The weight of what she carries is with her every day. But right now, for once, it is not the roundness of her belly that occupies Rita’s thoughts as she sits in the kitchen mechanically stringing beans, barely aware of the process. No, it is not the roundness that occupies her midday thoughts. It is the night before. She was slumped in her chair, listless, enough energy for a quack if not a duck walk, when she felt herself rising from her chair. Suddenly felt Vic’s arms around her. And her first reaction was, what’s this? Vic’s arms had not been around her for a long time, not like that, and she was struggling to remember when the last time was — the last time Vic’s arms encircled her, and the last time she felt joined to that half of something else that makes your half feel whole, the way, she notes, these things ought to be. Halves meet halves and become whole. That’s how it should be, and that’s how it was once. But when Vic’s arms encircled her the night before, she did not feel that sense of one half meeting another half. At first it was … unfamiliar. So unfamiliar that she asked, what’s this? And with this question came the impulse to push him away, as you would the unwanted advances of just anybody. But this was not an advance and Vic was not just anybody. It was, the realisation slowly dawned on her, an act of affection. And so, in response to the question she posed herself — ‘What’s this?’ — she slowly, silently, spoke the word: ‘affection’, welcoming back something into her life that had not been there for too long.
Over their four years of marriage Rita has learnt much about Vic. About his nature. In fact, in those four years she has learnt all she needs to know about his nature. The rest of their years, she muses, will simply bring more of the same. The rooms in which they will live and in which the events of their lives will be enacted will change. Their faces will change. Their bodies will grow old. But, and at this particular moment she is sure of this, what she has learnt of Vic’s nature over the last four years will not change.
And one of the things she has learnt about Vic (who has just left for the shops) is that he is a man of appetites. Of course, everybody has appetites. Rita has appetites, and the child when it is born will have appetites. But Vic is a man of appetites. That is different from having appetites. You only have to watch, thinks Rita (and this sometimes annoys her, even disgusts her, and sometimes pleases her, depending on the night and depending on Vic), you only have to watch him eat his meal, the way he gathers it all into him, all of it, everything on the plate. You only have to see that to know that Vic is a man of appetites and that appetites are large in Vic’s life. Larger than they are in Rita’s, or most people she knows, for that matter. And, being a man of appetites, his appetites need satisfying. There is something basic about Vic. That for all the smart things he says, the books he’s read (and he is a reader), his way with words, with music and dancing, for all of this, for all the things that told her when she first met him that his mind was different from most people’s she’d known, for all this there is something as basic as appetites about him.
And this is why, when she asked herself ‘What’s this?’, her first impulse was to push him away. But it was the way he put his arms around her that changed her mind. As if he’d remembered something, some afternoon, some night, from those days when they first met, and, in remembering that afternoon or night, also retrieved a feeling that had been carelessly lost, and in retrieving that feeling he retrieved those days when they first met, in which words of love were spoken, often and recklessly.
And so when his arms encircled her, the act brought with it a hint of those days. Back again for a moment. This is why, in response to the question, ‘What’s this?’, she answered ‘Affection’. For affection is not an appetite. An appetite requires satisfying. If you’re hungry, you eat. If you’re thirsty, you drink. These are appetites. Just as the child that will soon be born was, she knows, the result of appetite satisfying itself one hot Saturday night the previous summer. But last night was different. And again she can only say it was the way Vic’s arms encircled her that told her this. Affection, she likes to think, is something given to you, an offering, a gift that, unlike an appetite, doesn’t require satisfaction and doesn’t ask for it. And because it is asking for nothing, because it is given, this spontaneous act of affection comes with something else that she chooses to call love. And love is not an appetite, not to Rita. Love doesn’t satisfy itself like hunger or thirst and then forget about itself until the next appetite arises. No, these appetites are passing things. They come and they go. But love is not a passing thing. Not to Rita.
And what followed afterwards? A hummed melody, perhaps from those days when, often and recklessly, words of love were spoken, but possibly new. She’s not sure because she was still slowly and silently and with a touch of wonder pronouncing the word ‘affection’ rather than listening. But it was one of those sentimental numbers, or maybe that was just her mood. And then a gentle rocking — or was it swaying? — and the first steps of a dance. A dance that took them slowly and gently round the room until the humming stopped and the melody faded into some half-remembered past when melodies like that were always playing or never far away. And when the dance stopped they stood still for a moment, and then she released him, he released her, and she fell back into the chair from which he raised her.
It is all of this that she is thinking about right now instead of, for once, the weight that she carries in her belly. And she will remember that previous night long beyond these days. She will remember it all, years from now when the two halves that came together and briefly made a whole return to being two separate halves, and the child who is not yet born has grown and gone independently into this world that awaits them all. But what Rita doesn’t know at the moment is that she will remember the dance with such sad clarity because it will be Vic’s last memorable act of affection. Throughout all the years to come, nothing will have the sad clarity of those three or four minutes that it took them to dance around the kitchen table while Vic hummed a tune as if a band was suddenly in the room.