Greenwich Park(27)

I look at her, try to gauge whether or not she is being serious about going to see Serena. The thought fills me with an irrational sense of dread.

‘I’m so comfy,’ Rachel says, yawning loudly again. ‘I might have a little nap here. You don’t mind, do you?’

Without opening her eyes, she gropes around for the raspberry punnet, takes another handful and tips them into her mouth.

It’s only later, when I notice the wedding photograph Rachel brought down, that I realise. I keep that picture on my bedside table. What was she doing in our bedroom?





32 WEEKS





SERENA





If it wasn’t for the rain, I’d probably have gone home. There didn’t seem much point in staying. But it started again about five thirty, lashing down, hammering at the skylight over my desk. I hadn’t remembered my umbrella.

I like being in my studio when it rains: I put the heater on under my desk, listen to the hum of it while I boil the kettle for tea. The studio is in a tiny mews off the high street. Hardly anyone comes down here. It is deliciously quiet. When it rains, that’s all you hear, like a rush of pebbles, a gorgeous white noise. The cobbles in the mews shine when it’s wet, like polished wood. I photographed the rain on the cobbles once, the stones rising out of puddles like tiny islands. It looked like an alien landscape, or the back of a huge crocodile.

At the back of the studio are the darkroom on one side and my desk on the other. Next to my desk is a corkboard of photographs, art postcards, things I’ve ripped out of newspapers and magazines. Places I’d like to go, one day. A window looks out to the little paved courtyard, where there is just enough space outside for a tiny table and chairs, a few plants in some old milk pails I got from the antiques place in the covered market.

I grow herbs on the windowsill in white ceramic pots: parsley, rosemary, fresh mint. I use the mint leaves for tea, which I make in my bright green mugs, with spoonfuls of dark brown sugar. I bought the mugs from the woman opposite, who rents the pottery studio. I feel a bit sorry for her. I don’t think she sells much.

I sip my tea. The sugar makes my baby dart inside me, like a fish. After university, Rory and I went backpacking in Morocco and drank fresh mint tea with sugar while we were camping out in the Atlas Mountains. Cold nights under scratchy wool blankets. The air was so clear, you could almost drink it. In the nearest town, the houses were painted blue to match the huge desert sky.

There’s a photograph of us there on my corkboard. We are on the ridge of a mountain, him in his grey alpaca jumper, grinning widely, his hair messy, sun-bleached, the snowy peaks reflected in his mirrored sunglasses. He has his arm around me, my hair is blowing over my face and I’m squinting in the sunlight. We are happy. It radiates from the surface of the picture, like heat.

We’d argued last night. He is still so upset about the interview. He can’t stop talking about it. The journalist had seemed nice, he said, genuinely interested in the development, in the company. In wanting to hear his side of the story. I couldn’t believe he’d been so naive. What did you think would happen? I asked him. You know what people are saying about the development. Why didn’t you just keep your head down? Why did you say yes? I knew the real answer even before I typed the name of the journalist into a search engine, brought up her smiling professional picture. But of course, it wasn’t just about the interview. Not really. He thinks he’s losing his grip.

He’d stormed upstairs. I knew he was going to have a cigarette on our balcony. He likes to think I don’t know about the cigarettes. Or the coke. He likes to think I don’t know a lot of things. I’d picked up the magazine, thrown it in the recycling. On the cover, his face looked like somebody I didn’t recognise.

Later that night, when he was asleep, I’d finally committed it to words. The question I typed stared back at me accusingly from the bright, white search box on the screen.

How do I know if my husband is having an affair?

I stared at them for a while, and after a few minutes my eyes strained under the white light of the computer. Then, I took a swig of Chablis and hit return.

Of course, there were thousands of results: articles, quizzes, tick-box guides. How modern, I thought, to turn to a search engine for answers. How many millions of women, I wondered, have sat, as I do now, in a beautiful home, wine glass in hand or a baby in their belly or both, tears pricking at their eyes as they typed these very same words?

I selected an article at random – one of the checklist-style ones. More Chablis. Then I clicked on it. But I heard Rory’s voice. He’d woken, noticed I was up. I deleted the search history, again. Snapped the laptop down. It is one of those paper-light ones: it had closed noiselessly, like an eyelid.

I watch the rain outside, how it washes the green leaves of the plants in my courtyard, how it pools on my chair, my metal table. I’ll finish my tea and stay another half-hour, wait and see if the storm dies down. But when I reach the last dregs, it seems to be getting worse, the sky darkening into an angry bruise. I flick the kettle on again, decide to get on with some developing. That’s when I hear the knock.

The first thing I notice about her are her feet. She is wearing lime-green flip-flops; her feet are bare, other than a chipped purple manicure. Her legs are bare, too, even though it’s freezing outside. The rest of her body is shrouded in a huge winter coat, the enormous furlined hood pulled down over her eyes, dripping onto the cobbles like the mane of a soggy lion.