Other People's Children

Chapter Thirteen

In the supermarket, Elizabeth bought things she thought Rufus would like – a selection of individual cereal boxes, finger biscuits covered in chocolate, raisins in a cardboard drum, doll-sized Dutch cheeses in a plastic net bag. She was tempted by all kinds of babyish things, too, strawberry-flavoured toothpaste and pasta shaped like dinosaurs, not because she didn’t realize that Rufus was too old for them, but because it was such pure pleasure to shop for food from such an entirely different perspective than her usual lone adult one. She spent a long time in front of jars of baby food, too, and neat piles of cotton-wool balls and baby wipes and disposable nappies, all packaged in pristine white plastic printed with nursery symbols in primary colours. It was like being in another dimension, standing there imagining needing such things on an ordinary daily basis, like being in another world. She picked up a pale-blue tin of baby-milk formula. ‘For babies up to four months,’ it said, and on the side, in darker blue letters, ‘Calcium and vitamins added.’

Her trolley looked satisfyingly full as she wheeled it towards the exit. She had never, in her whole life, bought so much in a single expedition, had never had need to buy bulk packs of lavatory paper or more than six apples, or two items at once from the delicatessen. Certainly the fact that Rufus was coming for almost ten days made a difference, but somehow even shopping for herself and Tom had a richness to it because of all the things a household seemed to need to clean it and service it and to keep it living and welcoming. There were items in that trolley now – a box of ivory-coloured candles, a packet of Italian espresso coffee, a patent cold remedy – that had nothing to do with her, in herself, but were bought because someone else needed them, wanted them, because shopping was now an imaginative experience on behalf of several people, not just a practical one on behalf of a mere one whose tastes were so familiar to her, she was sick of them.

She stopped her trolley by an empty checkout, and began to unload the contents.

‘Busy weekend?’ the woman on the till said, watching.

Elizabeth nodded, head down, to conceal her smile.

The woman picked up the cold remedy.

‘Got a cold then?’

‘No,’ Elizabeth said, and then, to her own amazed surprise and delight, added, ‘It’s for my fiancé.’

The woman swiped the remedy across the scanner panel of her till.

‘If there’s one thing I can’t abide,’ she said cosily, ‘it’s a sick man.’

I’m new to it, Elizabeth wanted to say, so new to it that I don’t mind, I don’t mind Tom thinking he’s getting a cold, I don’t mind buying him the capsules he imagines will prevent it happening; in fact I’m so far from minding, that I like it, I’m grateful to be asked to do it, to choose sausages for Rufus, to replenish the supplies of soap and furniture polish and bottled water.

‘Fiancé, did you say?’ the woman asked.

‘Yes—’

She gave Elizabeth a kindly glance and picked up a bag of potatoes.

‘You’ll learn,’ she said.

There was a parking space right outside Tom’s house, and it was, in addition, a big enough space for Elizabeth – who was not an experienced driver and had never needed to be a car owner – to manoeuvre into without difficulty. Tom had bought her this car, just like that, easily, amazing her.

‘You’ll need it.’

‘But I’ve never—’

‘You do now. Anyway, I want you to have a car. I want you to have the freedom.’

‘I can’t believe it.’

He had kissed her.

‘You’re joining another world. Families have cars.’

Already Elizabeth liked it. She liked the unexpected status she felt it gave her, the independence, the choice. Even now, lifting the back to heave out the bulging supermarket bags, she felt a small pride she couldn’t help relishing even though she was glad no-one more experienced was there to see. She carried the bags up the steps to the front door in pairs and then locked the car, carefully checking to see that the central-locking system had actually done what it was supposed to do. Then she climbed the steps again and put her key in the front door. It wasn’t locked. She turned the handle and pushed the door open.

‘Tom?’

‘Me,’ Dale called from the kitchen.

Elizabeth took a breath.

‘Oh—’

Dale came to the kitchen doorway. She wore a scarlet apron tied over a black T-shirt and jeans.

‘Been shopping?’

‘Yes.’

Dale moved forward.

‘I’ll help you carry.’

‘Dale,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Have you been here long?’

‘About an hour.’

‘Why didn’t you ring?’

‘What?’

‘To say you were coming. Why didn’t you ring me?’

Dale stooped to pick up the nearest bags.

‘Please leave those,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Please leave those and answer my question.’

Dale straightened slowly.

‘I don’t have to ring.’

‘You do now,’ Elizabeth said.

