Perhaps, one might say, not as much as before. It’s instructive to note what piques her interest. On the whole, family life seems to bore her; she was nowhere to be seen for the birth of our children. She’s much more likely to make an appearance in my workplace, or any kind of event I’m dreading: the parents’ socials at the twins’ school, for example. Tom reckons it’s a reaction to stress, to which I reply with a certain vehemence that the twins’ birth was about as stressful as anything I can imagine, and where the hell was she then? He just shakes his head, amused, and says, “Not that sort of stress.”
Tom is often amused now. Gently and also to the point of genuine laughter. We both laugh more; I can’t remember a point in my life up until now when I have laughed this often. It’s the twins, especially at the age they are now. They are literal, no room for grays; they don’t understand irony or cynicism. They strip that away from us and instead extract an exaggerated politeness and a readiness to laugh; they make us into the people we want them to see—they make us kinder. More tired, certainly, but kinder.
Channing Associates makes me tired, too. We are seven now, with larger offices, and champagne glasses hidden in the back of one cupboard in case we have new contracts to toast. Paul is smugly satisfied that he stayed, but no less bipolar. Gordon Farrow has become the firm’s informal mentor, and I meet him at least monthly for lunch or dinner, and often more. We don’t talk of Caro. Sometimes I wonder if he is a father figure to me now, in which case am I a daughter figure? Though I should know by now not to assume symmetry in relationships.
And so the lovely ribbon of time keeps slipping through my fingers, and through it all, a walnut brown girl with impossibly slender limbs saunters by, her dark, unreflective eyes taking everything in but revealing nothing. I never do see her smile.