The Two of Us Read online

  ‘Before my time,’ I say. ‘Was it in colour?’

  Ivy flicks me on the ear. ‘Any more of that and I’ll set my bulldog on you.’

  In a variation on the previous evening, Frank falls asleep in front of the TV, whereas Ivy is as lively as a 5-year-old full of chocolate cake – telling me about her day, asking about mine, fidgeting in her seat and offering thoughts and opinions on everything from the Saturday-night movie to the colour of my socks. After Frank comes abruptly awake (his sister’s wet finger in his ear), he takes himself to bed and Ivy announces that we are going for a walk.

  ‘It’s almost eleven,’ I tell her.

  ‘So?’

  ‘And it’s winter.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘And you’re nineteen weeks pregnant. With twins.’

  ‘I know,’ says Ivy, ‘second trimester, baby! Now get your coat.’

  To say she jumps up from the sofa would be an exaggeration, but she is on her feet in under a minute, which, under the circumstances (approximately twenty extra pounds of bodyweight) is pretty impressive.

  It’s past chucking-out time, and the open expanse of mulchy grass is quiet as we circle the duck pond and head towards the denser woodland of Wimbledon Common proper.

  ‘Spooky,’ says Ivy. ‘Are you scared? I bet you are.’

  ‘Bloody freezing is what I am.’

  Ivy’s arm is looped through mine and she pulls me tight against her side. ‘I’ve got heat to spare,’ she says. ‘Snuggle in.’

  ‘I hope you’re not planning on making a habit of this.’

  ‘Shh, don’t ruin it. I’ll be crashed out on the sofa for the next seventeen weeks. Enjoy it while you can.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound long, does it? Seventeen weeks.’

  ‘Nuh huh; four of us soon.’

  ‘I expect we’ll spend a lot of time up here, with the twins. Picnics, bikes, kites.’

  ‘Treasure hunts.’

  ‘Paper boats.’

  ‘See those trees?’ Ivy says.

  ‘I can’t see anything.’

  ‘They are teeming with conkers in the autumn. Hundreds and hundreds of them.’

  ‘Better hope we have boys, then.’

  Ivy shoves me with her shoulder. ‘I was conker champion of our house, thank you very much. Trick is to soak them in vinegar and bake them.’

  ‘Isn’t that cheating?’

  ‘That attitude is why you will ne—’ Ivy stops walking. ‘Shh, look . . .’

  ‘What, where?’ Ivy takes my chin in her hand and points my head towards a stand of thin sparse trees. Something moves and a pair of eyes glint out from the tangled undergrowth. My heart quickens. ‘The fuck is that?’

  ‘Womble.’

  ‘Can you eat Womble?’

  ‘Yes, but they make better slippers.’

  I laugh under my breath.

  ‘Hang on, what happened to those slippers I bought you?’

  ‘They made my feet hot, and Uncle Bulgaria’s fur made my ankles itch.’

  Ivy sighs. ‘I should take them back.’

  ‘God no, I love them. Just not . . . on my feet.’

  The Womble darts out from the bushes as if it’s going to attack.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ This from me.

  ‘Calm down, it’s only a fox.’

  The fox is maybe twenty yards away now, facing us down, challenging us. I’m acutely aware of my own breathing as the three of us stand regarding each other in the thumping silence.

  ‘How fast can foxes run, do you think?’

  ‘Don’t be such a wuss,’ Ivy says. ‘It’s more afraid of you than you are of it.’

  ‘Debatable. I hate foxes.’

  ‘What have foxes ever done to you?’ Ivy says.

  ‘What have they ever done for me?’

  ‘Well, they eat rats, for a start. No foxes and you’d be tripping over rats the size of babies.’

  ‘Nice image. Can we go home now, please?’

  Ivy claps her hands together. ‘Go on! Scoot!’

  The fox stares at her disdainfully for a second, before turning and walking casually away.

  ‘See?’ I say. ‘Attitude problem.’

  ‘The problem with foxes is bad PR,’ says Ivy.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Did you know, for example, that foxes form strong family units?’

  ‘Can’t say that I did.’

  ‘Well, they do,’ says Ivy as she sets off walking again. ‘And they breed like crazy.’

  ‘Lucky foxes.’

  ‘And when all the cubs come along, the aunties and big sister foxes all pitch in and help to raise them. Put some human families to shame.’

