Zoe moved in the same week, on Saturday. Her mother drove her and although she knew she ought to be grateful, it was frustrating to start a new life this way: getting a lift from your mum, aged twenty-seven. But she didn’t have a car or enough money to hire a van and anyway, she couldn’t drive, so she sat in the passenger seat, watching the rain make little broken lines on the window, becoming gradually more rigid.
‘It’s nice round here, isn’t it? Pretty houses,’ her mother said. ‘We used to think Hackney was the back of beyond.’ Zoe thought about replying but didn’t have the energy and then it was too late: the remark sank into the silence. She was preoccupied with how she was going to defend herself when her mother saw the basement – not even a basement flat, effectively someone’s spare room. The shock, the disappointment, entreaties to come back home. She was working herself up into a self-righteous rage thinking about the conversation they were going to have: her mother would tell her she was crazy, paying rent to live in this place when she could have her old room in Kentish Town. Zoe would tell her that she didn’t understand – this was just the way it had to be, if you wanted to live by yourself in London. Her mother would be appalled by the dingy carpet, the miserable furniture; Zoe would be scornful of her bourgeois obsession with soft furnishings.
Richard let them in and Zoe felt horribly juvenile as he and her mother talked cheerfully about his children, stamp duty and the congestion charge. Richard must have been closer in age to her than her mum, but all his stabilizing forces – his family, his mortgage, his wealth – put him in a different league. He offered to help unload the car but her mum said there wasn’t much, and they made their first procession down to the basement carrying boxes. Zoe gingerly turned the door handle to her new living room, thinking how ludicrous it was that she’d agreed to live here when she couldn’t properly remember what it looked like. She hoped that the reality might be an improvement on the half-formed impression that had stayed with her all week, but it wasn’t: it was worse. She wanted to cry, as she took in the grime and the gloom, and braced herself for her mother’s reaction. But all she heard was, ‘Oh, this is lovely!’
Her mother put down the box and walked round the room, patting the mantelpiece and peering out of the window.
‘All this space to yourself – this is going to be wonderful. And Richard seems nice. Look at this fireplace!’
She stood in the middle of the room and put her hands on her hips.
‘I think this is going to be great, Zo.’
Zoe tried to detect a false note, but she seemed completely sincere. Had she been expecting something worse? Was this really all she thought Zoe was capable of?
‘Why don’t we get you some furniture? I mean, this is all very nice, but you might want a few bits of your own.’
‘I don’t think I need anything, Mum.’
‘It might make it feel more, you know, yours. I would – help you.’ She paused. Zoe’s mother very rarely offered to help with money and it didn’t come naturally to either of them. It had been the three of them for so long, Zoe, her mother and her brother Peter, that they’d felt almost equal – even though her mother was in charge, the triangle was small and its points were close. Now she said, ‘I helped Peter when he moved. Not much, but . . . I’d like to do the same for you.’
‘But Peter was buying somewhere, getting married. This isn’t the same thing.’
‘No, but this is your place now. You’re getting settled too, in your way.’
‘But it’s not— This isn’t the end!’
She laughed. ‘Well, I don’t think it’s “the end” for Peter either.’
‘Maybe you can do it later on, when I’m a bit more sorted?’
Zoe wanted to tell her that something else was going to happen, that she wasn’t going to spend the rest of her life in a stranger’s basement on her own, that it would get better than this. But she couldn’t quite see the way. She just wanted her mother to leave. And, after some token unpacking and small talk that gradually wound down into silence, she did. Zoe sat on the ageing duvet on her bed, the boxes on wheels so light they tried to skate apart and away from her. She pressed her fingers onto her eyelids and tried to regulate her breathing. She didn’t want Richard or Eleanor to hear her cry.
*
On Sunday, Eleanor came down and asked Zoe if she’d like to meet their children, Rosie and Isobel. Zoe made a show of leaping up enthusiastically, even though children made her nervous. She had an automatic, craven desire to be liked by them, as though they could expose some unsavouriness in her. Eleanor had mentioned the possibility of her helping with babysitting and she wanted to ingratiate herself, but she’d only babysat once, for one of her university tutors when she’d graduated. It had been stressful and relentless: the two-year-old had done a shit in the garden and the dog started eating it.
