He Said/She Said(33)

Kit folded up the map, getting the creases in all the right places where other people would wrestle with it. ‘I think you’ve already done more than enough for Beth,’ he said, tucking the map away into our suitcase. I stiffened but there was no side to his voice, no meaningful glance; it was just a turn of phrase that I had freighted with my own paranoia. ‘Anyway, let’s not keep going on about it,’ he said, zipping up the bag. ‘It’s not like she’s gonna know. Carol Kent told me she’d already left Cornwall. We’ll never even see her again.’





Chapter 17





KIT

18 March 2015

This cruise ship is built for old people. Handrails line every wall and half the chairs in the bar are those high-backed, high-sided chairs you see in retirement homes. I’ve found one that faces the room but hides my face so I can see but not be seen. I’d say at least half the passengers are pensioners, and – I didn’t realise this when I booked – there are no children on the trip at all. I’m so used to public spaces being overrun with kids that the slow pace and muted hubbub here is unnerving. Or perhaps I’m just in the mood to be unnerved.

A cold beer is taking the edge off my earlier shock, although the woman I mistook for Beth is everywhere, snagging my vision whenever she goes to the bar. Worse, she keeps smiling at me and even though my rational mind knows it’s not Beth, each time she does, there’s a twentieth of a second where some primitive defence instinct turns my hands into fists.

‘How’s Louise’s pregnancy going?’ It’s the first time Richard has mentioned it.

‘Laura,’ I say. ‘She’s good. Due in two months.’

Unable to resist, I show him the picture on my phone of the twenty-week scan of our twins, two curved full-moon skulls, the vertebrae like centipede feet. I still can’t believe that the monochrome fuzz is my children.

‘Double trouble,’ says Richard after a cursory glance. ‘You took your time about it, though. I got Nadia pregnant on honeymoon.’ The gaucheness gets my hackles up. No man who has ever had to masturbate into a cup in a clinic and who’s had to watch his wife being injected and drugged, scraped and invaded, would ever say that. No man who has ever known his wife pushing him away because it’s the wrong day, or watched her grimace her way through sex on the right one, would ever say that.

‘One hit, bang,’ he continues blithely. ‘Almost too early if I’m honest, but it was the same with the second one, too. Up the duff, first month we tried.’ I get it. Richard thinks he did it, that he can take the credit for the fluke of biology. It’s a bit late, now that we’re stuck together in a floating metal cell for four days, but it occurs to me I don’t like Richard very much.

‘I tell you what,’ he says in what’s clearly supposed to be a man-to-man voice. ‘Get your oats while she’s knocked up, because you won’t be getting a shag for months now. You think the logistics of doing it with a seven-months-pregnant woman are tricky, that’s nothing compared to having a baby conked out in bed between you.’

‘Two babies,’ I correct him automatically.

‘Well, that’s it, then,’ says Richard. ‘Your love life’s over. Just wait until they’re eighteen and then get into wife-swapping.’

I laugh too loudly to cover my grief. The truth is, I think I’ve already lost Laura in that way. The past few years haven’t been like the beginning, obviously; we aren’t immune to the law of diminishing returns. But right up until we started trying for children, I still wanted Laura and she still wanted me for the sake of it. The ghosts of our younger selves could always be coaxed out to play. That delight was underscored by a little more surprise every time, that despite all these years and all this time our bodies still fit together like they were made for it.

The first few months of trying for a baby are romantic; no, more than that, they’re exciting: sex on the appointed day and, if that doesn’t work, on the appointed hour. But sex by appointment soon became sex on demand, and once we went medical, something between us died. It was resurrected only briefly; there was a flurry of genuine desire I think around the beginning of the second trimester, but the mechanics were so challenging – that hurts, don’t touch me there, maybe if I put a pillow under my hips, not like that, Jesus, Kit you’re squashing them – that it didn’t really count.

I can’t tell Richard any of this. I can’t tell anyone. I use my thumb to wipe the beads of condensation from my glass.

‘It’s all downhill from now on,’ says Richard, setting his glass down on a frilly Princess Celeste beermat. ‘Nothing puts you under pressure like kids.’ At this, my anger turns to amusement, because after all Laura and I have been through, what harm can these longed-for, tried-for, paid-for and already beloved babies do? ‘It’ll be weird, having nippers after all this time with just the two of you,’ he says. ‘You’ve been together since you were kids, pretty much, haven’t you?’

‘Twenty-one,’ I say.

Richard gives the corner of a smirk I’ve seen on countless other faces. I often meet people who almost pity me for settling down so early. Not just because I didn’t get to play the field, but they wonder what I had of myself to contribute at such a young age. They don’t understand that that’s the whole point. I had the rest of my life to offer Laura. I look at these couples, who only met each other after their thirtieth birthdays, and wonder how deep a relationship like that can be. There is so much unshared life to intrude upon the marriage; so much opposing history. The defining event of my life is the defining event of Laura’s. I don’t know how couples who haven’t been through something like that stick together. And if I’ve lost the carefree girl I first knew, then she’s lost the boy with the brilliant future, and made him her present nonetheless. I know I’m not what she signed up for; after the meteor smash of the Lizard I was knocked off course and I never became who I was supposed to.