His mouth is hot and liquid. His lips feel swollen and thin-skinned; his beard growth is long enough to be sleek and not stubble-rough against her mouth and her wet cheek. She thinks of the many parties at Sam and Rachel’s where she has stayed dumb while Kieran has spoken out eloquently on some subject; and now that same tongue of his is shyly tentative against hers, and hers is bolder. It’s marvellously simplifying that there’s no time for this to become anything more than a kiss. They have only this moment before they have to follow the others and go back inside the light.
Vince calls again. His voice sounds a long way off.
— We’re listening to the owl, Kieran shouts back.
It makes a space between them. They draw slightly apart.
— Look what you’ve done, Janie says.
She couldn’t have said this to his face, in the light.
— What have I done?
She finds his hand, presses it against her breasts, where they have leaked soaked circles of milk on to her dress. — I’m still feeding. I’m very full. Ready for the baby when I get home. You made it come.
— I didn’t know that happened, he says, not embarrassed, in a voice of calm scientific interest.
When he says that, Janie intuits a warning; faintly, like a note sounding far off in the hills. She has an instant’s intimation of how she could, in a different life from the one she has had so far, come to need this terribly and not be able to get it: this calm impersonal interest of his, turned on her.
But for the time being it is Kieran who is desperate.
Rachel thinks that she’s going to lie awake, absorbed in the momentousness of her life today. She’s thinking that she’s not going to go through with this thing with Kieran, not now, not this time. But that doesn’t spoil the euphoria that comes from knowing that he wants her, knowing that he has pursued her down here. It makes her feel as if there were a glorious abundant tide of secret possibility flowing around the world, enough for everyone. She feels that she will be able now to dip into this tide and take her share any time she chooses to.
Sam is lying flat, snoring with his mouth open, because he’s been drinking and smoking. She shoves him hard to tell him to turn over, and then when she cuddles up against his broad hot back she falls asleep almost at once.
Janie has brought Lulu into bed to feed her; Vince is reading a computer magazine. Her treachery in relation to him doesn’t seem important yet. (Vaguely, she thinks he owes her this.) If she imagines Rachel finding out what she’s just done with Kieran, after everything they talked about all afternoon, she feels a sickish kind of unease. She doesn’t for one moment, though, believe that she ought to have deflected Kieran’s kiss, which opened this thrilling new space in the night. A real adventure with a man mustn’t be wasted. Everything is running away so fast; your deepest responsibility is to snatch at all the living you can.
And, anyway, she only kissed him.
Kieran asked if he could call her and she said she didn’t know yet, but as the baby sucks she feels herself hollowed out from her old life, empty and hungry, filled up with an excited wanting as painful and bloating as wind.
Rachel has made up the sofa bed with sheets and a duvet for Kieran. She kept worriedly sniffing it and saying that if it smelled of vomit then he could have their bed and she and Sam would be quite happy down here. He hadn’t been able to smell anything then but now he can. He lies awake wondering how families manage in this awful perpetual twilight of false sleep: the landing lights left on, the rustlings and the snatches of childish sleep talk, the bare feet padding downstairs, the murmured parental admonishments, the baby’s loud cry at some point, Sam’s snoring, the toilet light left on after a child’s visit so that the fan keeps whirring until he goes upstairs himself to switch it off. He hears one of them climb into bed with Sam and Rachel. He hears the bed creak and protest as the adults move over.
He remembers glancing into Sam and Rachel’s bedroom on his way to the toilet this afternoon when he arrived. The king-size bed, its grubby Habitat striped sheets and heaped-up duvet littered with clothes and toys and Rachel’s hairbrush and face cream, looked to him then like the outward embodiment of something he wanted, something he had missed out on. In the thin hours before dawn, the truth seems bleaker. He isn’t a good sleeper at the best of times. The duvet is too hot and then when he pushes it off he is too cold. He finds himself longing for the perfect silence of his own room, which he thought was what he wanted to escape from, coming down here.
MOTHER’S SON
SOMEONE TOLD CHRISTINE that Alan was going to get married again: the new girl apparently was half his age. Christine didn’t think she cared. She hardly ever spoke to Alan these days; there was no need for them to consult together over arrangements for their son, now that Thomas was grown up and made his own arrangements. In fact, after the person told her the news, at a dinner party, Christine forgot it almost at once in the noisy laughter and conversation, and only remembered it again the following afternoon, when she was sitting at home, writing.
She was making notes for a lecture on women novelists and modernism; books by Rhys and Woolf and Bowen were piled all around her, some of them open face down on the table, some of them bristling with torn bits of paper as bookmarks. When she suddenly remembered the news about Alan she lifted her mind from its entanglement in the Paris and Ireland of the twenties and stared around in surprise at her real room in London: tall and white and spacious, with thriving house plants and, filling the wall at one end, a floor-length arched window. The rooms of the flat, where Christine lived alone, were all small — bedroom, bathroom, kitchen — apart from this big one, the centre-piece. Here she worked at a long cherrywood table; when she entertained she pushed all her books and papers to one end and laid places at the other. It was March. Outside the window a bank of dark slate-grey cloud had been piled up by the wind against a lakelike area of silvery-lemon sky, smooth and translucent; the alterations in the light flowed fast, like changing expressions, across the stone housefronts opposite.
Christine’s flat was on the second floor; the house was one in a row of houses all with the same phenomenal window and cold north light, built as artists’ studios in the 1890s. Some had been renovated and cost the earth, like hers; others were still dilapidated, bohemian, mysterious, the windows draped with rags of patchwork and lace curtains or satin bedspreads. Inside the room, the weather and the light were always intimately present; there were long white curtains at the window but she didn’t close them very often. Instead of shutting the drama out, they suggested too eloquently immense presences on the other side. It had been difficult to choose paintings for the walls; in the end Christine had hung a couple of prints of Mondrian drawings. Nothing else had seemed quite still enough.
The doorbell rang, she padded in her stocking feet to the intercom.
— Mum? It’s Thomas.
She made them both coffee, hasty — measuring out the grounds, taking down the mugs — in her pleasure at his visit, her eagerness to get back to where her son, her only child, was sprawled in the low-slung white armchair in front of the window. She put milk and sugar on the tray, she was glad she had bought expensive chocolate biscuits. She found an ashtray: no one else was allowed to smoke in her flat. Thomas always for some reason chose that armchair, and then leaned his head back against the headrest so that the ridiculous length of him (he was six foot four) stretched out horizontally, almost as if he were lying flat; he crossed his ankles and squinted frowningly at his shoes.