I'm currently working on Making up for Lost Time Ch. 06, but I found the time to edit a chapter of one of the stories I wrote during my hiatus. It's shorter, coming in around three parts, and it's all about a pregnant woman who's become immune to her husband's compliments. Then, someone arrives who is capable of making her feel good about herself. Very good indeed...
Jen Hartley was thirty-seven weeks pregnant and had stopped believing her husband.
Not about everything. She believed him about the mortgage, and about whose turn it was to put the bins out, and about the noise the car had definitely been making before it definitely stopped making it the moment a mechanic was within earshot. What she had stopped believing was the daily testimony — delivered with his hands full of anti-stretch-mark oil and his face arranged into total sincerity — that she was beautiful.
The oil had been her mother's idea, which was reason enough for Jen to have resisted it for a fortnight before quietly adding it to the big shop. Now it was ritual. Every morning before John left for work, or shuffled the eight feet to the kitchen table that was currently pretending to be his office, he knelt in front of her on the bedroom carpet, warmed a capful between his palms, and worked it into the great pale curve of her, slow and clockwise, while she sat on the edge of the bed with her t-shirt rucked up under her breasts like a woman awaiting a verdict.
There were rules. Clockwise, always, for reasons neither of them could remember or had ever known. Don't neglect the sides. Pay particular attention to the underneath, the overhang she hadn't actually seen in weeks and now knew only by touch and rumour. He was good at it, she'd give him that — thorough, unhurried, frowning slightly, like a man waxing a car he genuinely loved.
"You," he said that Tuesday morning, both hands spread over the summit of her, "look incredible."
"I look like something that washes up on a beach and makes the local news."
"Incredible," he repeated, working oil into her flank.
The problem with John's testimony — and Jen had worked this out around month seven, lying awake at 3 a.m. with a foot lodged under her ribs, with the cold clarity available only to the heavily pregnant and the recently bereaved — was that he was a compromised witness. He had to say it. He was contractually obliged; it was practically in the vows. Worse, he had seen her with norovirus. He had seen her cry at the Christmas adverts, and at one memorable low point at an advert for sofas. A man whose standards had survived all that could not be trusted on the subject of whether she currently resembled an attractive woman or a duvet with a head. His evidence was inadmissible. She loved him for giving it anyway.
So he knelt, and oiled, and said incredible, and she heard there, there, and the day began.
The house had spent the spring rearranging itself around the baby, the way houses do. John's office — formerly the second bedroom, formerly his — was now a nursery, painted a lemon yellow chosen for its neutrality, because they had decided not to find out what they were having. The cot had gone up over a long Saturday that featured three separate arguments with an Allen key and one short period during which John, on his back, half under the frame, had genuinely considered breaking the damn thing out of spite. A mobile of small felt sheep hung over it, rotating gently whenever anyone opened the door, as if the sheep were checking who it was.
On the windowsill sat the baby monitor, a sleek white obelisk with a camera, night vision, two-way talk, and an app — the most surveilled cot in the South East, John had said, screwing the bracket to the wall. He had tested it a fortnight ago from a car park, sitting in the car with the engine off, watching a live feed of an empty cot with an expression of deep satisfaction he would have struggled to justify out loud. The app could send his phone an alert whenever it detected motion. He had meant to show Jen how it all worked, and somehow never had. He'd get round to it.
Evicted from the second bedroom, John's working life had been promised a new home: a garden office, at the bottom of the lawn, which had gone up over March and April and now stood insulated, plastered, and smelling gorgeously of sawdust and possibility — and entirely without electricity, which was where Darren came in.
Darren had been the builders' recommendation. Sound bloke, tidy work, won't have your floorboards up for fun. He had arrived on Monday in a grey Transit with D. MERCER ELECTRICAL on the side in faded letters, walked the site with his hands in his pockets, sucked his teeth, and quoted a number that made John wince. First fix was already done — the cabling run under the lawn and through the walls while the plaster was off. What remained was the second fix, the finishing: consumer unit, sockets, lights, the works, plus one or two bits in the house while he was at it. Rest of the week, he'd said. Done by Friday.
He was somewhere in his late thirties, Darren, with the build of a man whose exercise was lifting things for a living rather than for Instagram, and a way of standing back from a problem with his head tilted that suggested the problem would shortly be solved and didn't need to make a fuss about it. He said please and thank you, wiped his feet, and kept his radio at a volume that acknowledged other people existed.
