It is not the right time to tell Terry about the job. Maybe later, once he’s had a line or two. Or when their friends are round. Or once Dominic is home from school and has eaten the chocolates from the silly blonde woman next door.

Veronica

Veronica had managed to unpack all of the boxes, with the exception of the ones labelled for George’s study. Those were sitting neatly piled in the third bedroom atop the olive green carpet she had finally managed to convince him was coming back into fashion, and anyway a good colour for channelling the fields and calm-inducing pastures of their childhoods, which they did not see in the city. Despite being a stone’s throw from Regent’s Park, landscaped gardens fanned the mind with precise, ordered beauty; they didn’t drench the soul with wild terrain. She and George both agreed that during their teen years, they would have been lost without such wilderness. Their boarding schools, it turned out, were less than five miles apart in the Kent countryside and they have often spoken of how while she was performing in her school’s open-air drama festival, he may have been shooting down a frosted pitch, legs muddied and hands bloodied in worship of the fast-clasped rugby ball. Over a decade since his last match, George retained a steel pin in his left shoulder, a knee that was in constant need of physiotherapy and a nose that would never be quite as straight as God may have intended. But like her love of American rock music, and a series of dalliances with unsuitably young male English teachers, her husband wore these badges like the proofs they were: attestation to the years of privilege and opportunity and community and neglect.

He had promised to tackle the boxes at the weekend, but for the time being Veronica had shut the bedroom door to hide them. It may have taken her until almost midnight, but tomorrow they would wake up in the house they had been visiting at various stages of demolition and resurrection every week for the past six months, and it would be just as they had dreamed it. Even the wedding china, which while they were in the flat languished in storage, had now been meticulously removed from bubble wrap and placed on the exact shelf of the exact cupboard that she had been planning. For his part, George had fitted the feet of every chair and table and moveable piece of furniture with thin felted cushions, so as to protect the dark oak floor. He had read all of the instructions for the gas and electricity metres, for the boiler, for the alarm system. And he had phoned the council to find out which days each of the different bins were collected. He had not, yet, touched her.

Their bed had a high romantic headboard, waffled in cream, and the wardrobes and bedside tables were painted a slightly peeling white in the shabby chic style of Louis XIV. These were pieces they had garnered over a series of months, visiting showrooms and antique fairs, each fastidiously chosen to complement the sweeping floor to ceiling windows and luxurious cream shag rug at the end of the bed. The effect was a success. Despite the dust, which even a professional post-build cleaning crew and three attempts by herself had failed to dispel, the room exuded airiness, tranquillity, and, of course, amour. This last was an added pressure she had not accounted for. Since the miscarriage, everything was a pressure. Yet without discussing it, Veronica felt that both she and George had been viewing the house as a new start, building it up in their minds as the fresh slate upon which their dreams, their family, would materialise. The only problem was that now the house was complete, there was a call for action. Now they had to do something. Not something, one specific thing. And now, all they could do was lie on opposite sides of their soft, vast bed, petrified by the prospect of continued catastrophe, continued ways in which they had failed and would fail each other.