‘Can I get out and make a snow angel?’ Martha asked from her booster seat in the back.
‘No. Mummy will be here any second.’
‘Think she knows?’
‘Hasn’t got a clue.’
The sodium lights dimmed and went off, leaving the square eerily luminous. Daniel checked his watch again. ‘Did Mummy give you your injection?’
‘Not yet,’ Martha replied with a yawn. ‘Said she’d do it in the car.’ The child gathered her hair into a ponytail. Pulled up her hood.
Shivered. Although it had been nine months since her tiredness, blurred vision and nightly thirsts had resulted in a diagnosis of type one diabetes, her father still couldn’t bring himself to administer the required dose of insulin. He could inject rabbits and mice in a laboratory, but not his own daughter. Nancy had no such compunction. Being a dentist, she was used to the sight of other people’s discomfort.
That was how they met, Daniel and Nancy. She had entered wearing a facemask that exaggerated her eyebrows: two fiercely plucked arcs. As he lay on her hydraulic chair thinking of the impacted wisdom tooth she was trying to wrest from his numbed gums, her eyes entranced him. They were bearish brown, flecked with gold. He fell in love with them right there as he lay on his back, with his mouth open, flinching intermittently. He also fell in love with the weight of Nancy’s left breast, which, under several layers of material, was pressing against his arm. Pleasure and pain. Pain and pleasure. Their relationship had started as it was destined to continue.
What was she doing in there? They were going to miss their flight at this rate.
Daniel probed with the tip of his tongue the soft cavity that had been left by the wisdom tooth – something he often did without realizing, the equivalent of touching a comfort blanket. He tapped his watch again and shivered with excitement as the porch light came on and Nancy emerged from the house shrugging a grey duffle coat on over a fawn polo neck. The falling snow had softened a little, arriving in flurries, and downy flakes were settling on Nancy’s hair as she turned the front door key in the lock, stood framed on the lip of the porch and closed her eyes – something she always did when making sure she had remembered everything. Watching her, Daniel felt a surge of tenderness. How beautiful you look, he thought. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you looking more beautiful. ‘We’ll be late!’ he barked through the lowered window. ‘The traffic is bound to be bad with this weather.’
Snow that had settled on the path creaked as it was compressed under Nancy’s sheepskin boots. ‘
Don’t push it
,’ she muttered,
opening the back door and getting in beside Martha.‘And why did you turn the heating off?’
Think. Think.‘Global warming.’
Nancy narrowed her eyes.‘Now we’ll use twice as much energy reheating the house when we get back. You should have just turned it down.’
Daniel drew breath as if about to reply, but stopped himself. He was becoming mesmerized by the speed at which Nancy was unzipping a medical pouch, removing a needle from a sterilized pack and slipping it on to a syringe. She did everything quickly: talk, eat, walk, reach orgasm, pick up new languages. Even sleeping was something she appeared to do in a hurry. Something to do with her REMs. Daniel could study her sleeping face for hours.
Nancy was now holding a small bottle of insulin to the car light and giving it an impatient shake. In the same movement, she pierced its rubber stopper, preferring this old-fashioned method to the ‘pen’ because it was easier to keep track of doses. A familiar clinical smell, sharp and metallic, pricked the air. Martha assumed a kneeling position, pulled down one side of her tracksuit trousers and pinched a fold of skin. Nancy positioned the syringe at an efficient right angle, inserted the needle up to its full depth, pressed down on the plunger and allowed a few seconds for the dose to be delivered before withdrawing the needle. ‘There,’ she said, massaging the skin. ‘All done. You had enough to eat?’
Martha nodded, holding up a mottled banana skin.
Nancy stayed in the back and clipped up her belt: as she normally travelled in the front, this was intended as a statement of her annoyance. Daniel shrugged, turned the radio on and, recognizing the thumb positioning of Charlie Mingus, nodded approvingly. He then tuned it away from his preferred jazz station and found a raw, metallic Lenny Kravitz song instead. Better. Less relaxing. He started the engine. They had gone a hundred yards up the road before Daniel said: ‘Dog!’ The brakelights came on and the hybrid began reversing.
