‘Getting Finn into St Anthony’s. This end of Prendergast Road isn’t guaranteed catchment area.’
‘But isn’t that why you’ve been dragging him to bloody church every Sunday since before he could talk, and why you—’
Kate started to speak over him. ‘Beulah Hill’s guaranteed. Jessica’s been telling me about this place that’s been on the market for over a month now—and it’s a hundred and twenty thousand cheaper than what we’d get for this so we’d actually make some money,’ she said, realising as she looked at Robert’s face that this was the first time either of them had openly acknowledged that they needed to. ‘What d’you think?’ she said after a while, over Flo’s increasingly loud and peculiar bleating sounds. Even after six months, the bleating still sounded odd to Kate.
She smiled absently at him as he walked over, put his hands on her shoulders, eventually kissed her and said quietly, ‘I think that’s fucking nuts.’
‘But, Robert—’
‘If we need to talk about our finances—’
‘Our finances?’ Kate started to laugh.
The laughter was ambiguous. Now he was anxious and over the past six months, which had been difficult—although the word ‘difficult’ didn’t do justice to their marriage so far, so he’d avoided using the word—anxiety had become the third person in their marriage, making it an unpredictable ménage à trois.
There was a scratching at the door and Margery’s voice, ‘Flo’s awake—do you want me to feed her?’
‘It’s fine,’ Kate said, ‘I’m just coming.’
How long had Margery been there? It was difficult to tell; she’d perfected the art of creeping soundlessly around the house. Sometimes, when Kate came back from work, she thought the house was empty until Margery appeared at random, framed in a doorway Kate was about to walk through, claiming to have been asleep.
‘She’s really working herself up.’
‘Mum—it’s fine,’ Robert cut in.
Margery paused. ‘Morning, love.’
‘Morning, Mum,’ Robert called back, watching Kate pull on some black pants that had gone threadbare at the back.
‘D’you want tea—I’ve just made some?’
‘We’re fine.’
‘There’s plenty in the pot.’
‘It’s okay—we’re coming down now.’
When Kate appeared five minutes later, Margery was still hovering on the landing.
‘I didn’t like to leave her in case she was choking or something.’ Margery paused, as if the fatal choking had already taken place, adding, ‘She’s only six months.’
Kate disappeared into Flo’s room and, as she lifted her daughter—now bleating hysterically—out of her cot, Margery, who was still in the doorway, said again, ‘She’s only six months.’
Kate stared at the rhinoceros on Flo’s safari curtains, pulled over the Gina Forde-recommended blackout blinds, rhythmically stroking her daughter’s back, aware of every bump in her unformed animal spine, and didn’t say anything.
She didn’t know how long she’d been standing like that, but when she at last turned round, Margery was gone and the house was full of the smell of economy bacon frying in the water it had been injected with at the processing plant.
Kate crossed the landing, walking through the toxic bacon fumes with Flo towards Findlay’s room. Findlay was up, kneeling intently on the floor. His bed looked as though it had barely been slept in.
‘I’m building a world,’ he said, without looking up from the piles of Lego he had heaped on the rug in front of him—the Lego obscuring the Calpol stains that raising Findlay for the first four and a half years of his life had cost her so far.
‘We need to get you dressed,’ Kate said vaguely, over Flo’s body draped across her shoulder.
‘Okay,’ Findlay agreed, standing up in a manner that was efficient rather than obedient, and that already lured her into confiding in him things about the world and the people in it that she wasn’t convinced he was ready to hear yet.
‘Should I wear my Spiderman suit?’
‘Oh, Finn…’
‘I should,’ he insisted.
‘But you’ve worn that nearly every day this week—it’s filthy.’
He thought about this for a fraction of a second. ‘But I should,’ he said again. Then, ‘Is it okay?’
Kate felt as though Findlay was prompting her, and when she finally nodded at him, he smiled back at her as if they’d just consented to take a huge leap forward in cross-cultural understanding.
Unnerved, Kate made a show of efficiency, opening curtains, making the bed—all with one hand. ‘But not the mask—they won’t let you wear the mask to nursery.’
Findlay watched approvingly as she helped him into the Spiderman suit while listening to what was going on downstairs. Had Robert, who didn’t mind the economy bacon sandwiches as much as he pretended, finished making his way through the rashers leaking white residue, layered between Blue Ribbon margarine and two slices of Mighty White? She hadn’t heard him come back upstairs and he hadn’t brought her a cup of tea yet—a ritual observed every morning since the first time they woke up together.
Downstairs, Margery, who had been outraged when she’d discovered that Robert was expected to help himself to a bowl of cereal—when there was any—at breakfast, before a full day’s work, was overwhelmed with pride that now she was here she could send him out into the world with meat in his stomach as well as a greasy chin and cuffs. That was one wrong in this marriage she’d been determined to set to rights.
She trailed after him now to the front door, in a grey tracksuit she’d been given by American Airlines on one of her Florida trips when her luggage got lost, and waved frantically as he cycled off down the street—until he turned the corner, out of sight. Then she sighed involuntarily, stared threateningly at the innocent commuters passing No. 22 on their way to the station, and shut the front door quickly before the Jamaican next door saw her standing there and decided to rape her. According to the free paper they got at home, The New Shopper, these things happened in BROAD DAYLIGHT in London, and nobody lifted a finger to help.
When she turned round, Kate was standing at the foot of the stairs, watching her.
‘He’s gone,’ Margery said, fairly certain from the look on Kate’s face that this was the first—or one of the first times, anyway—that Robert had left the house in the morning without saying goodbye. Had the Hunter marriage entered a new phase, and would she—as she’d always hoped—live long enough to witness her son rising like a phoenix from the ashes of a passion gone cold?
Kate hid her face in her daughter’s back again, briefly shutting her eyes so that Margery couldn’t read in them the last two minutes spent at the bedroom window, watching Robert cycle off down Prendergast Road without so much as turning to look up at the house; without so much as even saying goodbye.
When she opened them again, Margery had disappeared into the kitchen.
‘You’re never wearing that to nursery,’ her voice exclaimed, outraged at the perversity of Findlay’s fancy dress when there was no occasion.
‘Mum said I could.’
‘You’ll get your eczema back if you wear that nylon suit in this heat.’
‘What’s nylon? I’m not hot anyway.’
‘You wear it day in, day out—it needs washing.’
This