THE SUNDAY TIMES NUMBER ONE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE VERSIONS OF US
LAURA BA RNETT BIRTHS,
& Marriages Deaths
Births, Deaths and Marriages
Also by Laura Barnett
The Versions of Us Greatest Hits Gifts This Beating Heart
Births, Deaths and Marriages
Laura Barnett
TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS
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First published in Great Britain in 2025 by Doubleday an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © Laura Barnett 2025
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Extract on p. vii from ‘Journey of the Magi’ from The Complete Poems and Plays by T. S. Eliot, reproduced by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.
Extract on p. vii from Pandemic Stories from the NHS Frontline, reproduced by permission of University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust.
Extract on pp.113 and 336 from Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami, published by Vintage.
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For Judith and Kirsty, the best of women
And for my stepfather Peter Bild, 1943–2024, and father Ian Barnett, 1951–2024, with love, sorrow and gratitude
. . . were we led all that way for Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly, We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death, But had thought they were different . . .
T. S. Eliot, ‘Journey of the Magi’ (1927)
Fear was in the air. It was either the fear of death or the fear of losing loved ones. It did prove to me how mortal we are, how we chase the material things, even though we cannot take even a penny or a single cloth when we actually die.
Madhuri Ankleshwaria, international staff nurse, day surgery unit at University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire (UHCW) NHS Trust; from Pandemic: Stories from the NHS Frontline (2022)
The Group
April 2003
So here they are, the group, standing together on the greenish concrete patio behind the shabby rented house, holding mugs brimful of cheap red wine. They have run out of glasses, not that there are ever enough. It is almost eight o’clock on a Saturday evening in the spring of their second year at university, and one of them – Al – is twenty today. The party is filling out, its noise thickening, though it is early yet, the full crescendo will not be reached for some time.
Manu Chao is on the stereo, not too loud: another of them, Zoe, is a stickler for neighbourly consideration, though this is not the sort of area where people complain. Tulse Hill: scruffy, smog-choked, bisected by the South Circular, but close to Brockwell Park, where they go for picnics and barbecues and to procrastinate in the anxious hours before essay deadlines and examinations. And cheap, of course; this house especially, with its ancient dubious stains and gaping floorboards, and the front windows that shake with the regular passage of double-decker buses.
Four of them live here; two of them might as well. Only their parents notice the dirt (Zoe’s mother scrubs the kitchen and bathroom with Dettol each time she visits) and several of them – Rob,
Indie, even Zoe once after too many rum and cokes – enjoy running upstairs sometimes to flash the passengers on the upper deck of the passing buses. They think this is funny; perhaps it is. They are still young, so young, though they do not feel it, and are as luminous and certain as they will ever be. They like drinking, and sex, and smoking, and loud music. They eat pasta with pesto and an astonishing amount of hummus. Some of them (Yas, Zoe, Rachel, Al) work hard, and some of them (Rob, Indie) do not, or at least not at their university degrees. They care, deeply and passionately, about each other, in ways that are known to all of them, and in other private ways that are not.
Four women – Zoe, Indie, Rachel, Yas – and two men – Al, Rob. A group formed midway through the first term of their first year, when they had found themselves sharing a pew at the funeral of poor Peter Kennedy, first-year History, killed by a speeding driver outside his hall of residence in the fourth week of term. Tragic, of course, but they will admit to the grim truth that without Peter’s death, and the wake that had followed, they would probably never have met. A possibility that seems to each of them, now, astonishing; eighteen months on they are enmeshed, woven into the weft of each other’s lives in a way that seems immutable, fixed in time.
Look at them now, in this moment, thrown together in the chilly shadows of the garden while around them other friends and lovers and strangers shout and laugh and drink and roll slender, inexpert joints.
‘Eight o’clock on the dot, wasn’t it?’ says Zoe.
Al nods. ‘Yep. So my dad tells me.’
‘Typical Al,’ Rob says. He’s the better looking of the two men. Casting-couch handsome. Tall, dark and – by his own estimation – strange. ‘Punctual from birth.’
Al smiles. Peer closely, and you might notice that the smile doesn’t quite reach his eyes. ‘That’s me.’
‘Fuck’s sake, guys.’ This is Yas, medical student, pickaxesharp, sexy in her vest and low-slung jeans. ‘Are we doing this bloody toast or not?’
They are. They lift their mugs, clash them together. Happy birthday, Al! The wine slides down their throats. Thanks, guys. They smile. They laugh. They come together in a many-armed embrace, and then scatter, each one absorbed into the party’s onward flow.
Al takes a moment upstairs, alone in his attic room.
He finds parties difficult, always has; he may be only twenty, but he has long suspected that inside him lurks an older, quieter version of himself, one that prefers talking over dinner to dancing at raves, that is happier in the company of one other person, two at a pinch, than among the frantic bustle of the group. He is an only child; at school he’d had a couple of close mates, but had never run with a pack. These friends, this shared house, this noisy technicolour life have come as something of a surprise, and he wonders how much he’d have invested in the group, in this complicated network of connections, if it had not been for one person, one friendship, in particular.
