Grace and I don’t exactly look like sisters. I’m prettier, but she has more personality, I’ve heard people say, which I thought was a compliment when I was fourteen, but now I know different.
Jack sets up the traveling cot in one of the spare bedrooms before joining the men in the garden, where they are standing around the barbecue—that great leveler of legends, where any man can be king if he’s holding the tongs. His first two beers go down in a matter of minutes. He gets a third. When did I start counting?
Mum needs help in the kitchen. We dress the salads and butter the potatoes. Grace is playing with Lucy and Lachlan, keeping them amused until dinner. She says she loves kids, but I suspect that’s only other people’s children, who can be handed back when they’re overtired or emotional.
I hear laughter outside. Jack has cracked everyone up with one of his stories. They love him. He’s the life and soul of every party—the TV star who is full of gossip about transfers and signings. A lot of guys are knowledgeable about football, but they all defer to Jack on the subject because they imagine he has some added insight or inside knowledge.
“You’re lucky with that one,” my mother says.
“Pardon?”
“Jack.”
I smile and nod, still looking into the garden, where flames are leaping from the barbecue.
“I have no idea what I’m going to do with him,” says my mother, referring to Daddy’s retirement.
“He has plans.”
“Golf and gardening? He’ll be bored silly within a month.”
“You could always travel.”
“He keeps wanting to go back to places we’ve been before. They’re like pilgrimages.”
She reminds me of when they went back to the hotel in Greece where they spent their honeymoon. They were woken at three in the morning by a Russian waving money around and demanding sex.
“The place had become a brothel.”
“Sounds like an adventure,” I say.
“I’m too old for that kind of adventure.”
When the meat is suitably cremated we sit down to eat. Lachlan and Lucy have their own little table, but I finish up sitting with them, coaxing food into Lucy and stopping Lachlan from drowning his sausage in ketchup.
There are toasts and speeches. Daddy gets maudlin and thick-voiced when he talks about how much his family means to him. Jack keeps making wisecracks, but it’s not the time or the place.
At ten o’clock we each carry a sleeping child to the car and make our farewells. I drive. Jack dozes. I wake him at home and we repeat the kid shuffle, carrying them to their beds. I’m exhausted and it’s not even eleven.
Jack wants a nightcap.
“Haven’t you had enough?” I say, wanting to reclaim the words as soon as they come out.
“What did you say?”
“Nothing.”
“No, I heard you.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.”
“Yes, you did.”
“Let’s not fight. I’m tired.”
“You’re always tired.”
Too tired for sex is what he means.
“I wanted to have sex all week, but you weren’t interested,” I counter, which technically isn’t true.
“Can you blame me?” asks Jack.
“What does that mean?”
He doesn’t answer, but I know he’s saying that he doesn’t find me attractive right now and that he didn’t want another baby. Two is enough—a boy and a girl—all bases covered.
“I didn’t do it on purpose,” I say. “It was an accident.”
“And you decided to keep it.”
“We agreed.”
“No, you decided.”
“Really? Is that what you tell your mates at the pub—that you’re so pussy-whipped that I bully you into having children?”
Jack’s fist tightens on his glass and his eyes shut, as though he’s counting to ten. He takes his drink into the garden and lights a cigarette from the packet he keeps on a high shelf beside the kitchen clock. He knows I hate him smoking. He also knows I won’t complain.
Our fights are like this. We snipe rather than throw plates. We go for those tender spots, the weaknesses and embarrassments that we have each learned how to find in the course of a marriage.
Once we made a point of never going to sleep angry at each other. I don’t know when that changed. I keep telling myself that everything will be fine when the baby is born. I’ll have more energy. His doubts will disappear. We’ll be happy again.
AGATHA
* * *
Sometimes I feel as though my past ticks inside me like a phantom clock telling me what dates must be acknowledged and what sins need to be atoned for. Today is such a date—the 1st of November—an anniversary of sorts, which is why I’m traveling north under a bleak gray sky on a National Express coach that hugs the inner lane of the motorway.
Rolling my forehead against the glass, I watch cars and trucks overtake us, their wheels spitting water and wipers swaying back and forth. The rain seems particularly apt. My childhood memories do not involve endless summers, long twilights, and crickets chirruping in the grass. The Leeds of my youth was eternally gray, cold, and drizzling.
My family home is gone, bulldozed to make way for a bulk-goods warehouse. My mother bought again—a small terrace not far from our old house—using money my stepfather left her. He died on a golf course, having sliced his drive into a pond—a heart attack. Who knew he had one? My mother rang to tell me the news, asking if I would come to the funeral, but I told her I’d rather gloat from a distance.
I won’t be seeing my mother today. She’s “wintering in Spain” as she likes to call it, which means roasting like a chicken beside a swimming pool in Marbella, drinking sangria, and being rude about the locals. She’s not rich, simply racist.
From Leeds coach station I head to the nearest florist and have her make three small crowns of baby’s breath and greenery. She wraps them in tissue paper and puts them in a polished paper box that I tuck into my shoulder bag. Afterwards, I buy myself a sandwich and a drink before catching a minicab along the A65 as far as Kirkstall, where it crosses the River Aire. The minicab drops me near Broadlea Hill, where I climb over a stile and follow a muddy path through the forest.
I can name most of the trees and shrubs, as well as the birds, thanks to Nicky, my ex-husband. He thought I wasn’t listening when he pointed things out to me, but I loved listening to his stories and marveling at how much he knew.
I met Nicky a month after my thirtieth birthday—just when I thought time was running out to meet Mr. Right or Mr. Wrong, or any old Mister. Most of my friends were married or engaged or in long-term relationships by then. Some were pregnant for the second or third time, wanting big families or more welfare or not planning at all.
Living in London, I worked for a temp agency doing short-term secretarial placements, mainly for women on maternity leave. I had a bedsit in Camden above a kebab shop that served up fights and doner kebabs when the pubs shut their doors at night.