“She’s my only family, really.” Her mother, Katrina had decided, didn’t count. Katrina almost never rang her now—she’d had no energy left for another dependent after Nicky was born—but she did send her occasional postcards, to which her mother did not reply.

“I’m your family now,” John said. “You don’t need anyone else.”

And feeling the truth of this, settled in her own house with her husband and son and another baby on the way, finally believing she had got the hang of it all, Katrina experienced something close to contentment.

But a ghost of unease remained. Katrina felt, alongside her new calm, that the world was contracting and narrowing until it consisted only of the desire for her husband to be happy and her two babies, born and unborn, to be healthy. She didn’t know if this just meant she had everything she wanted already, or if it was true for everyone that after you became a proper adult you stopped looking forward the way you once had.

4

She never did work out what went wrong between her and John after Tommy’s birth, why he suddenly seemed to lose all patience with her after that second baby. It had been a difficult labour, and Tommy was eventually delivered by C-section (thank God Katrina had held out for a hospital birth on the mainland, not a home birth, as John had wanted). Katrina was weak for a long time afterwards and couldn’t do much around the house, though she tried her best. She managed, just about, to care for Nicky and the new baby, but she had to let many other things go. Fiona helped for a while, but John, when he realized how much Fiona was doing, didn’t like it. He said it made it look like he wasn’t caring for his own wife. Katrina had to withdraw from Fiona, to tell her that she was managing fine now and that John was around more.

But maybe it wasn’t this weakness that irritated him. Maybe he had been waiting all along to see which way she would fall, and up until that point he had still believed she could suit him; maybe he had even believed she could save him. Whatever his dream had been, he was thoroughly disillusioned by the time their second son was six months old.

“You’ve put on so much weight,” he said to her. “I know some women let themselves go after they have children, but I didn’t think you’d be one of them. You didn’t seem lazy when I met you.”

Katrina wondered if she had deceived him in this. She hadn’t intentionally, she thought. But she was starting to feel that she was lazy. Everything was such a struggle.