‘I did,’ she says. ‘It was lovely to get out and about.’
He peers at her curiously. ‘Are you OK?’ he asks.
‘Yes. I’m fine.’
‘I mean, with this? With us? With the move? Are you getting on OK?’
‘Yeah, I mean. It’s not … I don’t know. It’s not—’
He cuts in. ‘Are you regretting it? Coming out here with me?’
‘No,’ she says, forcefully. ‘No. I’m not regretting it.’
She sees his face soften with relief. ‘Good,’ he says.
‘I knew what I was signing up for,’ she says. ‘I knew everything. And it’s fine. Honestly. I just want you to concentrate on your job and not worry about me. Please.’
He exhales and smiles and pulls her towards him in an embrace laced with regret and guilt and fear, because, despite the words that have just passed between them, they both know, deep down, that this is not going to work; that what brought them together in London, with the romance of separate homes and separate friends and jobs that they both knew how to do without thinking too hard about them, is not here any more; that they rushed into this in a flurry of sex and summer and the romantic notion of the English countryside and manicured grounds and foreign princesses and now they are floundering.
Shaun’s phone chirrups on the counter behind him and he goes to look at it. He never ignores his phone because he doesn’t live with his children and Sophie entirely understands this. ‘It’sKerryanne,’ he says. ‘She wants me to come to her apartment. She says it’s urgent.’
‘Shall I come too?’
She sees indecision pass across his features. He should say no. But in the light of the conversation they’ve just had, he nods and says, ‘Sure. Of course.’
The sky is just growing dark as they crunch across the gravelled path towards the accommodation block. It’s the first cold evening of the autumn and Sophie shivers slightly in a thin cardigan and bare legs.
Kerryanne is waiting outside the door of her block, her arms folded across her chest. She looks relieved when she sees Shaun and Sophie approaching and says, ‘I’m so sorry to disturb you in your free time. I really am. But you need to see this.’
She leads them around to the front of the block, where the balconies overlook the woods beyond and where her own large terrace overhangs the spot where they stand, and she points across the flower beds. ‘I didn’t see it. It was Lexie. She just got back from Florida at lunchtime, she was vaping on the terrace and there it was. She hasn’t touched it. Thank goodness I’d already filled her in on all the shenanigans so she knew what it meant.’
Behind the flower beds is a small straggly area of lawn, then a wide gravelled pathway and beyond that a second gateway into the woodlands. But there, tucked away but apparently visible from the balconies overhead, is a piece of cardboard nailed to the bottom of a tree, with the words ‘Dig Here’ written on it in black marker pen and an arrow pointing to the soil underneath.
35
September 2018
Noah falls asleep as soon as Kim puts him to bed. He’d been tetchy all evening. Kim can’t quite remember what her two were like at this age. Her memory has recalibrated the detail. She knows that one of them used to have tantrums in the supermarket and she suspects it was Tallulah, but that suspicion has been subverted over the past fifteen months because Kim cannot remember anything bad about Tallulah. She cannot remember beyond Tallulah’s upturned face in her bedroom as she painted black liquid wings on to her eyes before the Christmas party at college: the pale luminescence of her skin, the perfect upward slope of her nose, the pink of her rosebud lips, the fragile, barely noticeable beauty that had always felt like a secret just between the two of them. She can’t square that calm, glorious girl withthe two-year-old girl screaming in supermarkets. They cannot be the same person, therefore she tends to imagine that these things hadn’t really happened or that it had been Ryan, in fact, or maybe somebody else’s child. Not hers. Not Tallulah.
But she has no such ghostly veils across her opinion of her grandson. She loves him, but oh, she finds him so very, very difficult to live with. She had not wanted a third child. She had been offered the opportunity; there’d been a man a year or so after she and Jim split up, a man who said he’d give her a baby and she’d been in her early thirties and Ryan had been about to leave primary school and it had felt, for a moment, like the right time to do it. But she hadn’t been able to face the prospect of the sleepless nights and the worry and the adding of another eighteen years on to the journey of motherhood. She’d imagined herself the age she is now, just forty, with two grown-up children and she’d liked the idea of it. So she’d said no to the nice man who’d offered her a baby and they’d gone the distance as lovers, and then he’d left when he realised he wanted more and that was that. She had specifically chosen not to have a third child and now she has one and he is dark and angry and she is tired all the time. All the time.
But for now he is asleep and they have crossed the bridge of another day together and her love for him is as complete as the love she has for the two children she gave birth to, especially now, when he is close but not awake, when she has twelve hours to be herself.
She opens a bottle of wine and pours herself a small glass. The cold kiss of it as it hits the bottom of her stomach is immediate and pleasurable. She takes another sip and picks up her phone,about to spend some time mindlessly scrolling through her Facebook feed. But just as her thumb hits the blue icon on her screen, it is obliterated by an incoming phone call.
Dom McCoy.
She clears her throat and presses answer.
‘Kim. It’s me. Dom. We’ve had a development. At Maypole House. Are you able to come over?’
Kim’s breath catches. ‘Erm. I just put the baby down. I’m alone. I don’t have anyone to ask to sit with him. Can you just tell me?’
There’s a beat of silence; then he says, ‘OK, Kim, give me five. Ten minutes. I’ll come over. Just stay put.’
The ten minutes turn to eighteen minutes before Dom’s shadow finally passes across the panes of glass in Kim’s front door. She opens the door before he’s rung the bell and leads him into the living room. While she’s been waiting, she’s tipped her wine back into the bottle and put it in the fridge. She’s plumped her cushions and put away some of Noah’s toys. She’s tied her hair back and put some socks on so that Dom won’t see her unpolished toenails.
‘How are you?’ Dom begins, taking the blue denim armchair he always takes when he comes to see Kim with updates.