  ‘When did you become an authority on foxes?’

  Ivy hums all the syllables of I don’t know. ‘Must have read it somewhere.’

  ‘Okay, I take it back. Foxes are amazing.’

  ‘Fox is a good name,’ says Ivy.

  ‘Not on my watch.’

  ‘Or Vixen.’

  ‘Only if we have one with superpowers.’

  ‘What would be your favourite superpower?’ says Ivy, tugging on my arm and dragging me further into the deep dark woods. ‘For me it would have to be mind control. Or time travel.’

  ‘How about night vision?’

  Ivy begins on a long, tangential riff about the pros and perils of time travel. It’s been four months since we went on our impromptu road trip from London to the North-west. Ivy would have been pregnant at the time, but we were blissfully ignorant of the double miracle unfolding behind her belly button. It feels like a lifetime ago now, and in a way it was – two lifetimes, in fact. When we weren’t in bed, the car or a pub, we were rambling through late-summer countryside, walking nowhere and talking about nothing. Not unlike we are now. It will be roughly eighteen years before we have that kind of extravagant liberty again, but in return we get picnics and kites and treasure hunts and Wombles and all the conkers a kid could wish for. From where I’m standing – in cold mud while Ivy talks nonsensically about quantum cause and effect – it sounds like a pretty good deal. As Ivy expounds on the inherent dilemmas of meddling with history (assassinating Hitler, saving Hendrix) I know one thing for certain – if I could go back in time to the day Ivy became pregnant, I wouldn’t change a single thing.

  Chapter 14

  I normally see El on a Tuesday, but Ivy is working tomorrow, so here we are – me, El and Ivy – at the Natural History Museum on a fresh Monday morning in December.

  The last time I saw El – six days ago, now – it followed a similar pattern to every other Tuesday: we ate pizza, drank alcohol-free beer and El fell asleep in front of a DVD. What was different was Phil; he was more drunk than usual when he got back from the pub, and correspondingly more tearful and maudlin. Part of it, I’m sure, is the ADRT sitting in a drawer in Phil’s office – a signed four-page testament to the fact that El is not simply ill, but dying at an indeterminate speed. The other part, Phil only hinted at, but I think loneliness has a lot to do with it. He spends practically every waking moment with El, but it’s not the El he fell in love with. Instead, Phil is left with a bad copy of the original that can only serve as a constant reminder of what and who he is living without. When he came back from the pub that night, Phil was so drunk he was afraid to carry El upstairs, and asked me to do it for him. El is in a separate room now, and sleeping in a form of cot. Sitting on top of his single mattress is an inflatable, four-sided cocoon called a SafeSides. This protects El from falling out of bed or bashing himself against the wooden bed frame, both of which are a significant risk since his tics and twitches have become more exaggerated.

  ‘Poor soul doesn’t even get a break while he’s sleeping,’ Phil told me through more tears.

  Phil is taking antidepressants now, but it’s as clear as the bags under his eyes that they aren’t proving entirely effective. I offered again to take El out for the day, and again Phil demurred.

  When I told Ivy about it on Saturday night, sh
e said we should ‘kidnap El’ and take him to the Natural History Museum for a day. And these are the kinds of things love is made of, I suppose, because I have never (in our long four months together) felt closer to Ivy than I did at that moment. There have been other moments, of course – the first time we made love, the day we first saw our babies on the sonographer’s screen, the night she asked me to move in with her – and while they have been both wonderful and profound, they were also, to an extent, inevitable: a million couples do these things every single day. But this empathy and understanding towards both El and Phil, the desire to be involved, it just reminded me how much I love her.

  I phoned Phil this morning to check he and El were home, saying little more than I needed to ‘collect something’. Neither Phil nor El has met Ivy before and her unannounced visit provided enough shock and laughter that Phil put up no resistance when we announced our intention to take El out for the day. We ordered a taxi and it arrived before we’d finished our first cup of coffee. I just hope Phil uses his day well.

  For El’s part, I haven’t seen him happier or more excited in a long long time. El has a wheelchair now; he can still walk, but he tires quickly and stairs are practically impossible. Ivy is slower moving, too, and she takes some of the weight off her feet by leaning on the handles of El’s chair as she pushes him into the central hall of the museum.

