of her bump, fingers spread, pale and fat as starfish. ‘I’m fed up of it,’ Helen is saying. ‘We need a bit of rain. Have you seen Greenwich Park? The grass is all dead and yellow.’
‘It will grow back, Helen,’ Rory mutters. ‘You’re being dramatic.’
I place a cool hand on his shoulder to silence him.
‘We’ve got a few more warm days at least, I heard,’ I soothe. ‘Chilly in the evenings now, though, isn’t it? Do you want a blanket or anything, Helen?’
Rory tuts and rolls his eyes. ‘Of course she doesn’t need a blanket! For God’s sake. When is it ever warm enough to sit outside in the evenings in this bloody country? Let’s enjoy it!’ He says it as if the rest of us are stopping him from doing so.
Crossly, he picks up the kindling for the log burner, turns to face me. ‘Do we really need this on?’
‘Yes,’ I tell him. ‘It’s atmospheric. Besides, your sister is cold.’
At this, Daniel looks up, blinks at me through his glasses, as if he had been asleep and I have just woken him. Next to Helen’s outsized form, Daniel looks insubstantial somehow, his trousers and shirt crumpling where he fails to fill them out. He turns to his wife.
‘Are you cold, Helen?’
Helen says she is fine but pulls her grey cardigan closer, like a life jacket. Daniel starts to take his jacket off, and I motion him to leave it on.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll fetch you a blanket,’ I tell her. I pull myself up out of the hammock and head to the kitchen. There, after a backward glance at Rory, I slide the laptop out from under the papers on the table where I put it when he came in earlier. Positioning myself so I can’t be seen, I delete the search history. It only takes a second.
I look back at the three of them, through the French doors. From inside the house, the veranda looks like a little raft on a calm, dark sea. Behind the swing seat, the scattered lights of the city blink and flicker, like a civilisation on a faraway shore. Sometimes Greenwich can feel a long way from anywhere.
It was Rory who wanted to live on Maze Hill. Our house is the one with the huge sycamore tree. Rory loves to point out the blue plaque on the house next door, tell people about the famous architect who once lived there. From the way he tells the story, you can tell he wants a plaque like that on our house too, one day, talking about him.
I don’t care about the plaque, but I love the view from the balcony in our top bedroom. You can see the whole city stretched out like a silver platter, the cranes against the metal sky dotted with red lights. The shot-silk sunsets, the leaden shimmer of the Thames. I was up there earlier, trying to take a photograph for Instagram. But I can never get it quite right – the low light makes the sky seem duller, the little lights bleed into one another.
I pick up the cashmere blanket and step outside, closing the doors behind me carefully. I step over Daniel’s legs to reach Helen. He hardly seems to notice. He is eating a handful of pistachios, without much apparent pleasure. He holds them in his lap in one cupped hand, using the other to rub off the shells before transferring them mechanically, one by one, into his mouth, staring expressionless into the distance.
‘At least it’s due to get cooler now,’ Helen is saying. ‘It was so hot in the park the other day, when I was going
to meet Rachel, that I had to stop and sit down in the memorial garden. I thought I was going to faint!’
I’m almost as far gone as Helen is, but I just don’t seem to be experiencing the same thing at all – this heaviness she talks about, this loss of energy. I feel charged, fortified by the baby. I love to feel her, sitting firm under my clothes, snug as a weapon. She feels powerful to me, her kicking feet, her racing heart. I feel stronger and stronger, suffused with her energy. She floods me with blood. I can feel myself growing new tissues. I walk and walk, my headphones in. My libido is high. I can feel my small breasts are swelling, my hair thickening. The muscles in my legs growing hard and firm.
Helen and Daniel live at the bottom of the park, in the house she and Rory grew up in. That was the deal, when their parents died: the company went to Rory, Helen got the house, and Charlie retains a small slice of each, and got the rest of his inheritance in cash – cash that, word has it, he has mostly squandered.