Jen, who was three weeks into maternity leave and going gently insane, had decided he was the most interesting thing to happen to a Tuesday in some time.
Nobody warns you about the boredom. That was Jen's considered position on maternity leave, three weeks in. They warn you about the tiredness, the heartburn, the ankles — God, did they warn you about the ankles — but nobody mentions that you will have packed the hospital bag, unpacked it, repacked it to a superior system, washed and folded clothes for a person who does not exist yet in three ascending sizes, and organised the cupboard under the stairs, all by the second Tuesday, and that the remaining weeks will then stretch in front of you like the M6.
She was a primary school teacher by trade — Year Two, twenty-nine children, crowd control with occasional sums — and her days had previously been loud and structured and full of people who told her with total honesty exactly what they thought of her. (For her birthday, the class had drawn portraits. In nineteen of them she was a circle with a face. She'd laughed. Mostly.) Now her days were silent and shapeless, and the only scheduled events were the 10:30 tea break and the 3 o'clock tea break, which she had instituted on Monday with the relief of a castaway organising the beach.
The electrician took his tea strong, two sugars, and the routine never varied. She would make it in the good mug — the giant one, the builder's mug, John's mug technically but requisitioned for the war effort — and carry it down the lawn, and Darren would hear her coming and stand, and wipe his hands on his trousers, and say thank you.
To the mug. He said thank you to the mug. Or to the skirting board, or to his own boots, or to a point in the middle distance just over her left shoulder where presumably something fascinating was happening.
That Tuesday's half-ten run had been representative. She'd come down the lawn with the mug and a plate of biscuits she had decided at the last moment were not too much (they were possibly slightly too much), and found him kneeling at the new consumer unit, dressing cables into it — and whatever else you could say about the man, he was good to watch work: no wasted movement, each wire stripped and bent and seated in three unhurried motions, the pencil coming down from behind his ear to mark something and going back up like a component returning to its slot.
"How's it all coming?" she'd asked, setting the tea down at the agreed altitude.
"Getting there." This to the consumer unit. "Second fix is the nice bit, to be fair. First fix is all crawling round in the muck before the plaster goes on. This is just making it tidy."
"Well, it looks very tidy."
"Hm," said Darren, and seated another wire.
She'd hovered. She knew she was hovering; she was a woman with a fortnight of silence behind her and a plate of arguably excessive biscuits in her hand, and she would have happily discussed ring mains for an hour if he'd let her. She asked whether it would really all be done by Friday (it would); whether he wanted anything doing for lunch (he had a box, thanks — this addressed to the workbench); she offered the biscuits, and he took one and said "lovely," to the biscuit. And then, because she was a friendly person and the silence had been long: "You'll have to give me the tour when it's finished. I'm going to be out here on maternity leave with no idea what any of the switches do."
There was a pause. And for a second — she'd have sworn to this — he had been about to actually answer her: he'd half-turned, and his eyes had made it as far as her elbow, travelling with the deliberate care of a man carrying something full. Then whatever it was went off the boil, and he said, "It'll all be labelled," to the elbow, and picked the screwdriver back up, and that had been that.
She'd carried the full plate back up the lawn. Labelled. Right.
On Monday she'd thought he was shy. By Tuesday afternoon she had revised her diagnosis, because she'd watched him from the kitchen window talking to the builder who'd dropped off some trim — easy, eye to eye, laughing at something — and understood that Darren was perfectly capable of looking at people. He just wasn't capable of looking at her.
She stood at the window with her hands round her own cooling tea and conducted the trial quickly, the prosecution resting almost before it had begun. She was thirty-seven weeks pregnant. She'd had to give up on her wedding ring in June and her coat did up over precisely none of her. The man could not look at her because there was too much of her to look at, and he was embarrassed — for her, possibly; on behalf of John, conceivably; at the basic spectacle of her, most likely.
She texted her sister.
Electrician update: day two, still cannot look at me. Addresses all remarks to mug. I must look even grosser than I thought.
Claire replied within a minute, because Claire was on her lunch break and lived for this.
or he fancies you. tradesmen love a milf
I'm not a milf, I'm a pre-milf. I'm milf adjacent at BEST. And no — he's seen the ankles, Claire. Nobody fancies these ankles.
you're mad. you've got the boobs of your life and you're glowing
I am not glowing, I am SWEATING. Those are different things.
