‘Yes all right,’ says Manon, shoving more crisps than seems feasible into her mouth, frightened it might be true – about all the sex she’s missing out on.
‘Anyway, he had all that rich boy’s confidence, and I knew he was a bit of a player – you could just tell from his moves, and I’m telling you, his friends from the City were wankers, I mean boorish, sexist, the works. But Jon-Oliver … I suppose I thought if I was the one he settled down with, then I’d get all the sexiness and the money – the money was a really big part of it, I’m not gonna lie – and the other stuff he’d grow out of. Thought I’d be living in Holland Park and wearing taupe to yoga.’
‘Nearly got there,’ Manon says.
‘Single mum living in Hinchingbrooke? Yep, not far off.’
‘So what happened? Between you and him, I mean.’
‘Playboys aren’t fun when you’re pregnant. They’re the opposite of fun. First there was just a line over and over again on a bank statement he’d left out by accident. Awork. I Googled it. Adult work – a prostitutes’ website. He came clean, said he was watching porn videos late at night, nothing more than that. But it’s always more than that. The stuff they come clean about is only ever a fraction of it. To be honest, it was a disaster to have got pregnant and I say that with love in my heart for Sol.’
The thought of the unaware baby upstairs makes them both silent.
Ellie rotates her glass. ‘To be honest, I’m not that surprised he’s dead. I know that sounds awful, but the world he moved in … It was all glinting surfaces hiding God knows what. It wouldn’t surprise me if he was trading for dangerous people. There was no heart …’ Ellie is rubbing her fingers together, as if trying to assess a fabric. ‘Nothing real to it, you know? He was a man without any substance. Every now and then, he’d deny himself – no coke, no prostitutes, back to the gym, kale in his NutriBullet, a really superficial bout of CBT. And then he’d rebel against the clean slate so hard it was terrifying. Jon-Oliver liked a cold kind of pleasure – sex without a relationship. I’d say it was some Russian bitch he was shagging. That’ll be who stabbed him.’
They are silent again. Ellie sips her wine. Manon wishes she could have some.
‘He told me some insane stories about the City. Champagne, hotels, piles of drugs, piles of girls. He told me about one party they had where they hired a whole floor of a London hotel and it ended up being a sea of naked bodies.’
‘Don’t get much of that in the police,’ says Manon. ‘Not on cold cases, certainly.’
‘No, there’s not much of it in nursing either. I mean there’s bodies, and they’re often naked, but not in a good way.’
‘In general,’ Manon says, ‘if you’re after the orgiastic experience, public sector isn’t really the way to go.’
She is struck by a drip on the bridge of her nose. She touches it with her fingers, looks at the wetness, looks up at the ceiling. There is a small gathering of drips, trembling on the ceiling, waiting to fall.
‘Fuck!’ says Manon. ‘The fucking bath!’
She gets up and makes for the hallway with every molecule of haste she can muster and generates all the speed of an 80-year-old. ‘Fly! Flyyyyy! Pull the flipping plug out!!!’
Upstairs, the water is tumbling over the edge of the bathtub – rather beautifully, she notices, like an infinity pool at a posh hotel. She turns the tap off and pulls out the plug, wetting her sleeve and hearing the gushing of water down the waste pipe. The sound prompts an urgent need to pee. She grabs all the towels hanging on hooks on the wall and flings them onto the floor to soak up the wet; sighs, closes the bathroom door.
Only five months pregnant. Is it possible she will become still more ungainly?
When she emerges and walks into Fly’s room, he predictably hasn’t lifted his face from the page. Solly is squatting happily in his nappy. ‘Dine-soar,’ Solly says, pointing with his little pointy finger. He sets the universe in order with the naming of things with the pointy finger and she hopes he never grows out of it.
‘Right, so thanks for flooding the bathroom, Fly,’ Manon says.
He doesn’t look up.
‘Fly, listen. There was water coming through the ceiling in the kitchen. Really! Jesus, Fly!’
Was he this disrespectful when they were in London, or is his disdain part of her punishment for uprooting him? For being pregnant? She snatches his book away. He is forced to look up.
‘What?’ he asks, genuinely nonplussed. It’s as if he’s been in a bubble, the outside world on mute.
‘You flooded the bathroom.’
‘Oh my God, sorry. Did I?’
She is furious, but he genuinely didn’t notice.
Day 2
16 December
Manon
They cannot take their eyes off Solomon, especially Mrs Ross.
All movement and talk swirls about them in the lounge; offers of tea, isn’t it awful, you must be devastated, but Mrs Ross doesn’t take her eyes off Solly.
Sitting forward, on the edge of the sofa, she drinks him in as he plays with his Duplo, making a tower in order to knock it down. He is delighted by knocking things down.
Fly is at school (Manon hopes). She has been tempted to walk him in each morning, to make certain he arrives, but stopped herself. The headmaster didn’t think it was a good strategy either. ‘You want to rebuild trust, not infantalise him,’ he said.
For everyone else in the room, with grief as with illness, normal service has been suspended, hence the midday tea party.
‘Isn’t he like Jonno?’ Mrs Ross whispers to Mr Ross. (They have not offered their first names – not, Manon suspects, because they are formal, but because the moment has passed and they are not smooth operators who can re-route the social flow.)
A smile plays about the corner of Mrs Ross’s mouth as if she dare not find happiness at a moment such as this.
‘The very spit,’ says Mr Ross.
Their voices have a lovely Welsh song to them, but subtly and not all the time.
‘We never met you,’ Mrs Ross says, looking up at Ellie as if she is confused by the way in which Ellie and Jon-Oliver had this child, without marrying or meeting the parents.
‘Where are your people?’ Mr Ross asks. He holds his tea with one hand under the mug’s base. Thick hands.
‘Our dad’s in Scotland,’ Manon says. She is about to say, ‘With our stepmother Una,’ but it is all wrong. There is nothing of the mother in Una. Instead she says, ‘Mum died when we were kids – teenagers.’
‘Oh how terrible for you,’ says Mrs Ross.
‘Yes, it was,’ says Manon.
Mr and Mrs Ross have gone back to drinking Solly in, as if they can soak up enough of him to take back to Wales.