One person. One friendship. Yes. Sitting on his bed, beneath his Blu-tacked posters of David Beckham and Radiohead and (he’s a little sheepish about this) Kelly Brook, Al thinks about her. Zoe. He thinks about her all the time, really; has done since the moment they met. Peter Kennedy’s funeral. The church in Streatham Vale huge, cavernous, sad. He’d clocked Zoe outside – a woman of about his age, wearing knee-high boots and a heavy coat unbuttoned over a long black silky dress that he’d not allowed himself to think of as sexy. Not a goth – it was a funeral, after all; they’d all been in black, and she looked too wholesome for that. Whole-milk skin. Long brown-blonde hair that caught the late-autumn light and held it, tawny, radiant.
‘Were you at school with Peter?’ he’d asked her, just for something to say. She’d shaken her head.
‘No. I was with him when it happened. Not just me, there was a group of us. Someone called the ambulance. We all stayed.’
Al had told her he was sorry, that it must have been traumatic. As his father had taught him, he’d then let the silence stand.
After a moment, she said, ‘How did you know him?’
‘Peter’s room was next door to mine. I still can’t believe it. That this happened so early in the term. I mean, not that it would be different if it happened later, but I hardly knew him – we’d only spoken once or twice.’
She’d nodded, watching him with eyes that were a rare shade of greenish-blue. He’d wondered what her name was, what she was studying, where she was from. And then the mourners had begun to file into the church, and they’d fallen into step together, choosing a pew that would, in a few short moments, contain them all: Al, Peter’s neighbour, who’d felt it was only right to pay his respects. Zoe, who’d seen the moment of impact, done what she could, along with a small, concerned crowd, because she was studying to be a nurse, and because, well, what else would anyone do? Indie and Rachel, who’d met Peter at a freshers’ week meeting of Students Against Global Warming. Yas, who’d kissed Peter in a nightclub toilet the weekend before he died, though she had told nobody this, and wouldn’t, not for a long time. Rob, who’d kissed Peter in a different club the following night, though again, this was not something he had told anybody.
Useless, now, to pretend Al doesn’t love her. Zoe’s hair, her eyes, her low cackle of a laugh; the silver rings she wears, heavy as knuckledusters on each hand. The way she falls silent, sometimes, in a crowded room, and he can sense that, like him, she is turning inwards, stepping away. And they do step away, often, he and Zoe: into the kitchen, the garden, the yard behind the pub, with its barrels and gravel and discarded cigarettes. Drinking, talking, smiling at each other. He senses it in these moments; he is sure he does. He hears the low perceptible beat: the pulse that connects them, the attraction that he believes – hopes – they share.
There have been moments – her hand slipping into his on the walk home from the station; his leg pressed against hers under the pub table, more closely than might be usual between friends. But nothing more than this. Why? Because he is pathetic, useless,
a chicken; and because Zoe is . . . Well. He doesn’t know. Not interested? Shy? No, not that. So probably the former. So runs the circular route of his thinking, but either way, Al thinks – getting up from the bed, stepping across the dusty floorboards towards the door, the music, the party – tonight, finally, he needs to know.
Indie is dancing in the living room – ‘Lose Yourself’ by Eminem; the whole room is moving, the uncomfortable landlord-issued sofas pushed back against the walls – and wondering where Al has gone.
Ah, here he is – she watches him slinking in from the hallway with his beer, keeping to the edge of the crowd. Reddish hair, denim eyes, on the short side – in her heels, she’s taller than him, as all the women are except Yas. Not at all her usual type; it had been Rob she’d noticed that first day, at the funeral (such an odd place to make new friends). She’d slept with Rob a few days later, after a night spent together in the union bar. The sex had been good, if a little clumsy, but they’d both decided against telling anyone or it happening again. Friendship, they’d agreed, was far more interesting, and they’d sensed already that this was what was beginning to form between the six of them.
No, this fascination with Al had developed more slowly, over time, almost without Indie noticing. He is attractive, yes – something of the young Robert Redford about him, her mother Matilda had said after meeting him for the first time, though Indie sees more of Damian Lewis (she and her flatmate Cesca had developed a major crush on him in Band of Brothers ). But it’s not really about that. There’s something about Al that makes her feel calm, safe, at ease. A quietness about him, a steadiness, that answers her own restlessness, her continual yearning for novelty. Look at her now: ditching her degree at the end of the year to head off to Goa with Cesca to study yoga and clean tourist villas and work out what the hell she wants to do with the rest of her life. Not this, anyway. Not uni. Not writing essays about politics instead of going out and actually changing things.
Not sitting around drinking and getting stoned in an ugly rented house that isn’t even hers (she lives rent-free in Cesca’s parents’ flat in Battersea) when she could be out there doing . . . well, something. Something significant. Something big. Not pining for someone who clearly doesn’t give a shit about her, not in that way. She watches Al now as she dances; he’s still standing there, back to the wall, scanning the writhing, shifting crowd for another woman, another face.
Rob catches Zoe on the upstairs landing, leaving the bathroom. Brushes her hand with his; lets his fingers travel along the cool creamy skin of her inner arm.
‘Don’t,’ she says, but she is smiling. He smiles back. ‘Don’t what?’
She narrows her eyes at him – those lovely eyes, sea-green, infinite – and continues downstairs. He watches her go – she looks hot tonight: plunging black top, jeans that cling to the curve of her hips – forgetting for a moment why he has come up. Ah yes – his room. The pills. The moment is now, he feels; it’s after ten; he’s riding the crest of a buzz, one he’d like to take further, higher. He’ll see if Indie wants to join him, or Yas. It’s not Al’s thing, or Rachel’s. And Zoe is fairly po-faced about drugs – ‘I’m training to be a nurse, for God’s sake’ – though Yas is going to be a doctor, and it doesn’t seem to bother her.
