Chapter 60
Rachel
About a fortnight out from Christmas, after picking Emma up from school, I sit alone for a while in our kitchen-diner before Oliver gets home.
I’m attempting meditation, ten guided minutes via Ingrid’s company’s new wellbeing app.
She’s out in LA promoting it at the moment with Sean, who now works with her as her CTO.
They’re spending Christmas there, and I will really miss her: each year it’s Ingrid who supplies the mistletoe, who insists we do Christmas jumpers and Secret Santa, festive karaoke, rude charades – not to mention destroying us all with the world’s most potent eggnog.
Emma comes into the room, still in her uniform, and slides silently on to the stool opposite me. Her hair glimmers gold in the glow of the bulbs I’ve strung around the room.
I always love this quiet time with her, just the two of us, when things spill softly out of her about school and her friends, small dilemmas and funny things that have happened, ideas for the weekend.
And I treasure it, because I know that all too soon she’ll be going straight to her bedroom after school and I will be coaxing her to talk to me, having to work far harder to keep track of the person she is becoming.
And perhaps our time together also feels special because she might soon be joined by a sibling.
Or is it, in fact, more that she might not?
Oliver and I have been trying to conceive for three years now, and, lately, everything we’ve been throwing at it has been beginning to feel faintly house-of-cards.
Hope built with bated breath from fertility vitamins and acupuncture, special tea and scheduled sex, reflexology, guilt trips, tears.
Emma peels the foil thoughtfully from a mince pie. Oliver has a thing about not eating Christmas food before the day itself, but I have a shelf of festive contraband hidden in the larder, which Emma and I enjoy raiding whenever his back is turned.
I shut down the app and take off my reading glasses. ‘What’s on your mind, sweetheart?’ This, I have found, is much more effective than just asking if she’s okay, which is far easier for her to shut down by way of a single syllable.
‘Did you know that Uncle Josh took a pill to stop him getting older?’
I feel my blood turn to iced water. ‘Where did you hear that, darling?’
She bites into the mince pie. ‘Dad told me.’
I feel a tiny flare of anger, quick and bright as a struck match. Lawrence cannot have imparted this information by accident. Is he still so bitter about Josh that he would involve his nine-year-old in weaponising his past?
Emma is aware I used to be married to the man she knows as Uncle Josh. But I’ve never really told her how or why it ended – only that we drifted apart, over time.
We bumped into him in town not long ago. He bought Emma a doughnut, and they chatted about Harry Potter, then she grilled him about being an author. I noticed he was no longer wearing his wedding ring, which made me sad and relieved, all at once.
It always seemed to me that Emma and Josh had a special bond. Some of my happiest memories are of Josh making her laugh as a toddler, so hard she’d get the hiccups. He’s just one of those people who has a magic touch with kids. I’ve never doubted he would have been an amazing dad.
Sometimes the guilt swamps me: that I am the reason he never got to do that. That he may never get to do it. But then I have to remind myself – as Ingrid would say – that Josh made his choices. Still. The feeling of culpability never quite goes away.
Emma looks up at me. ‘Did he, then?’ she says, through another mouthful of pastry.
It is hard to believe, sometimes, that Emma is only nine. Because she is already so smart. And we never lie to each other.
I glance for a moment towards the darkened window. There is no point in making this about her father: she wouldn’t know why, and it wouldn’t be fair. ‘Yes,’ I say eventually.
‘That’s so cool,’ she says, screwing up the mince pie foil and wiping her mouth.
‘What do you think is cool about it?’
‘Not ever getting old, or wrinkly,’ Emma says.
I smile. ‘There’s actually nothing bad about getting old, or having wrinkles. It’s natural, very normal.’ I lean forward. ‘I have them. Look.’
What I don’t say is that occasionally, fleetingly, of course I fantasise about being twenty-nine again. Firm-bodied and shiny-haired, with skin that looks better under bright light, not worse.
She peers at me. ‘No-but-I-mean really wrinkly. Like Grandad.’
‘Well, I’m sure Grandad would tell you he’s proud of his wrinkles.’
‘Why, though?’
‘Because all of Grandad’s wrinkles add up to a million smiles.’
We saw Dad just last night, when he came to ours for tea. He ruffled Emma’s hair and called her poppet, the way he loves to do.
Oliver asked once if I minded Dad ruffling her hair like that.
‘Of course not,’ I said, bemused. ‘Why would I?’
He just shrugged. ‘It tangles so easily,’ was all he said.
‘Anyway,’ I say to Emma, ‘taking a pill like the one Uncle Josh took wouldn’t just be about appearances, would it?
Imagine if everybody decided to take one.
The world isn’t set up for people to live forever.
And if some people took it and some didn’t, it might be really hard to know how old someone was, when you met them. ’
She nods slowly. ‘I don’t think I’d like to live forever. Like, loads longer than anyone else.’
‘No,’ I say carefully, not wanting to veer too closely towards the subject of death. ‘Me neither.’
Thankfully, her mind is already wandering. ‘Mum, can we finish watching Home Alone? Before Oliver gets back.’
There were countless tiny joys I hadn’t realised were waiting for me when I first became a mother, and this is just one of them.
Snuggling with my daughter beneath a blanket in front of our favourite Christmas film, toes touching, our eyes and smiles meeting at exactly the same moments.
I can’t wait to watch The Holiday with her, too.
But she is not quite old enough yet. So, for now, Macaulay will have to do.
I’d been planning to squeeze in a bit more work before dinner. But then I catch sight of my daughter’s hopeful face, and check the time. Screw it, it’s Christmas. ‘Go on, then. Why not.’