‘This is my home—’

Elizabeth put her hands in her jacket pockets.

‘Mine, too, now. You are welcome any time, any time, for any reason, but not unannounced. I need to know.’

Dale stared at her.

‘Why?’

‘Privacy,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Not secrecy, but privacy.’

Dale said fiercely, ‘This was my home for twenty-five years before my father even met you!’

Elizabeth bent to take the two bags closest to her feet.

‘We can’t have this conversation on the doorstep—’

‘You started it.’

‘No. You caused it by letting yourself into the house in our absence and without warning us.’

‘It’s my house!’ Dale yelled.

She turned her back on Elizabeth and marched into the kitchen. Elizabeth lifted the shopping bags from the front doorstep into the hall and then shut the door. She followed Dale into the kitchen. Half the cupboard doors were open and the table was piled with packets and jars.

‘What are you doing?’

‘What does it look like?’ Dale said rudely. She had pulled on a pair of yellow rubber gauntlets. ‘Spring cleaning. I always do it for Dad.’

‘Always?’

‘Well, the last year or two—’

Elizabeth took her jacket off and hung it over the nearest chair.

‘It’s my job now, Dale. If it’s anyone’s. And these are my cupboards and my kitchen. I am, in an old fashioned expression, to be mistress of this house.’

Dale banged a yellow-rubber fist down on the table. She said furiously, ‘Oh that’s obvious, you’ve made that perfectly plain, you don’t have to tell me.’

‘What do you mean?’

Dale shouted, ‘My mother’s photographs! My mother’s pictures! What have you done with all the pictures of my mother?’

Elizabeth said steadily, ‘You’ve been in the drawing-room—’

‘Yes!’

‘And where else? Where else have you been? In our bedroom?’

Dale glared.

‘In our bedroom?’

‘Only quickly—’

‘Only quickly! Not too quickly, I imagine, to notice that the photograph of your mother is where it’s always been?’

Dale was breathing fast. She tore the rubber gauntlets off and slapped them down on the nearest counter.

‘The drawing-room was her room!’

‘The pictures are perfectly safe. They are wrapped up and packed in a wine carton for you and Lucas. You’ll find them in his old bedroom. The portrait of your mother is still in the drawing-room and it will stay there. I’m not obliterating anything, I’m just making my mark, alongside.’

Dale said vehemently, ‘It was her room, she made it, she chose everything, she was Dad’s wife, she was Dad’s first choice, she was our mother—’

‘I know all that. I know.’

Dale slumped into the nearest chair and put her face in her hands. Elizabeth went round the table and stood next to her. She looked down at the gleaming dark hair so smoothly tied back into its velvet loop.

‘Dale—’

Dale said nothing.

‘Look,’ Elizabeth said, trying to speak gently. ‘Look, you’re a grown-up, a grown woman, you must use your imagination and maturity a little. I can’t negotiate with a ghost like this, Dale, I really can’t. I can’t compete with something idealized and you shouldn’t demand that I do, either. Anyway—’ She paused.

Dale took her hands from her face.

‘What?’

‘Aren’t you maybe too old to go on believing your mother was a saint?’

Dale stared ahead of her.

‘You never knew her. You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘You didn’t know her very well, either,’ Elizabeth said. ‘You were only a child.’

Dale sprang up and shouted, ‘There were hundreds of people at her funeral! Hundreds and hundreds! They came from all over England, all over the world.’

Elizabeth closed her eyes for a moment.

‘I don’t doubt it.’

‘You do!’

‘I don’t doubt that your mother was a wonderful person and much loved. That’s not the point. The point is that she, tragically, is dead, and therefore, however fondly remembered, cannot influence how we, who are still living, choose to live our lives. When she lived here, this house was hers and she arranged it as she wished to. Now, it’s going to be mine and your father’s, and we will want to live in it rather differently.’

Dale bent her head and put the back of one hand against her eyes. She was crying.

‘Oh Dale,’ Elizabeth said in some despair. ‘Oh Dale dear, do try and grow up a little. I’m not some intruder you have to make bargains with.’

Dale whirled round and snatched several sheets of kitchen paper off a roll on a nearby worktop. She blew her nose fiercely.

‘You want to turn us out!’

‘I don’t,’ Elizabeth said. ‘It’s the last thing I want. All I want is for you to respect my privacy and independence as I respect yours.’

Dale blew again.

‘You don’t respect my past!’

‘I do,’ Elizabeth said. She gripped a chairback and leaned on it. ‘All I have difficulty with is when you try and insist that the past has more importance and significance than the present or the future.’