He finds the little plastic bag in the drawer of his bedside table, beside the packet of condoms. He opens the bag, places a pill on his tongue. Thinks about the things he’d done in this room the night before, and the person he’d done them with. The feel of her body. The silk sheet of her hair. The sounds she’d made when she came.
Rob gets up, slides the bag into his pocket. Someone has turned the music up; the bass is shaking the floorboards. Aaliyah. ‘More Than A Woman’. Yas’s taste: she must have taken over the CD player. Great woman – shame she doesn’t live with them, that she’s still stuck at home with her mum, though she’s here so often, sleeping off her hangover on the sofa, that she probably
ought to start contributing to the rent. Great song. Great night. It’s a great time to be alive, to be Rob: nineteen years old, handsome as Hollywood, six-packed though he has never worked out in his life. He’s starting to feel it now, that clearer brighter high, as he eases past the queue forming outside the bathroom and runs back downstairs to dance.
Yas is in the kitchen, pouring tequila into plastic cups.
‘More,’ Rachel says, half shouting over the blare of music from the living room, and Yas obliges.
‘Sam not here yet?’
Rachel shakes her head.
‘Fuck him,’ Yas says, taking up her glass. ‘Or actually, don’t. He’s boring anyway. Boring and mainstream. I bet he gets his mum to iron his pants. I bet he never gives head. I can’t be arsed with lemon and salt. Can you?’
‘Nope.’
They drink. Yas pours another. They drink. Aaliyah gives way to ‘Murder On The Dancefloor’. Rob appears in the doorway, vamping, shaking his hips; the crew in the kitchen cheers; ridiculous, Yas thinks, the effect Rob has on people, though it’s hard not to get swept up in it – she’s getting swept up in it herself now as Rob takes her hand, and Rachel’s, and leads them through to the living room. They dance, as everyone is dancing. Indie is here too, and people Yas knows from the union bar and the lecture halls and the dissection room, and others she does not. It’s been a heavy week – genetics lectures, cancer seminar, anatomy exam; two evenings waitressing and another shift today at Frank’s café, helping her mum serve fry-ups to crashed-out clubbers and hungover ballerinas. None of her mates really know what it’s like to live at home through uni, to have to fit two jobs around your medical degree; they’re not cheap, stethoscopes and lab coats and skeletons, and they don’t buy themselves. (Well, OK, her skeleton – she has named him Bert – was a gift from the group for her nineteenth birthday.) But Yas isn’t one for selfpity. She’s a good dancer, and she knows it: easy, loose-hipped,
relaxed in her own skin. She wants distraction, fun, release. She looks from face to face, eye to eye. One guy stares back; someone she vaguely recognizes, though she can’t quite think where from. Yas holds his gaze. Smiles. He smiles too. Comes over, parting the crowd. Good hair. Nice eyes. Good body. Yes. ‘Hey,’ he says, and Yas mouths back, ‘Hey,’ and draws the semi-stranger closer.
Rachel doesn’t know why she bothered asking Sam to come. She doesn’t even like him that much; she’d been so bored on their last date, listening to him drone on about his plans for the summer – France with his family, followed by two weeks on an archaeological dig in southern Spain – that she’d gone to the toilet after the starter and texted Zoe, asking her to phone with some invented emergency.
She’d never done anything like that before. It had worked, though. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she’d told Sam, ‘but I’ve got to go, my friend’s having a meltdown.’ As soon as she’d got back to Tulse Hill, Rachel and Zoe had collapsed into laughter and agreed that it was good riddance. But when Sam had texted the next day asking how Zoe was coping, Rachel had felt guilty, and dropped back into an exchange of messages that had led, with grim inevitability, to her inviting him to Al’s party in the vain hope that it might make Rob jealous. And now it’s ten thirty, and Sam hasn’t even bothered to turn up.
She takes out her phone – she’s having a wee in the downstairs loo, murky (luckily, as it is rarely cleaned) under the shadeless dwindling bulb. Nothing from Sam. Blurry on tequila and filled with a sudden rage, Rachel finds his number in her contacts and hits delete. It takes her a while – the phone is new, as is the whole vexed business of texting, but she manages. Fuck him. She checks her lipstick in the mirror – a bit smudged, but it’ll do – and looks back at herself for a moment, flushed, wild-eyed, unable to pretend, suddenly, that she’d been interested in Sam for any reason beyond the fact that he bears a passing resemblance to Rob.
Robin Stevens. Rob. The boy – man, for God’s sake; they’re
grown-ups now, aren’t they? – who had, when she’d found herself sitting next to him in the lecture hall, struck her as the most beautiful human male she had ever seen. So absurdly beautiful, in fact, that she had found it difficult to believe that anyone in the room could continue with what they were doing without stopping to acknowledge it; that Professor Simon could just set up his projector and begin to speak, and others take out their pads and pens and appear entirely focused on what he was saying.
Rachel had pretended to do the same. She’d written down the odd disembodied phrase – tower; Black Death; trenchant social criticism – but nothing had stuck; when she’d come to write the essay, she’d had to look up the professor’s article in The Cambridge Companion to Piers Plowman to regain even the most minimal sense of what he’d been talking about. Rob, on the other hand, had remained painfully clear in her mind – the sculpted nose and chin, the scattered stubble, the perfect shell-whorl of his ear. Jesus, her rapture had been embarrassing, even then; halfway through, he’d turned to her and muttered under his breath, ‘You got any idea what he’s talking about?’ and she’d flushed scarlet, shaking her head.