She took him his 3 o'clock tea anyway, because standards were standards, and lowered it onto the workbench he'd set up — lowering being the only speed she had now; somewhere in the eighth month, putting things down gently had stopped being a choice. Darren was crouched at the consumer unit with a screwdriver, and he thanked her warmly and sincerely without rotating any part of himself in her direction, and Jen walked back up her own lawn feeling — and she interrogated the feeling all the way to the back door, because it seemed so silly — genuinely hurt.
It wasn't that she wanted the electrician to fancy her. Obviously. She was a married woman five minutes from motherhood; the want, whatever it was, wasn't that shape. It was that she had spent thirty-one years being looked at — not adored, nothing dramatic, just included in the ordinary economy of glances that tells a woman she is present in a room — and pregnancy had pulled off a trick she hadn't thought physically possible: it had made her enormous and invisible at the same time. People looked at the bump and addressed the bump and gave up their seats to the bump. The bump was having a wonderful year. She had just assumed that somewhere behind it, she was still faintly visible, like a driver behind a windscreen, and the electrician's devoted study of his own boots every time she waddled into view suggested otherwise.
She went in, and did some folding she'd already done, and tried not to think about her thirstiness for approval.
John worked in risk. Operational risk, for an insurer — a job that consisted, as he explained at parties to people who instantly regretted asking, of putting numbers on things that probably wouldn't happen so that everyone could relax about the fact that occasionally they did. He'd been in the office that day, Tuesdays and Wednesdays being his anchor days, and the 17:12 had actually run, and so it was just gone six when he turned in to their road and saw the grey Transit still parked outside the house, rear doors open, in the lingering golden light of the kind of June evening England produces three of a year and then dines out on.
He slowed as he came up the pavement, composing the small homeowner pleasantries — how's it going, shout if you need anything, that sort of thing — and then he heard Darren's voice and understood that Darren, in the driver's seat with the window down and his phone to his ear, had not seen him.
John was not by nature an eavesdropper. He would tell himself this several times over the following days, with decreasing conviction. But the van was between him and his own front gate, and the voice was already mid-sentence, and there is a category of sentence that takes the legs out from under your manners.
"—no, the job's fine. Money's good, bloke's sound, tea's flowing. It's not the job. It's the distraction." A pause. Darren tipped his head back against the rest, eyes closed, a man confessing to his ceiling. "The client's missus. … Mate, I'm being serious. She is heavily pregnant. Due any minute, by the look of her. Out to here." Another pause. A short, rueful laugh. "Yeah. Exactly. You know what pregnant women do to me."
John stopped walking. Afterwards he would be unable to say how long he stood there, laptop bag in hand, on his own pavement, three feet of warm evening air and a sheet of van door between him and the rest of it.
"I've spent two days staring at a consumer unit, Gaz. Two days. She keeps bringing the tea down — lovely, friendly, completely oblivious — and I have to read the label on a junction box like it's scripture, because if I actually look at her I'm done, I'll be staring like a sex case and she'll see how hard I am and probably call the police. … No. No. Course not — a client's wife? That's not — no. I finish Friday, I'm gone, end of. … Yeah. All right. Give us a ring Sunday."
The phone came down. John achieved motion. He came round the end of the van just as Darren swung out of the cab, and the two men did the entire exchange — all right? — yeah, good, getting there — anything you need? — no, all good, I'll crack on first thing — while John's face, to his own quiet astonishment, held. He let himself in, set his bag down in the hall with great care, as though it contained the conversation and might detonate, and stood for a moment listening to the van pull away.
The first thing he felt, he was pleased to note, was the correct thing: a flare of something territorial and prehistoric, that's my wife, brief and hot and gone almost before he'd registered it, like a struck match in the rain.
The second thing arrived as a series of translations. You know what pregnant women do to me — said not as a boast but as a complaint, the way a man says you know what I'm like about heights. The two days of label-reading. The boots, the skirting board, the mug. He thought of Jen at dinner the night before, retailing the electrician's rudeness with wounded comedy — the wall, John, he thanks the wall — and felt the whole picture rotate once, smoothly, into focus. The man wasn't ignoring her. The man was avoiding her.
The third thing he became aware of was happening below his belt, and he took it into the downstairs loo and examined it the way you'd examine a parcel you didn't remember ordering.
His wife — his huge, despondent, certain-she-was-invisible wife, currently audible overhead as a series of slow creaks moving between airing cupboard and nursery — was, it turned out, another man's type. Not generously, not charitably — specifically. Catastrophically. A capable grown man with his own van had spent two working days unable to look at her, in the way that people can't look at the sun.
