This wasn’t a conversation that I wished to conduct at this moment for I had been thinking about changes. ‘But the twins were three, and it’s only part time… at the moment. No, not at all.’
‘Of course not,’ said Roger. ‘He made that mistake with Rose.’
I slept badly. The cold had crept into me, and I searched my mind for sources of warmth. I pictured myself as a void filled with echoes that made no sense. I did not mind very much how others judged me, but I needed to make some connection, somewhere, somehow.
Beside me, Nathan was breathing deeply, a little laboriously, the price of a rich meal and good wine. I stroked his cheek, a gossamer touch. He stirred and moved away. My hand fell back to my side.
Around four thirty, I slipped out of bed, went down to the kitchen and made myself a mug of mint tea. When I returned upstairs, I poked my head round the door of the twins’ bedroom. Felix was flat on his back, making puppyish, whiffling noises. Lucas was curled into a ball and I could just make out the outline of his spine. This was sweet, innocent sleep, such as I could never have.
Cradling the tea, I took myself up a further flight of stairs. The twins now occupied the original spare room, and its replacement, next door to Eve’s bedroom, was much smaller with sloping eaves. There was scarcely room in it for one person, which suited me as I didn’t wish to encourage guests.
The bed was slotted under the eave, with a painting of white roses in a pewter vase above it. Nathan was especially fond of it but, like the Cornish picture, I couldn’t see much in it. I didn’t come up here very often, but since we had had the new bathroom, Nathan had used the cupboard to store his clothes. A pile of his ironed shirts lay folded on the bed. I lifted them and stowed them on a shelf. As I did so, my fingers encountered a hard object amid the pile. It was a notebook, black and bound in hardboard, held shut by an elastic band now slack with use and age. I slid it off, and opened the book. Inside ruled pages were filled with the distinctive slope of Nathan’s left-handed writing. Notes for the office? Financial plans? Nathan was careful with his money. Private things?
Of course they were private. I got into the bed, and cradled the mug and felt its heat trickle into my cold joints. I drank the tea before I picked up the notebook and began to read it. It was some sort of diary, and began shortly after we had married.
‘5 January. Minty angry…’ The scope for my anger was as great as anyone’s, and its sources just as forgettable. What had I been angry about? True, the list of things had been accumulating. Married things. Nathan’s habit of leaving cufflinks in his dirty shirts. Small change dropped from his trousers, which clogged the Hoover. His inability to tell me what he wanted for Christmas or birthdays.
I leafed back through time. ‘17 March: Felix and Lucas arrived. They are beautiful. Minty took it well…’
Did I? I hated pregnancy. I hated labour. ‘Look at your babies,’ cooed the midwife, and invited me to peer through a plastic incubator at two tiny frogs. I remember being surprised at the precision of my response. I had expected to tip into a maelstrom of passionate feeling, only to experience nothing, absolutely nothing, like that, only the sharp pain of my Caesarean scar.
‘20 July: Twins thriving. Exhausted. What can I do to make Minty’s life easier?’
If Nathan had asked me, I would have told him. He could have helped me search for the tenderness, the physical desire for my babies that eluded me. That would have made my life easier.
I leafed forward. ‘6 June [two years ago]: I would give almost anything to be walking the path above Priac, smelling the salt and feeling the wind in my face. A healing solitude.’
Then I read. ‘21 February [of this year]: Disappointment with oneself is a fact of life. It is something one must try to come to terms with.’
I looked up from the notebook and through the window where the darkness was just lifting over the city. How was I going to deal with this discovery? I was conscious of irritation at the revelation of Nathan’s hidden inner life, and the forensic manner in which he was analysing us. I was aware that I should consider how to square this circle, and puzzle away at Nathan’s mindset in order to understand him, but I only possessed so much energy.
‘30 October [this year]: I read somewhere that most people have a secret grief, and that seems correct.’
And yet I minded about Nathan’s secret grief. Its existence, its confirmation in writing, pointed to a wound, and a failure. The words spelt out the ridiculousness of our ambition to be happy, and its defeat.
Here was the deal. I had seen Nathan and taken him. He had talked a lot about ‘new beginnings’, ‘freedom’, ‘climbing out of a box’, and that had made it all very exciting. Rose had wept and grieved and gone away, leaving me to run her house and produce more children for Nathan. Before I knew it, that had constituted the main business between Nathan and me. Bringing up the children and running the house – or was it the other way round? Nathan had made a terrible miscalculation. He may have climbed out of his box, but he had jumped straight into another.
I made to shut the notebook. As I did so, I noticed the document tucked into the pouch at the back and pulled it out. It was a professional drawing of a small garden – ten metres by fifteen, according to the plan – and a compass indicated that it was south-west facing. An arrow pointed to a line of trees that bisected the space: ‘pleached olive’. Other arrows pointed to plants: humulus, ficus, verbena… Typed at the bottom of the diagram were the words: ‘Height. Route. Rest.’ At the top was scribbled: ‘This is it. What do you think? Why don’t you talk it over with Minty?’
The handwriting was Rose’s.
Downstairs, Nathan was sleeping on his back. He murmured as I got back into the bed and took him in my arms. ‘Wake up, Nathan.’
After a second or two, his protests died, and I helped myself to my husband’s body, as angry with him as I had ever been, as angry as he was riddled with secret grief.
3
At nine fifteen precisely, hair brushing cleanly across my cheeks and smelling of almond shampoo, I walked up Shepherds Bush Road, past two pubs – hitherto unreconstructed and raucous – that had catered for the Irish and were now undergoing rebirth as gastropubs, then past the recently repaved green. ‘The Bush is the new Gate,’ read the graffito on a brick wall.
Once upon a time the old United Kingdom Provincial Insurance building had been what its name suggested. These days, United Kingdom Provincial Insurance operated entirely from Bombay and the building was home to seven start-up enterprises. They shared a reception desk, coffee facilities and conversations, conducted on the stairwells, which centred chiefly on the inequities of the rent.
Some things are eternal but not, as I have discovered, the obvious candidates. The stained nylon carpets and the smell of plastic and paper in offices never change. Yet I had never been so glad to inhale a deep, plastic-filled breath as I was when I returned to work after three years at home with the twins. It notched up my pulse rate from lacklustre to viable. Nathan’s response to my exhilaration, I remember, had been a little sour. The office – he stabbed the air to emphasize the point – isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. For all the fuss he made, you might have concluded that I, not he, worked from eight until eight five days a week, rather than the three days on which I had compromised.
Paradox Pictures was one of the numerous small independent television production companies clustering in Shepherds Bush. ‘Dirt cheap rents and easy access to the Beeb and Channel 4,’ confided Barry, chief executive and executive producer, when he interviewed me over lunch at Balzac’s. (In the letter that accompanied my CV, I pointed out that we had both taken degrees at Leeds University, a sliver of research that had probably earned me the interview.) He cast an eye round the crowded restaurant. ‘I’d say most of the Beeb are here at the trough right now. I got the sack for being a naughty boy.’ His lived-in features slackened with nostalgia. ‘She was very beautiful. Anyway, Auntie and the then Mrs Helm took a dim view, and I had to take off to the States for a time where I made Spouse Exchange. When I came back there had been the Thatcherite decree that the BBC was to use independents. I met Lucy. So here we are.’ He held up both hands, palms towards me. ‘No longer a naughty boy.’