After the End(105)

Lars didn’t only bring dinner. He brought the tablecloth and place mats, crockery and cutlery. He brought flowers and a vase to put them in, and a candle that sat in the centre of my table, on a little silver stand.

I stood in the doorway to the kitchen, suddenly shy, watching Lars put the finishing touches to the table, and chatting to Grace in her bouncy chair. As if he could feel me watching, he turned round, and for a second we just looked at each other. Something shifted in the air, and suddenly I really did feel as though I was on a date.

“You look lovely.”

I blushed. “I do have plates of my own, you know.”

“Ah, but this way I can whisk them away at the end of the evening, and we can pretend we’re in a restaurant, and someone else is doing the washing up for us.”

I laughed. “I suppose you’ll be expecting a ten percent tip for your trouble . . .”

“At least. I do need some wineglasses, though—I didn’t think they’d survive the shopping bag experience.”

“Here.” I crossed the room and took two glasses from the cupboard.

“I wasn’t sure if you’d be drinking.” Lars held up two bottles—one of wine, and one of something fizzy and nonalcoholic.

“One won’t hurt.”

We clinked glasses, and I tried to think who else I knew who would go to this much trouble to give me a lovely evening. I came up blank. “This is really, truly lovely,” I tell him. “Thank you.”

Lars had cooked. Chilli con carne, with paprika rice, and the lightest lemon sponge, served with a spoonful of vanilla ice cream.

“I didn’t make the ice cream, I’m afraid.”

“I’m impressed you made any of it—I feel I should email your cookery teacher with a testimonial.”

“I’ve signed up for the intermediate sessions,” Lars says, a slight blush to his cheeks.

Afterwards, we retired to the sitting room with our coffee. It was strange to see another man sitting where Max used to sit, and I felt a wave of sadness that life had not worked out the way either of us expected. But then, I suppose life rarely does.

We talked about Grace, and about travel—of course—but so much more besides. We talked books, and politics, and feminism, and although my eyelids were dropping I didn’t want the evening to end.

I woke, groggy and confused, to the sound of Grace crying. The lights were dimmed and I was lying on the sofa, still dressed. Pulled over me was the blanket from the back of the sofa, made from the yellow squares I’d started by Dylan’s bedside and finished in my reading room, three years later.

Where was Grace? Where was Lars?

I was seized by panic, tangling myself in the blanket as I got up, and tearing it off me, leaving it lying on the floor. I rushed to the kitchen, where a light shone around the slightly open door.

“Grace!”

Lars stood and handed me my daughter. He looked relieved, as well he might have done, given that I had literally left him holding the baby for—I checked my watch—three hours.

“I thought you could probably use the rest.”

“I’m so sorry, Lars.” I turned away so Grace could latch on, and checked my dress for modesty, wondering if I was the only woman to have ever breastfed on a first date. “You must think me so rude.”

“I think you’re a new mother, coping brilliantly. And I think I should leave the two of you in peace now.”

We didn’t kiss, not on that first date. But we did kiss on the second, a fortnight later, when Grace and I met Lars at the butterfly house, and it just . . . happened.

“You could stay,” I say now, as though I’m testing out the idea. Repeating his words, not giving an answer.

“Only if you want me to.”

My heart pitter-patters, because I do want him to, but—God, this is complicated—I have an eight-month-old baby, the skin on my stomach is stretched and silvered, and as for down there . . . I remember when Max and I had sex after Dylan was born—the tentative, sometimes painful forays back into a physical relationship. And that was a man who knew me before, who’d watched my body change into pregnancy and beyond. I move to sit on the floor next to Lars. He puts his arm around me, and I nestle into him. “I’m not young anymore,” I say hesitantly.

“Nor am I.”

“Having a baby has . . . my body is . . .” I stumble on, and eventually Lars twists to face me.

“You’re beautiful. I have thought you were beautiful since the first time we met, and if you only knew how hard I found it to walk away from you, that night in Johannesburg . . .”

He moves forward to kiss me, and I let myself melt into his body. He has seen me give birth, this man. He has watched me sleep, and breastfeed, and he has looked after my child while I have a bath, and handed her to me while I’ve been wrapped in a towel. He wants this. And I do, too.





forty-nine





Max


   2018


Glen sits on the floor and strokes his brush carefully along the baseboard. His tongue pokes from the corner of his mouth, the way Blair’s does when she puts on mascara in the morning. He’s spent six months with me, on what started as a week’s shadowing and ended up as a paid apprenticeship. That Jessica Miller sure knows how to work a favor.