That every time I had to dispense forgiveness in the following weeks, I loved him more afterwards and not less, was also incredible to her and eventually to me.
*
If my daughter thinks he’s good enough, then so do I, was all my father said when I asked him if he liked Jonathan, the morning after the dinner. My mother said he absolutely wasn’t the kind of man she had imagined I’d choose and consequently, she adored him. I told her I couldn’t tell, especially not from the way she had flung her arms around Jonathan’s neck and tried to initiate some sort of dance in the foyer as we were all standing around saying goodbye, or the fact that she’d laughed so hysterically when he’d leaned in to kiss her cheek and by some wrong angling of their heads, they had caught the corner of each other’s mouths.
I moved in with him the following weekend.
*
Because Ingrid’s children look like her, they look like me. People in the street – older ladies who stop me and say you have got your hands full or, alternatively, he is too big for a pram – do not believe me when I say I am not their mother, so I keep walking and let them think that I am.
*
There were two en suites attached to Jonathan’s bedroom and he came into mine on Sunday morning as I was pressing a pill out of the sheet into my hand, saying he was bored and had started missing me the second I got up.
Before, we’d been lying in bed; Jonathan drinking a tiny espresso produced by the expensive coffee machine he’d bought himself as an engagement present the previous day, while I studied the engagement ring he’d chosen on the way home and just given me, sliding it onto my finger with ease because it was too big.
Now, in the bathroom, he picked something of mine off the sink, then seeing the pill in my hand, asked me what it was. I said birth control and told him to please go out. Jonathan pretended to look wounded but left. I swallowed the pill and put the packet back in my make-up bag, a hidden pocket.
I came out and saw him back in bed, propped up against his European pillows, apparently in the throes of an epiphany. He patted the space beside him. Before I was all the way there, he grabbed my hand and pulled me onto the bed.
‘Do you know what Martha? Fuck the birth control. Let’s have a baby.’
I said, ‘I don’t want a baby.’
‘Not a baby – our baby. Can you imagine? My looks, your brains. How can you wait?’
‘I’m not waiting. I never want one. Neither do you.’
‘And yet, I just suggested it.’
‘You told me,’ I said his name because he wasn’t listening, ‘you told me the second time we met that you didn’t want children.’
He laughed. ‘I was front-running it, Martha, in case you turned out to be one of those women who is desperate for a –’ Jonathan interrupted himself. ‘Imagine a girl. Me with a daughter, a tribe of them actually. It would be phenomenal.’
Already and from then on, Jonathan was consumed by the idea, in the same way he would be if one of his university friends called to say they should go skiing in Japan ASAP or buy shares in a boat. He kicked the covers back and sprung off the bed, saying he was so convinced he could change my mind, he might as well put one in me now before he had to leave for the gym so that it was already underway by the time I did.
I laughed. He told me he was deadly serious, and went over to his wardrobes that looked like a stretch of mirrored wall.
My suitcases were in his way, open and empty but surrounded by the clothes that I had taken out the day I arrived and was still in the process of putting away. He asked me to take care of it while he was out because the whole area was starting to look like the square footage beneath a TK Maxx sale rail.
‘Have you ever seen inside a TK Maxx, Jonathan?’
‘I’ve heard tell.’
He opened the wardrobe doors and, as he was dressing said, ‘Apart from the risk of my daughter also being a slattern, you’d be a ravishing mother, ravishing.’ He jogged back to the bed, kissed me and said, ‘Fucking ravishing.’
Once he was gone, I went back into the en suite and started running the bath.
8
THE NIGHT I got engaged to Jonathan was also the night I found out, beside a row of commercial rubbish bins, that Patrick had been in love with me since 1994.
I had come down, hoping Ingrid might still be on the street. There was no one. I crossed over and stood under an awning, unready to go back upstairs. It was raining and water was sheeting off the sides and thundering onto the footpath. I had been there for a few minutes when Oliver and Patrick appeared out of the lobby. Seeing me, they bolted across and pressed in on either side. Oliver reached into his jacket pocket, took out a cigarette, lit it behind his hand and asked me what I was doing.