Abby sat back in her seat with her hands resting across her tummy. She knew she wouldn’t feel a kick for another month, knew that there was still a long way to go. But the baby was blessed. After everything that had happened, after all the heartache and the loss, the baby had to survive. It was only fair. It kept the world in balance.
She spoke to the baby sometimes. Only just moving her lips, a half-whisper. She told it about its father. She told it about Lee. She spoke about David. She shivered with excitement as they pulled into Penn Station. She said a little prayer as the train clunked and hissed to a stop. God, please look after the baby. After that, I really don’t care what else happens, just please let the baby survive. Amen.
*
Marcus was drunk. He had stopped at Bergdorf Goodman on the way home from the Course office on 52nd Street. He wanted to buy Abby a dress. They had a fundraising dinner at Trinity Church on Wall Street that evening. Abby was on the train home from one of her university sessions. He had walked through the dimly lit corridors of the mazelike department store until he came to a large room full of beautiful dresses. There was some sort of event being held. A group of women in their sixties stood around drinking champagne. Their hair was immaculately coiffed, their nails dripped red varnish, diamonds hung from earlobes and wattled necks and wide lapels.
Marcus began to wander around the room looking at the dresses. He held one up to the light, trying to make out whether it was black or navy blue. One of the older women came up behind him.
‘You buying something for the girlfriend, sweetie?’
‘It’s for my wife, actually.’
‘Oh, don’t you have the cutest little English accent? So it’s for your wife. It’s for his wife, Carmella.’ She took the dress from him and held it up against her, looking critically in the mirror. ‘Oh, I don’t think she’ll like this. Now what does she look like? About my build?’ She was tiny, her wasp waist held in with a large black belt. Marcus smiled.
‘Oh, no. She’s very tall. And she’s pregnant.’
‘Wonderful! How far along is she?’
‘Coming up for four months.’
‘Well, we must have a drink to celebrate. Come on, take a glass of champagne. Carmella, Nicole, get the girl to bring this young man a glass of champagne.’
Marcus took the glass, feeling rather dazed.
‘Now she’ll want something slimming. Is she showing properly yet? Does she have a bump?’
‘No, not a proper bump yet.’
Marcus drank almost an entire bottle of champagne with the ladies, who he discovered were members of an exclusive Bergdorf Goodman loyalty club. He left carrying a beautiful gold dress, another bottle of champagne slipped into the black-and-white carrier bag.
He walked along the concrete and steel canyon of Fifth Avenue until he reached the great green breath of the park. The sky above was a deep blue. The sun touched the uppermost branches of the trees. He browsed the bookstalls that had colonised the railings along the south-east corner of the park. The first leaves were appearing on the trees above him. He bought a copy of Fitzgerald’s short stories and walked across the busy street. He made his way into the Frick Gallery, flashing his membership pass at the guard on the door, who recognised him and smiled.
He had taken out membership of the Frick on his first day in New York. He walked through the quiet atrium where a fountain babbled soothingly. The gallery would close in an hour and the tourists had already left, heading back for cocktail hour at their hotels. Marcus strode through the rooms that held the major collections, barely looking at the Italian and Dutch masters, which he knew by heart now. He made his way up the narrow winding stairway at the end of the gallery to the second floor where the collection grew more haphazard, less easily negotiated by the portly tourists, less amenable to holiday snapshots. The rooms here were high and dusty, full of Louis XIV furniture and Limoges porcelain.
Marcus wandered through the silent, airless rooms until he came to a gallery overlooking the lily pond with its sparkling fountain. The dusk had a quality to it that he could taste at the back of his throat, something nostalgic and poignant. He knew it was partly that he was drunk. He sat down in a green wing-back chair. The trick was to manoeuvre the chair so that the security guards wouldn’t be able to see him when they did their rounds. Not that they seemed too concerned when they did. He and Abby were increasingly treating these upper rooms as their own.
They chose times when there were few visitors: just after opening time on weekday mornings, or in the evenings when the tourists had gone home. They settled themselves into the high, comfortable chairs and pretended that it was their home. It was an elaborate fantasy, and a thrilling one. Abby would speak about the children downstairs with the nanny, Marcus would bring a copy of the Wall Street Journal with him in order to make worldly-sounding comments about the day’s financial news. They would spend hours moving around the gallery’s labyrinth of still rooms, constructing slight variations in their imaginary lives: in some, Marcus was an oil baron; in others, he had made his fortune in pork bellies. Sometimes Abby was the great heiress and Marcus a devious adventurer.
That evening, he drew out the bottle of champagne from the Bergdorf Goodman bag and removed the cork very slowly to muffle the pop. He sat back and opened the book of short stories, his feet drawn up beneath him. He sipped at the champagne as he read, the small bubbles exploding upon his tongue. The yeasty aftertaste always made him think of money. He was reading ‘Babylon Revisited’, and when he came to the passage where the hero’s wife dies, he was overcome by a sudden heart-clutching sadness. He put the book down on his lap and concentrated on drinking, staring out with cool, dry eyes into the atrium. When the bottle was almost finished, he put it back in the carrier bag and made his way downstairs. He nodded at the security guard as he left the building and walked slowly up 70th Street to the apartment, smoking one of the cigarettes that he kept hidden in the inside pocket of his coat.
When he got inside, he hung the dress in a cupboard, made himself a gin-and-tonic and took a bath, listening for Abby as he lay back in a nest of foam. He could hear his heartbeat in the whisper of bursting bubbles. He missed being able to smoke in the bath. He knew he was drinking too much, and let some of the gin-and-tonic dribble from his mouth and into the water. Stretching one arm along the cold porcelain and resting his head on it, he fell asleep, his half-snores sending little puffs of foam into the air with each out-breath. When he awoke, the water was tepid, the bubbles gone. He heard the clanking of the lift shaft and then, a few moments later, the clink of Abby’s keys in the lock. She dropped her bag in the hallway and sighed. He closed his eyes and muttered a prayer. God, look after Abby and the baby. And when it comes, let it bring light into our lives. I pray for Mouse, Lord. I pray. . But then Abby appeared in the doorway and stood staring down at him. Marcus, shivering in the lukewarm water, felt very vulnerable. He drained the last of the watery gin-and-tonic, folded his hands over his shrivelled cock and closed his eyes.
*
David Nightingale was dreaming about Lee. In his dream, he awoke from a deep sleep and slipped out of bed. He heard the sound of a piano playing downstairs, but couldn’t be sure that this was what had woken him. Sally slept on. In his dream he knew that his wife was taking sleeping pills, perhaps also antidepressants. Something was not right with her, although he wouldn’t allow his conscious mind to acknowledge this. He made his way downstairs in pale blue pyjamas and padded into the drawing room. The standard lamp was on in the corner, casting shadows across the room. Lee was sitting at the piano, playing the ‘Promenade’ from Pictures at an Exhibition. She swayed with the music, her willowy figure stretching upwards and quivering as the song reached its conclusion. When she finished, she paused for a moment, and there was total silence. Then, with a deep intake of breath, she began again.