the bed and kiss her, stayed standing instead.
‘She used to do that when I was a kid,’ he said, suddenly remembering.
Still propped on her elbow, which was sinking deeper and deeper into the pillow, Kate waited for him to carry on, but he didn’t. Unexpectedly, at 6.10 on a Thursday morning, the clouds had parted and Robert had given her a picture of a small child standing outside a shut bedroom door on a cold landing in the early hours of the morning, waiting for the woman on the other side to stop screaming; hating himself for not having the courage to open the door and walk in and comfort her when he knew he was all she had.
Kate and him stared at each other, momentarily stunned. Robert never talked about his childhood. He never talked about it with Margery or other people who had been there, so why talk about it with people who hadn’t? For him, it was time that had passed—and anyway, now he was healthily involved in the direct manufacture of his own children’s childhoods.
He shrugged uncomfortably at his own transgression, then said cheerfully, ‘So—what’s on for today?’
‘Today’s the day.’
‘For what?’
‘Robert—you can’t have forgotten.’
‘What?’
‘St Anthony’s. Today we find out…whether Finn’s got a place at St Anthony’s.’ That’s what the row had been about last night—now she remembered and, pulling the pillow out suddenly from under her elbow, threw it at him.
Robert ducked and the pillow went crashing into the already broken blind, breaking another three slats.
‘God, I hate those fucking blinds.’
Kate was trying to decide whether he was genuinely angry or not when she heard Flo, on the other side of the bedroom wall, starting to cry.
‘Princess is up,’ Robert said.
Ignoring this, Kate hauled herself automatically out of bed and said, ‘Well, let’s hope we don’t have to sell the house or anything.’
‘Why would we need to sell the house?’
‘It’s the only viable option,’ she carried on.
‘Viable option for what?’
‘Getting Finn into St Anthony’s. This end of Prendergast Road isn’t guaranteed catchment area.’
‘But isn’t that why you’ve been dragging him to bloody church every Sunday since before he could talk, and why you—’
Kate started to speak over him. ‘Beulah Hill’s guaranteed. Jessica’s been telling me about this place that’s been on the market for over a month now—and it’s a hundred and twenty thousand cheaper than what we’d get for this so we’d actually make some money,’ she said, realising as she looked at Robert’s face that this was the first time either of them had openly acknowledged that they needed to. ‘What d’you think?’ she said after a while, over Flo’s increasingly loud and peculiar bleating sounds. Even after six months, the bleating still sounded odd to Kate.
She smiled absently at him as he walked over, put his hands on her shoulders, eventually kissed her and said quietly, ‘I think that’s fucking nuts.’
‘But, Robert—’
‘If we need to talk about our finances—’
‘Our finances?’ Kate started to laugh.
The laughter was ambiguous. Now he was anxious and over the past six months, which had been difficult—although the word ‘difficult’ didn’t do justice to their marriage so far, so he’d avoided using the word—anxiety had become the third person in their marriage, making it an unpredictable ménage à trois.
There was a scratching at the door and Margery’s voice, ‘Flo’s awake—do you want me to feed her?’
‘It’s fine,’ Kate said, ‘I’m just coming.’
How long had Margery been there? It was difficult to tell; she’d perfected the art of creeping soundlessly around the house. Sometimes, when Kate came back from work, she thought the house was empty until Margery appeared at random, framed in a doorway Kate was about to walk through, claiming to have been asleep.
‘She’s really working herself up.’
‘Mum—it’s fine,’ Robert cut in.
Margery paused. ‘Morning, love.’
‘Morning, Mum,’ Robert called back, watching Kate pull on some black pants that had gone threadbare at the back.
‘D’you want tea—I’ve just made some?’
‘We’re fine.’
‘There’s plenty in the pot.’
‘It’s okay—we’re coming down now.’
When Kate appeared five minutes later, Margery was still hovering on the landing.
‘I didn’t like to leave her in case she was choking or something.’ Margery paused, as if the fatal choking had already taken place, adding, ‘She’s only six months.’
Kate disappeared into Flo’s room and, as she lifted her daughter—now bleating hysterically—out of her cot, Margery, who was still in the doorway, said again, ‘She’s only six months.’
Kate stared at the rhinoceros on Flo’s safari curtains, pulled over the Gina Forde-recommended blackout blinds, rhythmically stroking her daughter’s back, aware of every bump in her unformed animal spine, and didn’t say anything.
She didn’t know how long she’d been standing like that, but when she at last turned round, Margery was gone and the house was full of the smell of economy bacon frying in the water it had been injected with at the processing plant.
Kate crossed the landing, walking through the toxic bacon fumes with Flo towards Findlay’s room. Findlay was up, kneeling intently on the floor. His bed looked as though it had barely been slept in.
‘I’m building a world,’ he said, without looking up from the piles of Lego he had heaped on the rug in front of him—the Lego obscuring the Calpol stains that raising Findlay for the first four and a half years of his life had cost her so far.
‘We need to get you dressed,’ Kate said vaguely, over Flo’s body draped across her shoulder.
‘Okay,’ Findlay agreed, standing up in a manner that was efficient rather than obedient, and that already lured her into confiding in him things about the world and the people in it that she wasn’t convinced he was ready to hear yet.
‘Should I wear my Spiderman suit?’
‘Oh, Finn…’
‘I should,’ he insisted.
‘But you’ve worn that nearly every day this week—it’s filthy.’