I’M ROB, he’d scrawled on his notepad. Hi. I’m Rachel, she’d written back, her heart skittering, trying to think of some hilarious quip with which to capture his attention. None had occurred to her. Still, on the next line, he’d put, Hi Rachel. You’re looking very beautiful today. Maybe we could get a coffee some time? Especially if you’ve actually read this dreary crap! And she, now so red in the face that she’d imagined she might actually be visible from space, had written, Sure!
But Rob had written nothing more; and later, when they’d filed out, she realized he hadn’t even asked for her phone number or email address. For weeks after that, Rachel had moved through her days in a state of absurd romantic reverie, thinking she saw him everywhere – in the coffee shop close to Senate House; in Waterstones on Gower Street; in the basement laundry room of her hall of residence – but each time, it had turned out not to be him. It was as if she’d been flirted with by a ghost. Until
she’d stepped into the church pew at Peter Kennedy’s funeral, and there he’d been, sticking out his hand to introduce himself, appearing not to remember her at all. And behind her, of course, had been Indie, and Rachel had introduced them, and that, for a while anyway, had been that (Indie and Rob seemed to think that nobody knew they’d slept together, but everybody did). And now Rachel shares a house, a kitchen, even a bathroom with Rob, and he comes to sit on her bed late at night to eat crumpets and cut his toenails and ask her about the significance of the rural idyll in Victorian realist literature, and leaves tidemarks in the bath and razor clippings in the basin, and never, ever does the washing up, and has so much sex in his room that she has started wearing earplugs. And still, like the stupid idiot she is, she loves him, though to him she is no more than lovely Rach, good old Rach, you’ll just let me have a quick peek at your Middlemarch essay, won’t you, Rach?
Fuck Rob. Fuck Sam. Fuck it all. She’ll find Zoe. She’ll drink tequila. And she’ll dance, she’ll dance, she’ll dance.
‘Here you are,’ Al says.
Zoe turns, lowering her cigarette. She’s back on the concrete patio, shivering a little without her cardigan; easy to forget how cold the nights can be in April, even when the days have turned warm. ‘Here I am.’
He steps outside to join her, leans, as she is doing, against the rough brick of the house. The garden before them is night-lit, mysterious: ragged unmown grass, neglected borders, a mouldering barbecue unused since last summer and now, like everything, in serious need of a clean. A few other smokers gathering, chatting, swaying to the music pouring out from the open windows.
‘Having fun?’
Al nods. ‘You?’
She nods back. ‘Flagging a bit, though. If that’s not too lame to say to the birthday boy. We’re running low on wine and beer. I was going to do a shop run before it closes.’
‘I’ll come with you. I can hardly let you go on your own, can I?’
‘Let me? This isn’t eighteen ninety-one.’
‘No,’ he says. ‘You’re right. So will you let me come?’
She looks at him. ‘Of course.’
They slip out of the front door unnoticed; most people are in the living room now, or the kitchen, or upstairs. The street is cool, night-quiet, which is not really quiet at all, but a softer, muted version of the day’s clamour: there is the muffled noise of the party, the purr of television laughter, the growl and shudder of passing traffic.
Zoe draws on her cardigan, suddenly cold and feeling naked in her skimpy top. She’s been a little self-conscious all night; not only because of the top, which she fears makes her look fat (Indie, Yas and Rachel are all so skinny; it’s impossible not to feel like the dumpy, unglamorous friend), but because it is Al’s birthday, and she is . . . Well. Not quite sure what she is doing and why. Until a few months ago, she would never have imagined that she was capable of something like this. It is as if she has split herself in two, and one part of her is exactly as she has always been, whole and honest and authentic, and the other part is a wild sleepless liar who spends half her nights doing unspeakable things with a man she suspects – no, knows – she should not be doing them with. Or perhaps that is hindsight speaking. Perhaps, in this moment, Zoe, twenty, a student nurse from Herne Bay who had lost her virginity to her school boyfriend at seventeen a month before he broke up with her, sees that man only as he wishes to be seen. Gorgeous. Charismatic. Impossible to ignore. A dreamboat, as her grandmother might say, if only she knew. A dreamboat who appears, against all possible expectations, to have chosen her.
Neither Al nor Zoe speak, and even as the silence stretches and extends, exquisite in its awkwardness, she can think of nothing to say. She knows what Al is thinking, what he wants. She thinks about it; wants it, too. She has imagined it, enacted it in her mind, in a million different ways, but has never made the fantasy reality because . . . How would she explain it? Out of fear? Inexperience? A belief that if it were going to happen between
them, it would already have done so? And now, it can’t happen. Now, it is too late, but there is no safe, kind way to tell him.
The corner shop is busy, its narrow aisles demanding careful navigation. Zoe grabs a basket, fills it with six-packs of beer, the cheapest bottles of wine, as much as she can carry. Al, following behind her, does the same. When they reach the till, he offers to take her basket, lift it up to the countertop for scanning, and Zoe lets him. He smiles at her, and she smiles back. She wants to say to him, You are so lovely. I’m not good enough for you. Really, if you knew the truth, you would see that I’m not. But she doesn’t say this, of course.
Their route home takes them past Brockwell Park, bordered by high railings, the familiar grass and trees and benches made sinister in the darkness. They are almost home when Al stops, puts down his bags, and looks at her.
