After dinner Beth took the dishes to wash in the kitchen, then she soaked the oats, squeezed the juice and simmered the fruit in syrup for breakfast the next day. She ironed Paul’s shirt ready for the morning and finally collapsed exhausted into her bed. As she did every night.
As he always did, after dinner Paul lifted Gracie out of her high chair and Gracie waved goodbye to the teddy bears painted on the tray. Paul carried her to the sitting room, where he flopped into his leather chair that caressed every groan and creak in his body and read, resting a monstrous law book on one arm of the chair, while cuddling Gracie with his other arm. Gracie was contented. She lay back in her father’s arm and occasionally kicked her chubby legs. Sometimes she leant over to suck the corner of his book.
After dinner Edie sat beside them knitting a jumper for Gracie, who grew quicker than Edie could knit, until Paul fell asleep in the chair with Gracie still in his arms. When Edie was sure Paul and Gracie were both fast asleep, she gently picked Gracie up out of Paul’s arms.
‘Papa,’ Edie gently shook his shoulder. ‘Papa, time you were in bed.’
‘Mmmmm,’ he said, blinking his eyes sleepily. ‘Oh yes, I’ve fallen asleep again.’
And he reluctantly lifted himself out of the chair. He looked so sad and lost and she knew he missed her mother, but she didn’t know that of all the times he missed her, this time, at night, was the moment he loathed the most. It was now he had to face his large, empty bedroom and his cold, empty bed. There would be no visits from his wife in her nightgown, her hair falling to her shoulders like clouds visiting the earth. This was the time of day when he had to pass her room, the boards still nailed over her door, knowing there was no point taking those boards down, she wasn’t Sleeping Beauty, waiting in there for his kiss. It was the room he no longer visited later when Edie was asleep; he no longer listened to the whisper of her song that filled his soul. His life was now full of no-longers. He envied Edie that she could take Gracie to bed with her and drift off to sleep with Gracie’s plump smell warming the brittle night air. He sighed and wandered off to his room.
Edie put Gracie in her bed, where she slept with the baby nestled in close to her bosom.
‘Gracie, you are so perfect I couldn’t imagine ever being anywhere but with you,’ Edie whispered into the silence of the night. And in the dark, baby Gracie smiled.
Every night after dinner Theo played Chopin’s Prelude in E Minor and the melancholy notes seeped into the walls, the furniture, and Lilly’s skin and made her weep. It was a fine piano that Theo played: a Beale piano with the new Beale-Vader all-iron tuning system that Octavius Beale had patented in 1902. The frame was hand-strung and the timber panels were wet sanded so they shone like a mirror. It had cost him £45 after the 25 per cent discount for buying direct from the manufacturer. Every string in that piano and every piece of ivory that his fingers touched wept as the notes filled the house. Theo played every night for precisely two hours and as the last note drifted off into the world, he would gaze at his reflection in the piano and wonder who he was now. He knew that his life was no more than a series of perfunctory actions, as though he was acting until his real life could begin — his life with Edie.
‘Two hundred and forty-six days,’ he whispered to his reflection, ‘five thousand nine hundred and four hours, three hundred and fifty-four thousand two hundred and forty minutes, twenty-one million two hundred and fifty-four thousand and four hundred seconds, twenty-eight million and three hundred and thirty-nine thousand and two hundred beats of my heart.’
That was how long he had waited for Edie Cottingham so far.
Theo could wait and even though he had told his mother he would wait for six months, he had waited eight. In the four weeks he had watched Edie come to church, her skin stricken with grey in her black mourning clothes and a dismal grey hat that bleached the colour from everything it touched, unable to speak to anyone and looking only at the ground. It was Beth or Mister Cottingham who pushed the baby in the pram and who made an effort to smile when the women, including his mother, cooed over it. Then suddenly one Sunday it was Edie with the baby and no pram. She carried the baby like it was the most precious thing in the world and she smiled at everyone and was wearing a white hat with blue ribbons instead of her mourning hat. He saw how tiny and dependent the thing was in her arms, like a bald pink joey peeping out from the safety of a pouch. Then last Sunday Edie had thrown off her mourning clothes altogether and worn crimson like a rose and he knew that was the sign that her mourning was over and she was ready for him. He saw the baby in Edie’s lap playing with a knitted giraffe. The baby had grown so much, it probably didn’t need Edie now. But he did. Now she was no longer mourning, he would ask her father for her hand.
All this time, for all these months, he had said no more to her than ‘Good morning, Miss Cottingham’ and gone on
