“Aren’t you hungry?” James asks. His mouth is full of hog’s pudding: pork, oatmeal, pearl barley.
I’d been planning to do a twenty-mile run after this. But when James ordered the full Cornish, I knew I’d offend him if I didn’t order something extravagant. I pick up my knife and fork.
James reaches across the table for my hand. I let him take it, but my fist remains clenched, still holding my cutlery.
“Solvig,” he says. “I wanted today to be special for a reason.” He’s staring at the salt shaker as insistently as if it were my eyes. “I don’t know if it’s the right time to bring this up. You know what I’m like. I find it hard to keep things in.”
He’s so porous, everything cascades out of him.
“Seriously, if you’re not up for it, then say,” he continues. “I was thinking, though, that since we’re so settled now—we’ve got the house and the dog and our careers—that it might be nice, or even . . . amazing . . . to start, well . . .”
My chest tightens.
James squeezes my hand. “Start trying for a baby.”
I focus on the condensation running down the window.
James keeps talking. He talks about how he wants to do some fence repairs in the front garden, about how he’d love to re-create a nursery he’s seen on Pinterest, about how pleased he is that his parents live nearby, and about how fantastic his sourdough is going to taste.
I nod in between mouthfuls of waffle. I nod and eat, nod and eat. I know how lucky I am. I’m so lucky to be here, in my idyllic hometown, with my kind and handsome boyfriend. Everything is perfect between us. We have all the necessary prerequisites to create human life. Why wouldn’t I want to start trying for a family? Why wouldn’t I want that?
•
After James heads to work, I’m desperate to run and run, as far as I can possibly go. Running on a full stomach is a bad idea, so I’m compromising and only doing ten miles.
This baby thing has thrown me into disarray. Certainly, I’ve acknowledged that one day, I might want to grow a child inside my body. But even though I’m the grand old age of thirty-six, I’ve never stopped to think that “one day” might be today. And if it’s not today, then how much time have I got left?
As I run along the seafront, I weigh up the pros and cons. Pros: babies make you feel fulfilled. Cons: babies stop you from feeling fulfilled.
What if there are other things I want to do with my life, big things, things I couldn’t possibly do with children?
I look up at Pendennis Point. Then I slow down, catching my breath. My stomach is in knots. I hurry down some stone steps leading off the pavement. They take me onto the beach. I hurry to the water, then hunch over, bent double, emptying my guts into the sea. A mass of burgundy-coloured winter berries floats, half-digested, on the surface. Flotsam.
I wipe my mouth and lie back on the sand, squinting. The sky is blank. I extend my arms and reach out for it.
4
A hot shower makes everything better. That’s what my dad always says. But as I emerge from the bathroom, wrapped in a fluffy towel, it’s not my dad I’m thinking of—it’s my mum.
She died two months before my third birthday. I don’t remember her. I don’t know if I called her Mum or Mummy or Elaine. I don’t know what her voice sounded like, or what she liked to eat for breakfast. I do know that it was my mum who chose a Scandinavian name for me. She was into hygge long before it was fashionable; said my name reminded her of a bowl of split pea soup. That’s one of the only things she wrote in my baby book. My mum was a genius and didn’t have time for filling in books for babies.
I head into the spare room, leaving a trail of wet footprints on the floorboards. The shelves in here are crammed mostly with James’s stuff: tattoo guns, inks, needles, machine tips. We once had a house party where James gave free tattoos to his friends all night. There are people living all over Cornwall who’ve been forever changed by that party. Like Kensa, who works at the bike shop and has a top hat on his middle finger. Or Polly, who teaches at the university and sports “wanderlust” on her clavicle. I didn’t get a tattoo that night, of course. The permanence frightens me.
I take a Quality Street tin off the bottom shelf. This is mine. I take off the tin’s rusty lid and sift through the old photographs inside. There’s me winning the long jump at school; me dressed as Fred Flintstone for Halloween; me and Dad on a canal boat, both gripping enamel mugs. I can’t remember the days these pictures were taken, but I know the photographs so well that they feel like memories. When I see the canal boat photo, for instance, I think about the taste of hot cocoa. It’s possible that we were actually drinking tea.
At the bottom of the pile, there are six pictures that I know even better than any of the others:
1. Mum is a baby, trying to eat her christening gown.
2. Mum is a teenager, sitting on a bed with two girls and a boy, wearing bell-bottoms, laughing.
3. Mum is lying on a sun lounger next to a swimming pool, wearing a bikini. The photograph is taken from above, presumably from a hotel balcony. My mum looks as though she’s sleeping peacefully.
4. Mum is blinking, holding hands with my dad in front of a sparsely decorated Christmas tree. Mum is at least six centimetres taller than Dad. Dad’s pupils are glowing red.
5. Mum is in the house my dad still lives in, lying