‘You’ll learn,’ Dale said bitterly. She untied the strings of the scarlet apron, ducked her head out of the neckband and threw the apron on the table among the boxes and bottles.

‘What is that supposed to mean?’

Dale was pulling on a jacket.

‘You can’t touch what we’ve got, what we’ve got because of what we’ve had—’

‘I know that—’

‘You don’t!’ Dale cried. ‘You don’t and you never will. You think you can come in here with your tidy Civil Service mind and file us all away neatly so there’s nothing messy left, nothing real and human and powerful. Well, you can’t. What we had, we’ll always have and you can’t touch it. You’ll never understand us because you can’t, because you can’t feel what we’ve felt, you can’t know what we know, you’ll never belong. You can try changing Dad outwardly, nobody can stop you doing that, but you’ll never change him inwardly because you don’t have it in you. He’s been where you’ll never go.’

Elizabeth took her hands off the chairback and put them over her ears.

‘Stop it—’

‘I’m going,’ Dale said. She sounded out of breath. She was rummaging in her bag for her car keys. ‘I’m going, and I’ll be back. I’ll be back whenever I want to because this is my home, this is where I belong, this is where I come from and always will.’

Elizabeth said nothing. She slid her hands round her head from covering her ears to covering her eyes. She heard Dale’s bag zip close.

‘It would be nice,’ Dale said, ‘if you didn’t tell Dad about this. But I expect you will. And if you do, then I will. I’ll have to.’ She paused and then said with emphasis, ‘Won’t I?’

And then she went out of the kitchen and the front doors, slamming both behind her.

‘What’s all this?’ Tom said.

He stood in the doorway of his bedroom, and peered into the half-dark. Elizabeth lay on the bed, as she had lain for several hours, with the curtains drawn. ‘Are you ill?’

‘No.’

He moved closer.

‘What is it, sweetheart?’

Elizabeth said, without moving, ‘You saw.’

‘I saw a fair old muddle in the kitchen, certainly. And shopping all over the hall floor. Basil, needless to say, has found the butter. I thought perhaps you weren’t feeling too good—’

‘I’m not.’

Tom lowered himself on to the side of the bed and put his hand on her forehead.

‘Headache?’

‘No.’

‘What—’

Elizabeth was lying on her side, still dressed, under a blanket. She said, looking straight ahead and not at Tom, ‘Dale came.’

‘Did she?’

‘She was here when I got back from shopping. She was in the process of turning out the kitchen cupboards.’

Tom took his hand away from Elizabeth’s face.

‘Oh dear.’

‘We had a row,’ Elizabeth said. She rolled over on to her back and looked at Tom. ‘I told her she mustn’t just let herself into the house whenever she pleased any more, and the row began.’

Tom wasn’t quite meeting Elizabeth’s eyes.

‘And how did it end?’

‘With Dale saying she would go on letting herself in whenever she wanted to because this was her home and always would be.’

Tom got slowly off the bed and walked towards the window, pushing the curtains back to reveal quiet cloudy afternoon light.

‘Did Pauline come into it?’

‘Oh yes,’ Elizabeth said. She stared up at the ceiling. ‘She always does.’

‘What did you say?’

‘About Pauline? That I couldn’t negotiate with a ghost. That Dale was too old to go on believing her mother was a saint.’

‘She wasn’t,’ Tom said. He had his back to Elizabeth. She turned her head to look at him, outlined against the window.

‘I’m relieved to hear you say it—’

‘She was very like Dale, in some ways, but with better self-control.’ He turned towards Elizabeth. ‘Sweetheart. I’m so sorry.’

‘Yes.’

‘Have you been up here ever since she left?’

‘Yes.’

‘Poor love. Poor Elizabeth.’

Elizabeth struggled up into a half-sitting position, propping her shoulders against the bed’s padded headboard.

‘Tom.’

‘Yes?’

‘What are you going to do?’

He came back to the bed and sat down beside Elizabeth.

‘What do you want me to do?’

She closed her eyes.

‘That’s not the right way round.’

‘I don’t follow you—’

‘It isn’t,’ Elizabeth said, ‘a question of what I want you to do, it’s a question of what you want to do yourself, not just for my sake, but even more for our future sakes, jointly, for the sake of this marriage we’re embarking on.’

‘You don’t sound very enthusiastic about it—’

‘It’s not lack of enthusiasm I feel,’ Elizabeth said. ‘It’s fear.’