While Nancy ran back into the house, Daniel blew on his hands and patted the pocket of his cord jacket, checking he had the
passports. He could feel two, but nevertheless pulled them out to make sure he had picked up Nancy’s not Martha’s. He flicked to the back page and stared at Nancy’s photograph. It was recent and a good likeness: shoulder-length hair that had gone chestnut in the sun, swollen cheekbones, a puffy curve for a top lip. With a shake of his head he flipped open his own photograph page. It had been taken eight years earlier, when he was thirty, and he had not only looked younger – sandy hair thicker, not yet frosting at the temples – but also, somehow, more luminous: his long eyelashes paler, his blond eyebrows more feathery, the rims of his eyes pinker. He was, he felt, cursed with the fussy, delicate appearance of a Victorian clergyman. In recent years he had tried to compensate by growing sideburns and hair down to his collar, but this, he had come to suspect, made him look like a Pilgrim Father instead. He opened the glove compartment, pulled out a manila envelope and slipped the passports inside it next to the tickets, just as Nancy appeared with Kevin, a brindle-coloured mongrel of indeterminate age. She had rescued him from Battersea Dogs’ Home and given him his name because it amused her to think of her socially ambitious parents having to shout ‘Kevin!’ in the park whenever they were looking after him. When she opened the hatch and Kevin jumped into the caged-off boot space, Daniel grimaced as he waited for her to notice the picnic blanket covering the two pieces of hand luggage next to the cage. She didn’t and, having slammed the hatch-door shut, deigned to sit in the front passenger seat. As the car set off again, Martha caught her father’s eye in the rearview mirror, made a letter ‘L’ sign with her thumb and index finger – ‘Loser’ – and placed it on her forehead. They both grinned conspiratorially.
Nancy turned the volume on the radio down, flipped open the passenger-side shade-mirror and, in the partial glow of an interior light, began to apply mascara to her lashes. With her mouth open to stretch her skin, she dusted her cheeks with a brush and removed an eyelash. ‘Explain to me again why we have to dump Martha at your parents’,’ she said, snapping the shade back up.
‘Knew something was bothering you.’
‘Of course it’s bothering me. You didn’t even ask me whether I minded.’
‘We are not
dumping
her at my parents’. Martha
likes
staying with my parents …You like staying with Grampy and Grumpy, don’t you?’ There was a pause before a fluty voice rose from the back: ‘Grampy and Grumpy. Mum’s parents. Whomsoever.’
(That was her new word, whomsoever.)
‘If your mother wasn’t so squeamish about doing the jabs …’ Daniel said to Nancy, surreptitiously turning the radio volume back up.
‘Don’t start, Daniel,’ Nancy said, turning the volume down again. ‘
Do not start
. I mean it.’
‘I never feel it when Grampy gives me my injection,’ Martha said. ‘He told me he was awarded the Order of the Hypodermic when he was in the Medical Corps.’
‘I still don’t understand why the baby can’t come with us to the airport,’ Nancy pressed.
‘Because there won’t be room.’
‘Because there won’t be room,’ Martha echoed unhelpfully.
‘She can go in the back with your uncle Fritz and aunt Helga …’ Nancy continued.
‘Helmut and Frieda,’ Daniel corrected, turning the volume on the radio back up as a Foo Fighters track came on. ‘And they are not my aunt and uncle, they are my cousins. And, no, Martha can’t go in the back because they’re bringing Hans.’
‘Hans?’
‘Their son.’
‘You didn’t tell me they had a son.’
‘Did.’
‘He did,’ said Martha.
‘You did not … How old is he?’
‘Fifteen.’
‘
For fuck’s sake
.’
‘Mum, you promised you’d stop swearing in front of me.’
‘Call me Mummy.’ Nancy folded her arms. ‘Where will he sleep? You thought of that?’
‘We could put the camp bed up in my study. He’s bringing a sleeping bag.’
The windscreen wipers thrashed against the thickening snow. The Foo Fighters began a growling chord progression. ‘I still don’t see why I couldn’t have stayed at the house with the baby while you went to collect them.’
‘Because you speak German.’
‘They’re bound to speak English.’
‘Apparently not.’
‘
Christ alive
.’
‘Look, it’s all organized now,’ Daniel said in a neutral voice. ‘Besides, they’ll be expecting me to bring my wife. Germans are big on family.’
‘No they’re not. That’s Italians. Germans are big on sausages and genocide. And anyway I’m not your wife, if you remember.’