  Much of El’s excitement has been the prospect of a day at the museum, but he is also beside himself at having finally met Ivy, and hasn’t stopped talking at her since we loaded him into the taxi. He’s even managed to get her name right. But as we cross the threshold of the museum, even El falls silent. The word that springs to mind is cavernous, but no cavern was ever this expansive or flooded with light. The wide tiled floor is enclosed on either side by two tiers of stacked, terracotta arches, each one maybe twenty feet high and leading the eye upward to a vaulted ceiling, composed of decorative panels and broad glass panes. At the far end of the hall a row of tall stained-glass windows boom with rose-tinted sunshine. Majestic, ethereal, magnificent, opulent – they all come close. You could almost miss the museum’s most famous exhibit, but of course nobody does. It’s early in the day and the schools are still in term time, so there are fewer visitors than there might be; even so, there are a couple of hundred people in the main hall. And, of course, they are entirely preoccupied with the twenty-six-metre dinosaur skeleton that has pride of place.

  ‘J. . . Jesus!’ El points at the giant pile of mahogany-coloured bones. ‘L. . . look the s. . . size o’ that f. . . fuckig diosonour!’ he says, his voice echoing around the glorious space. ‘R. . . right, l. . . less go ex. . . explorin’.’

  Without El we might be tempted to flow with the crowd, but both his wheelchair and his unselfconscious awe force us to amble at a slower, more considered pace. After graduating from Bristol University with a degree in Biology, El came to London to do a Ph.D. in something involving bugs and DNA. Maybe this is why he is so uncharacteristically quiet – reverential, even – as we stand mute before the fossils, models and stuffed specimens of beasts prehistoric, extinct and – you could be convinced – simply imagined. We examine glass cases displaying shells and minerals and teeth and petrified dung (‘Dino poo!’). We linger over glass cases of butterflies, skulls and preserved footprints from one hundred million years ago. An archaeopteryx fossil in a square slab of rock looks like some prehistoric fairy-tale book, and a decorated dolphin skull makes the hairs stand up at the nape of my neck. We stare open-mouthed at a woolly mammoth, a sabre-toothed tiger, a duck-billed platypus and a gorilla that bears an uncanny resemblance to Ivy’s brother Frank.

  ‘Want me to push?’ I ask Ivy, and she accepts the offer.

  ‘Practice for you,’ says El. ‘For when b. . . baba c. . . comes along.’

  We stop to look at a Neanderthal skull. The yellowed bone is broken and incomplete, as if it’s been dropped and shattered at some point in the last couple of hundred thousand years. After pondering the exhibit for a minute, El turns to Ivy and stares at her face. He holds a shaking hand to his cheek as if checking to see if his own face is scarred like Ivy’s.

  ‘F. . . Fisher din’t tell me,’ he says. ‘W. . . w. . .’

  ‘What happened?’ Ivy asks.

  El nods.

  Ivy smiles, squats down beside the chair so that her face is level with El’s. ‘When I was eight, I decided to try and tap dance on top of a glass coffee table.’

  El’s head wobbles on top of his shoulders; he pulls a face that suggests he doesn’t believe this.

  ‘’s true,’ she says. ‘The table was toughened glass, so I thought it’d be okay. Although it’s so long ago now, I’m not really sure if I was thinking anything at all.’

  ‘B. . . blimey,’ says El, ‘b. . . bet you w. . . won’ do th. . . that again.’

  Ivy laughs and shakes her head. I’ve been worried about El meeting Ivy – worried that he’d say something to offend her, or incriminate me. But seeing them together now, I feel myself relax and I regret not introducing them to each other sooner.

  Before we leave, we stop at a glass case containing a first edition of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. And (with the exception of the dino poo) this captures El’s attention more than anything else we have seen today.

  ‘Old Ch. . . Charlie,’ El says. ‘He’s my h. . . h. . .’

  ‘Hero?’

  El dismisses the word with a frustrated flick of his hand, as if it irritates him, but he nods to himself nevertheless. The ancient copy of Darwin’s book is displayed alongside an imposing marble statue of the great man himself sitting in a hefty chair, beard rolling down his chest, coat draped across his knees. The symmetry between my friend in his wheelchair and Charles Darwin on his white marble throne is impossible to miss.

  ‘F. . . fuckig g. . . g’netics.’