‘Fear?’

She picked up the edge of the blanket that covered her and began to pleat it between her fingers.

‘Fear of what?’ Tom said.

‘Dale.’

Tom leaned forward and put his head in his hands.

‘Oh my God.’

‘Can’t you imagine?’ Elizabeth said, fighting with sudden tears. ‘Can’t you imagine trying to be married here with both of us straining to catch the sound of her key in the lock?’

‘It wouldn’t be like that—’

‘It might!’ Elizabeth cried, sitting up and dropping the blanket. ‘If she got in a state about something, or jealous, or lonely, she might come in all the time, any time, demanding your attention, insisting on her right to come home, informing me, as she did today, that I’ll never belong here however hard I try, however much I love you, because I haven’t got what you’ve all got, what you’ve had, I just haven’t got what it takes to make you happy!’

Tom took his hands away from his face and put his arms around Elizabeth. He said, in a fierce whisper against her hair, ‘I’m so sorry, so sorry—’

Elizabeth said nothing. She turned her face so that their cheeks were touching, and then, after a few moments, she gently but firmly disengaged herself.

‘Help me,’ Tom said. ‘Help me to decide what to do.’

Elizabeth began to extricate herself from the blanket, and to inch across the bed away from him.

‘I’m afraid,’ she said politely, ‘that it isn’t my decision.’

‘Elizabeth—’

‘Yes.’

‘I can’t change the locks of this house against my own daughter!’

Elizabeth reached the far side of the bed and stood up.

‘We don’t have keys to Dale’s flat. We never go there. We’re never asked there.’

‘But Dale was almost born in this house—’

‘I know. That’s one of the reasons why I wanted to sell it and move to another house, with no associations.’

‘But Rufus—’

‘I know about Rufus. I accept the Rufus argument.’

Tom stood up, too. He said, ‘I’ll go downstairs and clear up. Why don’t you have a bath?’

‘I’d love a bath, but it won’t make me feel any differently.’

‘You want me to tell Dale—’

‘No!’ Elizabeth shouted. She raised her fists and beat herself lightly on the sides of her head. ‘No! Not what I want! What you want for us, for you and me, because you can see what will happen if things go on like this!’

‘But they won’t. These are teething troubles, the shock of the new. We have so much going for us, so much, we love each other, Rufus loves you, Lucas will love you, too, any minute. We mustn’t get things out of proportion. Dale’s just in a state while she gets used to the idea of you. I’m so sorry she’s upset you—’

‘Shut up,’ Elizabeth said.

‘What?’

‘Stop talking. Stop mouthing all this stuff at me.’

Tom said angrily, ‘I’m trying to explain—’

‘No, you’re not, you’re trying to talk yourself out of having to face what’s really the matter.’

‘Which is?’

Elizabeth took a few steps towards the door. Then she took a breath.

‘That Dale is neurotically insecure and possessive, and that if you don’t do something about it now you’ll have her for life.’

Tom said sharply, ‘You have your children for life anyway.’

Elizabeth looked at him. Against the light, it was difficult to see his expression, but his stance looked determined, even defiant, as if he was challenging her to know better than he did about an area of life she had never experienced, and he had. She opened her mouth to ask if Tom’s pronouncement on children held good for third wives, too, and then felt, almost simultaneously, that pride would prevent her ever asking such a thing. So, instead, she closed her mouth again and walked, with as much dignity as she could muster, into the bathroom next door, closing the door behind her.

‘It’s really nice of you to see me,’ Amy said.

‘Not at all, it’s a pleasure—’

‘I haven’t been to London for ages, not for months, but then I got this interview and I thought that, while I was at it, if you didn’t mind—’

‘I don’t,’ Elizabeth said. ‘I’m pleased to see you.’

Amy looked round the sitting-room.

‘It’s a lovely flat. It’s huge.’

‘I thought I’d have parties here. But I haven’t—’

‘You could have your wedding reception here. Couldn’t you? It’d be a lovely room for that.’

Elizabeth went past Amy and into the little kitchen that led off the sitting-room. She called from inside it, ‘White wine?’

‘I don’t drink much,’ Amy said.

‘Tea then, coffee—’

‘Tea, please,’ Amy said. ‘A bag in a mug. Lucas thinks it’s dead common but it’s how I like it.’ She came and peered through the kitchen doorway. ‘I’ve never seen you in a suit before.’

‘It’s my working mode.’

