I said she could choose. At Soho House, wearing Chloé, holding lily of the valley flown in from somewhere, I told Jonathan I was so happy I felt like I was on drugs. He told me he was positively ecstatic, and actually was on drugs.
*
Patrick accepted the invitation to my wedding. Peregrine, walking the Camino de Santiago with Jeremy, sent his deepest regrets and an antique oyster knife.
*
We had a honeymoon in Ibiza, which was short but in dog years, proportionate to our marriage. Jonathan said it was a crime he hadn’t already taken me to his favourite place in the world which was, he promised, nothing like its reputation. I said I would go as long as we stayed somewhere that was far away from everything.
In the members’ lounge, waiting for our flight, I told Jonathan I had changed my mind. He was sitting in a deep armchair reading the Weekend FT with his feet up on the low table in front of him.
‘Scratch too late, I’d say, darling. We’re boarding in twenty.’
I said no. ‘About having a baby.’
His campaign had been relentless over the six weeks since he first suggested it, and he seemed unsurprised to have broken me so quickly; he said in that case, I could look forward to being thoroughly knocked up by the time we got back to London, unaware that the effort he had invested in changing my mind had been wasted. I had flushed the pills that I told him were birth control, and the pills that really were, down the toilet, while he was on his way to the gym.
It was not my intention, but while the bath was running I looked in the mirror and remembered how I had appeared in it on the night of Jonathan’s dinner, the rictus expression on my face. I remembered the minutes after he proposed, standing in front of my family while they laughed and laughed at the idea of me being a mother. Jonathan did not think it was hilarious any more. He thought I would be a fucking ravishing mother. Standing over the toilet I pressed the pills out of the foil one by one. They were already dissolving in the water before I pushed its hidden flush.
Once Jonathan had gone back to his newspaper I looked around the airport lounge for a moment, then got up to get a drink. A woman in the next circle of chairs was so enormously pregnant she had balanced a small plate of sandwiches on the top of her stomach. As I passed her, I tucked my hair behind my ears, both sides at once to hide my face because I was smiling in a way that would make me seem mad.
Jonathan and I flew business class. We drank champagne from miniature beakers. I found out that my new husband owned an eye mask that he had bought in a shop, not retained from a previous flight. All the way there, I thought about my baby.
*
We got to the villa in the early afternoon. While I was unpacking, Jonathan suggested a swim followed by some pre-prandial fornicating. I told him I felt tired, that I would sleep while he swam and join him for the sex part. He had already changed into his floral trunks and did his famous impression of a sulking child on his way to the door – the bottom lip, the crossed arms, the stomping. I had a shower and got into bed.
The housekeeper woke me up, apologising that she needed to come in and close the shutters to keep the mosquitos out now that the sun was setting. She said the husband would be unhappy to come back and find she had let the beautiful wife get eaten to the death on the honeymoon. I asked if she knew where the husband was. He had gone in the taxi to the town and even though, she said, the husband had told her he would be back at eight, it was nearly nine and she did not know what to do with the dinner that had been ready for a long time.
I ate on the terrace, at a table that had been carefully set for two and was hastily reset for one while I stood waiting. Excessive sad-eyed smiling, and fussing with napkins and glasses, constant coming in and out to check if the lady likes what she is eating and if she would like more candle for the mosquito and compliments on her youth are the international signs for your marriage is bad.
Afterwards I lay on a lounger beside the pool with a towel around my shoulders, looking at the sea, which rose and fell on the other side of the low stone wall, black and straggled with bits of goldish moonlight. I stayed there until midnight. Jonathan came back early the next morning, his septum crusted with what could have been the fine white sand Ibiza’s beaches are famous for.
*
While Jonathan had conceded to stay somewhere that was far away from anything, he couldn’t bear days of it being just the two of us. I could not bear nights of it being just the five hundred of us at clubs he said he had been to once or twice, and where he would invariably turn out to be well known. He promised I would have fun if I let myself and I stayed for as long as I could each time, but when I became panicked by the music that sounded like the soundtrack to a session of electric shock therapy, we’d agree that there was probably no point. I took long taxi rides back to the villa by myself and went to bed.