Daniel sucked in air theatrically, as though Nancy had landed a low punch. As he regularly pointed out, he
thought
of her as his wife. They had been together for ten years, had a joint chequebook, a joint email address and a green but mean hybrid utility vehicle that they shared, and which they both usually needed at the same time. And they were named on the deeds of their house in Clapham Old Town, South West London, as Mr and Mrs Daniel Kennedy, a mistake that amused them and made them cringe in like measure. It had become a vinegary joke between them that he called her ‘Mrs Kennedy’ and she called him ‘Mr Kennedy’.
Nancy spoke in an undertone.‘How could you forget to tell me that your aunt and uncle were bringing their teenage son? Are you a complete fuckwit?’
From the back: ‘Mum!’
From the driver’s seat: ‘They are not my aunt and uncle. They are my cousins.’
Daniel did wonder whether he had gone too far with the German cousins theme. While he had been planning this trip to the Galápagos Islands for several months, as a tenth anniversary surprise for Nancy, he hadn’t thought of a good excuse to get her to the airport until the day before. But this had proved a sound
tactic, as it turned out. In her anger at having German cousins foisted upon her without warning, Nancy was too distracted to notice his suspicious behaviour, as well as the tracks he failed to cover: the almost illegible prescription for diazepam which he left on the kitchen counter, the one his doctor friend, Bruce, had written out to help him cope with the flight; the bag that Martha and he had packed full of Nancy’s summer clothes and unthinkingly left in the hallway; the phone call he ended abruptly when she walked into the room – the one in which he had checked with the receptionist at the dental surgery that Nancy’s appointments had been cancelled.
All other preparations for the trip had been worked out meticulously. After a day in Quito they would fly by seaplane to Santa Cruz Island where the four-berth yacht he had chartered would be waiting to meet them. Assuming they could get a signal, they would ring Martha, have a swim, unpack, and then, maybe, have sex – loud, sweaty, on-holiday-without-children sex. This would be followed by a siesta. They would wake in time to get a little drunk on whisky sours as they watched the sunset from their hammocks on deck. And after dinner they would take a motorized dinghy to the shore and Daniel would propose on a moonlit, barefoot walk along a beach patterned with worm casts, crab trails and dead jellyfish – his idea of a romantic setting. If Nancy could be persuaded, they would get married in a secular ceremony the next day; in the equivalent of a register office he thought he had located, or, failing that, in the Charles Darwin Research Station, which to Daniel was holy ground.
It was Daniel’s turn to sigh. ‘Said I was sorry.’
As the early morning traffic on the South Circular began to build, he drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, then felt in his jacket pocket for the box containing the emerald and diamond engagement ring he had bought. He was going to tell her about the trip when they reached the airport – he would ask her to check in the glove compartment for the arrival times, and she would find the passports and tickets there – but the engagement ring would have to be kept secret for a while longer. He gave her a sideways glance.
She was tugging at a strand of her hair, crossly examining it for split ends.
‘And why have you never mentioned you had German cousins before?’
Daniel dipped his head to avoid an interrogative stare. ‘To be honest,
I
didn’t know I had German cousins. They’re on Amanda’s side.’ Daniel smiled to himself. Amanda was his stepmother. Nancy didn’t like her.
‘Typical.’
It
was
typical, that was the beauty of it. Typical of him to forget to mention it. Typical of his stepmother to have German cousins. Typical of his German cousins to have a teenage son called Hans. What made the deception perfect, though, was the fact that Nancy often commented on how she could always tell when Daniel was lying; that he was a useless liar; that he couldn’t lie convincingly if his life depended upon it. Ha.
Nancy clicked the radio off and stared at the road ahead. ‘I’m not sure I feel up to seeing Grampy and Grumpy. They can be so … I mean, why does your stepmother always have to raise the subject of marriage?’ She was holding up one hand, as though wishing to silence any objection.
Daniel ignored it.‘She doesn’t.’ He checked his watch again and lowered his window to flick snow off his side mirror. His father and stepmother lived in Kew, in a double-fronted, ivy-covered Georgian townhouse that was, to their regret, directly under the flight path to Heathrow. The first of the transatlantic red-eyes, Daniel noticed, was slanting down, beginning its descent.
‘And why does your father always have to belittle your work.’
‘He doesn’t …’ Daniel checked himself. ‘He doesn’t mean to.’ Nancy patted his knee with mock sympathy. ‘You go on believing that.’