And she had no idea.
John washed his hands, studied himself in the small mirror, and went up to dinner carrying the most interesting piece of information he had ever owned.
Dinner was toad in the hole, the kitchen full of the smell of batter and sausage, the windows open to the warm evening. Jen had cooked it as a mood-correction measure, comfort food being one of the few levers still available to her, and was three forkfuls in when she returned, as he had somehow known she would, to the topic.
"He did it again, by the way."
"Who did what?" said John, who knew precisely who had done what.
"Darren. The tea. I took it down at three, I practically curtseyed, and he said — to the workbench — 'lovely, thanks.' To the workbench, John. The workbench got more eye contact than me." She speared a sausage. "I've decided I genuinely don't care."
"Mm," said John.
"It's just rude, is what it is. I know I'm hardly a — I know what I look like at the moment. But there's basic manners, isn't there? You look at people. People are looked at." She caught herself, and laughed, and rubbed the side of the bump with the heel of one hand, a gesture she'd developed lately that he found unaccountably moving. "Listen to me. Hormonal woman shouts at cloud. He's probably just one of those blokes who can't talk to women."
"He talked to the builder all right," John said, before he could stop himself.
"Thank you. That's what I said. So it's me, isn't it? It's specifically me." She said it lightly, in the voice she used for things that weren't light.
There were, John reflected, men who could sit on a secret like his without leakage — without a tell, without a single molecule of it escaping through the face — and he had always assumed, on no evidence, that he was one of them. He spent the rest of dinner finding out that he was, but only just. Twice he caught himself smiling at his plate, and converted the smile into appreciative chewing. Because here was his wife, building a small sad theory of her own invisibility out of the exact evidence that proved the opposite, and he was the only person at the table who could read the data correctly.
He could tell her now. He could simply say it: funny thing, actually, about Darren. The whole misunderstanding would unwind in thirty seconds and she'd be flattered and appalled and they'd laugh, and that would be that.
He didn't say it. He told himself it was kindness — not the sort of thing to land on a woman over sausages; she'd want to take the news lying down, so to speak. He told himself the timing wanted choosing, the way you choose your moment with any sensitive disclosure. He told himself several true and reasonable things, and underneath all of them, in the dark, in the part of himself he kept off the books, the real reason sat quietly with its hands folded and waited for bedtime.
By half ten Jen was installed in the bed in her nest — the architecture of pillows that assembled itself around her each night, its central structural member being the great C-shaped pregnancy pillow they had named Gerald, who slept between them now like a chaperone, and about whom John made the same joke roughly weekly ("If you and Gerald want some time alone—") to the same reception.
She had her phone propped on the bump, which had its uses as furniture, and was scrolling, and John was getting into his side, and he was still choosing his moment when the moment was chosen for him: her phone, with the malice of all phones, had surfaced a memory. Two years ago. Somebody's wedding in Northumberland. Jen in the green dress, the one with the wrap waist, laughing at something off-camera, collarbones and cheekbones and one knee showing through the slit, a woman who took up an ordinary amount of space and had no idea that this was a privilege.
"Oh, there she is," Jen said, with a brightness that wouldn't have fooled a customs officer. "Look at her. I used to have a waist. An actual waist. I keep thinking I've put it somewhere."
"Jen."
"I'm fine. I'm not — I'm fine." She put the phone face-down on the duvet, which was worse than anything she could have said, and looked at the ceiling. "I know it's temporary. I know it's for something, I'm not an idiot, it's the best thing I'll ever make and I'd do it twice over. I just—" Her hands moved on the bump, that slow circling. "I miss being seen, John. People look at me now like I'm infrastructure. Like I'm a roundabout. Or they don't look at me at all. And don't" — she pointed at the ceiling, warningly, as he drew breath — "do not tell me I'm beautiful, because you're my husband, you're obliged, it's like the Queen's guard, you'd say it under torture."
And there it was: the moment, gift-wrapped, hand-delivered. The narrator of this story would like to note that John genuinely believed, as he opened his mouth, that he was about to perform an act of pure marital charity.
"Funny you should say that," he said. "Because I heard something today. About you."
She rotated her head on the pillow. "About me."
"Overheard, technically." He had her now; he made himself unhurried. "When I got home. Darren was still outside, in the van, on the phone to some mate — Gaz, I believe, for the record — and the window was down, and he didn't see me. And he was talking about this job. And about why it's been the hardest job he's had all year to concentrate on."
