I wasn’t sure if I should go to the Knitting Circle or not. It was such a stunning day that I really wanted to crack on in the garden. Also, while Aidan was here, I thought I might persuade him to take a run out to a garden centre. I needed tools and seeds and, well….gardening things. I suppose I felt a bit of a need to shop.
But Aidan frowned when I suggested it over breakfast and said he’d be tied up pretty much all day. I tried to lose myself in the garden but I couldn’t stop thinking about what he’d said. Move back to London?
I should be over the moon. So why was I feeling, well, depressed? I was sitting on the bench, watching a fat thrush tugging at a worm, when I heard a car drawing up outside. Jane marched round with a menacing look on her face.
‘You’re not thinking of bunking off?’
‘Hmm, well….it’s a lovely day and I’ve got tons to do.’
‘Looks like it,’ she said, casting a beady eye on me, the bench, the clearly unturned earth. ‘Come on. Grab your stuff. You need some company.’
‘But Aidan’s here.’
‘Exactly. Go on. Hurry up.’
Lord she was bossy.

It was a much diminished group. No Maura, for which I was profoundly grateful. No Judith, which was surprising but, as it turned out, really a blessing. Without her bossiness, everyone loosened up and Camilla really came into her own. She possesses a wry, sardonic sense of humour and a very fine intellect, marred only by a crushing lack of self-esteem. Her passion, it turns out, is her horses.
‘Do you ride?’ she asked.
There was a tone on the word ‘ride’ that reminded me of my youth, when the question actually meant ‘do you hunt?’
‘My mother was joint-master of foxhounds,’ I said, which didn’t really answer any question. But Camilla obviously understood for she smiled right up to her eyes.
‘I’ll lend you a horse. It’s good riding country. No hedges, not much jumping, but challenging, very challenging.’
I thanked her and said I might just take her up on that offer. What a funny thought. How would it feel to get up on a horse after all these years?

On the whole, the conversation was light and pleasant. I realised, as I walked home (having turned down the offer of a lift from Jane) that I hadn’t once thought about Aidan and London. But, as I looked at the banks - bursting with green, young nettles and cleavers and aconite like starbursts – it all came crowding back to me. I was confused. Move back to London?
Isn’t it funny what a difference a month makes? If he’d said it even a fortnight ago, I’d have bitten his hand off with impatience. But now? I wasn’t sure. The house was coming together. It still didn’t feel entirely ‘mine’; still had uneasy corners, snags of discord, as if it still clutched onto old dark secrets. But what old house doesn’t have its secrets, its dark moments? Ben was teaching me patience. Showing me that you can’t just race in, that slash and burn isn’t the way with old houses. You have to nibble at the edges, to tease out the problems, like softly untangling yarn. I was no longer in such a rush. I wanted to discover its past, but slowly, cautiously, one stitch at a time.
The garden was all mine though and I loved it. Could I bear not to see my flowers bloom? Not eat the vegetables I was lovingly planting? I was making friends too. Jane of course, but also Camilla, and Ben and even Hazel too, in her funny way. And - how could I have forgotten -
Rommel? He wasn’t a city dog. He couldn’t live cooped up in an apartment, go for walkies in some neat urban park. Could I abandon him?

Aidan was closeted in his office when I got back. I could hear his voice, raised, on the phone. Angry. Barely containing his temper in fact. I retreated quietly to the kitchen and started preparing lunch. Ten minutes or so later he stormed in.
‘Bloody idiots. All bloody incompetent.’ He was white with rage.
‘What’s up hon?’
‘You wouldn’t bloody understand,’ he snapped, slamming his hand on the table.
‘I’m not a fool, Aidan.’ I was surprised at how sharp my voice sounded. So, I think, was Aidan.
‘I’m not saying you are, darling. It’s just….it’s complicated.’
‘Try me.’
‘Boring, darling, boring. It’s nothing I can’t sort out once we’re back in London.’
A deep shaft of sunlight was ploughing a furrow of light across the flagstones, dust motes dancing in its path. Rommel was curled up by the Aga, giving every appearance of sleep but with ears pricked, slightly twitching at the shifts in our voices.
‘I’m not sure I want to go.’
‘What?’
‘I thought you’d be pleased. You’ve wanted this so much. I think we need to give it a bit longer. A year at least. I don’t want to give up so easily.’
‘A year?’ He virtually spat it out. ‘But you hate it.’
I shrugged, feeling a little foolish.
‘Maybe I don’t hate it quite so much any more.’
‘This is ridiculous. You’ve been moaning about it ever since we got here.’ He was still angry – I could see it around the corners of his mouth, set hard.
‘I’ve changed my mind. It’s allowed, isn’t it? Anyhow, what about my novel? I’m making really good progress. And what about the babies? I thought we’d agreed this move was about us, about us as a family, about us having babies.’
Aidan glared at me and I couldn’t read his face at all. Then he spat out the most horrible sentence I have ever heard.
‘There won’t be any bloody babies.’


