moved over him, touching him gently so that he was still half asleep as she straddled him and guided him into her. Afterwards, she lay very still, feeling the air on her body, careful with herself as the very beginnings of her baby attached himself firmly inside her. Three weeks later the test confirmed what she already knew. She held the knowledge to herself for a couple of days, wanting, just for a while, for it to be something for only the two of them. Rupert, when he was told the news with candlelight and due ceremony, was delighted, and set about big plans for a nursery with an underwater theme, complete with circling sharks and lampshades shaped like jellyfish.
Three months after Molly fell pregnant, her mother developed terminal breast cancer. For once Molly ignored the fact that Rupert didn’t like her going out without him and went to her parents’ house as much as she could. Molly and her mother had never been demonstrative with each other and her mother’s illness didn’t change the reserve between them, but it did provoke in Molly memories of her own childhood she thought she had forgotten. She remembered how her mother used to leave secret messages around the house for Molly to find when she returned from school; a tiny scarf knitted for her toy monkey, a jigsaw puzzle stealthily completed, her pyjamas spread over the warm radiator. There was a doll called Beth, her favourite, who always went missing and which she would find eventually somewhere in the house or garden, mid adventure. Once she had been discovered halfway up a tree; another time, Beth had been in the fridge, her plastic fingers dipped into a pot of strawberry yogurt. The postman even delivered the doll one day with a stamp attached to its chest. Moving the doll around and giving it its own secret narrative was her mother’s way of telling her the stories that she seldom spoke out loud.
Max was born in the last weeks of Molly’s mother’s life and on one strength-sapping summer afternoon, after Molly had brushed her mother’s hair and pinned it up on her head in an attempt to keep her cool, she had placed Max in her mother’s arms. He lay there, looking just like Molly’s old doll embarked on another adventure.
‘Thank you,’ her mother said, looking down at Max, one of her pale fingers clutched in his firm red fist.
‘What for?’ asked Molly.
‘For this. For him. And for you.’ Her mother answered and turned a peaceful face to her daughter. The lines around her mouth and her eyes had smoothed out as if she had begun some process of reversal. Molly could see that Max’s birth had loosened her mother’s hold on life; had provided the slipway that would launch her beyond them all.
Molly’s father found he couldn’t settle after his wife’s death. After wandering round and round the empty family home, opening and closing doors, looking in cupboards, pacing through the night over the pale blue carpet they had chosen together only a year ago, he thought vaguely about the waste of both carpet and of life and bought himself a one-way ticket to Australia. For the first month or so he stayed with Molly’s sister who had moved there ten years before, but then he moved on. Never settling in any one place for long, he rang Molly from time to time from towns she had never heard of. It was clear to her he would keep moving for the rest of his life.
‘We are all the family we need,’ Rupert said when he caught her weeping for her mother or worrying about where her father was. ‘It’s us three against the world.’ Instead of being stifled by these words, she took comfort from his strength and certainty. And if sometimes, he retreated into dark, unreachable moods, or occasionally seemed to become suddenly and inexplicably angry about imagined slights or conversations that took a turn that displeased him, these times were more than made up for by the other things that he did during the first few years of Max’s life. He had boundless energy and enthusiasm; waking them when it was still dark one morning and insisting that they put their coats on over their pyjamas and walk to a nearby hill to watch the sun come up. He once jumped over a fence that had been put up to keep the viewing public at bay during lambing season and put his hands out at just the right moment to catch a mucus-covered lamb as it shot into the world. He scrambled up trees showering conkers and apples and blossom depending on the season. He crowed at all of Max’s milestones, as if no child in the world had ever before grown a tooth or hauled himself along a hallway and he still kept his attentive watch over Molly’s body, stroking her soft curves, noting the old, familiar marks and watching for new ones.
Chapter Nine
When she woke up on the morning of Oliver’s party, Carrie was sure she wasn’t going to go. There was something about her neighbour that irritated her. He seemed far too sure of himself and she didn’t want to give him the impression that she was in the least bit interested in his well-used charms.
It was raining on her way to work and her bike went through the puddles that had gathered in the uneven surface of the road, splashing her legs and sending muddy sprays up the back of her camel coat. Even quite light showers of rain seemed to saturate Cambridge quickly, streaking the fronts of buildings with ugly damp marks and causing the ancient, inefficient drains to overflow along the sides of the roads. On days like this and in this part of town it seemed like the sweet stretches of green that edged the parchment-coloured colleges were a long way away.
By the time she arrived at Trove, both her coat and the shirt underneath were soaked through. In the little toilet off the kitchen she tried to dry her hair with a hand towel and surveyed the wreck of her make-up in the mottled mirror. She rubbed at her face with some cucumber and lemon cleansing cream, which was from a range she stocked in the shop. Made from natural ingredients, the moisturiser, cleanser and body lotion in their beautiful green glass bottles were produced on a farm in Yorkshire.
Carrie wriggled out of her wet shirt and dried herself as best she could with the minuscule towel. She found a powder blue cardigan with mother of pearl buttons at the back of a rack of clothes and put it on, grateful for the warmth of the soft cashmere. She wasn’t sure where it had come from, but she would wear it and then wash it and sell it. There had to be some perks to having her own shop. Her jeans would just have to drip dry as the day went on. She clipped on some earrings the same colour as her sweater, shook her still-damp hair around her face and felt that she was at last ready for the day. She had a lot of work to do to make the most of the last couple of shopping days before Christmas, and she had to do it alone because Jen had taken the day off to do her own shopping.
She had just taken delivery of a batch of felt brooches, which were ideal as last-minute Christmas gifts. In beautiful dark reds and greens they were shaped like cherries and apples and embroidered round the edges in gold blanket stitch. She decided to use them as the inspiration for a whole display based on food and after putting on a CD of carols she set about covering the table in the centre of the shop with some red gingham material she had bought at an end of line sale. She was so absorbed in her task and so caught up in the purity of the singing, she didn’t hear the doorbell go and jumped when Oliver Gladhill materialised in front of her.
‘Morning!’ he said cheerily, eyeing her still-wet jeans. ‘I see you got caught in the rain.’
Carrie was conscious that her jeans were clinging rather closer to her curves than she liked.
‘Party. Tonight. I need napkins and thought you might do me a discount?’ said Oliver. He had no need of napkins, and in fact, they were something of an alien concept to Oliver, but he had spotted his neighbour’s well-clad bottom through the shop window when he was passing and thought he would use this excuse to check that she was coming to his party. Although clearly grumpy, the woman had something about her, mainly legs that went on forever. Carrie showed him the paper napkins, thinking that perhaps lilac pansies wouldn’t really be his thing, but he took two packets and placed them on the counter.
‘Are you still coming tonight?’
Carrie, who was never good at lying, thought that developing a sudden migraine