"Oh God." She pushed herself up the pillows, appalled, delighted, a woman bracing for gossip. "It's me, isn't it? He's been moaning about me. What — the tea? Is it the tea? Is it me?"
"It's you," John confirmed. "It is very much you. He said — and I want you to know I'm quoting now, word for word —" and he laid it out on the duvet between them like a jeweller laying out a stone: "'You know what pregnant women do to me.'"
There was a silence while the sentence performed its work.
"Do to him," Jen said.
"Do to him."
"What do pregnant women do to—" and then her face did something John would have paid considerable money to film: the eyebrows still asking the question while the eyes, several frames ahead, arrived at the answer. "No."
"Yes."
"That is not a thing."
"Of course it is."
"Stop it."
"Two days, Jen. The man has spent two days staring into a fuse board because — again, quoting — 'if I actually look at her, I'm done.' He then said some things about not going near a client's wife, very honourably, I thought, and that he's finished Friday and gone, and then he rang off, and I came in and ate sausages opposite you and said nothing, which I'd like noted as one of the great performances."
Jen was staring at him. And John watched as the last two days re-ran themselves behind his wife's eyes with new subtitles. The mug. The skirting board. The workbench. The middle distance over her left shoulder. Every averted glance, every thank-you delivered to an inanimate object.
"I thought he couldn't stand the sight of me," she said slowly.
"He can't," said John. "Just not for the reason you thought."
"He looks at the wall—"
"Because the alternative is looking at you. He said — I shit you not — that he wasn't prepared to stand in a client's garden staring at a client's wife because 'she'll see how hard I am and probably call the police'."
"Oh my God," she half laughed and gasped. She was lying very still, both hands on the bump, eyes on the ceiling, and the corner of her mouth was misbehaving. "Oh my God. I curtseyed at him with a mug and the poor man's been—" She turned her head. "You're not winding me up. Swear. Because if this is some kind of scheme to flatter me, John, if you and my sister have—"
"Word for word," he said. "On my life. 'You know what pregnant women do to me.' Your electrician is a man with a thing, and you, Jennifer, are the thing."
She was quiet for a moment.
"Well," she said, in a smaller voice, "This is scandalous."
"Of course."
"He's here to do the sockets. It's completely inappropriate." A pause. "What did he sound like? When he said it. Was it — was he being horrible? Laddy? Was it a horrible laddy thing?"
John considered this with the care it deserved, because he had considered it already, several times, in the downstairs loo. "No," he said. "That's the thing. He sounded afflicted."
And Jen laughed — the real one, the unguarded honk she'd been issuing less and less of lately — and the bump shook, and Gerald slid an inch, and something in the room had changed temperature and they both knew it and neither of them had named it yet. The conversation could still, at this point, have gone several ways. There was a perfectly good exit nearby marked isn't that funny, well, goodnight. They drove past it together at speed.
"So," said John, to the ceiling, in the carefully uncommitted voice of a man pushing a boat off a beach to see what it does, "do you fancy him?"
"John."
"It's a simple question."
"It is not remotely a simple question. I'm thirty-seven weeks pregnant. I don't fancy people any more, I'm not equipped. All available staff have been redeployed. I'm a — I'm a roundabout, we've covered this."
"That's not a no."
"It's—" she started, and stopped. And here is where the evening turned, on as small a thing as this: Jen Hartley, who had spent two days being hurt by a man's wayward eyes, discovered she was now too pleased to lie. "He has nice arms," she said, with dignity. "He carries the cable drums up from the van like they're nothing and he has nice arms and good hands and he doesn't fuss, and I'm pregnant, not dead. Yes. Fine. Yes. In an abstract way. In a — in a fully theoretical, never-to-be-actioned way, the way you fancy a weatherman."
"A weatherman who fancies you back."
"A weatherman," said Jen, "who apparently cannot be left alone with me for health and safety reasons," and she meant it as a joke, she would always afterwards be quite sure she had meant it as a joke, and it came out of her mouth and landed between them on Gerald and did not behave like one.
There was a silence with a great deal of import in it.
"Should I be worried?" said John. His voice had moved house: down half an octave, somewhere less furnished. "Leaving you home alone with him all day?"
"Definitely," said Jen. "We're at it constantly. The tea rounds are a front."
"Ten thirty and three."
"A woman has needs. He's very punctual." She shifted in the nest; the laugh in her voice had gone slightly liquid at the edges. "It's all very efficient, he barely takes his tool belt off—"
"What would he do?" said John.
