Perfect Day

o’clock newsreader’s sitting in front of a still from the wreckage.
    ‘There must have been another train crash,’ he says, rejoining Kate in the bookshop.
    ‘Oh dear.’
    Kate is immersed in a new hardback novel. He sees that she could happily settle down for the rest of the day here. In the far corner of the children’s section, he spots a boxed set of his mother’s books.
    ‘Come on,’ he says, ‘where’s all this food you promised me?’
    They walk towards the escalator past tables laid out for dinner parties that will never happen.
    ‘There’s everything down here,’ Kate tells him. ‘Everything to make your life nicer. They’ve got little forks with corncobs on them and the only thing you can do with them is hold your corn on the cob!’ she says. ‘I mean, how many times a year do you have corn on the cob?’
    She looks at him.
    All he wants to do is kiss her again.

Ten

    ‘Now, look,’ says Frances . ‘Blue, all the way down to the horizon.’
    ‘What’s the horizon?’ Lucy asks.
    ‘Where the sea and sky meet,’ Frances says.
    The three of them are standing facing the sea, getting the full force of the wind. If it were a fraction less sunny the temperature would be numbing.
    ‘Did you know, Frances , that the little black bit in the middle of your eye is really a hole?’ Lucy asks, apropos of nothing.
    Elementary human biology is part of the curriculum for year 1. Lucy’s now very exact about her body parts and knows roughly where her kidneys and heart are situated. But while she readily accepts that there’s a pump with four tubes inside her chest, and little round things that help you wee, the pupil of the eye mystifies her. She asks every adult she encounters about it, as if a trick is being played on her and somebody is bound to cave in and tell her the truth.
    ‘That’s right,’ says Frances .
    ‘It’s amazing, isn’t it?’ says Lucy, gazing at the vast expanse of choppy indigo sea and clear blue sky. ‘All that seeing through one little hole.’
    Frances ’s face softens with pleasure.
    ‘Did you just think that?’ she asks the child, bending down and pulling the zip of her anorak right up to her chin.
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Well, it’s a very beautiful thought,’ Frances says, patting Lucy’s padded arms.
    Nell has a moment of glowing parental pride. In her head she repeats what Lucy has said, pasting it into the album of Lucy stories she tries not to recount too often.
    ‘How about a round of golf, then?’ says Lucy.
    Frances raises her eyebrows.
    ‘She means putting,’ Nell says.
    They pay the man at the garden-shed kiosk and receive two adult putters and a child’s, and three different-coloured balls. Lucy putts as if she’s playing hockey, dribbling the ball up to the hole, declaring that she’s won because she’s first there.
    They are the only people on the strip of bright green grass between promenade and seafront road.
    Frances drops her ball on the ground.
    ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this,’ she says. ‘Tell you what, let’s you and I have a bet. A pound per hole?’
    ‘How about loser buys lunch?’ says Nell.
    ‘You’re confident.’
    ‘I’ve probably had more practice recently.’
    Frances tees off. She hits it too hard and the ball runs way beyond the hole.
    ‘Children really change your life, don’t they?’ she says watching the ball until it comes to a stop. ‘I mean, it’s not just that you don’t sleep for a couple of years, it’s that you have to be good-tempered enough to play games with them at eleven o’clock in the morning...’
    ‘And let them win!’ says Nell, taking her shot. The ball bounces along in a good line, but it carries just a little too much momentum and runs over the top of the hole.
    ‘Do you like it?’ says Frances , as they walk up the green.
    Lucy’s already on hole 4.
    ‘What, putting?’ says Nell.
    ‘You know what I mean.’
    ‘I love her,’ Nell says, carefully, ‘and I love being her mother... I’m not sure I particularly like motherhood, if that’s what you mean.’
    Is it possible to separate the particular from the general like that? Nell has missed this sort of conversation with Frances which makes her apply rigour to the way she thinks about her life.
    ‘I know that I’d happily do absolutely anything to make Lucy’s life a happy one,’ she explains. ‘I’ve never felt that before about any other human being, and it’s a wonderful feeling, but then sometimes I find