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Light filters now through her eyelids. She gives up, opens her eyes, sees the time. It is almost half past eight. The bed is empty. It is later than usual; the sky is too bright.
Emily.
She throws back the covers, grabs her nightdress from the floor and dashes into her daughter’s room. Emily is asleep. Samantha holds her finger under the baby’s nose. Feels the warm, sweet breath of life. It is two hours later than she’s ever slept. Since last night, Samantha has told herself over and over that Emily will not have felt one moment of fear. If she is still asleep now, it is because she must be exhausted from the chaos of yesterday. She places her hand on Emily’s chest. And there it is, just to be sure: the swell and sink. She forces herself to turn away and go downstairs.
Peter is drinking coffee. He is standing up, facing the bank of charcoal-coloured kitchen units, looking at his phone. They don’t have coffee in bed anymore, she thinks. Haven’t done since Emily was born.
‘Hi,’ she says.
‘Morning.’ He barely glances at her, last night’s attentions lost in the cold light of the morning. And up she comes, into the clarity of realisation that it has always been like this: nights full of warmth; mornings full of this, whatever this is. He is flushed, she notices. He must have been for his usual early-morning run. She did not hear him get up. It amazes her how unaltered he is. He has slept, has got up at his usual time, has completed his customary route along the river, back through Ham House, Richmond Park, Petersham, and is now drinking his morning coffee. He has ploughed forward.
She, meanwhile, can barely hold her cup. Her nightdress, she notices then, is on inside out. Her baby is safe but her life is a shattered windscreen, held in place only by cracks. One more tap and it will rain down shards on all of them.
‘Are you going in?’ she asks.
He takes a sip of coffee, swallows. ‘Tutorial at eleven.’
That he is going to work the day after their child was kidnapped has not come as a surprise. She has not, she realises, expected him to do anything different, has not expected more. Night’s empathy is day’s near indifference, even today. Night will come; day will dawn. Life goes on, repeat ad infinitum.
She tells him – tells the back of his head, at least – that she’ll see him later. She doesn’t ask what time he’ll be back, doesn’t ask if he could take the afternoon off and be with herunder the circs, as Marcia would say. Marcia, who wouldseeher fragility, who at one glance wouldknow. If Peter notices the cracks, he says nothing about it. He will come home exactly when it pleases him. His day will not be conditioned by anything she might say or do, nor by anything she might feel. Evenunder the circs.
Leaving him in the kitchen, she returns upstairs. Checks on Emily. She is so peaceful, fists up, head to one side, lips a pout. Another kind of indifference altogether.
‘See you later then,’ Peter calls up. A moment later, the door shuts with a bang.
The house is so silent that she can hear a bird calling outside: a waxwing, possibly, or a chiffchaff. It’s not a song, she knows that. It’s a territorial war cry.
In the bathroom, she undresses, stares for a moment into the full-length mirror. It is not something she does often, at least not with any real intention – she is usually too busy grabbing a shower while trying to sing to Emily through the glass screen – but she looks now. Is she still attractive? Would or could she appeal to someone nearer her own age now that her eyes are ringed in black, the whites bloodshot, now that pregnancy has struck silver lightning onto her abdomen, now that her stomach is not taut as a drum? Her hips are wider than they were yet her ribs protrude in a rack. Her body looks like it’s been in a fight. Like it’s had a rough time and needs tenderness, a softer light, understanding.
‘Poor body,’ she whispers, stroking the loose pouch of her belly. ‘Poor, poor you.’
No such ravages for Peter. At forty, he’s pretty much unchanged from the photographs in his bedside drawer. A flare of resentment hits her. How weird that it is stronger than any emotion she felt last night, in the car, nose pressed to his mistress’s scarf. She is angrier about his dumb luck than his infidelity. Unless he was telling the truth and it really is Professor Bailey’s scarf. Who cares, frankly? Emily is safe; she, Samantha, is tired.
She wonders if this is how bitterness starts, with this not caring, or no longer caring about things that once meant so much, whether you work through disappointment after disappointment towards weary expectation, until even the most serious transgression barely ripples the surface. She wonders whether in five years she’ll have left Peter in this beautiful house on the hill, told him to go to hell, in ten be drooling over younger men in dark bars, drunk, proselytising, telling strangers what’s what, jabbing at them with an ash-piled, lipstick-smudged cigarette, or living in a shoe with ten kids by as many different fathers. Or maybe even dead, found only weeks after complete organ failure, empty whisky bottle and a half-eaten tuna sandwich at her feet, dozens of cats clawing at the ratty second-hand sofa upon which she’s exhaled her last.
‘Madwoman,’ she says to her reflection and laughs.
She stays under the hot shower for a long time, much, much longer than three minutes.
She cleans the shower screen with the squeegee and places it carefully back in the correct place in the cupboard. Still no sound from Emily, so she takes her chance: moisturises her legs and arms, combs her wet hair back from her face, brushes her teeth with her electric toothbrush for the full two minutes, even though Peter isn’t there to check that the beeper goes off.
She is watching the steam clouds shrink from the mirror when she remembers Peter’s pills. She wonders if he has taken them out of the glove compartment and hidden them in the house, or taken them into work along with the scarf.
She pulls his robe from the hook, wraps it around herself.
In the bedroom, she tries to work methodically. She searches his side of the chest of drawers, her own, his bedside cabinet, his wardrobe, his shoes, the small wooden box with the intricate marquetry in which he keeps his monogrammed cufflinks. Nothing, no sign.
She returns to the bathroom, goes through the shelves. Shaving foam, aftershave, razor, deodorant, aspirin, hair fudge, hair wax, hair gel, moisturiser, anti-wrinkle cream.
Anti-wrinkle cream? She doesn’t recognise the brand, assumes it’s something expensive. She unscrews the lid, smells it, dips her finger in. It is smooth, unctuous. She wipes it on the back of her hand and, as she does so, drops the pot.
‘Shit,’ she hisses, falls to her knees.
A blob of thick white cream has escaped onto the floorboards. She scoops it as best she can back into the pot, half giggling at how horrified Peter would be if he were to see her doing this. She smooths the cream with her finger, tries to make the pot look like it did before. It looks OK, she thinks. Hopefully he won’t notice. If he does, she can say she tried some, just a tiny bit. She stands up, screws the lid back on and replaces the pot in the exact same spot on the shelf. Turns it a half centimetre, back three millimetres. Yep. She’s pretty sure it was like that.
She tears off some loo roll and drops again to her knees. A few satellites have flicked out across the floor. And it is when she is cleaning up the streak on the base of the loo that she sees that the floorboard behind doesn’t lie flat. She screws up the tissue and throws it into the toilet. Then, on all fours, she worries the corner of the board with the tip of her finger. It lifts easily. She slides her finger underneath and pulls it up and away. Hidden in the space is a brown leather toilet bag. She pulls it onto her lap. It is the size of her father’s old analogue radio. Her heart is beating. From the other side of the landing, Emily cries out.
‘Shh,’ she whispers.
