She went on to describe a sense of privacy so singular and ecstatic that, as desperate as she felt to tell someone, it was still painful to give up. She said, ‘You feel the most intense inner superiority because everyone is oblivious to the fact you have gold inside you. For however long, you get to walk around knowing you’re better than everyone else.’ She yawned again and handed me the baby while she put her top back on. ‘Did you know that’s why the Mona Lisa is smiling like that? As in, so smugly. Because she’d just done a test or whatever in the studio loo and got the two lines right before she sat down and he’s studying her for ten hours a day and the whole time she’s like, he doesn’t even know I’m pregnant.’
I asked her how they knew that but she said she couldn’t remember, something to do with a shadow he put on her neck, to do with some gland that only sticks out when you’re pregnant, and I should just Google it later.
Cross-legged then, Ingrid spread a muslin square out in front of her and took the baby back, laid him down and wrapped him in a tight swaddle. She didn’t pick him up, instead, gazed down at him and smoothed out a fold in the fabric, then said, ‘Sometimes, I wish you did want children. I just think it would have been fun, having babies at the same time.’
I said maybe I would have but I hated leisure centres and they seemed mandatory to the task.
Ingrid picked the baby up and held him out. ‘Can you put him back in the thing?’
I got up and carried him against my shoulder. I felt like she was watching me as I set him down on the little mattress and slid my hands out from underneath him.
She said, Martha? ‘I hope it’s not because you really think you’re a monster.’
I put a blanket over him, tucked both sides and asked my sister not to talk about it any more.
*
In the morning I got up and made the older boys breakfast so that she could keep sleeping. The eldest one asked me to make him boiled eggs.
The middle one said, I don’t want boiled eggs and started crying. He said he wanted a pancake.
I told him they could have different things.
‘No we can’t.’
I asked him why not.
He said because this isn’t a restaurant.
While he was waiting for his pancake, he recounted a dream he had had when he was much younger, about a bad man who was trying to drink him. He said he didn’t find it scary any more. Only sometimes, when he remembered it.
27
NEAR THE STEPS of St Mark’s Basilica, I threw up into a cigarette bin. Patrick and I were in Venice for our fifth wedding anniversary. For the previous two weeks, he’d kept asking me if I wanted to cancel because I was obviously sick. I said, ‘Refreshingly of body not of mind though, so it’s fine.’
I was desperate to cancel. But he had bought a Lonely Planet. He had been reading it in bed every night and as ill and scared as I was, I couldn’t bear to disappoint someone whose desires were so modest they could be circled in pencil.
Patrick found us somewhere to sit down. He said I should go to the doctor again as soon as we got back to Oxford in case it wasn’t just a virus. I said it was and, since it hadn’t made me vomit before, clearly that was a separate, psychosomatic reaction to the fact that we looked so much like tourists because of his backpack.
I was pregnant. I had known for a fortnight and hadn’t told him. The doctor who had confirmed it said no idea to the question of how it had happened with the implant still in my arm. ‘Nothing’s foolproof. Anyway, five weeks, by my maths.’
Patrick stood up and said, ‘Let’s go back to the hotel. You can go to bed and I’ll change our flights.’
I let him pull me up. ‘But you wanted to see that bridge. The Ponte de whatever it is.’
He said, ‘It doesn’t matter. We’ll come back.’
The walk to the hotel led us to it anyway. Patrick got out his guidebook and read from a page that had the corner turned down. ‘Why is the Bridge of Sighs so named?’ He said it was funny that I should ask. ‘In the seventeenth century …’
Listening to him read I felt like I was being constricted by sadness. Not because et cetera, et cetera, according to lore, criminals being led to the prison on the other side would sigh at their final view of Venice through the windows of the bridge which are typically baroque in style. Just because of the way Patrick was frowning at the page, the way he looked up intermittently to check if I was listening, the way he said wow, once he’d finished. ‘That’s quite depressing.’ We flew home the next day.