‘No thanks. Big lunch.’ Jack works for a Chinese property developer in London, something that Bry always finds incongruous with his foppish, affable nature. Ash reckons that’s why the Chinese hired him in the first place (
‘Busy day?’ Elizabeth asks, taking a crisp herself.
‘Always,’ Jack says, without meeting his wife’s eye. ‘So, is this what you lovely lot get up to, drinking wine in the sun while I’m slogging away at work?’
‘Pretty much, mate, pretty much,’ says Ash, leaning back on the bench, tipping his sunglasses down from his forehead as he drapes an arm over Bry’s shoulders.
Elizabeth laughs as if Jack’s suggestion is the most ridiculous thing she’s ever heard, and she launches into the story about her meeting at the council. ‘So apparently we need to fill out yet another application that no one ever mentioned before today’s meeting, which is just typical …’
While Elizabeth talks, Bry feels Ash’s warm hand on her shoulder and tries to remember the last time she came home energised and buzzing from a day’s work. When she met Ash, she had been a documentary producer, working on what Ash called ‘medium-brow social commentaries’, which was a nice way of saying ‘fairly shit fly-on-the-wall stuff’. She made behind-the-scenes series about hospital wards and prison blocks, and had just set up her own company with a director colleague of hers when she discovered she was pregnant. Her colleagues didn’t find out until Bry burst into tears after refusing a glass of champagne in celebration of their first commission – a documentary slated for a 3 p.m. Sunday slot about people who work on the Underground. Bry was nearly eight months pregnant when they started filming, and eight months and one week when she finally accepted she wasn’t going to finish the film. She would have gone back to it if they’d stayed in London, but now Pool Productions is flying, Bry seamlessly replaced by someone else.
In the beginning, Bry’s life had been absorbed by her relationship with Ash – their move out of London, visits from Theo and Bran (his two sons with Linette), Alba, the house renovations. When they’d been in Farley a few months, she’d tried putting Alba into a nursery, stating she was going to train to be a yoga teacher. But Alba cried when Bry did her best to cheerfully wave goodbye and she would spend the day a tight ball of anxiety, trying to learn about yogic breathing and meditation while all she could see was Alba red-faced and wailing, ignored by staff in a lonely corner of the nursery. She decided yoga could wait; she’d focus on transforming herself into a brilliant mum. She’d keep Alba at home and focus on learning how to bake, imaginative play and curtain patterns. But the transformation she imagined hadn’t happened, not yet at least.
And now this last year, especially with Alba in preschool, the extra time in her life has seemed more of a hindrance than a blessing. Bry has noticed how it seems to take her at least three times as long as Elizabeth to complete a simple task, such as making sandwiches or paying a bill. Time seems to spill around her, messy and uncontainable. She sees the same thing in Ash. How life sags around him like excess skin. True, Ash does a couple of days’ consultancy work a week from home, and he did oversee the renovations of their new home, but still, they see too much of each other. That’s their problem.
Ash lifts his arm away from Bry and tugs at his short, grey beard, which means he’s uncomfortable about something; perhaps he senses what she’s thinking. He gets up from the table and Alba laughs as she stands on her chair to spoon fruit salad into his mouth. Clemmie asks Elizabeth’s permission to get down before she runs over to sit in her dad’s lap. Max kicks Charlie on the bottom as they carry the empty bowls inside, laughing, and then run, shouting, all the way to their cricket stumps. After the boys have left, Alba asks for some more, and after batting Ash away she sits quietly, nodding seriously and singing a made-up song between mouthfuls of orange and banana. Bry sees Elizabeth cast a quick glance at Alba. If she was one of Elizabeth’s kids she’d be told not to sing with her mouth full, but Bry catches her eye, reminds her silently about their agreement to respect their different ways of parenting. They’ve done this for twenty years, after all – recognised a difference between them, talked about it as much as they could bear and then, like respectful warriors, put their swords down and quietly backed away from each other.
‘Quick, Auntie Bry, quick, Baby Alba! Come and look – Dandelion has a family!’ Clemmie calls from the apple tree at the bottom of the garden. Alba puffs out her chest, makes her hands into fists and steams into her fastest run, Bry following behind, her toes cool in the grass and a warmth in her chest.