Chapter 1 #3
The women blow him kisses and everyone calls out goodnight as Anna checks Blake found his plate of food in the kitchen, and Eddy gets up again to bear-hug his son.
Later, after they’ve eaten and watched Eddy open his gifts– ‘It’s not…
it can’t be… it is! The fucking Slazenger!
Thank you, you beautiful people’– and everyone is sloppy with wine, Anna squeezes Rosie’s hand and says to her and Seb, ‘I was doing that thing of hating my kids all day, then scrolling through baby pictures of them all night, and look what I found…’
Anna holds up the screen for them to see a photo of two naked, creamy babies with arms like fat, buttery croissants, sitting opposite each other in the bath. Baby Albie– Eddy and Anna’s younger son– and baby Heath– Seb and Rosie’s middle child.
‘I mean, just look at them! Such little puddings.’
A warm longing floods Seb because there he is, their baby son. He glances at Rosie, too; she’s smiling but it’s a sad smile, like she wishes she could reach into that photo and hold her beautiful baby one last time.
‘Flick to the next one,’ Anna says. It’s a photo of Rosie holding a naked baby on a towel on each leg, having just lifted them out of the bath.
Rosie frowns at the screen, like she can’t quite place herself from eight years ago.
Anna’s turned away from them now, laughing at something Vita and Eddy are arguing about, so Seb and Rosie look at the photo together.
‘Look at you, so beautiful,’ Seb says, resting his hand on her lower back. Close, but hopefully not too close.
‘You reckon?’ Rosie says, doubtful, cocking her head to look at the photo from a different angle. ‘I was thinking how knackered I looked, and I think that’s breast milk leaking through my T-shirt.’
‘Still totally gorgeous,’ Seb says, before adding, ‘That photo must have been taken before we moved down here.’ He remembers back then; they were still living in London.
He’d just started teaching while studying at the same time, Sylvie a boisterous toddler and Heath crying with reflux all night.
They’d spend most weekends trekking down to stay with his mum, Eva, and he longed to move, craved the simpler, safer life Waverly offered his young family.
Now, living in Waverly, just a ten-minute walk away from his mum and with so much to be grateful for, Seb still feels hungry.
It seems he is always yearning for something.
Next to him, Rosie sighs, her eyes fixed on herself in the photo, the woman she hardly recognizes.
The wine is making her maudlin. For a mad moment he thinks about picking her up and carrying her home.
He wants to lie skin to skin, wants to feel the mysterious electric pulse of her, the pulse that will remind him of his own precious aliveness.
Rosie glances at her phone and he knows she doesn’t want that.
She never wants that any more. As she reads a message, he looks at her and tries to imagine how it used to be, Rosie naked and lovely on top of him, her head thrown back, immersed in pleasure.
For a long time, that image had been almost painfully erotic but now, mostly, it makes him sad.
He’d tried everything he could think of.
He’d tried talking, not talking, he’d back off and then he’d come on strong– buying Rosie an expensive silk nightie he thought she’d love but which she said made her feel like mutton– and so he’d retreated into despair.
He was usually so good at being who people wanted him to be, expert at denying himself to make others happy, but this– this sex thing– and Rosie’s complete detachment– no, her complete rejection of him– gnawed at him until he felt he was disappearing inside his wanting.
In the first few months they hadn’t had sex, she said she was ‘touched out’– the kids still grabbing, so demanding of physical touch.
Now they are all at school, she has more time without them, but nothing has changed.
She still flinches every time he even touches her hand.
It’s the confusion that is slowly dissolving him.
The feeling that she is wilfully keeping him from understanding.
She says it isn’t that she doesn’t desire him, it’s that she has to relearn what she wants, what will turn her on.
She needs time to figure that out. That’s as far as they’ve got and nothing– as far as Seb knows– has changed in months.
What has become clear– crushingly, devastatingly clear for Seb– is that sex, and specifically their sex life, is, for Rosie at least, simply not that important.
Vita and Patrick shift furniture around to make a tiny dance floor and Eddy puts a Prince record on. He’s trying to pull Anna up to dance with him, but she’s squirming away, saying, ‘No, Eddy! I don’t want to, stop!’
Eddy gives up on his wife and instead grabs Rosie’s hand.
Rosie drops her phone back into her bag again and because it’s Prince and because it’s Eddy’s birthday, she lets herself be led to the makeshift dance floor in front of the sofa.
Rosie loves to dance. Her body flows like liquid, natural and free as she lets the music pour through her.
Seb looks at Rosie– she’s laughing and for the first time tonight she seems at ease, like she’s shrugged something heavy off her shoulders– and, as he looks at her, he feels for an insane moment like he might cry, because all he can think, when he sees his wife’s happiness, is:
How could you, Sebastian?
How fucking could you?