I stared at him in sheer amazement. My hands started shaking.
‘What on earth do you mean?’
He gazed at the floor, plucking at a hang-nail. How funny. Aidan is always so well-groomed, so fastidious – how had he got a hang-nail? How ridiculous that I should notice something so tiny, so inconsequential, so totally trivial at such a horrible, life-changing moment.
Thoughts hurled themselves round my head. I felt sick and dizzy.
‘What do you mean?’ I repeated, my voice sounding cracked and discordant.
He couldn’t meet my eyes. He’d obviously not meant to blurt out what he’d said – but there was no taking back those words.
‘I..er….well.’
‘For God’s sake, Aidan, you have to tell me what you mean. Are you ending it? Are we over? Is that it? You’ve got someone else?’
All those trips to London suddenly seemed clear, crystal clear. I could feel the bile rising, swallowed desperately.
‘No. No. Nothing like that. God no. Row, I love you, you know I do. There’s nobody else. How could you think that?’
‘Well, what did you mean?’
‘I…it’s just…. I don’t know how to tell you this. Well, I had a call from Dr F…’
The fertility specialist.
‘Why?’
‘I went to see him when I was in London. Got him to do some more tests on me.’
‘Lord, Aidan. What did he find?’
‘Nothing, I’m afraid.’
‘But that’s good.’
‘Well…..’
Then he told me. Pulling each word out of a dark dark place, explaining that the doctor had been reviewing our files, rechecking our results and a mistake had been made. I didn’t take it all in; I don’t really want to talk about it. I just watched the shapes his mouth made, found myself thinking about how strange speech is, how curious that we developed it. When I hauled myself back to his words, I understood the bottom line all too well. No wonder he hadn’t meant to blurt it out. No wonder he didn’t want to tell me. Aidan isn’t the problem. I am. The doctor thinks it’s highly unlikely I will ever have children naturally.
‘I don’t believe it. I want to see him. I want more tests.’ My voice was shaking.
‘Of course you do, darling. So do I. We’ll look at it when we go to London. Though we can’t see Dr F for a while yet – he was going off on some conference in Florida.’
I burst into tears. I couldn’t help it, couldn’t stop them. I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. Aidan tried to comfort me, but he isn’t good at comforting. He dislikes overt displays of extreme emotion.
‘Darling. It’s not the end of the world, truly it isn’t. I know it’s a shock but it’ll be fine. We’ll go back to London, get our old life back. We could think about other options. If it comes to it, we could always adopt.’
‘I don’t want to adopt. I want my own children.’
‘Darling, please.’ But I was sobbing too hard to hear. I thought I’d never stop.

I walked to the very edges of the garden, where the compost heap lies smouldering. Where the nettles muscle in, where the brambles tangle. It’s where the beginnings of cultivation end and the wilderness begins. A threshold, an inbetween place, liminal, neither here nor there. Just how I felt. I burrowed myself into a place in the bank, between the stiff rods of elder; pushing aside the willow. This had once been a dry stone wall, but the moss had long ago claimed it. I poked at it with my toe, peeling off a mat of thick springy green moss. The green was everywhere, trying to take over the entire valley. Grass, moss and lichen raced, almost barging each other aside, to cover stones, branches, bones. Who knew what lay hidden under their green cover?
For some stupid reason I thought about Judith. She moans endlessly about the way everything here goes green. I could hear her voice in my head, high-pitched and strident, droning on about how you could paint your house white the previous summer and it would take on an unmistakable greenish hue by the following spring. Slates on the roof, she grimaced, would be grouted with moss. She had to get the whole place power-hosed at the first hint of sun.
The woman is ludicrous of course, but I had the uneasy feeling that, were I to sit still too long, the moss and lichen would climb up over me, transforming me into a statue of green until I would elide with the hills and became no more.
I heard Aidan’s voice, calling round the house, out into the garden. But I couldn’t see him, couldn’t talk to him. I slunk away, through the fields, like an injured animal going to ground.