What became of us

her waist, tentatively.
    ‘Barry, I need to sleep. I’ve got a long journey in the morning,’ she said, in answer to his unspoken question.
    ‘Of course. Sorry.’ He turned away again immediately.
    The air was filled with his disappointment.
    ‘Don’t say sorry,’ she said irritably.
    ‘Well, what am I supposed to say? You never seem to want to any more.’
    ‘I do... it’s just...’
    It’s just that I can’t stop thinking about having sex with someone else. It’s just that I feel guilty because I’m imagining that Liam is doing it with me, not you.
    ‘Oh, I can’t have this conversation now,’ she said impatiently.
    That sentence, she realized, made it inevitable that they would. Now she had acknowledged it as an issue, something to be discussed. If she had let it go then his regret and her guilt would have seemed trivial after sleep.
    ‘It’s just that I’m tired. I’m so tired,’ she turned onto her side and put her arms around him, trying to backtrack, ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered into his nape.
    ‘It’s fine,’ he replied flatly.
    ‘It’s not fine,’ she protested, touching his chest with her fingers. She did not want to go away for the weekend with a bad feeling in the air. He rolled over to face her again, his erection brushing against her thigh. She let him make love to her, and once they had started, they were so used to each other that the familiar rhythms of pleasure took over. It was more like a happy memory for her than an act in which she was participating.
    ‘I love you,’ he said in the moment of exhausted closeness just after she had come.
    The space in which she was meant to say ‘I love you’ back gaped between them.
    ‘Mummy, Mummy, Mummy...’
    George’s cries rescued her.
    ‘I’ll go,’ Barry said, withdrawing, wiping himself with a tissue, and handing one to her.
    She laying staring upwards and listening to the exchange in the next room.
    ‘Now, what’s the matter?’
    ‘I want Mummy.’
    ‘Mummy’s asleep.’
    ‘I don’t feel very well.’
    ‘Ursy? His forehead’s a bit hot.’
    Wearily, Ursula climbed out of bed, felt a trickle of her husband’s semen on her thigh, sighed, and walked into the children’s bathroom. She rifled about in the cupboard for the thermometer.
    ‘37.5. Just on the high edge of normal,’ she said, taking it from under the child’s arm after a minute. ‘Would you like a drink?’
    ‘Yes, please. An orange juice,’ George said.
    ‘I’ll get it,’ she told her husband. Barry slumped back to bed.
    ‘I think actually I would like an apple juice,’ George announced.
    ‘OK,’ Ursula replied.
    ‘And a biscuit.’
    ‘Don’t push your luck,’ she told him.
    When she returned from the kitchen he was fast asleep again. She stood in the doorframe looking at him for a couple of moments, thinking how utterly innocent he was in repose with his arms stretched up above his head on the pillow and the slight gleam of sweat accentuating each of his perfect little features like a della Robbia angel.
    When he was awake, demanding attention, wanting to help with the cooking and generally getting in her way, it was easy to forget how young he was. His language was advanced and he parroted phrases they both used with astonishing accuracy. On occasion she would look at him when he was telling her something he had done that day and see a miniature Barry, and she was entirely capable of being cross with him when he reneged on his part of a negotiation whose terms were far too adult for him to understand. In sleep, he looked just as vulnerable as he had done when he was a baby. He was just three years old, her last child, and as she watched him sleeping, she loved him so much it frightened her.

Chapter 8

    The smell of his in-laws’ house was the same as it had been on the first occasion he had slept there. Geraldine made her own pot-pourri. A Chinese bowl of shrivelled petals stood on the walnut chest of drawers on the landing just outside the guest room. The sweet-stale perfume of old roses permeated every timber of the Cotswold vicarage. He had known whenever Penny had been to see her parents for the afternoon because he could smell it in her hair. It was as much of a giveaway as the scent of another man’s aftershave on an adulterous wife’s skin. Not that Penny had ever made any attempt to disguise her frequent visits home.
    If he had been asked to choose one word to describe the family he had married into it would have