‘Zoe,’ he says. ‘I think you know how I . . .’
She watches him. No words come to her. Al reaches across, takes the bags from her hands, lays them on the pavement next to his. The bottles clash together. Neither of them looks down to check whether anything has broken. He reaches out again to take her hand in his.
‘Do you . . . ?’ he says.
Zoe can’t answer. Her mouth is dry. Her heart is thudding violently in her chest. She steps towards him. Her arms link around his neck, unbidden, moving of their own accord. Their bodies recalibrate, align. His hand is on her back. She is leaning down to meet his lips with hers.
The drone of traffic. The glow of a streetlight. The purple shadows of the trees. No place but this one. No other sensation but this.
PART ONE SPRING 2023
Invitation
The time of birth is 5.52 a.m. A boy, seven pounds four ounces, battered and furious like all newborns, or at least the ones about which Zoe doesn’t have to worry. ‘Don’t freak out’, she says often to her first-time mums, ‘if they come out looking like they’ve done five rounds with Mike Tyson. It’s a physical assault, being born.’
Labour, too. This mum, Helen, is exhausted, lying slumped against the deflating wall of the birthing pool, damp hair plastered against her forehead. It has been a straightforward birth, really: six hours from first contraction to the arrival of her third child, delivered at home in water as Helen wanted. No complications, no medication. Zoe had held Helen’s shoulders as she’d shuddered through great gusts of pain. She’d always known she wanted a hospital delivery with Gabriel – gas and air, epidural, whatever they could throw at her. Not for her, back then, the typed birth plan, the hypnotherapy, the doulas with their massages, their heady scents of jasmine and peppermint and clary sage. Shame, really: perhaps if she’d had access to these things, her own birthing experience would have been different. Perhaps many things would have been.
There’s a doula here now. Isabella. Zoe’s come across her several times before, though alternative approaches aren’t quite such a thing in Herne Bay as they are in London. You get a bit of it
in Whitstable. Isabella is kneeling behind Helen, wrapping her hair in a towel. Across the room, dad Pete is holding the hatted, swaddled child. George Arnold Stevenson Thomas: a fine, serious name for a fine, serious-looking baby. Always, no matter how many babies she has delivered, Zoe is struck by the knowing expression they all have at the moment of emergence, that sense they bring of carrying with them so many unfathomable secrets. (Jill, the senior midwife at her first hospital placement, always told her it was just wind.)
‘Help me lift her?’ Isabella says, and together they draw Helen from the pool, drape her in a towelling dressing- gown, settle her on the sofa. Zoe helps Pete to unbundle the baby and place him, still wearing his tiny knitted hat, on Helen’s chest. Skin to skin, his mouth opening and closing, seeking the wordless comfort of the nipple. His eyes tight shut. All of it normal – Zoe knows this now, though she hadn’t all those years ago, in those wild, fractured hours of new motherhood. Gabe hadn’t opened his eyes for two days, until Zoe had begun to fear that there might not actually be any eyeballs behind his tight- shut lids: her mother, holding him for the first time, had mentioned reading about something like that in the Daily Mail . ‘Thanks, Mum,’ Zoe had said drily from the hospital bed, her son settled in the nest of her mother’s arms. ‘You really know how to set my mind at rest.’
Now, gently, Zoe angles George’s head towards Helen’s breast. Sometimes, rarely, the newborns latch on right away; most often they do not, continue snuffling and rooting. Tiny animals, bound by skin and flesh and instinct. The ordinary miracle of their existence, which has never become banal to Zoe, not even after almost twenty years as a midwife, and which she hopes never will.
In the kitchen, Isabella fills the kettle, and Zoe stands for a moment, looking out over the garden. Six fifteen, dawn becoming morning, the sky hanging in monochrome drifts; the trees and shrubs and play-frame (the Thomases’ two other children are in Canterbury with their grandparents overnight)
shrugging off the night to reveal their familiar forms. Zoe has always loved this moment, the gate-swing of night into day; which is lucky, considering she’s rarely slept past dawn for the last twenty years.
‘Milk, yes? No sugar. Nice and strong.’
Isabella hands her a blue-striped mug. A kind woman, gentle, good at her job. Zoe refuses to be like the old-school midwives, with their suspicion of the doulas, of their lotions and potions. ‘Thanks. How did you . . . ?’
Isabella smiles, displaying a row of small white teeth. Everything about her is neat, trim, compact. Beside her, Zoe feels clumsy and oversized.
‘My memory’s ridiculous. I never forget anything I’m told. Honestly, I think I freak people out.’
Zoe takes a sip. It’s just right. ‘There are worse ways to scare people. My brain’s a sieve. I swear there are days when I can barely remember my own name.’
Zoe slips into the silence of her car, leans back against the headrest, closes her eyes. The broken nights are harder than they used to be, as they are for her older mums: as they are, Zoe knows, for Rachel. In some ways she was fortunate, having Gabriel young: she had more energy, more stamina. There have to be some advantages to blowing up your life with an unplanned pregnancy at twenty-one. That, and the fact that without becoming a mother herself she’d never have chosen midwifery over nursing. She’d found the whole thing – her pregnancy, the bloodied exhausting battleground of childbirth – extraordinary, mind-blowing. ‘I’m going to do what you do,’ she’d told her attending midwife on a gasped out-breath between contractions, her mother standing on one side of the bed and Rob on the other, his face contorted with what had been either anxiety or squeamishness, or some complicated blend of the two.
