of us have ever lived in the country. You’re strange, Adam, I never had you down as a cottage with roses round the door man.
Aye I know, said Adam. It is strange.
He didn’t understand what he’d been after, either. But a couple of months later he came home from work, went straight into the kitchen and heard Cate speaking Mercian in the front room. He listened for a couple of minutes. She hardly paused for breath, but it wasn’t a song, it wasn’t a poem, it was the old eloquence, inspired. He went quietly out into the hallway and looked round the door. She was sitting on the settee with her hands folded across her belly, looking out into the distance, talking. She’d bend her head forward and tuck her chin into her chest so that she was talking and looking down at her navel.
Adam went back into the kitchen and stood still for a while. Then he sat down on the kitchen floor. Cate came in and stopped sharply in the doorway when she saw him.
God, what are you doing? she said.
Sitting on the floor.
I didn’t hear you come in. I was talking to the baby.
Its ears haven’t even formed yet.
It’ll make them come faster.
What language?
I don’t even remember. English, I think.
It was Mercian. I heard you.
Are you spying on me? What difference does it make? Don’t you want our kids to speak Mercian?
You said you’d been speaking English.
What the fuck would I want to do that for? I can speak to you in English, can’t I?
But you can’t make yourself speak Mercian when you know I’m in the room.
Why should I when you never bothered to learn it, when you couldn’t be arsed cause the only person in the world daft enough to speak it is a nonentity, your worthless wife?
I’d be a hell of a lot keener to learn it if you didn’t go stum every time I’m around, if you weren’t so ashamed of it. Christ talk to the baby in any language you like, only not behind my back. I just want to listen, even if I don’t understand what you’re saying. I don’t want to understand. I just want to be there.
You can’t be. You know where the book is, go and learn it, in a couple of years you’ll be perfect, but it’s not going to take any less, is it? How else can we …
What?
I don’t know.
How else can we what?
I don’t know.
Who is we?
You and me.
You meant you and the baby.
I did not.
You did. The officer is your friend. Let’s move to the country.
The country.
Then I’d be outnumbered two to one instead of two to a million and still outnumbered.
Cate turned away and shook her head. I don’t understand, she said.
At last! said Adam. He grinned. Good.
Off Cape Hatteras the sea arched up to her, a gymnast too perfect to be had but wanting to be wanted. Only a detail of scale stopped the Queen of Ukraine sticking out a tonguetip to tickle the muscled water, make the sea plunge concave with a gasp. The ghost of the taste of salt filled the back of her mouth and she ordered Captain First Rank Gubenko to lower a champagne bucket over the side. A steward brought her the seawater on a tray and ladled it into a tumbler of Lviv crystal. It was grey and swirled with plankton and the dandruff of the deep. She took a mouthfull, swilled it round and spat it over the side, sending the glass after it.
Crystalware overboard, she said, and wiped her mouth with the back of her gloved forearm, making a roadkill-crimson smear on the white satin. She walked towards the prow of the SS Lesya Ukrainka, pride of the Black Sea Shipping Company. Twenty-five knots in all weathers, your majesty, Gubenko said each night at dinner, morsing dots of red caviar onto a buttery trencher. Give them money and they could never find the place between vulgarity and frugality. In all Ukraine only the Queen knew where that was.
Forced to choose, of course, vulgarity every time.
She stood alone in the bows among the anchor chains, back to the bridge, and the officer of the watch eye-gorging on her. An optic nerve with fingertips and a mouth, tease the curve of her spine and swallow the fruit of it with a snap and a gulp. Cherry on a stalk. The west wind had a coldness. She drew her shawl, an embroidered tribute from the women of Lutsk, gold fleurs-de-lys merging into trezubi on white lace, more closely around her. The sun wasn’t long up. Through clouds like torn strips of sodden cardboard the redundancy of a lit barsign on the empty streets of dawn, or a gleam of noonday hustle from the other side of the ocean, while here, off the cape, night had dismantled America, which could, it seemed possible in the diluting blue, with nothing but a hazy code of buoys and lighthouses to remind it of the order of things when it went to bed, be obliged to build it all again.
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