Emily got home around two o’clock. Lou had love-bombed her all weekend: taken her out for fabulous meals, practised his Shiatsu on her, then last night they’d driven up to Mulholland Drive to watch the lights of the city and he’d said that this was something they’d tell their grandchildren.

‘Classic commitmentphobic,’ she said gaily.

‘What are they?’

‘They do instant intimacy – just add water and stir. Then you never hear from them again.’

‘You almost sound happy about it.’

‘It’s nice to know there are some things you can depend on… Unless he actually meant all that stuff about telling our grandchildren,’ she added scornfully. ‘That’d be even worse!’

No need to tell her that Mort Russell hadn’t called: she’d checked her messages several times.

‘So how are you?’ she asked.

How was I? Troy still hadn’t rung, which had whipped up a ball of anxiety in my stomach. But hadn’t I always been one for deferred gratification? When he finally came through, the wait would have been worth it.

‘You look… different.’

Oh my God, was it that obvious?

She studied me thoughtfully. ‘Your eyebrows!’

‘Oh, ah, right. Lara took me to Madame Anoushka.’

‘Tell me about Cameron Myers’ birthday party.’

‘Weeelll,’ I said, unable to keep my delight from spreading right across my face. ‘It was great.’

‘How? Tell me everything.’ Then her expression altered. ‘Oh, shit.’ She looked surprisingly shocked. ‘You slept with Troy’

‘What’s wrong with that?’

‘Nothing,’ she insisted. ‘Nothing… OK,’ she admitted, ‘it’s just a bit weird for me. Like, for nine years you’ve been Garv’s wife, you’ve been here – how long? – less than two weeks and you’re sleeping with other men. And you were never a goer –not really – and, you know, it’s a bit hard to get used to, that’s all.’

‘I’ve got used to it.’

‘Great.’ She made a very obvious attempt at being fine, and with a big smile asked, ‘Was it fun?’

‘Fun isn’t the word.’

‘Fair play to you.’ For a second, it looked like she was about to say something else, then she stopped.

25

About three years ago, two things that I never thought would happen, happened. My thirtieth birthday arrived and, after five years in Chicago, Garv was offered a promotion in the Dublin office and we decided to move back to Ireland. Garv settled into his new managerial position, I got a six-month contract at McDonnell Swindel and suddenly it was baba time!

But, to my distress, I still didn’t feel ‘ready’. It was great being back in Ireland, but I missed Chicago. In addition, adjusting to my new job was stressy; I hated the insecurity of a short-term contract, but that’s all that anyone offered me. And we had nowhere to live: we’d expected our return to the Emerald Isle to be the traditional one of an Irish person who goes to Amerikay: they make good, then come back and dispense largesse like it’s going out of fashion. So it came as a big shock to discover that while we’d been away, Ireland had had the temerity to go and get an economy for itself.

Dublin was boomtown and the price of property had gone through the roof. We arrived back at the very zenith, when shoeboxes were changing hands for several million quid and if someone stood still long enough, someone else would apply for planning permission to build sixteen apartments on them. The upshot of all this was that instead of snapping up a city-centre mansion with the proceeds of our Chicago apartment, it took us five months before we managed to buy a house in the suburb of Dean’s Grange, several miles from the city Before us, it had been owned by an old lady – the kitchen and bathroom were museum pieces and small, gloomy rooms were the order of the day. So we fashioned plans to modernize: new kitchen, new bathroom, knocking through walls, adding skylights and all that. Lord Lucan Construction duly arrived, knocked down most of the house, then promptly disappeared. And every day that the pile of cement in the front ‘garden’ stood unattended was another day that I didn’t have to commence babymaking.

But all the time the net was tightening. Just before we’d left Chicago, nearly every couple we knew were having children, and we’d barely touched down in Ireland when I noticed they were at the same lark there. Only a week after our return, Garv’s sister Shelley had a baby boy, Ronan. Garv and I went to visit her in hospital, a bunch of grapes under our oxter, where we found that Shelley’s partner Peter had conjoined with a bottle of Power’s to celebrate the birth of his first child. ‘GARV!’ he shouted, when he saw us coming down the corridor. ‘Garv, Garv! C’mere till you see the fruit of my loins!’ He thrust his pelvis at us with such vigour that he almost fell over, then, bouncing between the shiny green walls, he got Garv in a headlock, dragged him to the infant’s cot and berated him, ‘De murkil’ f new life. ‘Sa MURKIL!’ I was mortified for him, especially when he was asked to leave as he was upsetting the other fathers. But Garv seemed quite moved by it all.

I hadn’t been able to avoid noticing that Garv was keen on sprogs. He liked them and they liked him back. They were particularly fond of messing up his hair and pulling off his glasses and poking him in the eye. When they cried, he held them and spoke sweetly and they stopped crying and looked at him with a kind of wonder and everyone said (except my family), ‘He’ll make a great dad.’

Sure enough, Garv started making noises about us reproducing, and I cursed my bad luck. In other relationships, it seemed to be the women who wanted to have children while the men would do anything to get out of it. In fact, according to popular folklore (and women’s magazines), these child-shy men riddled the landscape like landmines. Every time Garv brought up the subject, I always managed a legitimate reason why now wasn’t the right time. But it dawned on him that my reluctance wasn’t simply temporary, one weekend when we were babysitting Ronan. (Well, I say weekend, but it was only Saturday night, all that Peter and Shelley dared leave him for. And they rang about eighty times in that twenty-four-hour period.)

It was the first time that we’d minded Ronan for more than a couple of hours, and we weren’t at all bad at feeding, burping, changing and cajoling him. It was good fun because, you see, I had nothing against babies per se. Just the idea of having them myself. When Ronan cried a couple of times in the night, Garv got up without complaint. Then in the morning he brought him into bed with us and sat him on his lap facing us. Already Ronan was chortling, and when Garv held on to his chubby wrists and blew raspberries at him, Ronan nearly shrieked his head off. Garv was laughing almost as much, and with his bare chest and off-duty hair, he looked like the hunky man in that Man and Baby portrait. I got such a pang of confused yearning, it almost hurt physically.