When people admire Helen’s house, as they often do, Helen always tells them that Daniel only married her so he could get his grubby architect’s hands on it. She is joking, of course. She always squeezes his hand as she says it, I have noticed, and he always smiles, fondly, back at her. And yet, I have sometimes wondered whether there is a scratchy little grain of truth in there, somewhere. Not much, but enough to make Helen’s little joke not very funny.
‘It was packed in the park when I was there the other day, with Rachel,’ Helen is saying now. Rachel has been mentioned twice now. I haven’t heard her mention a Rachel before, and the statement feels designed to entice me to ask who she is, but somehow, I can’t bring myself to bite. Helen tries another line of attack.
‘It always gets me thinking of summers in Cambridge, when the park is full like that,’ she says. ‘You know, all the picnics everywhere. Everyone sitting on the grass.’
‘I thought the grass was all dead,’ Rory mutters.
‘Not all of it,’ Helen mumbles, stung by the sharpness in his tone.
We left Cambridge ten years ago. Yet Helen seems to lean on the memory of those summer days like a crutch. I don’t know why she must talk about it so endlessly, why it seems to matter so much more to her than it does to us.
‘God, it doesn’t feel like ten years ago, does it?’ Helen sighs wistfully. She prods at her brother. ‘Do you remember the time you stole that punt?’
Rory throws a final log into the fire pit then hauls himself up, brushing his hands on his jeans.
‘Borrowed,’ he corrects. ‘And I think you’ll find Daniel here was my accomplice.’ Rory slaps Daniel on the shoulder as he passes to sit back in his seat. Daniel’s blank expression is unchanged.
‘I don’t remember,’ Daniel says, after a pause, throwing the last of his nutshells into the bowl. ‘We went punting loads of times.’ The fire crackles in the silence.
I study Daniel’s face. This is an odd thing to say. It’s not unusual for Helen to remember things that some of us don’t. All kinds of flotsam seem to live in her memory. She embroiders things a bit sometimes, too, adding all sorts of pretty details that weren’t there before. But Daniel remembers that day, I’m sure of it. It had been like one of those perfect summer days – so perfect that you can’t be sure whether you trust your own memory, or whether you’ve mixed it up with a photo, or a film, and made the colours more brilliant than they really were.
The boys had snuck the college punt out of the boathouse – we weren’t supposed to use it, for some reason I can’t remember. A surprise, they said. After weeks in the silence and stale air of libraries and examination halls, it had been intoxicating to be drifting underneath a luminous blue sky. The smell of the grass on the banks, the sock, sock, sock of the punt hitting the riverbed, the reflections in the water. The boys had taken turns punting while Helen and I swigged from a bottle of cheap fizz they’d bought at the college bar. For Serena and me, finals were over, and Rory and Daniel had a long summer ahead before their MA year began. Life after university felt like a distant speck on the horizon, with all the time in between just a vast, delicious expanse of summertime.
Sun-soaked and tipsy, we’d laughed at Daniel’s skinny legs, at Rory getting so distracted posing with his shirt off that he forgot to duck at the bridge and nearly fell in. Then he did fall in, and got back on the punt, and pushed Daniel in, and then Rory had taken his clothes off – he was always taking his clothes off. Finally, we all got in, clothes abandoned. Even Helen. Giddy and drunk, we’d raced each other down the river. Rory had swum underneath Helen, picked her up on his shoulders, her mouth a little wet O of surprise. Rory! Put me down! I thought you were Daniel, she had screamed. We’d watched her from the other side. The water had been dark and cool. You couldn’t always tell.
When we got back to the halls that day, it had been later than we’d realised. My skin was still clammy and cold from the river water. My hair had been bleached by the sun; even Helen had coloured. We hadn’t bothered changing. Little constellations of freckles had appeared on Helen’s cheeks and I remember seeing Daniel kissing them, in the queue for the club. It had seemed intimate, so much so that it made me look away, gave me a strange feeling. I remember how I couldn’t wait a minute longer for Rory that night, that we’d collapsed into his single bed, a hot tangle of limbs. His sweat had tasted sharp and sweet, his body different then, hardened by hockey and squash. I still remember the feel of his arms, the weight of him. When we finally fell asleep, his arm underneath my neck, light had been leaking in through the sides of the curtains, the beginnings of birdsong stirring.