"What?"
"If he wasn't honourable. If you weren't a client's wife. The man can't look at you, Jen. So what's he not letting himself think about, when he's reading the label on the junction box?" He had come up on one elbow now, over the ridge of Gerald, and his hand had found the summit of the bump, where the skin was tight and warm through the cotton, and began, absently, clockwise — the licensed touch, the medicinal one, except that nothing about the room currently resembled medicine. "Go on. You're the one who's seen him all week. Professional opinion."
And Jen — Mrs Hartley, Year Two, twenty-nine children, very firm on the difference between an inside voice and an outside voice — looked at her husband over the chaperone pillow, did one final check of something — his eyes, mostly; whatever she was looking for there, she found it — and answered the question.
"He'd be gentle," she said. "At first. He'd think I was made of glass. They all do, now — the midwife talks to me like I'm a listed building." Her husband's hand kept its slow orbit; she watched it go round. "He'd be all — careful. Reverent. Hands like he's signing for a delivery."
"And then?"
"And then," said Jen, "he'd find out I'm not made of glass."
John removed Gerald from the bed.
It was less elegant than that sentence suggests — Gerald was five feet long and did not go quietly, and there was a moment of undignified grappling before the pillow hit the carpet with a soft flump and the two of them were left facing each other across an expanse of mattress that hadn't existed for months. Jen laughed; then she stopped laughing, because John was looking at her in a way he hadn't for some time — or rather, she corrected herself, in a way she hadn't noticed for some time, which was beginning to feel like an important distinction, and one with a wider application than this bedroom.
She reached for the lamp. It was reflex, four months deep: clothes off, lights off, the merciful dark.
"Leave it on."
She left it on.
Getting a t-shirt off over a bump at thirty-seven weeks is not a seduction, it is a logistics operation, and Jen performed it the way she now performed everything, in stages, with a pause in the middle for re-planning. Normally she'd have hated him watching. Normally he'd have known better than to watch, and would have developed a sudden interest in his phone while she wrestled herself free; that was the kindness they'd negotiated without ever discussing it. Tonight he watched the whole graceless procedure with his head propped on one hand and open appetite on his face, and Jen emerged from the neck-hole pink and cross and said, "You could help," and he said, "I could," and didn't, and she found, examining herself for outrage, none available.
She was enormous in the lamplight. There was the bump, vast and taut and faintly ridiculous, the navel flattened to almost nothing; there were the breasts that had gone up two sizes since Christmas and arrived somewhere frankly pornographic, resting now on the upper slope of the bump because there was nowhere else for them to be; there was the dark line running south from her navel like a seam, like the mark where she'd been assembled. Six hours ago she'd stood in front of the wardrobe mirror cataloguing all of it as damage.
"Tell me again," she said. "What he said. Exactly."
John moved down the bed. "You know" — he kissed the side of the bump, unhurried — "what pregnant women" — the summit, where the skin was tightest, where she was most drum-like and least hers — "do to me."
"And he meant—" Her voice had lost its footing. "What I do to him. He's down at the bottom of my garden wiring a consumer unit and physically can't look at — this—"
"Can't trust himself," John corrected, into her skin. "Different thing. Much better thing," and his hand travelled down over the curve of her and arrived between her legs, where they both received the evening's next piece of information at the same moment.
"Oh," said Jen, in a small voice.
She was soaked. Not the polite beginnings of interest — soaked, embarrassingly, conclusively, through the cotton of her knickers, and at the first press of his fingers her hips rose off the mattress to meet them with a frankness that bypassed her entirely. The pregnancy books had promised her a second-trimester surge — increased blood flow, heightened sensitivity, said the books, with their watercolour diagrams — and it had never come, and she'd filed it with the glow under things other women get. It arrived now, five weeks late, all at once, like a delayed train finally pulling in with every apology and all its freight.
"Well," said John, who'd had a speech of gentle encouragement half-prepared and now binned it, "Well, well, well."
"Shut up," she said, lifting her hips so he could draw her knickers down — another logistics operation, ankles, knees, the bump making its presence felt at every stage like a large committee member who has to be consulted on everything. "It's the hormones. It's a medical situation. Don't read anything into—" His fingers returned, bare now, sliding through her, and the sentence ended in a sound she'd have been mortified by in April.