‘It suits you,’ Amy said. ‘You look really in command.’

Elizabeth plugged the kettle in.

‘That’s exactly how I want to look. It hides a multitude of sins. What job were you interviewing for?’

‘A film,’ Amy said. ‘Some medieval thing. We have to plaster them in mud and keep them looking sexy at the same time. I don’t know if I’ll get it, but it’s worth a try.’

‘Aren’t you under contract to the TV station?’

‘Only for three months,’ Amy said. ‘Three months at a time. You can’t plan anything but that’s how they all work now.’

Elizabeth took a half-bottle of white wine out of the fridge and peeled off the foil around the neck. She saw Amy looking at it.

‘I always buy half-bottles, I always have. My father teases me, he calls them Spinster’s Comforters. He ought to be glad they’re not gin.’

‘Don’t you like gin?’

‘Not much.’

‘It makes me gag,’ Amy said. ‘Lucas drinks vodka. He’s trying not to drink at all at the moment.’ She paused and then she said with a tiny edge of venom, ‘It wouldn’t hurt his sister to try not to either.’

Elizabeth put a teabag in a mug and filled it with boiling water.

‘How strong?’

‘Very,’ Amy said. She moved into the kitchen and picked up a teaspoon to squash the teabag against the side of the mug. ‘Real builders’ tea.’

‘My father has it like that.’

‘Rufus liked your father,’ Amy said.

Elizabeth poured her wine.

‘It was mutual.’

She opened the fridge and offered Amy a carton of milk. ‘Sugar?’

Amy shook her head. She poured milk into her mug and stirred vigorously. ‘Look at that. Perfect.’ She lifted out the teabag. ‘Where’s your wastebin?’

‘There—’

‘It’s so tidy in here. You must be such a tidy cook.’

‘I don’t cook much.’

‘Lucas cooks for us, mostly. He’s a better cook than I am, more sophisticated. Trouble is, he’s almost never home at the moment so I live on sandwiches at work and crisps at home.’

Elizabeth moved past her, into the sitting-room, holding her glass of wine.

‘Bring your tea and come and sit down.’

Amy perched on the edge of a sofa, holding her mug balanced on her knees. She was wearing a very short checked skirt and a black jacket and had subdued her hair under a band. She said, ‘I don’t really know why I’ve come. Well, I do, but now I’m here I don’t know how to start—’

Elizabeth took a sip of wine.

‘Is it about Dale?’

‘How did you know?’

‘I just guessed—’

Amy leaned forward.

‘Do you like her? Do you like Dale?’

Elizabeth said, ‘I wouldn’t have the first idea how to answer that question.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘That she’s so overwhelming, so complicated, so big a personality, that liking or disliking her doesn’t really seem to come into it.’

Amy stared into her tea.

‘I know what I think.’

Elizabeth waited. She looked at Amy’s neat little legs in their smooth black tights, and her competent small hands folded round her tea mug.

‘We used to have such a good time, Lucas and me,’ Amy said. ‘Such fun. We were always laughing. I could tease him, I could tease him all day and he’d come back for more, he’d always come back. And it was OK when she had that boyfriend. He was a bit stuck up but he was clever, he could manage her. But since he went, it’s been awful. She won’t leave Lucas alone and he’s sorry for her; he says she’s his sister and she really battles with herself and that I ought to sympathize with her instead of bitching. But how can I sympathize, how can I when she’s hogging all Lucas’s attention? I’ve tried not saying anything but it didn’t get me anywhere because Lucas didn’t notice and I nearly killed myself with the effort.’ She stopped abruptly, took a mouthful of tea and then said, ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean it all to come out like that.’

‘It always does,’ Elizabeth said. She picked her wineglass up and put it down again. ‘Why have you come to me?’

‘Because you know,’ Amy said. ‘You’re coping.’

‘What?’

‘You’ve seen Dale in action. You’ve had her around, you’ve seen the score. But you can manage, you can deal with it.’

‘Oh—’

‘Lucas told me that if you could manage I could. He said you’re just getting on with your life, Dale or no Dale, and why can’t I. He said I’m letting it get to me, and I needn’t let it, look at you, you’re not.’

‘Amy,’ Elizabeth said. ‘I wish it was that straightforward.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean,’ Elizabeth said, carefully, ‘that it’s complicated all round just at the moment. That feelings seem to be running very high.’

Amy leaned forward over her tea.

‘Have you had a row with Dale?’

Elizabeth smoothed her skirt down towards her knees.

