If you learned it there’d be two, and we’d have children. How many more do you need? How many women do you love?
Adam sat down on the bed with his back to her. She poked him sharply in the side. How many women do you love?
Just you.
But you don’t love me enough to learn to speak my language? You wouldn’t do that for me?
It’s not a small thing.
Would you only do small things for me? And love me? What would you do for me?
Adam turned round. You said my language, he said. You said my language.
It is my language. I’ve got two of them.
I’m in love with the one that speaks English.
Cate lay down, pulled the quilt over her and turned away from him. Don’t tell me you love me in Mercian any more, she said.
He did say it to her again, two or three times, in the couple of days before the funeral. He said it to comfort her but it made both of them sick to hear it. Y tess ley had been his effort and his promise of a great labour, and meant love in itself to both of them and in the promise of what he’d do, and now it was only a sign of his still being there, like a lighthouse without rocks.
Don’t, she said, I told you. Tell me in English if you mean it.
The TV people did come to the funeral, they filmed Cate reading in Mercian from the Lay of Kenelm. Walking out of the chapel with his arm round Cate Adam lifted his eyes from his shoes sinking into the gravel to see the legs of the woman walking by herself in front of them. The legs in black tights were slender and moved in short, light steps. Above that was a short black coat and a black wide-brimmed hat. When they had arranged themselves at the graveside Adam was facing her, the same age as Cate but not a friend he’d ever met, and not a relative that he could think of, with her long North African face, black eyes and dark lips. He spoke to her at the buffet afterwards and was reminded how Cate’s dad’s sister had married an Ethiopian and gone to live in Addis Ababa and had a daughter before she died. The daughter was called Naomi.
Do you speak Mercian? said Adam.
I can count up to ten, said Naomi. My mum died when I was young.
Her eyes were fixed on him. He felt the blood surge through him and his skin prickled.
I’ve been trying to learn it, he said. But the only phrase I can remember is y tess ley.
She asked him what it meant.
It means I love you, he said.
She smiled and put her fingers over her mouth. He grinned and looked away. He was looking at Cate and he was grinning after her dad had just been put in a hole in the ground and buried in earth for ever.
He went over to her and she wasn’t speaking to him. They shook the hands of the guests together while they left. Naomi smiled at them both and neither of them smiled back. She said she was at university in Leicester and they should come over. They nodded and she left.
I see what you mean now about an incentive, said Cate.
What?
Don’t be a bigger prick than you are.
If you’re talking about Naomi, we were just talking.
I know, but seeing how you were talking it’s all become much clearer. It’s too much for you to learn it just for me, your time’s too precious, your mind’s too precious, but if you knew every time you went somewhere there’d be someone like Naomi to speak Mercian with, it’d be worth your while.
She doesn’t speak Mercian.
Jesus, it’s not the fucking point, is it?
Cate was cold and down for a week and for longer than that Adam would think about Leicester University and went into a bookshop to read a few pages of a book about Ethiopia. But he got a decent job in a print plant and was surprised that Cate didn’t show the missing of her father more. One time the guilt got to him and he took the book down again and left it on the table where she’d see it. But she only asked him how he was getting on, and he knew she knew he wasn’t getting on, he wanted her to know he hadn’t forgotten, and that was as far as it went.
Cate told him she was pregnant.
I found out just after the funeral, she said, only after seeing you with Naomi I decided not to tell you for a while.
God you talk to a stranger.
No you laugh with a stranger when my dad’s just died. Anyway you had the hots for her.
Ah but this is brilliant. A baby. With the job and everything. It’s too much.
Is it too much? Others have got more. The dog smells bad.
Do you want to move to the country?
Why? Cate frowned.
Maybe it’s better. I remember how you told me how the Mercian word for town and honeycomb was the same cause that was what the lights of the towns made them think of when they looked down at them at night from the hills before they lived there. And I thought maybe you were wrong and maybe they called them honeycombs because they found out that when you’d had too much of them they made you sick.
Neither of us have ever lived in the country. You’re strange, Adam, I never had you down as a cottage with roses round the door man.
Aye I know, said Adam. It is strange.
He didn’t understand what he’d been after, either. But a couple of months later he came home from work, went straight into the kitchen and heard Cate speaking Mercian in the front room. He listened for a couple of minutes. She hardly paused for breath, but it wasn’t a song, it wasn’t a poem, it was the old eloquence, inspired. He went quietly out into the hallway and looked round the door. She was sitting on the settee with her hands folded across her belly, looking out into the distance, talking. She’d bend her head forward and tuck her chin into her chest so that she was talking and looking down at her navel.
Adam went back into the kitchen and stood still for a while. Then he sat down on the kitchen floor. Cate came in and stopped sharply in the doorway when she saw him.
God, what are you doing? she said.
Sitting on the floor.
I didn’t hear you come in. I was talking to the baby.
Its ears haven’t even formed yet.
It’ll make them come faster.
What language?
I don’t even remember. English, I think.
It was Mercian. I heard you.
Are you spying on me? What difference does it make? Don’t you want our kids to speak Mercian?
You said you’d been speaking English.
What the fuck would I want to do that for? I can speak to you in English, can’t I?
But you can’t make yourself speak Mercian when you know I’m in the room.
Why should I when you never bothered to learn it, when you couldn’t be arsed cause the only person in the world daft enough to speak it is a nonentity, your worthless wife?
I’d be a hell of a lot keener to learn it if you didn’t go stum every time I’m around, if you weren’t so ashamed of it. Christ talk to the baby in any language you like, only not behind my back. I just want to listen, even if I don’t understand what you’re saying. I don’t want to understand. I just want to be there.
You can’t be. You know where the book is, go and learn it, in a couple of years you’ll be perfect, but it’s not going to take any less, is it? How else can we …
What?
I don’t know.
How