Without really noticing it, her friendships started to fade away. People got fed up of being turned down all the time or discovering that where Molly went, Rupert would inevitably be. Many of them felt envious of what they saw as the romance of her relationship. Only one or two of her closest friends questioned this all-encompassing intimacy, but when this questioning became too strident, Rupert was adept at putting doubts in her mind about their motivations.
‘I think they are just jealous of our happiness, darling,’ he would say. ‘They’d give anything to have what we have.’
They had been married for about a year and a half when Rupert suggested that she should stop taking the pill. Although in theory Molly was keen to have children, she found herself curiously reluctant to start the process.
‘Couldn’t we just have a couple more years enjoying being together?’ she asked. ‘Besides which, it wouldn’t be a good time to get pregnant at the moment, with the school getting ready for an Ofsted inspection.’
Rupert’s answer was to take the pills from the sponge bag that she kept by the bed and to pop them down the sink, pushing through the foil and firing each one down the plug hole as if they were tiny missiles, then pulling her down on the bed to perform his own ‘Ofsted inspection’ on her. He was so charmingly eager, so attentive to her every need from the first moment that the subject came up, that Molly quickly came to see her reluctance as simply a lack of confidence in her own readiness, in her ability to be a good mother. He set himself assiduously to the task of making a baby, reading about optimum times and recommended diets, researching a theory that if the man ate a high proportion of smoked foods he was more likely to produce a son.
‘I’d like a son,’ he said, as if the matter was decided. ‘Girls are too complicated. Just look at the convoluted way your mind works … In any case you are the Queen of the House. You don’t want any rivals for Daddy’s affection now, do you?’ and he set about preparing salads with smoked bacon and smoked salmon and looking into the benefits of water births.
She knew exactly when she conceived Max. Always a light sleeper, she had been woken that morning by the sound of clamorous birds and lay for a moment watching the muslin curtain at a half-opened window swaying in the breeze. Rupert had his back to her and she smoothed her hands along his spine and then moved over him, touching him gently so that he was still half asleep as she straddled him and guided him into her. Afterwards, she lay very still, feeling the air on her body, careful with herself as the very beginnings of her baby attached himself firmly inside her. Three weeks later the test confirmed what she already knew. She held the knowledge to herself for a couple of days, wanting, just for a while, for it to be something for only the two of them. Rupert, when he was told the news with candlelight and due ceremony, was delighted, and set about big plans for a nursery with an underwater theme, complete with circling sharks and lampshades shaped like jellyfish.
Three months after Molly fell pregnant, her mother developed terminal breast cancer. For once Molly ignored the fact that Rupert didn’t like her going out without him and went to her parents’ house as much as she could. Molly and her mother had never been demonstrative with each other and her mother’s illness didn’t change the reserve between them, but it did provoke in Molly memories of her own childhood she thought she had forgotten. She remembered how her mother used to leave secret messages around the house for Molly to find when she returned from school; a tiny scarf knitted for her toy monkey, a jigsaw puzzle stealthily completed, her pyjamas spread over the warm radiator. There was a doll called Beth, her favourite, who always went missing and which she would find eventually somewhere in the house or garden, mid adventure. Once she had been discovered halfway up a tree; another time, Beth had been in the fridge, her plastic fingers dipped into a pot of strawberry yogurt. The postman even delivered the doll one day with a stamp attached to its chest. Moving the doll around and giving it its own secret narrative was her mother’s way of telling her the stories that she seldom spoke out loud.
Max was born in the last weeks of Molly’s mother’s life and on one strength-sapping summer afternoon, after Molly had brushed her mother’s hair and pinned it up on her head in an attempt to keep her cool, she had placed Max in her mother’s arms. He lay there, looking just like Molly’s old doll embarked on another adventure.
‘Thank you,’ her mother said, looking down at Max, one of her pale fingers clutched in his firm red fist.
‘What for?’ asked Molly.
‘For this. For him. And for you.’ Her mother answered and turned a peaceful face to her daughter. The lines around her mouth and her eyes had smoothed out as if she had begun some process of reversal. Molly could see that Max’s birth had loosened her mother’s hold on life; had provided the slipway that would launch her beyond them all.
Molly’s father found he couldn’t settle after his wife’s death. After wandering round and round the empty family home, opening and closing doors, looking in cupboards, pacing through the night over the pale blue carpet they had chosen together only a year ago, he thought vaguely about the waste of both carpet and of life and bought himself a one-way ticket to Australia. For the first month or so he stayed with Molly’s sister who had moved there ten years before, but then he moved on. Never settling in any one place for long, he rang Molly from time to time from towns she had never heard of. It was clear to her he would keep moving for the rest of his life.
‘We are all the family we need,’ Rupert said when he caught her weeping for her mother or worrying about where her father was. ‘It’s us three against the world.’ Instead of being stifled by these words, she took comfort from his strength and certainty. And if sometimes, he retreated into dark, unreachable moods, or occasionally seemed to become suddenly and inexplicably angry about imagined slights or conversations that took a turn that displeased him, these times were more than made up for by the other things that he did during the first few years of Max’s life. He had boundless energy and enthusiasm; waking them when it was still dark one morning and insisting that they put their coats on over their pyjamas and walk to a nearby hill to watch the sun come up. He once jumped over a fence that had been put up to keep the viewing public at bay during lambing season and put his hands out at just the right moment to catch a mucus-covered lamb as it shot into the world. He scrambled up trees showering conkers and apples and blossom depending on the season. He crowed at all of Max’s milestones, as if no child in the world had ever before grown a tooth or hauled himself along a hallway and he still kept his attentive watch over Molly’s body, stroking her soft curves, noting the old, familiar marks and watching for new ones.
Chapter Nine
When she woke up on the morning of Oliver’s party, Carrie was sure she wasn’t going to go. There was something about her neighbour that irritated her. He seemed far too sure of himself and she didn’t want to give him the impression that she was in the least bit interested in his well-used charms.
It was raining on her way to work and her bike went through the puddles that had gathered in the uneven surface of the road, splashing her legs and sending muddy sprays up the back of her camel coat. Even quite light showers of rain seemed to saturate Cambridge quickly, streaking the fronts of buildings with ugly damp marks and causing the ancient, inefficient drains to overflow along the sides