Another baby would of course be the logical thing, and as an only child yourself, you badly want Tilly to have a brother or sister; and yet. Every time you have the discussion, about babies, or work, about what happens next, you feel deeply tired; an exhaustion that seeps into, or maybe from, your very bones. Bone-weary: you used to feel a sort of delight when a word or a phrase was a perfect fit, the mathematical logic of it; but now, for the first time in your life, you just feel old.

You stop, abruptly, expecting him to laugh at that, but he doesn’t laugh.

I’m fifty-six, he says, which on a bad day rounds up to sixty, and I’m two years divorced, and my boys are almost twenty-four.

You realise you’ve been trying to work out his age. 122

Fifty-six, you say, not meaning to say it aloud, and he puts up his hands and winces.

I’m not, he says, I know I’m not, but in so many ways I still feel twenty-four myself.

I know what you mean, you say. I mean, I don’t feel any different, I don’t think, than I did then?

I don’t think, he says, we ever really do.

You don’t think people change, you say, or ever really can?

I think people change, he says, for sure, but only ever become, essentially, more themselves.

You don’t know if that thought is comforting or profoundly sad.

Then where’s the hope, you say, if we can never truly begin again, or become, I don’t know, something else or better?

He shrugs, and smiles. Each moment, I guess, he says. Each moment, here now, that’s what we have.

That’s what we have, or that’s all we have?

Perhaps it’s both.

A girl you were at university with had married a man twenty-five years older, more, technically, than twice her age: she twenty-four, he forty-nine. She’d been engaged before that to a guy from uni; he’d been a Blue and they were something of a golden couple. No one could understand it. You didn’t know her very well, but you somehow once got drunk together and she started crying and said the loneliest 123thing in the world was lying in bed with someone and wanting someone else’s hands to be on you instead.

They had a daughter whom they’d had almost immediately, long before any of your other uni friends had kids, who must be in her teens by now. After that drunken night you’d stayed in touch for a while, and bought a present when the baby was born, a ruffled pinafore from a place whose clothes cost as much as adult clothes, and came, in a sort of performance by the cashier, wrapped in palest lemon tissue.