Chapters (32)
Something occurs to me, and as my husband stands alongside, it is suddenly important that I do something. I reach for the Birthday Book, which I keep by the Aga. I flip through the months, past Mirabel’s and Cas’s and Posy’s and Ralph’s birthday, past Calypso’s and my birthday, past Perry and Slinky Fleming’s birthdays and my brother Con and his four children’s birthdays and even past his saintly Austrian wife Gretchen’s Geburtstag, and past Trumpet’s birthday, and past the birthday of Caroline, the only nanny we ever had who stayed, until I come to October.
Then I place a cross in pencil on the due date of our forthcoming fourth child (and Ralph’s fifth child, not that we want to dwell on that, not after Ralph wept when he said, ‘Darling, the reason I couldn’t face you being pregnant, well, one of the reasons aside from sheer panic, and terror, was that thanks to my complete cock-up I already had four children, and I thought five children, including one I couldn’t tell you about, was pushing it, slightly.’) I close the book and slot it back next to Sarah Raven’s Garden Cookbook.
I smile at Ralph, who has watched me mark the Birthday Book with a baffled look, thinking, men are not all destroyers, just as women are not all nurturers. Men have a right to say no too. They should have a vote, if not the veto. Just as it takes two to make a baby, ideally, it should take two, not one, in a marriage to keep it.
Ralph is still watching me in silence, so I tell myself to shut up, even though I’m not talking out loud. In my own head, I’m beginning to sound like Hillary Clinton – i.e. never a good sign. Then Ralph whispers something in my ear, words that make my heart melt, pats me lightly on the bottom, and then strides towards the open door. Then he pauses, as if he is going to say something else.
But he clearly thinks better of it and, after giving me a farewell wave, dives through the honeysuckled porch and hurries away across the green, sweet meadows strewn with buttercups and daisies and primroses, across the fields of asphodel, down to the river, as if succumbing to some masculine, primordial urge I will never understand, to catch the evening rise on the Lar.