What followed, followed for a long time. He was thorough about it, in the way he was thorough about the oil — slow, clockwise, paying attention to the underneath — her on her side first, his chest against her back, his hand reaching over and down while he talked into the back of her neck. Because he did talk. That was the discovery of the evening, or one of them. Ten years of perfectly nice, perfectly quiet marital sex, and it turned out all either of them had been waiting for was a subject.
"He's down there all day tomorrow," John said, conversational, two fingers moving in her, the heel of his hand against her clit, her arse pushed back against him hard. "While I'm at the office. Just you and him."
"Just me and him," Jen agreed, unevenly.
"You'll take him his tea at half ten."
"Like a good hostess."
"And he won't look at you. He'll stare into that fuse board with everything he's got. And you'll know exactly — exactly —" his fingers picked out the word — "what it's costing him."
"God," said Jen, with feeling, to the wall.
"What it does to him. You walking down that lawn. Thirty-seven weeks of you in a sundress, coming towards him, carrying tea, completely off-limits—"
And Jen, who had said bits to her own GP until the age of twenty-six, heard herself say, clearly, into the lamplit bedroom: "Fuck me."
She didn't say it, was the thing — it wasn't in her repertoire; in ten years it had never once been in the repertoire — and John went briefly and absolutely still behind her, the way you do when a grenade lands in front of you, and then he was fumbling himself out of his boxers with a haste that no longer had anything performed about it at all.
He took her first like that, on their sides, behind her — the late-pregnancy standard, the only arrangement the committee reliably approved — and the first slow push into her drew a long vowel out of them both.
She was a different country in there: hotter, fuller, everything closer to the surface, the blood-flow the books had promised apparently all real and all reporting for duty. He moved in her without hurry, and his hand spread wide over the bump, holding the whole taut weight of it, and that — that, she noted, somewhere in the part of her brain still taking minutes — was what did it. Not despite. Because. His hand wasn't avoiding the bump, wasn't working politely around it the way it had for months; it was on it like a flag.
They hadn't done this since week twenty-nine. Neither of them had declared the drought; it had simply arrived, the way droughts do, out of an accumulation of perfectly reasonable individual evenings. She had felt less like a woman than like a vehicle someone important was travelling in; he had developed a terror of — he could never finish the thought — dislodging something, despite the midwife's breezy assurances and a leaflet, which he had read twice, entitled Sex in Later Pregnancy with a watercolour couple on the front smiling like they knew something. Two months of kind, careful goodnights. And now this — her arse pushed back into his lap, his mouth at her ear, the angle shallow and easy and somehow more than it had any right to be, and the leaflet's watercolour couple thoroughly vindicated.
"All right?" he said into her ear, an old habit. "If anything feels—"
"If you stop," said Jen, with remarkable clarity, "I will cry. Actual crying. The neighbours will hear it and you will have to explain it to them."
"Noted."
"Half ten and three," she said, a few slow strokes later, in a different voice — and he realised she had picked the subject back up, was carrying it now herself, turning it over. "That's all he gets of me. Two mugs of tea a day." Her hand found his on the bump and pressed it flatter. "You get all of it, and he gets — God, that's so unfair, when you think about it—"
"Tragic," John agreed, against the back of her neck.
"You could come home at lunch one day," she said. "Watch me take it down to him."
The sound John made was not a word. It was not, both of them noted — she with interest, he with something close to alarm — anywhere near a word.
The thing her mind kept circling back to while her body got on with the evening's main business, was that there were three people in this bed and it was fine. Better than fine. She examined it from a few angles, expecting to find guilt, and found instead that Darren-in-the-bed was not actually Darren at all — not the man with the lunch box and the honourable code who would be mortified to his boots — but a figure, a shared fiction, an idea on a lead that she and John were both holding. That seemed allowed. That seemed, if anything, like the most married thing they had ever done.
"Wait," she said.
John stopped as though unplugged. "What — is it—"
"No. Nothing's wrong. I want—" And here Jen Hartley met the evening's last frontier of embarrassment, looked it up and down, and walked through it. "I want to be on top. I want you to see me."
The manoeuvre that followed will not be described in full, in fairness to all parties. At thirty-seven weeks you do not swing a leg over a husband so much as dock with him — there were stages, and a pause for re-planning, and a moment when Gerald was very nearly recalled to service as structural support, and one knee placement that drew from Jen a word she'd have confiscated in the classroom. "This was more graceful in my head," she muttered, somewhere in the middle of it.
"It's extremely graceful from here," said John, from underneath, and was surprised to find he meant it.
