I heard on Radio 4 last year that you can buy facial recognition software that means all someone has to do is upload your photograph – scans count – and the app will trawl online images until it finds a match. It sounded to me like something from one of Kit’s beloved science-fiction novels, but so once did all the technology we now take for granted. We know that Beth has at least one photograph of us and – not knowing at first how sly she could be – we had so many snapshots just lying around the flat. She could have had any one of them copied and replaced before we had noticed. I must be one of the only women who wants crows’ feet and jowls but Kit says I’ve aged well. I don’t know if it’s flattery or just the fact that we’ve barely spent a night apart in fifteen years, so he can’t see the changes: a hollowing under the eyes; the slanting accents, grave and acute, carved in the skin between my eyebrows. Or maybe he can and he’s being kind.
It is only eight thirty, still before office hours, and I realise there’s a cowardly way around this. I call the refuge knowing I’ll go straight to voicemail, leave a message asking them to take my picture down for personal reasons and hope that they’re too embarrassed to dig deeper. I’m lucky that I make a good living doing something I love and believe in, but my career has definitely been impeded by my reluctance to publicise myself along with the causes I raise money for. I still get head-hunted once or twice a year but my answer is always the same. I cannot have a high profile.
I knew from early on there was madness in the heat of Beth’s moments. It wasn’t until Zambia that I understood she was as dogged as Jamie in her own way. I often wonder if she lives, like I do, with our history bubbling constantly in the background, spilling over only when an eclipse is coming. You couldn’t live at that level for the best part of fifteen years. It must come in waves, as it does for me. Or as it must for Jamie, whose campaign is not governed by alignment of the planets but legal mechanics.
After hours in the chair, I’m stiff all over and when I stand up my lower back cramps in response. I use the loo for the fourth time this morning, then rearrange the magazines in the bathroom into his-n-hers piles: New Scientist, New Humanist and The Sky at Night for Kit; New Statesman, The Fundraiser and Pregnancy and Birth for me. For balance I take the stairs crabwise, straightening the pictures on the walls as I go. It’s a series of eclipse shots, glossy black circles surrounded by tongues of white fire that look more like abstract art than anything from nature. They are in chronological order, deliberately unlabelled, although even if I were to mix them up Kit would be able to tell you exactly when and where each one was taken.
On the console table by the front door sits our wedding photograph in a little silver frame. It’s a bittersweet image; two frightened kids wearing other people’s clothes on the steps of Lambeth Town Hall. Kit’s bandages had only come off the day before.
There’s a thudding noise as the builders next door start work for the day. Until a few years ago the house next door to the left had two different families crammed into it; last year, it was bought by Ronni and Sean, who are now converting the flats back into a house big enough for their three children. Like everyone else who moves in these days, they are furious at having been priced out of Crouch End. Our neighbourhood is known as the Harringay Ladder, because on the map the streets look like eighteen rungs strung between Wightman Road and Green Lanes. Wilbraham Road is the sixth rung down. When we told Ronni and Sean we’d been on the Ladder since 2001, Sean whistled and said, ‘You must be swilling in equity.’ Once, perhaps, if everything had gone according to plan, but Kit’s earning power isn’t what we thought it would be and maintaining Edwardian houses doesn’t come cheap. If we hadn’t had the roof replaced we’d be able to see the stars from our bed whether we wanted to or not. And that’s before you count the IVF. After the third failed round it was clear that the only way forward was a hefty remortgage.
Kit hates Ronni for something she said to me a few weeks later. She was hugely pregnant with a toddler in a pushchair, and as I helped her up the steps to her front door, she said, ‘You must really rattle around in there, with no kids. We should swap! Our flat’s just about the right size for two.’
I kept it together until she was through her door, then I ran home, crashing so hard into Kit that I had his toothmark indented in my forehead for the rest of that day. I threw myself on the sofa and wailed while Kit called her a rude, clumsy, insensitive bitch and threatened to go next door and say something. (He’s much tougher on my behalf than he ever is on his own.) I had to beg him not to.