Rosie and Isobel looked older than she thought a three- and one-year-old ought to look, although, really, how would she know. Eleanor told her that Rosie was small for her age, but she looked uncannily grown-up, like a miniature adult. She had an elfin, slightly sad face, and she clutched Eleanor, who dredged the answers to Zoe’s questions out of her, saying, ‘You’re three, aren’t you, Rosie? Oh dear. She’s not normally like this.’ When Zoe started admiring Isobel’s smock, for something to say, Rosie came out from behind Eleanor’s leg and pushed Zoe and told her to go away. Zoe was mortified, which only increased when she saw that Eleanor was too. ‘She’s still a bit unsettled from the move,’ Eleanor said apologetically.
Isobel was just over one, what Zoe would have thought of as a baby, but she was large, slightly hulking, already walking and babbling. She looked exactly like Richard. Zoe knew that this was normal and apparently cute, but it was disconcerting to see a man’s face on a child.
In the last year or two, Zoe had noticed people starting to ask if she wanted children. When she said she didn’t know, they would say, ‘You’re probably too young, aren’t you?’ which might have been reassuring, but only reminded her that one day she wouldn’t be, particularly as nurses at family planning clinics had started talking about ‘leaving things too late’ or ‘wasting your fertile years’. They never even asked if she had a boyfriend, as though that was the least important aspect of the whole business. Looking at Isobel made her shiver: surely you had to be careful who you chose to do this with, if it meant staring at that person’s face for the next eighteen years.
*
On Monday, Eleanor was at home when Zoe got in from work. She’d told her that she worked four days a week at a publishing company and had Mondays with the children. She was sitting cross-legged on the sofa, her computer resting on a cushion on her lap, talking on her mobile phone. Rosie was lying on the floor on her back, gripping an iPad, fixated on something colourful and frenetic on the screen.
Eleanor looked startled, as though she’d forgotten Zoe lived there, but carried on with her conversation. Zoe thought about going downstairs, but went into the kitchen instead – she was seduced by what Eleanor was saying, in a low severe voice. ‘It’s 0145 – are you writing this down? – 01458 723 66 . . . I think it’s better if you speak to him direct actually, rather than us having a three-way conversation . . . Well, they’re not comparable projects, are they, that’s the point.’ Zoe made a cup of tea and lingered over it, turning the bag in the water, thinking how satisfying it must be to be paid to make decisions and have people act on them. ‘Well, that’s just going to have to move, I’m afraid. My department’s stretched enough as it is.’
‘You’re home early,’ Eleanor said when she’d finished. It sounded accusatory, but Zoe didn’t think she meant it to.
‘Well, the shop shuts at four, and it’s actually not too far on my bike so . . .’
‘Of course, sorry, you said.’ She shut her laptop. ‘This isn’t how we spend the whole day. It’s just now’s Isobel’s nap, so it’s a good time for me to catch up with things at the office, keep on top of things so tomorrow isn’t too hellish. We’re only going to watch one more, aren’t we, Rosie?’
Zoe didn’t know what to say, so she just smiled and got the milk out of the fridge.
Eleanor darted off the sofa to pick a chocolate wrapper off the floor. ‘We don’t normally have chocolate for tea either. But today was a bit tough, so . . . it’s a treat.’
‘Sure,’ Zoe said. She waited for Eleanor to ask her something about her day, but she didn’t say anything and the tea was resolutely made. ‘See you later then,’ she said and retreated downstairs.
*
The shop didn’t open until ten, so Zoe found she could avoid the family in the mornings, although she would often be woken up before they left the house, by some high-pitched debate about shoes or porridge. She would go into the deserted kitchen, looking with curiosity at the remains of their breakfast time: puddles of milk on the high chair. An electric toothbrush on the table. A lipstick in the fruit bowl.
On Thursday, she was surprised to find Richard at the kitchen table, but remembered that he worked part-time too: he was an ‘in-house lawyer’ at the property developer but devoted Thursdays and Fridays to his Master’s. She saw that he was looking at door handles on his laptop before he quickly shut it down and jumped up to start making coffee. She got a cereal box out of her cupboard self-consciously, trying not to get in his way.
