Having, together with Eleanor, fed, bathed, read stories to and kissed goodnight both Beanie and Jacob, Maserov was on his hands and knees in the kitchen for a second go at what seemed like a newly created rice paddy on the floor, when Eleanor told him not to bother about it. She would finish the cleaning.
‘Oh, that’s okay, I’m already down here,’ he said, but Eleanor seemed even keener than she usually was that he leave.
‘My mother’s coming,’ Eleanor said in a tone that suggested it was an explanation for wanting him to leave sooner than usual.
‘Are you preferring your mother’s floor cleaning techniques to mine?’
‘No, it’s not that.’
‘Well?’
‘I thought you’d prefer . . . not to see her.’
‘Why?’
‘I thought it might make you uncomfortable. You haven’t seen her in a while.’
‘I haven’t seen her in a while because you kicked me out.’
‘Let’s not start that again.’
‘You always say that, as though my drawing your attention to what you’ve done to me and indirectly to the boys is somehow the wrong that’s been committed. You know what? I don’t mind seeing your mother. It’s you who doesn’t want me to see your mother. You don’t want me to see her because she always liked me and she wouldn’t agree with what you’ve done. If she comes and has even a short chat with me, sees me cleaning the house with you, she’s going to give you a hard time in the days to come. She’s going to redouble her efforts to get you to reconsider this separation and, you figure, if I’m not here and she doesn’t see me, it will make your life just that little bit easier.’
‘If you want to see my mother, fine. Why don’t you call her and ask her out on a date?’
‘A date, where did that come from?’
‘Stephen, my mother’s coming to babysit. I’m going out and I need to get ready.’
‘Oh,’ said Maserov. All the possibilities contained in her last statement seemed to dance before him, above the former rice paddies and over the kitchen table where they had once eaten as a family every day.
‘Are you going out with Marta, the woman who’s taken the teaching of Geography to a new low?’
‘What is it with you and Marta?’
‘She’s always hated me. Is that why you’re going out with her?’ Maserov was looking for confirmation that Eleanor’s evening companion was indeed Marta with an urgency that bulldozed subtlety beyond the confines of a conversation whose agreed-upon subject was up for grabs.
‘It might be Marta. What does it matter? It shouldn’t matter who it is.’
Maserov wished for a service along the lines of Google Translate only instead of translating from foreign languages it would take something his wife had said and instantly tell him what it really meant. Forget the human genome project, where was the algorithm for determining what his wife meant?
‘You want me to go before the kitchen is all done?’
‘If you don’t mind, yes.’
‘I think I mind.’
‘One day you won’t.’
‘Can I leave then?’
‘Stephen, I need a shower.’
This was a bad development. It was unlikely Eleanor needed a shower to see Marta the geographer, although Marta probably had her standards. It was possible that the shower wasn’t for Marta per se but was just the ablution Eleanor needed to wash her children off her before going out, just to be comfortable. It was also possible she wanted to be clean for someone who wasn’t Marta, wasn’t even a woman. She might want to be clean to go out with a man.
Maserov sat in his car discreetly parked across the street from the home he was trying to pay off, listening to a BBC podcast called In Our Time in which Melvyn Bragg took it in turns with various aspects of himself to berate mild-mannered, learned academics who had the audacity to say something he wasn’t expecting. As comforting as it was, nothing could distract him from the anxiety in his stomach as he waited to see who it was that was coming to the house. It was dark but the street light illuminated his mother-in-law’s arrival. He wanted to tell her that Jessica Annand had praised the aftershave she had got for him with her pharmacy bonus points. Maybe his mother-in-law could pass news of Jessica’s existence on to Eleanor and that would make his wife think twice about finding some other man. Some other man. It was unthinkable. Yet, there he was. Maserov watched in the half-light as some other man came to his house and left again soon after with his wife.