‘OK, that’s great,’ the midwife had said, smiling, ‘but for now, let’s concentrate on getting this baby out of there, shall we?’
Her phone shudders in the pocket of her coat. Zoe opens
her eyes. Won’t be the ward – she’s already let them know that mother and baby are doing fine, and anyway, they’d call, not text. Could be Gabe, on the London train – he’s out of the door by half six these days – asking her to add one of his pricey vegan ingredients (organic almond butter; harissa paste; nutritional yeast) to their online shop. Or Dad, perhaps – he’s always up by seven – wondering whether she’d prefer lamb or chicken for lunch on Sunday, and whether Gabriel will make do with carrots and roast potatoes.
But no, it’s not Dad. It’s her . . . What is Rob to her now, really? Her ex-husband. Her co-parent. On a good day, if she is feeling generous, her friend.
He has sent her a photo of an invitation: smart font, minimalist, lots of white space. All very stylish, though the wording is curious, old-fashioned. Signore Gesualdo Simone and Mr Robin Stevens invite you to celebrate their engagement with generous libations . . .
There is an accompanying message.
About to put these in the post, but I thought I’d give you a heads-up first. It would mean so much to me if you could come with Gabe. I’m inviting the whole crew . . . First time we’ll all have been together in – God, how long is it now? Too long. Please come, Zo. It would mean the world to us both. But mainly to me.
Zoe flicks back to the photo, studies it. The Crypt on the Green. Well, that sounds suitably joyous. But then Gesualdo does rather have one foot in the . . . No, that’s unfair. Funny though. Bloody funny. The whole thing is, really. And alone in her car, releasing the handbrake, indicating, waiting for a van to pass before pulling out, Zoe permits herself, briefly and deliciously, to laugh.
The invitation arrives three days later. It is Saturday and she has slept in for once, taken a long, luxuriant bath. Across the landing,
Gabe’s door stands open, and his running shoes are gone from the hall.
Zoe makes herself a cup of tea, feeds Macavity, returns to bed with her novel. A chapter or so in, she hears the front door slam, then Gabe’s voice floating up to her from downstairs. ‘Morning, Mum! You up yet?’
‘Not quite! I’ll come down.’
She draws on her dressing-gown and slippers, finds her son stretching in the half-light, his lovely, familiar face slick with sweat. She brushes his shoulder with her hand. Astonishing, still, that her baby, her tiny fat-limbed child, should have become this enormous creature, six feet tall, muscle and sinew and questing, quick-fire brain.
‘Good run?’
Gabe nods, pointing to the radiator cover where they keep keys, circulars, flyers for new local takeaways: all the usual layered detritus. On top sits a new envelope – black, posh-looking, their conjoined names – Zoe and Gabriel Wells – etched in gold calligraphic strokes. ‘Post for you. Well, for us. From Dad, I think. Want a proper coffee?’
‘Sure.’
She places the invitation on the kitchen table, propped up by the fruit bowl. It sits there looking at them as they drink their coffee. ‘Proper’, to Gabe, means Good Morning Matilda, Indie’s house blend. She sends them packs for free: Zoe couldn’t afford to buy it, not regularly, so Indie dispatches a monthly supply in exchange (so her excuse runs) for Gabe posting on his socials.
‘Well,’ she says. ‘Are you going to go?’
Her son looks at her across the rim of his mug, brown eyes steady, his disordered post-run hair tucked behind his ears. Rob’s eyes. Rob’s hair, in colour, if not in length: Rob has always kept his short. Rob’s face, staring back at her across the table. Nobody ever sees Zoe in Gabe, though she is there, of course. ‘I think so. Yes. Are you?’
Zoe has already discussed her answer to this question at length with Rachel via WhatsApp: Rachel hadn’t yet received her invitation, so Zoe had forwarded Rob’s photo. Rachel was dubious about finding a babysitter but had promised to try; Zoe had restrained herself from asking why she couldn’t leave Mark at home with the kids. Neither Indie nor Yas have been in touch about the party, but that isn’t surprising – Zoe hasn’t heard from either of them in a while. It’s Rachel she’s closest to now. They’d always been close – except for a few tricky months after Zoe and Rob had finally owned up to what was happening – but the shared experience of motherhood had made them even more so. In the impossible early months after Ollie was born, and later Finn, Rachel had taken to messaging Zoe several times a day, seeking reassurance for her innumerable anxieties. Indie is always busy, so preoccupied with her business, and Yas . . . well, Yas is Yas. Slippery, elusive, as she has always been. And NHS consultant surgeons are kept busy these days: almost as busy as midwives.
On WhatsApp, their key speculation had been about whether Rob and Gesualdo had invited Al. Zoe didn’t think Rob and Al were in touch – it was, as far as she knew, years since any of them had heard from him – but Rachel was sure that Rob would have reached out. He did say ‘the whole crew’. I wonder if he’ll come . . . How long has it been? I don’t think I’ve seen Al since before I was pregnant with Ollie.
Zoe, in reply: I’m not sure anyone’s seen much of him since Estelle’s funeral.
Rachel: Yes. God. You’re right. And, after a moment, We should probably all have tried harder.
Zoe, by return: It’s true. We should have.
To Gabe, now, she says, ‘Let’s go together. I mean, who are we to resist your father’s offer of generous libations?’
Upstairs, dressing, making her bed, Zoe replays fragments of that day.