‘You must remember, Daniel.’ Helen seems upset. She searches Daniel’s face for signs of recognition. But he looks at her for a moment as if she is someone he has never met before. He shrugs, looks down. The flames from the fire pit dance on his face, sharpening the shadows under his eyes, the ridge of his brow.
‘I’m sorry we bailed on the antenatal classes, Helen,’ I say. ‘I hope you don’t mind me switching to those other ones. They’re a bit nearer to here.’
Helen smiles weakly. ‘Oh, no, don’t worry about it.’
I suspect a better explanation is demanded. Not having one to hand, I decide to change the subject. ‘Shall we eat?’
Rory sits down at the table, starts filling glasses. It is our practised routine: he does drinks, I do food. Helen reaches out two hands for Daniel to haul her out of the swing seat. Daniel does it, effortlessly, with the wiry strength he has, a strength that his slim body hides. Daniel won medals for gymnastics when he was at school. He showed us once how he can support his entire body aloft with just his wrists, the sinews in his forearms straining. He held himself like that for over a minute on the pommel horse in the university gym, his torso as flat as a pencil, his face a blank oval of control. When he takes his glasses off, Daniel looks like a completely different person.
‘So,’ I ask, ‘how have they been, anyway? The classes? Are you finding them useful?’
It’s true that I had agreed to come on this course with her, that I’d let her book it and get all excited, when, in all honesty, I couldn’t imagine anything worse. Sitting in a hot room with her, Daniel and Rory. All that talk of stretching, bleeding, pushing, cutting. I had also completely forgotten about it until the day itself. Helen seemed to think we’d had a letter or something, but I don’t remember it. By the time I saw the reminder on my calendar, I’d made other plans.
‘They haven’t been that great, really.’ Helen is watching me carefully. She has registered my lack of enthusiasm and tempered her own accordingly. ‘Actually, they’re pretty boring. And it’s been boiling hot in the room where they hold them. Awful! So stuffy. You haven’t missed anything.’ She takes a sip of her water. ‘Daniel hasn’t managed to make it to any of them yet, either.’ She looks accusingly at Rory. ‘But I suppose someone has to hold the fort at work, with all this uncertainty over the project.’
Neither Daniel nor Rory reacts to Helen’s remark. Sometimes I think they simp
ly don’t listen when she talks. I sense danger, reach over to pour more wine. I watch it wash around the sides of the fishbowl wine glasses. I can almost taste it, feel it whizzing into my bloodstream, sending the baby somersaulting dizzily in utero. But I glance at Helen, and decide to refrain.
I often find myself wishing Helen wouldn’t be such a stickler for the rules. At least, I wish she wouldn’t make such a song and dance about it, leaning over in restaurants to make sure the waiter can hear her tell him she’s pregnant, as if the poor bloke doesn’t have eyes in his head. It’s not her fault, of course. She has reason not to trust her own body. It has let her down before. This time, she is taking no chances. I think she believes that if she follows the rules, she can make a bargain that way. With God, the universe. Whoever. If she follows the rules, the rules will keep her baby safe.
I had been planning to make a toast, to the babies. But as soon as I fill his glass, Daniel brings it straight to his mouth, draining nearly half the wine in one go. For a few moments there is quiet, just the scrape of silverware against dinner plates, the snap of the fire, the faint sound of music from a party in one of the other gardens on the hill. The candles flicker darkly in the smoked-glass lanterns.
I glance at Rory. He is sipping his wine, cheerfully piling mouthfuls of tart and salad onto his fork. I kick him under the table. He looks at me blankly. I glare at him.
‘This is lovely, darling,’ he says loudly.
There is a murmur of assent.
‘It’s super easy. Loads more if you want it.’
It is cooler now – perhaps eating outdoors was a mistake. But no one mentions the temperature. No one is saying anything at all. The evening feels like it has blown off course. I wonder how to steer it back. I glare at Rory again until he catches my eye.
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