Beneath the rhythm of her breathing she can just discern a whispery thought: Maybe it’s going to be OK.

Gublet McDublet came back from the moon to find that his mum had been off having a chemical peel and her face was all red and flaky.

‘Oh, Gublet,’ she said sadly. ‘Why did you run away to the moon? You silly billy, didn’t you know I’d miss you?’

Gublet just gave her an enigmatic Mona Lisa smile, because actually he hadn’t known that at all.

‘You seem glum today, Sophie darling,’ says Rose as she’s leaving, wrapping her new pashmina around her.

‘I guess I’ve got a hangover from all that mulled wine,’ says Sophie. ‘And I feel especially ugly today with this horrible cold sore.’

‘Oh, well, it will get better,’ says Rose. ‘You’re a very pretty girl.’

‘Hmmmph,’ says Sophie disbelievingly, like a sulky teenager.

‘Well, of course you are. Oh, you know, there’s something I keep forgetting to tell you! I was thinking about you the other day and your search for the right man, so to speak, and you know what I suddenly remembered? I remembered that one day Connie said to me that she’d discovered the perfect man for you. The darndest thing is I can’t remember who it was–although I do remember thinking that I sort of agreed with her, although I felt disloyal to Thomas.’

‘Was it Rick?’ Sophie touches her cold sore. ‘Or Ian, perhaps?’

‘I really can’t remember who it was. I was just thinking about how funny it was that Connie was so convinced that this man was your soul mate!’

Wonderful. Fabulous. Oh, what does it matter anyway? The thought of meeting a new man at this stage, while she’s still so raw over Callum, seems ridiculous and pointless.

‘His name’s on the tip of my tongue! It will come to me. I’ll call you as soon as I think of it,’ says Rose. ‘Of course, you might not fancy the fellow at all!’

Rose kisses her on the cheek and Sophie breathes in her powdery scent.

‘Thank you for telling me the story about Alice and Jack.’

‘My pleasure, darling.’

56

It is the weekend after the Anniversary Night and Callum is taking Grace to see their house in the mountains. They haven’t been up for months and he’s hoping that they will be pleasantly surprised by how far it has progressed since they’ve seen it. Their builder has assured him that they will be thrilled, but Callum no longer likes the builder, in fact he hates him, and has secret fantasies about knocking him out with a plank of wood, sending that smug orange hard-hat flying.

Jake is in his capsule in the back seat, singing to himself. This week he has discovered his voice–a wonderful toy capable of creating a whole spectrum of interesting noises. When Jake is making his sounds he squints his eyes in deep concentration, which is exactly the same expression that Callum used to see on Grace’s face when he interrupted her working on one of her Gublet paintings. It twists his heart.

He and Grace are all tentative tiptoes around each other at the moment. They’re so polite it’s almost comical, but Callum can’t relax because he’s lost trust in his own character. He is completely appalled by himself. He thought he was superior to the sort of sleazy, shallow man who gets drunk and kisses another woman just a few months after his wife gives birth to their first child. He thought he was more evolved than that. And it wasn’t just the mulled wine. He actually teetered on the brink of an affair. An evil, lecherous part of his mind was thinking it all out: Where can we go? Her house? Now? He’d wanted to sleep with Sophie. He still wants to sleep with Sophie. He wants to talk to Sophie, listen to CDs with Sophie, dance with Sophie, make love to Sophie, make her laugh, tease her…oh for Christ’s sake. He is driving along with his wife beside him and his son in the back seat, having fantasies about another woman. But he doesn’t want to leave Grace. Oh no. Not at all. That’s not an option. All these treacherous thoughts about Sophie seem quite separate from his helpless, hopeless love for Grace. He wants to have his cake and eat it too–just like every fat, balding, middle-aged, unfaithful businessman throughout history. He is a tired cliché. A dirty joke. He has even caught himself thinking whiny, self-pitying thoughts like, But Grace doesn’t get me the way Sophie does. My wife doesn’t understand me.

And he doesn’t understand her. He doesn’t know what she’s thinking any more. He doesn’t know if she does have postnatal depression or not. She says she doesn’t. She says the doctor who suggested that had only spoken to her for ten minutes and had no idea what she was talking about. She says she’s fine. She smiles her beautiful smile and says don’t worry.

He will never forget the panic he felt when she had her allergic reaction on the Anniversary Night. It was nightmarish. It was punishment for kissing Sophie. He doesn’t know if Grace ate the samosa on purpose, like Laura is suggesting, because each time he goes to ask Grace, he’s terrified she’ll say, ‘Yes, I did,’ and then he’ll have to say, ‘Why? Why did you do that?’ And what if she answers, ‘Because I saw you kissing Sophie’? It gives him a stomach-lurching feeling of vertigo just thinking about it. So he says nothing at all. He acts as if it was just an accident, as if the doctor never mentioned postnatal depression, as if they’re just a normal married couple, as if everything is fine, as if they still have sex, as if they still touch each other, as if a few weeks ago she didn’t say, ‘You don’t even know me.’ He talks to her each day like he’s reading lines from a script. ‘Good morning!’ ‘How did you sleep?’ ‘Shall I put the baby down?’

He speaks more naturally to the man at the service station where he buys his petrol each month than he does to his own wife.

He tries out one of his jovial-husband lines now. ‘Do you want to stop for a coffee before we see the house?’

‘No, I’m OK,’ answers Grace. ‘Unless you want to stop?’

‘Only if you want to.’

‘I’m fine.’

‘Well, I’m fine too.’

Callum clenches the steering wheel and looks straight ahead at the highway peeling away before him.

57

‘Oh dear. Oh damn. Where is she, I wonder? Oh. Ah. OK. Well. Here we go. HELLO! SOPHIE! IT’S ROSE! I WANTED TO TELL YOU THAT I REMEMBERED THE NAME OF THAT FELLOW CONNIE HAD PICKED OUT FOR YOU. IT’S CALLUM’S FRIEND AND…oh dear, I don’t think this silly machine is working, is it? HELLO? Oh sugar!’