How long ago was it now? Ten years. Yes, it must be; they’d
all been turning thirty, Estelle’s accident had happened just a few days after Al’s birthday. There they’d all been, drinking strawberry margaritas in that Mexican bar on Brewer Street, and then two weeks later, standing in West Norwood crematorium, blinking at the coffin containing the woman they’d been drinking and dancing with . . .
Twenty- nine years old; not quite a year since Al and Estelle had got married. Her death had seemed an impossible, unimaginable thing; though really it had not been so impossible or unimaginable, for had the six of them not met at a funeral, in the wake of another sudden loss? Mostly, Zoe preferred to forget – they all did; the story they usually told was that the six of them had met in the pub, omitting the memorial service that had come before.
On the day he’d said goodbye to his wife, Al had been ashen, exhausted, looking as if he’d slept – or not slept – in his charcoal suit, which, sometime during the long blur of the wake, he’d admitted he had. She’d stood with him for a moment in the stark high-walled yard outside the Fox and Hounds, sharing a cigarette. ‘What am I going to do now, Zoe?’ Al had asked calmly, quietly. Zoe had handed the dwindling stub back to him and said, ‘I don’t know, Al. I wish I did.’
She runs a hand across the duvet now, smoothing creases, replacing the pile of graphic-print scatter cushions that must be one of the scant pleasures of sleeping alone at forty (nobody can complain about how long it takes to make the bed). A long time – too long – since she has thought of Al; really thought of him, beyond a vague formless guilt, a sense that she ought to have done more, that there was more all of them could have done. She hopes he’s recovered, as far as anyone ever could. She pictures him married again, with two children, maybe even three. A spaniel puppy. There had, in those distant first days, been something puppyish about him: he was eager, energetic, vulnerable. More a red setter than a spaniel, perhaps, with that hair, those eyes. That night, mostly forgotten, buried somewhere in the deepest recesses of her memory, when he’d turned those eyes to her
in the semi-darkness of the street beside Brockwell Park and said . . . well, whatever he’d said, and she’d offered him the only reply that had felt honest and true.
But that was a very long time ago; Zoe can barely recall the details now, and she is sure that Al won’t remember that night at all.
Generous Libations
The time of death was somewhere between midnight and 1 a.m. Her care worker had found her, surprised that the radio was still on: Mrs Lawson, Lorna, had always turned it off before falling asleep.
‘She’s a night owl,’ the care worker is telling Al now. Patience, her name is, according to her badge. She looks tired; her eyes, in the stark artificial light of the corridor, are pink, mapped with tiny networks of veins. ‘Was, I should say. I can’t believe she’s . . . I mean, you get used to it, doing this job, but still, it’s . . .’
Al places a hand on her arm: briefly, just the quick, barely noticeable pressure of his hand on her sleeve. ‘A shock. Of course it is. It would be strange if it weren’t.’
Patience lifts her gaze to meet his, nods. Two strangers, joined for a second in acknowledgement of the most basic and undeniable of facts. Then, just as quickly, divided: here is the night manager, a tall, hard-faced woman wearing neon-pink lipstick and a helmet of dark hair; and, a step behind her, Dad and Jack. Each of them sombre in his dark suit, wearing his best sad-respectful-formal face; though Jack had been firing up a cigarette outside just moments ago, complaining about having to answer another night call. ‘Didn’t used to take three of us to pick up a body,’ he’d said to Al in a low voice while Al’s dad was busy in the cab; and Al, tired too, terser than he’d meant
to be, had shot back, ‘Do you want to repeat that to Dad, or shall I?’
‘Right,’ the manager says now. ‘The doctor’s been and we have the medical certificate. The son’s been informed, but he’s up in Scotland: he won’t be here until tomorrow. He agrees that it’s best we move her as quickly as possible.’
There is a silence.
‘Policy,’ the manager says. ‘We mustn’t upset the other residents.’
‘It’s not allowed, is it?’ Al says to his dad later, once they’ve pulled out on to Croydon Road. His dad’s driving: he insists on it, though his eyesight isn’t what it was. It makes Al nervous, though at least Dad never drives above twenty miles an hour. Not in the ambulance, anyway. Or the hearse. ‘The law’s changed. They’re meant to ask the next of kin to appoint a firm, not call whoever they like.’
‘Does it matter?’ Dad says. ‘If we’re the ones who get the call?’
Al watches the road: the black tarmac, the yellow flash of streetlights. It’s not quite five and still dark, though on the horizon, above the roofline, the sky is lightening, shot through with layers of grey. ‘Of course it matters, Dad. It’s the law.’
Beside him, head slumped against the window, Jack snorts. ‘Give it a rest, will you, prof? Some of us are trying to get a moment’s shut-eye.’
Dad says nothing. They pass the petrol station, the terraced houses dim beyond their front gardens, few lights on; the other early-morning drivers are off to their shifts in hospitals, cafés, offices, or just coming home.
‘It’s good to care, Al,’ Dad says after a while. ‘It’s always good to care. Too many don’t, not after a few years. Too many forget what it’s like.’
Al wants to say, I’ll never forget. How could I? He wants to say, How could you? But he stays silent, watching the windscreen, watching the restless waking city.
The envelope is there on the table when he comes down for breakfast. Black coffee – Indie’s posh stuff; Dad scoffs at how much it costs, but it’s good, and Al is loyal. Two Weetabix. The envelope. Dad must have picked it up before he went down to the office. He will have been up since seven: just a few hours’ sleep, and he’s ready for the day. Often Al wonders what on earth his father is going to do with himself after his retirement. Often, he knows, his father wonders this too.
