Squirrels and other creatures she didn’t even recognize darted on the ground, as though they, too, had been displaced. The roots of the tree looked like human veins ripped from flesh.
She tries to remember what Tom said. “There are a million other trees for them to go to, Aurelia. Don’t be so sensitive.”
He’d said it gently, pulled her close, and kissed her forehead. More to the point, he was right. She’s just adjusting, that’s what this is. They’re both such city slickers that they didn’t even think to find out about garbage disposal. It’s not like the council is going to be sending out a weekly bin collection.
She checks that the baby is still asleep in the crib beside her bed before opening the last box to be unpacked. There, right at the bottom, are her cameras. A digital Nikon SLR and a Leica M6 with a few dozen films. She’s not used the Leica in ages as it’s crazy difficult to get film developed. She remembers burning her fingertips on the acidic chemical fluid in the college darkroom as a teenager, then taking Polaroid selfies back in the nineties and being amazed when, in a minute or so, a photographic souvenir of whatever wild night out she was enjoying with uni friends could be captured on a slim card. How things have changed. Somehow taking photographs on her phone feels like a little bit of the magic is lost.
She thumbs the beautiful Leica, holds it up to her eye. Already she feels a bit better, the darkness shifting a little. This movement tugs her instantly to a thousand other times and places that she’s held a camera to her eye: in Namibia, photographing tribeswomen naked to the waist, their babies held at the hip and their dreadlocked hair matted with mud; at Downing Street, photographing the prime minister addressing the nation after the vote for Brexit; and in a small, overlit studio, photographing a celebrity who had been giving the interview of her life, and whose face was still raw and swollen from crying. Moments that defined her more than they defined the subject on the other side of the lens.
“Aurelia?” Tom calls from the kitchen. The door slams behind him. She glances at the baby in the basket before making to answer, but he’s already stomping up the stairs. She sighs. It sounds as though he didn’t get permission for the build after all. Something’s gone wrong at the last minute. A conservation query. An issue about the architectural drawings. Weeks of paperwork for nothing.
“What happened?” she says when he enters the bedroom. “What went wrong?”
He sits down on the bed, unsheathes a thick wad of paper from an envelope, and thrusts it at her.
“What’s this?” she asks, panicked.
“It’s the contract for the build.”
“We got consent?”
He nods. She throws her arms in the air and gives a shriek of joy, making Coco jolt briefly awake. Aurelia straddles Tom and throws her arms around him, kissing his face.
They kiss, chaste pecks at first, then deep, passionate kisses that feel to Tom as new as the day they fell in love. It has been thirty-nine days since they made love. He feels all thirty-nine days and eleven hours grinding on him like a stone. When she pulls away he wants to plead with her not to stop but remembers the last time he did that, and the look of disappointment and—strangely enough—hurt on her face. I have an infection, Tom. You make me feel like I can’t so much as look at you without you begging me for sex. So he lies back on the bed with her on top of him and summons every ounce of his courage not to plead with her.
She plucks up the contract. “Wow, this is long.”
“Thirty-six pages.”
“Blimey. That’s a lot of pages just to say yes.”
“It’s a complicated yes.”
She looks down at him. He doesn’t meet her gaze. It must be something awful.
“They’ve insisted that I install a mechanical ventilation system.”
She laughs. “That’s it? What about the river? No issues with you diverting it?”
“I don’t think you understand . . .”
She turns back to the contract, trying to make sense of all the legal mumbo jumbo. “And they were fine with the house being on stilts?”
“Pilings, my love, pilings. Not stilts . . .”
“Pilings, then. They were OK with it?”
He nods. She seems appeased by this. Good. She gives up on the document and leans over him, pressing her breasts against his chest and