But the moment had passed. Sybil shook her head and put the key in the ignition.
Learning to bake, learning to develop her photographs, learning to prune the roses – as the weeks went on Laura began to appreciate these little physical triumphs over the shapelessness of the world. Deep within her was a sense that she and Edward did not deserve happiness now. But gradually she realised she was still determined to find some kind of contentment anyway, and maybe this was the way one built it, day by day, out of small pleasures and gentleness. It was on a fall day she had spent digging holes in the cold earth to plant what seemed absurd numbers of snowdrop, scilla and white narcissus bulbs alongside a taciturn gardener from the village, that she found herself counting days in her head, noting the changes, the sickness, the heaviness in her body, and realised she was pregnant again. When Edward came in she was in the kitchen, washing the earth from her hands in the sink, wearing a green sweater of his over an old grey dress.
On the kitchen table were some prints of the photographs that she had taken of Sybil’s children, and as Edward stood there drinking lemonade he started to look at them. ‘Funny to think that you started taking pictures of documents, and now this.’
He was looking at a photograph of Sybil’s son. It was one of the best pictures she had ever taken, Laura thought, with a very shallow depth of field so that all one’s attention was drawn to the boy’s wide eyes and slightly parted mouth. He was glancing off to one side, as if he had seen somebody he was delighted to look at. There was an inviting charm in that glance that she knew any mother would love. Under it was another that Laura had printed off to look at, although she knew she would not give it to Sybil. This time there was anger in George’s pursed mouth, and his curly hair made him look impish. Beside him was a dandelion clock, and the perspective made the dandelion as big as his head.
Edward held it up. ‘You are good, aren’t you?’
Laura said something about how mothers liked her photographs, because they captured time that passed too fast. And then she told Edward her news. The expression in his eyes was so hopeful, it hurt her.
She put the radio on, as they often did over dinner so that they did not have to think of new stories to fill all the silences, and some piano music that Laura thought she recognised fell into the room. ‘Didn’t you play that once?’ she asked, and then, struck by that thought, she suggested that they should get a piano, so that their child could learn as Edward once had. He agreed, and asked her about her plans for the darkroom in the garden. She realised, as they talked and she heated the soup and the pie she had bought from the village shop, that the news of the pregnancy had made this quiet life feel like the beginning of something rather than the end. When they were in bed that night, Laura felt a new current of exploration driving her pleasure, as if she had found a kind of confidence in her body, a confidence that she had not known before, and when Edward tried to enter her from behind she pulled herself up and turned over, embracing him again as she wanted to be embraced, and insisting through her movements that he follow her.
Those bulbs that Laura had planted with such effort did not do very well on their first spring outing. The scillas all began to raise their heads through the soil, but the snowdrops hardly made any appearance to speak of. When she asked the gardener what had gone wrong, he was clear. ‘They are hard to raise from bulbs, you should have ordered them in the green,’ he said. ‘Order them now and you can plant them later in the spring, and then next year you’ll have a pretty display.’
Laura felt irritated that he hadn’t given her this advice before, and annoyed that the display she was hoping for hadn’t arrived. But then, as she went back into the house, leaving the gardener to tie in the rambling roses, she turned and looked back into the green space and imagined how it would look next year with the snowdrops in bloom, and the year after, when the pear tree she had planted would be lifting its head above the walls. This rhythm is sustaining, she thought. Although she did not feel the mad rush she used to feel at the onset of spring, the sense of the inexorable march of the seasons and the turn of the year was in some way allied to the new life in her belly.