After the End(96)

“I look at these children and I—” I swallow. “I see Dylan.”

Blair’s eyes soften, but when she speaks again, she’s firm. “Then you’re not looking hard enough.”





forty-four





Pip


   2016


The sky is the cloudless kind of blue that looks like a summer’s day, until you step outside and see your breath misting before you. The washing line flutters with tiny onesies, softened by a wash, and pegged out to profit from a rare dry day. I wedge my basket against my hip, awkward against my vast bump, and with my free hand unclip each garment and drop it inside. My baby will bring the spring with her, and we will spend the summer months lying on the grass in the sunshine.

As I work, an aeroplane passes overhead and I wave, still the eight-year-old child who would lie in her parents’ garden watching planes, wishing for adventures. I didn’t fly until I was seventeen, but I knew the name of every plane leaving Birmingham airport, and how many staff would be on board. When I was fourteen my father arranged for me to visit the airport. I was treated like royalty, allowed to press the button to start the baggage belt, sit in the cockpit of a Boeing 747, and demonstrate the safety jacket and emergency exits to rows of imaginary passengers. My parents have the photograph on their mantelpiece. When I joined British Airways, eight years later, Dad sent it to the weekly paper, who ran a cheesy piece headlined Local girl’s career takes off.

I reach the end of the line and take my full washing basket inside. What will I do, once the baby is born? I stopped working long-haul when we had Dylan, but I missed it, and it’s taken years to get my career back to where it was. Maybe I could manage part-time long-haul if Max weren’t away so much, but . . .

“I’ll still be there for you,” he said, as he packed the last few things into his car. “Now, and when the baby comes. Just like before.” A box of vinyl leaned drunkenly against the passenger window, wedged on top of a bag of clothes.

“I know.” Only of course it wouldn’t be like before. Max wasn’t going to rub my feet after a long day at work, or lay his head by my bump at night to sing tuneless lullabies to our unborn child. He wouldn’t be there at three in the morning, with a baby who won’t sleep.

“We don’t have to do this.” Max paused by the open car door. “It’s not too late.”

It would be so easy to tell him to unpack, to tell Blair he doesn’t love her, to move back in and wait for the baby to be born and then . . . what? Be unhappy? Look at each other and think of what might have been? What could still be?

When people talk about riding out the ups and downs of marriage, they mean the usual stresses of life. Redundancies and money worries, health scares and recovery. My relationship with Max was played out in the national papers. In court. The nuances of our body language were captured by paparazzi and discussed across the kitchen tables of houses in which we never set foot. These are not normal circumstances. We are not the same people we were when Dylan was alive.

“It is.” We kissed, then, a slow, lingering kiss I felt in every part of my body.

A sad kiss, a goodbye kiss, is quite a different kind of kiss. Just as new lovers, too nervous still to say the words, thread their embraces with silent I love yous, so a goodbye kiss hides words beneath its surface. I’m so sorry, ours said, so sorry it happened this way. And more than that: I still love you, I will always love you.

My parents don’t understand it.

“But if you still love each other . . .” Mum looked for support from my father, whose discomfort was clear.

“It’s their decision, Karen.”

“They’re having a baby.”

“I’m right here,” I reminded them. “And well aware we’re having a baby, as is Max. But that isn’t a reason to stay together.” Mum’s pursed lips suggested otherwise.

Any shred of doubt she might have had that our separation was permanent was destroyed when I told her we’d filed for divorce.

“But that’s so . . . so final.”

“That’s sort of the idea, Mum.” We needed the closure. Both needed it, although Max more than me, I suspected. He remained wracked with guilt over cheating on me, prepared to finish things with Blair and make a go of our marriage. But our marriage was a ruin; his relationship with Blair a clean plot, foundations laid, ready for a new start. I owed him that new start.

Inside, I put the washing basket on the table, and hear the drop of letters on the mat. I am so large, now, that I can’t bend to pick up the post, but have to spread my legs wide and crouch, one hand pushed against the door for balance. Two utility bills, a letter from my solicitor, and a postcard from Johannesburg.

It isn’t the same without you! says the card, on the back of a picture of the Palazzo Montecasino. It’s been taken from the end of the garden, looking across the pool to the restaurant terrace. A hand-drawn arrow points to one of the tables—to our table.

I put the card on the fridge, where it joins the cards from Barbados, St. Lucia, Shanghai, Boston, Vegas, Seattle, and more. My virtual round-the-world trip, courtesy of Lars. Sometimes it’s easier to talk to someone you hardly know. Maybe I will call him, sometime. After the baby’s born.

Upstairs I put away the clean onesies in the chest of drawers on the landing. She—we haven’t yet found a name on which we both agree—will be next to my bed for the first few months, and this delay gives me justification for not yet having created a nursery for her. We have four rooms upstairs. The master suite I still think of as “ours,” despite having slept alone there now for almost three months; the guest room; Max’s study—now empty of books and computer; and Dylan’s room, now my reading room. I wander into all of them, now, and imagine the cot in each one, a little girl bouncing on the mattress, impatient to get up. Will I see that? Will this baby inside me grow to Dylan’s age? Beyond? Of course she will, I tell myself sternly, but still I can’t bring myself to fetch the cot from the loft, to paint a room in cheerful colours. Small steps, I think.