  And seeing El sitting before his idol, twitching and jerking and diminished . . . with the right soundtrack it could move me to tears.

  ‘R. . . right,’ says El, ‘I need a p. . . pee, and one of y. . . you two is going to h. . . hold my imp. . . impressive exhibit.’ He grins up at us, enjoying the effects of his hard-earned words.

  Charles Darwin may well have developed the theory of natural selection, but I’ll bet everything I have he wasn’t as funny as my friend El.

  We eat a late lunch at a posh restaurant in South Kensington. El struggles to grip cutlery now, so we have brought his own – a knife and fork with bicycle handgrips fitted over the handles to make it easier for him to hold. Every time the waiter brings something to our table, El raises his knife and dings an imaginary bicycle bell. Far from being offended by this behaviour in a Michelin-starred restaurant, our waiter appears to be highly entertained by it. A lot of rich and famous people live around here, so maybe he’s used to eccentrics. Either way, I tip him heavily, but this, too, seems to be nothing extraordinary – at least not to the waiter.

  ‘You sh. . . should be s. . . savin’.’ El points a shaking finger at Ivy’s bump.

  ‘He’s right,’ says Ivy, smiling. ‘You’re a family man now.’

  ‘C. . . can I touch it?’ El asks, and he has the expression of a child asking to stroke a puppy.

  Ivy moves her chair so that it’s alongside El’s, takes his hand and places it inside her shirt on the bare skin of her bump. I’m expecting some lewd comment or innuendo from El, but he simply closes his eyes and sits very still (as still as he can) with his hand against Ivy’s tummy.

  ‘Did you feel them move?’ asks Ivy, once El has removed his hand.

  El nods, and when he opens his eyes they are shiny with tears. He turns to me: ‘So y. . . you goin’ p. . . pr. . . propose or w. . . what?’

  Ivy laughs awkwardly and I excuse myself to the loo.

  In the taxi back to Earl’s Court, El sits on the back seat next to Ivy, holding her hand and, after only a few minutes, falling asleep with his head resting against her arm. Ivy strokes his head absent-mindedly.
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  It’s close to five o’clock when we drop El at home, and I help him up the steps to his front door as the driver removes El’s wheelchair from the boot. Phil invites us in for wine, but Ivy and I are both exhausted and the taxi is waiting to take us on to Wimbledon. With El safely installed in front of the TV, Phil comes to the taxi to say goodbye.

  ‘Same time next week?’ he says, and then, seeing our expressions, he laughs. ‘Your faces!’ he says, and his laughter catches until he is wiping tears from his eyes. It’s the most relaxed I’ve seen Phil in months, and I feel pretty good about myself for it. Not good enough to take the bait, though.

  ‘You know there are places,’ Ivy says, ‘where you can put El into daycare?’

  Phil looks up at the clouds, puts his hands in his pockets then immediately removes them.

  ‘It might be good for you,’ Ivy says. ‘Both of you.’

  Phil sighs and it feels like a gesture of acquiescence, or the step towards it. He leans in to the cab, kisses Ivy on the cheek, then turns to me.

  ‘If I were you, William, I’d put a ring on this girl’s finger and quick.’ And then, of course, he bursts into tears.

  Ivy sleeps in the taxi back to Wimbledon, and if there’s a happier man stuck in slow-moving rush-hour traffic this evening, then I’d like to shake his hand.

  When Frank gets back from work a little before eight, I’m dozing in front of a property show and Ivy is reading her book club assignment. Frank is carrying four bags full of groceries, and after a cursory hello, he changes out of his work clothes and starts cooking a spaghetti bolognese for the three of us. It’s a nice gesture, of course, but to me it feels a little too much like he’s moving in.

  This is only his fourth night staying with us so it’s too soon to have formed a concrete impression of the guy, but he seems unusually quiet as we eat our supper. Maybe he’s tired – it’s the first day of his working week, after all. Frank divides his professional time between St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington and a private practice in North London. Where he was today, I don’t know, but both are an awkward commute from Wimbledon, and he is surely earning enough to rent a flat of his own somewhere more convenient. As a prelude to sewing this seed, I ask how long it took him to travel to work this morning, but he merely shrugs and grunts. I comment on how unreliable the District Line is, and Frank collects the dirty supper dishes, takes them to the sink and washes up.