“Your dad knew hundreds of people before I met him.”
“I know. But he sounds really nice. He might have stories.”
“Well then, you can go there,” she says. “I’m sure he’d be thrilled to meet Paddy’s lovely girl and share his stories with you. And you might get a free dinner. Or a job.”
This last sentence is clipped and raw and there follows a small, tense silence.
“I might,” says Ash. Then she puts the card back on the sideboard with a slightly haughty snap of her wrist. “I might.”
Ash works at the fashion exchange boutique in the village. People bring in their old clothes; she and the shop’s owner, Marcelline, steam them up in the back room to get the smell off them; then they hang them on expensive hangers next to displays of silk flowers and snazzy cabinetry. If the item sells, the customer gets 50 percent; the shop gets the rest.
It was meant to be temporary, this job, just a stopgap for the summer after coming back to live at home when London didn’t work out for her, while she sorted herself out. But then it had been September, then October, then her dad had died and now it is January, nearly February, and she is still working in the fashion exchange boutique and still sleepingin her childhood bedroom, and she will be twenty-six soon and did not expect to still be here.
But as much as she knows she shouldn’t be here, she doesn’t want to move out. Not now. She wants to be in this beautiful house where she grew up, which still smells of her father.
She has regressed. She is going backward. She is falling.
FOURFOUR YEARS EARLIER
I kiss my wife on the lips. Her breath smells of last night’s toothpaste mixed with sleep. But I kiss her every morning. It’s what I do. It’s part of the thing, the illusion, the rhythms that have formed the percussion of the last four years of our lives. If I did not kiss her on her lips in the morning, then she would wonder… and I don’t want her to wonder. If she starts to wonder at the little things, then she will eventually start to wonder at the bigger things. So, I manage the little things forensically to make sure that everything is the same. Until it isn’t.
“Morning,” she says, curling into me, an arm reaching across my chest, her face nestling into the space between my shoulder and chin.
“Morning, my love.” I kiss her hair. It smells of her laundry, and also slightly of her scalpy essence, which I don’t love, but it’s part of the deal. I snuggle into her, and we lie like that for a moment, as we do every morning. And then I peel myself away from her and stretch and yawn and climb off the bed, find my gown where it is slung across the armchair in the window, and slide my arms into it. The sky through the window is a rich blue, more like July than February. It sends a shiver of hopefulness through me. My time here in this stultifying, unsatisfying place is drawing to an end. I can feel it sliding away, like a dropped silk scarf running between my fingers.
I turn and smile at my wife. “I love you,” I say.
“I love you too,” she replies.
Then I say, “Oh, by the way, I’m speaking to George today.”
George is my fictional financial advisor.
“He wants us to put a little more into our pensions. Just a thousand or two. He’s found a little wriggle room.”
Fictional pensions too. For the fictional future that we will be spending together.
“Oh,” says my wife. “That’s good. But I don’t really have the cash to hand right now. Not after paying for your knee surgery.”
I feel my jaw clench.
“I really think we should do it, though. Darling.” The word almost hurts to utter. “Think about our future. You don’t want to be doing this forever. You work so hard. We both work so hard. We need something soft to fall back onto, and the sooner the better. Every penny we put into that pension now, the closer we get to what we both want.”
I hear her sigh, and I know it’s a sigh of acquiescence and I feel my jaw unlock. The picture of the future I have painted for us is so exquisite that I almost wish it could be real. We will sell this house, this stupid house she bought when she left her stupid husband (nothing makes me happier than talking about how stupid her ex-husband is), and we will buy a house in the Algarve and she will paint and I will potter, and her children will come to stay and all of this, this dreadful day-after-day toil and drudgery, it will be over and we will be happy, forever.
“I’ll see what I can do,” she says.
“Thank you, darling,” I say, and this time the word doesn’t hurt because this time I mean it. She is my darling. My darling wife who would do anything for me. Absolutely anything.
FIVEMARCH
Two days after Ash’s twenty-sixth birthday, a parcel arrives. Ash sees it on the front step as she arrives home from work. It’s not an Amazon parcel, it’s in a smart box with a handwritten label, and at first she assumes it’s for her, a late gift. But she looks closer and sees that it’s addressed to her mother, so she scoops it up and brings it into the kitchen.
“Mum,” she calls out. “There’s a parcel.”
“I know,” Nina replies from her office at the top of the landing. “I asked the guy to leave it. I was in a Zoom.”
“Looks interesting. Can I open it?”