And then she was up, and settled, and full of his cock, and still.
The lamp saw everything. She rose over him in its light — the bump huge between them, resting its lower curve against him; her breasts heavy on its slope; her hair down and everywhere; the dark seam of her running up the middle of her like the join in something handmade — and the old instinct arrived right on schedule, the fold-your-arms, find-the-duvet, angle-yourself-smaller instinct that had governed four months of getting changed.
She let it arrive. She looked at her husband looking at her and she sent the instinct away.
She wanted to be seen. That was the whole of it. All those months of wanting the lights off, and underneath it, folded so small she'd missed it: the opposite, sitting there the entire time like a switch waiting to be labelled.
She began to move.
It was nothing like their old arrangement, where motion was his department. Up here everything was hers — the depth hers, the pace hers, the choice of slow, which she made and then enforced, was hers — and John lay pinned under the working weight of her with his hands full of bump and an expression of a man seeing his wife anew. When his hands travelled up to her breasts she hissed — "careful, they're—" — and he gentled, and she covered his hands with hers and pressed them back harder — "not that careful" — and the recalibration cost him visibly.
"This is what he thinks about," she said, riding him, breathless, the words coming apart at their edges. "In the van. On the phone to Gaz, poor Gaz. This. Exactly this." She pressed his palms into the curve of her, "This is the thing. I'm the thing."
"You're the thing," John managed.
"Tell me what he said—"
"You know what pregnant women do to me," he said, raggedly, and Jen came.
It went through her in a way she didn't recognise. Her orgasms of recent months — the rare, administrative ones — had been small, local affairs; this one started where he was and went everywhere there was, and she heard herself being loud about it from what seemed like a row or two back, inside voice gone, outside voice gloriously deployed, her hands braced on his chest and the whole of her shuddering above him. And somewhere in the middle of it her body, which had spent months giving things away without consulting her, gave one more: a bead of colostrum, then a second, welling and running and falling — a single warm drop landing on John's chest, where he did not wipe it away.
He registered that — the not minding; the opposite of minding — in the last coherent corner of his mind, alongside the sight of her: upright, enormous, lamplit, riding out the end of it with her head thrown back like figureheads he had seen on ships. Then she ground down onto him once, deliberately, watching his face do what it did, and he stopped having thoughts of any kind for a while.
The lamp shone on.
She came down off him in stages — everything in stages — and lay alongside, one leg hooked over his, the bump settling against his hip.
"Well," said Jen, eventually, to the ceiling.
"Mm," said John, into her hair.
There was a long, well-fed silence. Neither of them attempted the post-match analysis; some marital wisdom, operating well below the level of decision, told them both that the thing they had just done would not survive being explained, and they declined, jointly and wordlessly, to explain it.
She lay there, enormous, slick with sweat and the rest of it, leaking slightly from more locations than she cared to audit, listening to her own heart come down through the floors of itself, and felt — she checked twice, because the result seemed implausible — magnificent.
Afterwards, there was the matter of the wet patch. A towel laid down beforehand would have been the work of moments; foresight, John conceded, had not been the theme of the evening. There was Jen's expedition to the loo, because at thirty-seven weeks the bladder is a tenant with a key to every room and there is no act, however transporting, that it will not interrupt or invoice; she went in stages, wincing comically, one hand under the bump, and paused at the bathroom door to look back at him in a way that ten years of marriage had not previously produced.
Gerald was reinstated. The lamp went off. The house settled around them, ticking.
And in the dark, in the manner of married people, they each filed the evening separately, without conferring.
Jen's version: a kindness, basically. A silly, generous game her husband had invented to make her feel better, which had worked — God, had it worked — and which belonged to the category of things you do once, like swimming at midnight on holiday. Lovely. Contained. Harmless. She was asleep in minutes, one hand on the bump, smiling faintly, while the baby, night owl that it was, drummed its small heels against the world.
John's version, composed at greater length while the ceiling failed to hold his attention: a one-off. Obviously. A vitamin shot for the third trimester — you couldn't, in any case, repeat it; it had been a found thing, a windfall, you can't engineer a windfall. He had an early start. He should sleep. He thought about Darren's van pulling up at eight, and the tea going down the lawn at half ten, and himself forty minutes away at a desk assessing risk, and he examined the small bright coal of feeling this produced for quite a long time without ever quite agreeing with himself on what to call it.
Harmless, they had each concluded, in their separate currencies. It is the word people reach for once they have already decided to do the thing again.