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Berenice calls as soon as she gets to her advertising agency every morning. Or from her mobile if she's on her way to a working breakfast where she's to outline a campaign to an important client. Berenice. He visualises her by that name, as represented her to him when they first met and like most people tentatively attracted to one another used calls to pursue the attraction between meetings.
This call is supposed to be a substitute for the natural exchange of daily preoccupations and happenings they've had since living together, that's the premise both must keep up. She has to fill the silences by relating what's in progress in her working life in diverting detail as if giving a report to an interested party – another, an intimate kind of client; he has nothing much at all to say.
Yesterday I listened to the whole Fidelio.
This morning?
Maybe the garden.
Well, nice place to read, looks like a lovely clear day. Enjoy!
Some mornings she has as a hang-up conclusion, awkwardly irrelevant, I love you.
Be
His mother takes him to the hospital for his out-patient monitoring. His father substitutes if the appointments coincide with a court hearing at which she is appearing for a client but he is not as familiar with the medical procedures as she is, which makes her uneasy – one ca
On the first weekend she brought their child to him, but later visits had to be confined to the three-year-old boy seeing his father from the other side of the iron-barred gate – he could not be stopped from ru
It was decided not to expose the child to trauma while protecting him from danger he could not be expected to understand. Instead his mother substituted for the sight of him by begi
Primrose called to him at his breakfast, Why Nickie doesn't come to see his daddy no more? And the wail: Oh shame. But you must tell, you coming back soon, children don't think time like we do.
He had the impulse to bring the drawing from his bedside, where he had avoided looking at it since placing it where it ought to be, and he held it up for her to see from the distance of the kitchen door.
Adrian and Lyndsay manage the weekends well. It has never needed to be discussed, goes without saying that they refuse to keep their distance from him; even so far as that would be possible, sharing what's become the family house again. The only exception is that Lyndsay, the one who handles what touches him intimately, clothes and bedding, resists the move to follow him into his room and give him the goodnight kiss that a mother is entitled to, from childhood surely for all his life – the two men wouldn't be aware of this need. She herself does not know if she resists out of fear. Is there some sort of parenthesis in the mind: how can you fear your own child?
Neither Lyndsay nor Adrian plays any organised sport – Adrian likes to remark with pretended ruefulness, How can I retire, as I don't play golf? A vision of an eternity as an endless stretch of greens, tees, sand pits, small flags. He's always been a much diverted spectator of rugby, however, since he played scrum half in student days; on Saturdays he plans to pass the afternoon for his son, turning on the TV with the enquiring invitation glance to be joined in the living-room.
The form of exercise Adrian and Lyndsay take is long walks, ordinarily they would go off into the bush somewhere at least once a month, spend a weekend at some small resort from which they could cover trails with the exuberant dog, its sense of freedom matched by theirs. Paul knows, come Saturday-Sunday they would be doing what leisure best meant to them, and besides was essential for healthy people getting older. Living with a small child of his own two generations removed, he's been used to thinking of them as old, but in these days close in this house, a way one or the other moved, a reaction between them, a gesture or turn of phrase either used, returned them from individuals to what they had been before. Parents. He can't tell them, as he wishes, that they could go off and enjoy their walk in the country, he knows from living with Be