Nina’s loneliness descended on her again. It was like a gag, tearing the soft tissues of her mouth, stifling her.
‘Dean’s Row, miss,’ the driver called over his shoulder.
Inside her house, the silence felt thick enough to touch. Nina poured herself a last drink and took it upstairs to the drawing room. She stood at the window, without turning on the lights behind her. The floodlights that illuminated the west front were doused at midnight, but Nina felt the eternal presence of the saints and archangels in their niches more closely than if they had been visible.
She rolled her tumbler against the side of her face, letting the ice cool her cheek.
To her surprise, she realized that the pressure of her solitude had eased a little, as if the statues provided the company she needed. Or perhaps it was the party that had done it.
It was a good evening, and she had met interesting people. They were nothing like her London friends, these Grafton couples, but she was glad that she had met them.
‘And so, good night,’ Nina said dryly to the saints and archangels.
Vicky stooped down, lowering herself from the knees because it was weeks since she had been able to bend from the waist. She held on to the banisters with one hand and with the other gathered up the trail of Lego blocks that Alice had left scattered along the landing. The effort made her breathless and she had to wait for a few seconds before making the journey into the bedroom to put the blocks away.
The girls’ room was messy, heaped with discarded clothes and a jumble of toys, and Vicky wearily pushed her hair back from her face as she surveyed it. She had no strength left to do anything more than sleepwalk through these last days, and she turned away and closed the door, feeling guilty as she did so. She was not particularly houseproud, but she did not like the threads of her domestic organization to unravel completely because she was too exhausted to hold them firm.
Across the landing was the room prepared for the baby, and on her slow way downstairs again she stopped for a moment on the threshold. The cot had done duty for Mary and Alice and the white paint was chipped, but there were new curtains and a new cover on the daybed and the drawers of the chest were layered with tiny clothes. The Moses basket with its folded white blankets lay ready for Gordon to bring to the hospital so they could carry the baby home in it together.
Vicky thought about how in a few days’ time she would be here again with her new child. She would sit in this room in the silence of the night to feed it, watching the play of muscles in its face as it blindly sucked, feeling the steady flow of her milk. Her breasts ached now, and there was a pain low in her back that made her lean awkwardly backwards to try to ease it.
Downstairs, Alice was sitting on the sofa watching afternoon television. She had her bed blanket with her, and her thumb and one corner of the blanket were poked into her mouth. Alice was at nursery school only in the mornings. Vicky plodded across to her and the child made room without taking her eyes off the screen.
‘Tired Mummy,’ Alice remarked automatically.
‘That’s right.’
Vicky lowered herself, letting out a gasp of breath, and Alice snuggled up against her. Vicky put an arm around her shoulders and they settled down to watch together.
The child’s bare arm was round and smooth, still with a babyish ring in the flesh around her wrist. There was plasticine under the sticky fingernails and a faint smell of damp hay emanated from her hair.
‘That man is silly,’ Alice said, pointing to the television screen.
‘Is he?’
Vicky was thinking vaguely of the business of her children growing, the invisible multiplication of their busy cells, and the branching of veins and laying down of bone to support more growth, upwards and away from Gordon and herself, so that one day their present adult functions would become Mary and Alice’s own. She imagined under her daughter’s fine hair and the armour of her skull the eye of her brain restlessly moving, photographing the infinitesimal details of her world and storing them, creating a miraculous index that would enable her to occupy the enlarging shell of her body with ease and confidence.
The small shape resting against her seemed charged with an almost unbearable perfection.
Vicky had always felt an intense physical pleasure in her children’s bodies, a pleasure that was almost but not quite erotic, from the moment after Mary’s birth when the midwife had hoisted the baby into her arms and her womb had contracted with an amazed spasm of love and tenderness. She remembered how when Mary was tiny, six years ago, Gordon used to carry her into their bed in the early mornings and they would lean over her naked folded limbs and serrated face to feast on this embodiment and extension of their love.
Six years ago, not now: Vicky smiled at the contrast. Gordon’s practice was much busier these days and his hours were longer, and the mornings were a scramble to dispatch him and the girls to their separate destinations. There was too little time to spare, but she knew that all parents of young children suffered from that. There would be time again, she was sure of it. She shifted her position, her thoughts sliding away in another direction, to the pain in her back.
Then she said suddenly, ‘Alice, will you run into the kitchen and fetch me a towel from the big cupboard?’
Alice ran, unquestioning for once, because of the sharp note in her mother’s voice. Vicky’s waters had broken.
Gordon drove home from the office. He had telephoned Vicky’s mother and she was already on her way to collect the girls, and Marcelle Wickham would pick Mary up from school and stay at home with the two of them until their grandmother arrived. He concentrated on the road and the swirl of the traffic, frowning, trying to channel his attention down a single avenue directed towards reaching the house and conveying Vicky to hospital. He had been called out of a meeting and fragments of the discussion and the points he had been intending to make collided in his head.
There was a long queue of cars snaking up to the round-about at the city bypass, but he calculated rapidly that it would be quicker to wait in the line than to turn back and take a less direct route. As the car inched forward his thoughts ran on the hours ahead in the labour room, and then jumped backwards to the births of Mary and Alice. He could remember the contractions reflected in Vicky’s face, the way her mouth pinched in at the corners as she struggled to ride them, her cries and wails, and her final triumph and the emergence of the wet, black heads, like a conjuring trick. Each time, he recalled, he had been amazed by the appearance of a baby at the climax of it. It was as if the months of preparations and anticipation and ante-natal classes had been academic for him, or theoretical, with no particular end in view. And then there had been the extraordinary emergence of a third and completely other individual from what had once been only himself and Vicky. Now it was about to happen yet again, and there would be a new person around whom they would rearrange the formulae of their lives. Gordon wished that it might be a boy. He had begun to feel, lately, that he might be overpowered by the collusion of women in his house.
The car had almost reached the roundabout. In the middle of a November afternoon the fading light drew a greenish halo around the buildings and bridges, but some of the autumn trees were still bright. The burning colours made him think of the new woman, the one who had come to Andrew’s party, and the splashes of coloured light roving over her hair. Gordon circled the roundabout and saw the dual carriageway ahead of him. He accelerated hard towards home.
Janice had arrived to wait with Vicky while Marcelle had taken Alice with her on the school run. The two women were sitting