Rob’s invitation. Al had known it was coming: Rob had sent him a message a week or so ago. Al, my old mucker. It’s been an age. Really hope you’re doing OK. I’m getting MARRIED again, would you believe? I’m inviting everyone, all the old uni crowd. Could you let me know the best address for you?
Al had written back, keeping it brief. If Rob had found it strange that Al was now sharing a postal address with Goodwin and Son, funeral directors, he hadn’t let on. All he’d said was thanks, and that Al’s invite would be in the post. And now here it is.
Al slides out the card – cream, thick, smart black typeface. Signore Gesualdo Simone and Mr Robin Stevens . . . He remembers Indie saying something about Rob being involved with an older Italian guy – an artist, was it? Or an architect? He’d seen Indie last April; she had invited him to a talk she was giving at LSE on activism in the retail sector. He hadn’t been sure why she’d invited him, really, though they’d kept in sporadic touch over the years – more frequently than he’d been in contact with the others, though Al suspects this is more his fault than theirs. Indie had been an impressive speaker, and didn’t appear to have aged much. Afterwards, over lunch – pasta at a place on Sicilian Avenue – she’d sketched in what she knew about the group. Yas, a newly anointed consultant surgeon at UCH, was living in Kentish Town; still single, as far as Indie knew. Rachel was a stay-at-home mum in Tunbridge Wells with two under-fives. Zoe was still a midwife in Herne Bay, near her parents. Rob . . . well, he was still Rob. Teaching English. Living in some splendour in Clerkenwell with a rich Italian architect (yes, that was it)
almost twenty years his senior. ‘We should all get together,’ Indie had said, and Al had smiled, though privately he’d suspected this would never happen.
But now, apparently, it would. He could go to the party. Generous libations . . . The Crypt on the Green in Clerkenwell – not a part of London he knows well. ‘Doing all right for himself, then,’ Al had said when Indie told him where Rob was living, wincing as he said it, knowing he sounded like his dad, knowing, even then, that they’d been living together too long. ‘Private school?’
Indie shook her head. ‘No, a comprehensive. Gesualdo has the money, I think. But that’s Rob, isn’t it? He’s always landed on his feet.’
Al had sensed a sadness in Indie, behind her smile, her success, her glossy entrepreneurial sheen. The business was thriving, she said, growing year-on-year, exceeding expectations. Their coffee was stocked in several European countries, and there was interest from America; she was flying to New York the following week. ‘Xavier going with you?’ Al had asked, silently congratulating himself on remembering her husband’s name. That’s when he’d seen it most clearly – the sadness flitting across her face.
‘Not this time,’ she’d said. ‘It’s a work trip. Wouldn’t be much fun for him.’
Afterwards, on the train back to Beckenham, Al had found himself thinking about Indie, about all of them, as they’d been at university, and in the years that followed. The crap rented houses, the parties, the Saturday-night hangovers they’d flung off by Sunday lunchtime like a discarded coat. Indie with her yoga, her travel, her politics. Yas drinking too much and sleeping with half the medical faculty, and beyond. Rachel studying hard, and loving Rob painfully, privately, though of course everyone had known, including, surely, Rob himself. Al loving . . . well, that had been no secret, either, but she’d made her choice.
Rob and Zoe: nobody had seen it coming. A baby. A wedding. The three of them playing house in a basement flat in Tooting until Rob had finally had the guts to come clean about how he
really felt – the guts, or the gall, depending on your point of view. They’d all hated him for a while after he’d left her, left them. They’d rallied round, done shifts looking after Gabe, who’d been two by then – a toddler given to fits of rage that had shocked Al with their violence, their intensity. They’d taken turns cleaning the flat, doing what they could. Al had perhaps done less than the others; it was hard to see Zoe, his heart still sore. And then he’d met Estelle, and a few years after that, he’d lost her, and the loss had swallowed him whole.
Yes, he could go to Rob’s party, see them all, catch up. Perhaps he ought to go.
Of course you should, you idiot, he hears Estelle saying. What’s the point? he shoots back without thinking, out of habit. She is silent, then: a silence that seems pointed, meaningful. She’s right. He should go. Perhaps he will.
A Good Life
Gesualdo has thought of everything. Decorations: black paper pompoms, gold-sprayed foliage in tall vases. Drinks: champagne – Dom Pérignon – and a full cocktail menu. Food: twelve varieties of canapé. No live music as it’s too distracting; better to keep it low-key, chilled but upbeat, a suitable background to conversation. Gesualdo’s sisters Silvia and Agata are flying in from Milan and Los Angeles respectively. He has invited the entire architectural practice, and a roster of friends, relatives and acquaintances so extensive that Rob recognizes only a handful of the names.
‘Are you sure it isn’t all a bit much?’ Rob had said a few nights ago, over dinner. ‘It’s only the engagement party, not the wedding. And anyway, I thought we were keeping things relatively small.’
Gesualdo had put down his wine glass, taken his hand. There has always, it seems to Rob, been a layer of impermeability around him, a lacquer through which no anxiety or difficult feelings can penetrate. Perhaps it’s money: Gesualdo has always had it, is free with it, profligate even, in a way that Rob finds embarrassing as well as endearing. How is Rob to reconcile throwing an engagement party costing several thousand pounds with the fact that there are kids at school whose families can’t afford to