She hadn’t been fasting.
There was a feeling growing within her. A twitchy feeling. She was jabbing the spoon into the yoghurt and eating it too fast. She thought of the opening melody of Stravinsky’s ‘The Rite of Spring’. The high-pitched bassoon. The strange, jerky moments building to an ecstatic unfurling. She wanted to hear that piece. She wanted to play that piece, because that was exactly how she felt right now. There was an upward spiralling feeling in her chest. Was the yoghurt drugged? Was it simply exquisite relief because she’d demonstrated her absolute willingness to donate her eggs but she didn’t actually have to do it: altruism without action, it didn’t get better than that!
Was it just that she’d had enough of feeling bad over what happened? She could never forget that afternoon but she could forgive herself. She could forgive Sam. If he wanted to end their marriage over this, then she would grieve him as if he’d died, but goddamn it, she’d get over it, she’d live. She’d always suspected this about herself, that right at the centre of her soul was a small unbreakable stone, a cold, hard instinct for self-preservation. She’d die for her children, but no one else. She wouldn’t allow one mistake, one slip of judgement, to define her life, not when Ruby was fine, not when life was there for the taking.
She thought of Erika saying, ‘This is your dream, Dummkopf.’
That job was hers. That job belonged to her. She threw down the empty yoghurt container, licked her fingers and headed back to her cello, not to work on her technique this time, but to play music. Somewhere along the way she’d forgotten it was about the music, the pure, uncomplicated bliss of the music.
chapter seventy-three
‘He’s going to steal it!’ announced Holly, loud and clear.
‘Shh!’ said Sam. They could never get Holly to shut up during movies.
‘But he is, look!’
‘You’re right, but …’ Sam put a finger to his lips, although who the hell cared, the movie theatre was packed with wriggly, chatty, rain-crazed kids and their frazzled parents.
Holly shovelled a handful of popcorn into her mouth and sat back, her eyes on the flickering colours of the Pixar movie. Ruby was on Sam’s other side, sucking her thumb, caressing Whisk’s spokes. Her eyelids drooped. She would fall asleep soon and wake up five minutes before the movie ended, demanding it be restarted.
Sam normally loved a good animation but he had no idea what this one was about. He was thinking about his job, and how much longer he could get away with coasting. He was the new guy, still ‘learning the ropes’, but he should have had those ropes learned by now. People must be starting to notice. The head of his division had said, ‘Might be time to invest in an umbrella,’ with a quizzical look at Sam’s drenched clothes yesterday. It was all going to come crashing down. Someone would say, ‘The weird new guy isn’t doing anything.’
It’s past crunch time, Sam. You need to get over it, to get on with it, leave a goddamned umbrella at the front door. Why did tiny things like that seem so impossible these days? Ruby’s head tipped gently against his arm. He pulled up the armrest and she snuggled up to him.
Clementine was getting on with it. He’d seen something change in her after the visit from Vid and Tiffany and Dakota. ‘I feel better after seeing them,’ she’d said, ‘don’t you?’ He’d wanted to shout, ‘No! I feel worse! I feel much worse!’
Did he actually shout that at her? He couldn’t remember. He was becoming a shouter, like his own father used to be, before age softened him.
He shifted about in his seat.
‘You’re wriggling,’ whisper-shouted Holly.
‘Sorry,’ said Sam. The popcorn tasted like salt and butter-flavoured cardboard but he couldn’t stop eating it.
Yes, something was definitely changing in Clementine. There was a new impatience about her, a brittleness, except brittleness implied fragility and she didn’t seem fragile, she seemed fed up. She wanted to move on from Ruby’s accident and she was right. There was no point dwelling on it. There was no point replaying it over and over. Sam had always considered himself the more emotionally resilient one in their relationship. Clementine was the one who made too big a deal of things, who got dramatic, sometimes to the point of hysteria, over tiny things, like her auditions, for example, although of course auditions weren’t tiny, they were a big deal, and nerve-racking, he got that, but she used to let them consume her. Once Sam had heard Holly telling Ruby, ‘Mummy is sick with an audition.’ And he’d laughed because it was exactly like that. An audition hit her like a virus.