‘She has a key to Tom’s house. She lets herself in.’

‘Did you go for her?’

‘I asked her not to do it any more.’

Amy let out a breath.

‘Wow.’

‘I don’t want to seem stuffy about this, but I don’t feel I can talk about it much. Tom thinks—’ She stopped.

‘What?’

‘He thinks as I imagine Lucas thinks. He thinks Dale is still upset by her love affair ending and that this has unluckily coincided with my coming on the scene, which has brought back a rush of memories of losing her mother and we’ve all got to be very patient and wait until enough time has passed for Dale to feel calm again.’

‘Oh,’ Amy said. She stood up, pulling her skirt down with one hand. ‘Will you go along with that?’

Elizabeth hesitated. She remembered sitting at Tom’s kitchen table the evening after he had found her despairing in the bedroom, eating an admirable risotto he had made, and putting all the energy she had left into trying to understand, and believe, the explaining, reconciliatory things he was saying. She had so wanted to believe him; she had told herself that she owed it to him to believe him because he was so much in earnest himself and she had ended the evening by instructing herself severely in the bathroom mirror that the very least she could do – for Tom, for herself, for both of them – was to try. She looked at Amy now.

‘Yes,’ she said.

When Amy had gone, to catch the National Express coach back to Bath, Elizabeth scrambled herself an egg and ate it out of the saucepan with the spoon she had used to stir it, standing up by the cooker. Then she ate an apple and a digestive biscuit and made herself a mug of instant coffee which she carried back into the sitting-room. Her wineglass, still almost full, stood beside the chair she had sat in when Amy came. Amy hadn’t really wanted to go. Elizabeth had seen in her face that she felt she was just getting somewhere, that she had just glimpsed gold unexpectedly, when she had realized she had to go, that Elizabeth wasn’t going to open up, tell her everything, spill the beans.

Elizabeth sat down, holding her coffee mug, propping her chin on its rim and feeling the steam rising damply up against her skin. On the way home from work, she had called in at a set of consulting rooms off Harley Street, where she had previously been to visit a gynaecologist who was married to a colleague of hers. Elizabeth had been examined, and had had a blood test taken and, that evening, had been told that not only was everything normal and healthy, but also she was still ovulating.

‘Of course,’ the gynaecologist had said, ‘your chances of conceiving would be even better if you had chosen a strapping boy of twenty-two. But we don’t choose these things, do we? They choose us. Good luck, anyway.’

Elizabeth had sat in a taxi between Harley Street and her flat with one hand pressed against her stomach, as if its newly realized potential made it something worth guarding, something deserving of respect. She had felt mildly elated, as if she had been congratulated for an achievement or won a small award, and had reflected, with a gratitude directed at no-one in particular, how this new knowledge managed to put the disturbing events of the previous weekend into a different, and altogether less menacing, perspective. Then she had got home, and found Amy’s message on her answering machine and had been diverted, by Amy’s imminent arrival, from telephoning anyone with the joyful news that, given the limitations of her and Tom’s ages, she was still fertile, still stood a chance, at least, of conceiving a baby.

But now, sitting with her mug of coffee, she wondered about that earlier urge to telephone. Whom should she ring? Tom? Her father? What would she say? ‘You’ll never believe it, but I’m not too old to have a baby!’ And what would they say? Would they both, for various and separate reasons, be rather taken aback, her father because babies never occurred to him even as a concept unless one was actually thrust under his nose for admiration, and Tom because she hadn’t mentioned babies to him yet, because he had already had three by two previous wives, because his mind was so full – painfully full – of Dale just now that a distraction as intimate as this might seem merely provocative? She thought of Amy. Did Amy visualize having Lucas’s babies, had Dale wanted Neil’s? When women wanted babies, was the man they wanted them by – if indeed, this factor entered the equation at all – the first person they told, or the last? Elizabeth ducked her chin to take a swallow of coffee. Perhaps she should, in fact, tell nobody. Who, after all, needed to know, but her? Just as no-one needed to know her secret rapture in family supermarket shopping, in the possession of a car, in being able to say nonchalantly ‘my fiancé,’ and mean Tom by it, so no-one needed to know about this new, and extraordinary, possibility. She took another swallow and put her mug down, beside the wineglass. She had told Tom she would try, in the matter of being patient with Dale. She had meant it. She would try. She put her hands gently and firmly across her stomach and held them there. Of course she would try. She could now afford to. Couldn’t she?