We were at a pub when Emma found out she was pregnant with Ruby. We’d met in Soho after work, because there were still three days to go before Emma was due to take a pregnancy test and we both needed a distraction. Emma went upstairs to the loo while I ordered at the bar, but by the time I’d taken our drinks outside and found a patch of windowsill to lean on, she still hadn’t reappeared.
Everything OK? I texted her.
Seconds later, she appeared next to me, white as a sheet.
‘Look,’ she said. She turned to block out the other drinkers with her back, and handed me a plastic stick. I stared at the stick for some time before I realised what it was; what the two blue lines meant.
‘I bought the test on the way here,’ she said. ‘And it was there in my handbag just now and I know it’s three days before I should be doing the test and a pub toilet really isn’t the place to do it but I couldn’t resist.’
I tried to take the stick, but she held on fast. ‘I’ve just weed on it,’ she said.
It wasn’t the first time we had stared at a positive pregnancy test together. And I knew this pregnancy was only days old, that there was every chance it wouldn’t get far. But as we stood there, under hanging baskets of geraniums, surrounded by hipsters and market traders and office workers, I had a gut feeling this was it.
Tears filled my eyes. ‘Wow,’ I said. Emma didn’t reply, but when she turned her face up to mine, I saw she was crying, too.
She hugged me hard, burying her face in my shirt, and warm tears bled through the cotton onto my chest. Behind us, a bunch of young men were falling about laughing, singing a tuneless song with the lyrics ‘Blake smells of fish, Blake smells of fish.’
I remember our journey home later, how quiet she was, how she held my hand as we sped north on the tube. How she stopped me in the street, just before we went into our house, and said, ‘I love you so much, Leo,’ and how I smiled because I knew she meant it.
She did love me. She does love me. I haven’t just made it up.
But then I think of all the people I’ve written up in my time as an obituarist. The aristocrats with their happy marriages and long-term sexual relations with the housekeeper. The gangsters with girlfriends in every city. The married academics with their student lovers, the artists with their orgies. Many of these people claimed, towards the end of their lives, that they loved their spouses deeply; that their marriages had never suffered because of their infidelities.
Maybe it is possible to love someone and have basic physical sex with someone else? Maybe it is even possible to love two people?
I try not to think directly about Ruby, because I can’t, but the truth about her has already lodged itself somewhere in my skin. Jeremy and Emma met late at night at around the time she got pregnant. This, after years and years of us trying without success to have a baby.
They saw each other in Northumberland this week. They’ve been messaging each other. Emma calls him ‘the father of my child’。
There is no one on earth to whom I’m related by blood, I realise. Absolutely no one.
Chapter Twenty-Five
EMMA
I don’t take Ruby downstairs. I know something has happened by the way John Keats slinks into the bathroom with his tail rammed between his legs. He only does this when he’s seen human behaviour he doesn’t understand.
I help Ruby into her pyjamas, listening for a sound from the kitchen, but none comes. A quiet space of fear grows in my chest as I read Ruby her bedtime story. Since asking me about Mags earlier, Leo hasn’t replied to any of my messages.
The kitchen is like a held breath when I make it downstairs. Leo’s weekend bag is there, but mine is on its back, stranded like an overturned beetle. John Keats stands at my side, pointing his anxious nose at the wireless speaker through which we play jungle.