Perfect Day

happen soon,’ she said, ‘that will make you feel fulfilled again. It might involve pain or a difficult choice, but it is there for you.’
    ‘This was before, or after, you told her you were pregnant?’ asks Frances .
    ‘I didn’t tell her I was pregnant,’ Nell says.
    ‘Well, she should get a kiosk,’ Frances says, gesturing at the boarded-up arches behind them. ‘I shall be her first customer.’
    Nell stares out to sea. She had not connected the pregnancy with the woman’s prediction. She feels really stupid now.
    ‘Have you and Alexander had a row?’ Frances asks. ‘Not exactly,’ Nell says. ‘Why do you ask?’
    ‘Because you seem awfully subdued.’
    ‘Sorry.’
    ‘So, what’s the problem?’
    The wind is so cold that the water in Nell’s eyes feels as if it will freeze. ‘I don’t want to say it, in case it makes it true,’ she says.
    She slots each of her hands into the opposite sleeve in an attempt to keep her fingers warm.
    ‘Say what?’
    The silence stretches between them.
    ‘I don’t think Alexander loves us any more.’ Nell enunciates the words slowly one by one. It’s the only way she can say them without crying.
    She thinks of Alexander’s face when they went up to Chinatown recently for Chinese New Year. Amid all the whirring, noisy vibrancy, he simply stared, disconnected from experience, and when she caught his eye and made a face, trying to prise a smile from him, he looked at her as if he didn’t know who she was.
    ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Alexander adores you. You’re having another baby.’
    ‘It wasn’t exactly planned. Sex is so rare, I wasn’t prepared,’ Nell confesses.
    ‘Rare?’
    ‘Well, at midnight after you’ve spent the whole day doing housework and school runs and writing, you don’t tend to feel much like sex. I don’t anyway.’
    ‘Jesus! So when Freud said “what do women want?”...’
    ‘The answer was sleep.’
    ‘I can’t imagine living with Alexander, and not having sex with him,’ Frances says. ‘Or any man,’ she adds.
    ‘It’s different when you have children,’ Nell says.
    Is it? Or is it just them?
    ‘I think Alexander feels trapped,’ she tries to explain. ‘I know he does. I do too sometimes. But I accept it. It’s part of being with someone, part of being a parent. I don’t think Alexander can accept it.’
    ‘Didn’t Alexander’s father do a bunk when he was little?’ Frances remembers.
    ‘Yes, he did.’
    ‘Perhaps Alexander finds it difficult being a father because of that?’
    It’s remarkably astute of Frances to make a connection that now seems so obvious, but hasn’t occurred to her before. Nell is a little unnerved.
    ‘Perhaps he doesn’t know how to be a father?’ Frances says.
    ‘Perhaps.’
    ‘Do you still love Alexander?’ Frances wants to know.
    The trouble with talking to Frances is that she always seems able to voice Nell’s worst fears. Sometimes it’s helpful. Sometimes it’s very frightening.
    ‘I’m not sure any more what love is,’ she wavers.
    ‘How very Prince Charles.’
    ‘No.’ Nell tries to rise to the challenge of defending herself. ‘I’m really not sure what love means. I know what it feels like to fall in love. It feels like you can’t believe it’s happening, but at the same time it feels like it’s going to go on for ever. It’s more fundamental and powerful than anything else. It has a kind of imperative about it.’
    Frances is nodding.
    ‘But one day, it’s not like that any more. You’re just used to someone. You’ve got into a habit of being with them, and you know them quite well, and there’s no particular reason for doing anything different. Yes, there are moments of complete brilliance when you have a kind of flashback to what it was like in the beginning, but that’s about five per cent of the time. Maybe five per cent is what you call loving someone. It’s what makes your relationship different from friendship, or companionship, or even indifference. But then, if it starts to become four per cent, or three, or so infrequent that you can’t trust it will ever happen again...’
    ‘What’s happened to you?’ Frances butts in. ‘You’re so cynical. I’m meant to be the cynical one!’
    ‘No, you’ve always been the romantic.’
    ‘How d’you work that out?’
    ‘Because you believe in having one great love, and every time you go out with a man you think you’ve found him, and when you fall out, you blame him, and not your