flights of stairs, Andrew’s coat pockets clanking, and walked the long road of car dealerships and square concrete churches to the nearest grocery shop, which was closed. Dorothy began to weep. The fucking, the disclosures and the hunger overwhelmed her. ‘I’m sorry I told you about that guy,’ she sobbed. ‘I thought that’s what you were meant to do when you got engaged. Tell each other everything.’ In truth she was afraid that she had talked about Daniel simply for herself, to bring him closer, never mind that it hurt.
He sat down next to her on the red wooden bench outside the grocer’s and put his arm around her shoulders, stroking her head. Her hair ran like water through his fingers. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. A square-bodied woman in a coatdress crossed the chipped bark in front of them carrying a paper bag with pointy green leeks sprouting from the top and he called out to ask her where she had got her shopping from.
They walked in silence.
‘I know,’ he said when the Sunday market appeared just around the corner, ‘we’ll plant a garden on the windowsill.’
Dorothy waved as Andrew drove off. They’d have to get a new car; he’d ripped out the back seat for his canvases. He tooted from the traffic lights and she blew him a kiss. The interior of Evelyn’s flower shop was clouded and cool from the mist spray, and the scents of tuberose and potting mix made time heavy, dream-like. Surely smells weren’t usually this intense. She toured the displays of roses, geraniums, the hyacinths with their obscenely bulging soil.
‘Your friend isn’t joining you today?’ asked Kimiko.
‘Andrew? He’s gone back to work.’ She was dying to say it: you mean my fiancé.
Evelyn wiped flakes of green florist foam off her hands onto her legs and swizzled the apron off and flung it on the stalk-stained cutting board. ‘She means Daniel. He’s been popping in.’
Oh Daniel. Dorothy hadn’t seen him since he’d got back from Melbourne. ‘This smells amazing,’ she said, inhaling the air above a small potted lavender, waving it under Eve’s nose.
She veered away. ‘Sends me to sleep. I was at the flower markets at dawn.’
The sisters took paper-bag sandwiches down to the harbour and sat on the jetty with their legs over the edge. Six feet below swelled the choppy bottle-green sea, chunks of water buffeting the splintered pylons, the salt smell deep as petroleum, filthy, alive. Evelyn unpeeled her sandwich and tweezed out the alfalfa sprouts with her fingertips and dropped them in the sea. Birds swooped. Dorothy told her the news that she was pregnant. Eve’s face fell open and she placed the sandwich into her lap and wiped her fingers on the fabric of her coat. ‘And you’re happy about it?’ she asked, picking at a couple of pilled spots on the sleeve.
‘Yes,’ said Dorothy, amazed that she could ask, slightly frightened at the gap between them that the question exposed. ‘Of course. We’re going to get married.’
‘Will you keep teaching?’
‘Don’t know.’
‘Can I come to the scan with you?’ Eve hugged her sister fiercely, water rising in the side of Dot’s vision so that she felt she might fall in. They sat close together, foreheads touching. A cormorant plunged into the dark sea. ‘I can’t believe it,’ Eve said. Eye make-up had run on her cheek, and when she exhaled one laughing breath translucent snot bubbled out of her nose. ‘Why do I always get dumped? Sorry, sorry.’
Dorothy passed her the inadequate, one-ply paper napkin from her sandwich bag.
‘How’s Andrew?’
‘He’s excited.’
‘Have you told Frank and Lee?’
‘Not yet.’
Evelyn quizzed her more, about where she would live, they couldn’t stay in Andrew’s flat, and how would they live, would she go on the benefit, and what names she liked and what would the baby look like, questions Dorothy had no answer to. The wind died down and the sisters leaned forward to look at their reflections in the smoothly undulating, repetitive water, giant feet and small blurred heads. Evelyn held Dorothy by the shoulder and fake-shoved her as if to push her in, and they squealed and giggled and crab-crawled back away from the sea to the relative safety of the middle of the timbered jetty.
Daniel refused to be drawn on how long he would stay before leaving again, working his way, woofing or whatever. It was not enough that he had to be off-hand about his Melbourne ex-girlfriend, Tammy, a fucking performance artist, which probably meant stripper, or that he