“Sure.”
It was nice to be outside, walking in step, leaning close. He knew a coffee place in Covent Garden that stayed open till late. We talked until they threw us out. Jack escorted me home and walked me to my front door.
“Will you go out with me?” he asked.
“On a date?”
“Is that OK?”
“Sure.”
“How about breakfast?”
“It’s two thirty in the morning.”
“Brunch, then.”
“Are you angling to spend the night?”
“No, I just want to make sure I see you tomorrow.”
“You mean today?”
“Yes.”
“We could do lunch.”
“I don’t know if I can wait that long.”
“You’re sounding needy.”
“I am.”
“Why did you fight with that woman I saw you with?”
“She broke up with me.”
“Why?”
“She said I was too ambitious.”
“Are you?”
“Yes.”
“Is that it?”
“She also said I killed her fish.”
“Her fish?”
“She keeps tropical fish. I was supposed to be looking after them and I accidentally turned off the water heater.”
“When you were living with her?”
“We weren’t exactly living together. I had a drawer. It’s where she kept my balls.”
“She was crying.”
“She’s a good actress.”
“Did you love her?”
“No. Are you always like this?”
“Like what?”
“Interrogating.”
“I’m interested.”
He laughed.
Our first proper date was a lunch at Covent Garden, close to where we both worked. He took me to the Opera Terrace. Afterwards we watched the street performers and buskers and living statues. Jack was easy company, curious and attentive; one good story led to another.
We went out again the next evening and shared a cab home. It was past midnight. We both had to work the next day. Jack didn’t ask to come inside, but I took his hand and led him up the stairs.
I fell in love. Madly. Deeply. Hopelessly. It should happen to everyone once—even if love should never be hopeless. I adored everything about Jack—his smile, his laugh, his looks, the way he kissed. He was like an everlasting packet of chocolate biscuits. I knew that I’d eat too many and make myself sick, but I ate them anyway.
Six months later we were married. Jack’s career blossomed, then stalled for a while, but now it’s moving again. I fell pregnant with Lucy and turned down a promotion that would have taken me to New York. Lachlan arrived two years later and I quit my job to become a stay-at-home mum. My parents helped us buy the house in Barnes. I wanted to go farther south and have a smaller mortgage. Jack wanted the postcode as well as the lifestyle.
So here we are—the perfect nuclear family—with an oops baby on the way and the doubts and arguments of the middle years starting to surface. I love my children. I love my husband. Yet sometimes I rake my memory to find moments that make me truly happy.
The man I fell in love with—the one who said that he loved me first—has changed. The happy-go-lucky, easygoing Jack has turned into a brittle man whose emotions are wrapped so tightly in barbed wire that I cannot hope to unloop them. I’m not focusing on his failings or tallying his shortcomings. I still love him. I do. I only wish he wouldn’t fixate so much on himself or question why our family isn’t more like the Disney Channel variety where everyone is happy, healthy, and witty and there are unicorns tethered in the garden.
AGATHA
* * *
My shift finishes and I get changed in the stockroom, rolling my smock and name tag into a ball and shoving them behind the tins of olive oil and cans of tomatoes. Mr. Patel expects employees to take their uniforms home, but I’m not doing his laundry.
Shrugging on my winter coat, I slip out the rear door, skirting the rubbish bins and discarded cardboard boxes. Pulling my hood over my head, I imagine I look like Meryl Streep in The French Lieutenant’s Woman. She was a whore abandoned by a French ship’s officer, who spent her life staring out to sea, waiting for him to return. My sailor is coming home to me and I’m giving him a baby.
On the eastern edge of Putney Common I catch the number 22 double-decker bus along Lower Richmond Road to Putney Bridge. In the early part of my pregnancy people weren’t sure whether to congratulate me or buy me a gym membership, but now I get offered seats on buses and crowded trains. I love being pregnant, feeling my baby inside me, stretching, yawning, hiccuping, and kicking. It’s like I’m never alone anymore. I have someone to keep me company and listen to my stories.
A businessman sits opposite me, dressed in a suit and tie. In his midforties, with hair the color of mushroom soup. His eyes travel over my baby bump and he smiles, finding me attractive. Fertile. Fecund. Isn’t that a good word? I only learned it the other day. Fe-cund. You have to put the accent on the un sound and punch out the d.
Mr. Businessman is checking out my rock-star cleavage. I wonder if I could seduce him. Some men get off on sleeping with pregnant women. I could take him home, tie him down, and say, “Let me do the touching.” I would never do it, of course, but Hayden has been away for seven months and a girl has needs.
My sailor boy is a communications technician in the Royal Navy, although I don’t really know what that means. It’s something to do with computers and intelligence and briefing senior officers—which sounded very important when Hayden tried to explain it to me. Right now he’s on HMS Sutherland chasing Somali pirates somewhere in the Indian Ocean. It’s an eight-month deployment and he won’t be home until Christmas.
We met last New Year’s Eve at a nightclub in Soho. Hot and noisy, with overpriced drinks and strobing lights. I was ready to go home well before midnight. Most of the guys were drunk, checking out the teenage girls in their crotch-defying dresses and fuck-me heels. I feel sorry for hookers these days—how do they stand out anymore?
Occasionally some guy would summon up enough courage to ask a girl to dance, only to be dismissed with a flick of her hair or the curl of a painted lip. I was different. I said hello. I showed interest. I let Hayden press his body against me and yell into my ear. We kissed. He grabbed my arse. He assumed he was in.
I was probably the oldest woman in the place, but a hell of a lot classier than the rest of them. Admittedly, gravity has made some inroads on my arse, but I have a nice face when I paint it properly, and I can hide my muffin top with the right clothes. All-importantly, I have great boobs, have done since I was eleven or twelve, when I first noticed people staring at my bust—men, boys, husbands, teachers, and family friends. I ignored them at first—my boobs, I mean. Later I tried to diet them away and strap them down, but they wouldn’t be easily squashed or flattened or diminished.
Hayden is a boob man. I could tell from the first time he set eyes on me (or them). Men are so obvious. I could see him thinking, Are they natural?