‘Yeah, well he had erection issues which he said were my fault, demoralising et cetera, and we started using sex toys and then he tried using his Sega Light Phaser on me. You don’t recover from that. As a couple, I mean. But he wasn’t the worst, there was one, ohohoho no. No no no no no. But at least he could have straight sex, not like those ones that will only –’
‘Come on, girls, it’s ready,’ Nathan called.
Evelyn leaned into Dot. ‘He doesn’t like me to talk about the past,’ she said. ‘He likes to think I was a virgin, like him.’
Dorothy couldn’t wait to get alone with Andrew.
‘His Sega?’
‘Mark III.’
‘You’re shitting me.’
‘Mate, I shit you not.’
Sometimes they talked like people they were not. Language just came out their mouths, it didn’t belong to them.
‘Where are my war stories, man,’ Dot complained. ‘You never fuck me in your karate gear. What’s the name of that move? Crushing the demon?’
He stopped laughing. ‘That’s different.’
‘I was joking.’
‘OK. I get it. But.’
‘Seriously.’ She turned away from him in the bed and spoke it to the darkness. ‘We’re running out of kindness. If we don’t have sex soon we’re going to be fucked.’
‘Yeah I want to, I do.’ That tone in his voice, like he was trying to convince himself.
‘Are you really going hunting tomorrow?’
‘Have to. Otherwise Nathan will think I’m some kind of pansy who can’t bonk his wife or shoot a boar.’ Sleepily, he murmured, ‘At least he doesn’t make me feel like I’ve got the most boring job in the world.’ Nathan was an accountant. Dorothy reached an arm back to pat Andrew’s hip. Yes, he was the one in her life.
Rain truckled outside, heavier drops collecting and falling from the guttering. It was time to go and check whether the baby had a pulse and whether the blanket was too close to her mouth.
The mothers took the children for a walk over some fields, Louisa staggering ahead beside the hedgerows, Grace issuing orders from her pushchair, the baby strapped against Dorothy’s chest. Around dawn the rain had stopped and the green world glistened. Water hung in the cow parsley, the same colour as the thin circle of moon Louisa was calling to. Mud tugged at their feet. On a hill a clutch of crows burst from a tree like black stones. Dot pulled at the corduroy baby sling to make sure Amy’s maroon lips were parted, put a finger in front of them to feel the short hot exhale of her breath.
‘Keep pushing,’ Grace shouted in her cracking voice. Everything around them was part of the same feeling but Dot could only see one element at a time – the moon, the high bird, the nodding flowers – and tried to take them in all together, sense how the parts melded into this hot noticing, this sweating under the weight of the babies, the sun bearing down.
‘Keep pushing, stupid lady.’
‘Grace,’ said Evelyn, ‘don’t talk to your mother like that.’
‘It’s OK,’ Dot said. She stepped back from the buggy, fingers red and puffy from gripping the handle, and sat on the damp earth, lay down on her back so that the baby was balanced on her chest, the straps of the sling falling loose. The grass bore her weight until the world turned and she could feel herself hanging upside down in space, glued to the underside of the earth. ‘I don’t care, she can say what she likes.’
‘Yes but you should care.’
‘Yes but I plainly don’t.’ Dorothy plucked the soft transparent sunburst of a dandelion head. ‘This place reminds me of the commune.’
Evelyn was silent for a moment, then she said, ‘Have you heard from Mum lately?’
‘No. Grace’s birthday.’
‘Sometimes it amazes me that everything I’m going through with Lou, the intensity, the attachment, the way they take over your life, the sort of total love, she had with all of us. It’s so odd when you can’t remember it. Ever sitting with her the way you sit with Grace. We must have seen her pregnant with Ruth, and feeding her, and bathing us and all that, but I don’t remember it. Do you?’
‘No. We were too young to have memories.’
‘But even later.’ Eve removed her fingers from her lips and gave a little smile, a conscious effort to brighten. ‘She was good at helping us with our homework and stuff.’
‘I think she was different with Daniel. Close, or whatever.’
‘Oh my god what a gorgeous day.’ The words erupted from