She had to brace herself for the tenor of the conversation: he questioned her intently about the art shop, how she’d ended up temping on reception and why she’d left her original job in marketing, although she didn’t get a chance to speak for very long before he reinterpreted what she’d said. ‘Completely right. Completely right, Zoe. If something’s not the path for you, you have to leave. If you feel like you’re turning into the kind of person you don’t want to be. And you know, it only gets harder as you get older, have more responsibilities.’ He gave her pointless advice, like not to get a mortgage – ‘it traps you, Zoe’ – which seemed as useless as telling her not to buy a pony. He started talking to her about writing, and she was slightly puzzled that a dissertation could provoke the kind of agonizing creative process that Richard described, and also that he spoke in such collegiate and reverential tones, as if Zoe were an expert. She liked to think of herself as broadly creative – she worked in an art shop after all, she was friends with a lot of artists and she often thought about trying to write something – but she felt he’d got her wrong somehow. She didn’t want to disappoint him, though, so she was generally supportive and encouraging and he seemed happy enough to talk while she listened.
*
On Friday night, they had friends over, a couple, and Zoe sat in her room, marooned and hungry: she was too embarrassed even to walk past the kitchen to leave the house. She tried to read a book or write, but all she could think about was food and she found herself idly taking in snatches of conversation from upstairs: ‘You’re talking five, six hundred pounds if it’s a genuine Danish design’; ‘Bibury’s properly beautiful – it has a trout farm.’ The couple left early and when Eleanor and Richard had gone to bed, she crept out to the corner shop to buy crisps and ate them in bed, feeling absurd.
At the weekend, there were swimming lessons and birthday parties and trips to the park. The logistics were discussed endlessly, so it was easy enough to know when she had the house to herself and how long for. When she was sure it was empty, Zoe emerged from the basement to explore upstairs.
Eleanor still hadn’t shown her the rest of the house and she was too shy to ask, even though it made her feel mildly uncomfortable living in a house she hadn’t fully seen. She used the bathroom on the half-landing and stood at the turn of the stairs, prickling with curiosity, afraid of getting caught. She didn’t even know what she wanted to see: it would just be bedrooms and bathrooms, after all. The study Richard had talked about.
She went back downstairs and contented herself with inspecting the ground floor. It felt strange, the living room, because they still hadn’t done it up. The walls were the same dense colours. She was sure they hadn’t chosen the ancient sofas that seemed too big and formless, dominating the room, sinking into the floor. The ephemeral things clearly belonged to them, and they were solid, expensive and tasteful. And there were so many of them: butter dishes, rolling pins, knife-sharpeners. A pastry brush. Their bin was shiny and gargantuan, but it didn’t shut properly; the lid had to be weighed down with a dented can of Waitrose oxtail soup. She opened the fridge: Fairtrade coffee kept shut with a hot-pink plastic clip, brightly coloured pouches of baby food, apple juice cartons, supermarket gnocchi. A tube of medical cream. Half a lemon with a circle of ochre round the rim.
They looked younger in their wedding photo, but not too much – Zoe guessed they had got married not long before Rosie was born. Eleanor wore a very plain white gown with cap sleeves and her hair was neat and smooth, no loops or curls. Richard wore a top hat and tails: his outfit was fussy and didn’t sit well on him. It looked as if they’d come from two different weddings. They stood on a lawn, Richard behind Eleanor, with his arms around her. The pose was a little stiff – they were smiling but it was hard to tell if they were happy.
She set the photo down and saw that Richard had left his laptop open on the kitchen table. Up until then, she’d only looked at things they had on display, which she’d told herself wasn’t wrong. There would be no justification for looking at his computer. She gingerly touched the trackpad anyway. The screen came to life, and suddenly she was reading an email from Eleanor to Richard: ‘Carol can’t do Friday night, shall I try Mum? Let me know if you want me to pick anything up from the supermarket.’ No preamble or kisses. Why weren’t they nicer to each other? Zoe had sent emails to her ex-boyfriend that were warmer than that. She heard the key turn in the door and sprang back, her face hot. The hall filled with noise and she slipped out of the kitchen, waving tentatively, keeping her face turned away, retreating to the basement only half noticed.