The One Day You Were My Husband (3)
“Carrie! Look at this,” he says, holding the lens reverently. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
I walk over to pick it up. “Oh yes. Stunning.”
I have no idea if it’s stunning, or how he could possibly need another one, but astronomy is a nonnegotiable part of him and I have given up questioning the frequency and scale of his kit purchases. He has promised me he will only ever need the one appallingly expensive telescope that takes up half of our already small spare room, and as long as he honors that I can live with the cameras and lenses and all the sweet retired folk he chats to about supernovae and exoplanets.
He sticks out an arm and pulls me down next to him. “Hello,” he says. This dear man. I lean sideways into his armpit, enjoying the tired, sandy smell of him, the steady rhythm of his heart beating through his jumper. His ribs creak as he lets out a long, quiet yawn.
Robin has supported us single-handedly, often working crushing hours, since I walked away from my career. Encouraging him in his one hobby feels like the least I can do.
“It’s satisfyingly heavy,” I say, moving the lens from hand to hand. “I like it.”
This seems to please him. “The space station’s going to be visible tomorrow night,” he says, nodding at his laptop. “Providing the weather holds up. I was looking at it online with Maeve earlier and she was really interested—I’d love to show it to them. It’d mean a late bedtime, but we could have hot chocolate up in the field. What do you think?”
“That would be lovely. Although it’ll depend on how Raffy’s doing.”
Robin’s face falls. “Our poor furious little tube of Rolos. When did you last check him?”
I look at my watch. “Twenty-one minutes ago. He’s doing OK.”
We took Raffy and Maeve home for dinner after school but then drove back in for their nativity performance at five. “It’s the middle of the night!” Maeve breathed as our headlights scythed through the dense blackness of the moor. She couldn’t believe it. “I bet everyone else is asleep.” She was disappointed and quite angry when we arrived back in town to the sight of still-open shops.
The nativity was a little unorthodox. Miss Redmond had had the kids design their own costumes and they’d made a “very funny” plan to dress as sweets and chocolate. Except for Maeve, who made me dress her as a professional gymnast with scraped-back hair and a sparkly leotard. Visibly nervous, she reverted to her default showing-off and did two cartwheels and a roundoff on her way to the Baby Jesus—she was one of the Wise Men—then took out a sheep with her heel. The sheep’s mum deliberately left us out when she circulated with mince pies afterward.
We drove home in high spirits nevertheless, belting “Little Donkey” through open windows at the ponies grazing by the road, but when we got out of the car at Cold East Cross to look at the blazing fire of stars above us, I realized Raffy was wheezing, and after that things were a lot less jolly. He’s been fighting a cold all week.
When we got home he didn’t want to take his salbutamol and started to have a meltdown. His breathing deteriorated quickly. Robin, good cop, had to defuse things with all the bribes and tricks you’re not meant to use while Mummy, bad cop and doctor, hovered with his inhaler and spacer and called the pediatric ward at Torbay.
Maeve, who’s already outgrown her relatively minor lung complications, carried on doing gymnastics, ignoring what was happening around her. She’s witnessed this enough times to know there’s little point interrupting. But when we took Raffy up to the bathroom to build up steam, her finite six-year-old’s patience vanished. She started yelling at Raffy to stop “being stupid” and when he didn’t stop crying she burst into the bathroom with her giant stuffed dog, bashing at his Rolo costume, shouting “Stop it! STOP IT!” over and over again, until Robin had to pick her up and carry her out of the room.
Poor Raff’s prized Rolo outfit, a cardboard tube we had painted at midnight on Sunday, got badly dented and he went to bed furious and very, very sad. I’ve been up there every hour to monitor his sats since he went to sleep and I’ll be giving him salbutamol through the night. He’s doing well—it was a minor attack, and the on-call pediatrician wasn’t overly concerned—but I’ll be checking him all night, because I’m his mother and I can’t not.
“He’ll be OK,” Robin says gently. “We’ll see what the hospital says tomorrow. But it isn’t anywhere near as bad as it’s been in the past. A blip.”
He’s right, although I want to dismiss him. I don’t like it when Robin worries about the kids less than me, which is all of the time.
“Carrie,” he says, after a pause. “Have you eaten anything this evening?”
“I ate earlier.” I get up and go over to the fire. “With the kids.”
“Are you sure? I only saw you galloping around finishing costumes.”
I smile, caught out. “Fine. I’ll eat.”
I poke at the fire while Robin sets about levering off a square of hardened macaroni. “Well done,” he says.
“You’re a fascist.”
“Tell me about your day,” he replies, watching without comment as I shovel around in the embers with no effect on the flames. Until recently the fire was his jurisdiction, but I’ve been trying to change that.