Page 75 of The Bordeaux Book Club

She didn’t respond at first. The silence resumed, first slightly awkward – his words hanging in the air. Then companiable, comfortable again. And she hardly wanted to break it but suddenly, she knew this was the time.

‘I’d like you to,’ she said into the quiet car.

‘To…?’

‘The shelves,’ she said, her mouth feeling slightly reluctant, stiff. ‘If you don’t mind. I’d like that.’

He nodded. ‘Done,’ he said.

‘But maybe… there’s a room you could use,’ she said.

Whenever visitors commented on the house – how beautiful it was, how well-kept, how finished, Grace felt like a fraud. Because it wasn’t true. Upstairs, beyond her bedroom – decked in floral prints – the guest room – a cool blue – and the main bathroom, was another door she’d barely opened in fifteen years.

Now, once she was sure George’s car had disappeared and she was alone, she found herself walking towards it, past her bedroom door, turning the handle, her fingers shaking just slightly, her heart in her throat.

Barely disturbed in almost fifteen years, the room had retained its smell – a smell that had been present in the whole house when they’d first taken ownership, but had since been eroded by other paints, meals, coffees, perfumes, polishes and the scent of living. Except here. In this room where she never let herself go. It was the smell as much as anything that took her back.

The blind was closed, but she switched on the electric light and flooded the room with dull yellow. And she was back, all those years ago, assembling the cot from the barely legible instructions, screwdriver in hand, dungarees straining slightly where her stomach pushed at the fabric.

It had been two weeks after Stephen left that she’d discovered she was pregnant. At first, she’d been terrified, angry even that it had happened now. Then scared of a possible loss, at her age. But the embryo had seemed to stick, clinging on for the three-month scan. As her body had started to change, so had her attitude. She’d begun to allow herself to believe that she wouldn’t be alone for much longer – begun to purchase linenfor the smallest room in the house, to order a cot. To begin to wonder what it might be like to be a mother.

It had been in this room, standing triumphantly by a newly installed changing table, that she’d first felt that flutter of life inside. Had stopped and put her hand to her stomach, the feeling like a little bird beating its wings against her skin. She’d laughed with the strangeness, the thrill of it.

Two weeks later, it had been in this room that she’d felt something was wrong. They called it mother’s instinct. Only she’d never had the chance to be a mother.

At the hospital, the sonographer’s face had been unreadable as he moved the ultrasound wand over her belly and clicked on the tiny monitor. But when he’d turned to her, she’d already known.

The cot was still there. The changing table. The stack of linen. There was dust, too. Several spiders’ webs. A feeling, as she walked in, of despair – as if the room had held on to her emotions, had absorbed the turmoil of her miscarriage.

And she realised she was Miss Havisham, in her own way. She’d allowed the room to freeze in time and while she’d appeared to move on, there was a part of her still trapped.

Although it was dark outside, she walked across the parquet floor, ignoring the churning in her stomach, and pulled the catch of the blind, opened the window and pushed the wooden shutters back against the walls. The bang of it reverberated in the night air. Blue moonlight filled the tiny space, giving it a ghostly feel. And she sighed, deeply, gutturally, feeling the emotion that she still hadn’t released gather inside her, provoked by the setting, the smell, the weight of it all.

Then a slight breeze blew in, and she felt the newness of it. The fresh air. Felt how the room had been waiting. She moved to the light switch and turned off the bulb, then returned to the open window, leaning on the sill and gazing into the blackness.

As her eyes adjusted, she realised that the sky wasn’t black at all, but a deep, navy blue. And the more she gazed upwards, the more stars seemed to appear. They’d been there all along, of course, only she hadn’t focused; her vision had been deadened by the electric light inside.

Tomorrow, she would empty the room, clean it. Then choose paint for the walls. And soon George would come, to create shelves for her haphazard books, to create order out of chaos, and her own little library in this little room where once again, she might be able to dream of something beautiful in her future.

It was a relief for Leah to close the door on George and Grace and be able to sink into a chair. Grace had been an enormous help, and made her feel so much better. But now she was alone, Leah could stop pretending she felt positive and determined about it all. If anything, she was completely drained.

She checked her phone. Nathan surely should be back soon, and this simply couldn’t wait until morning. She’d confront him the moment he walked in the door, have it out with him. Finally wring the truth from him. The idea of it was terrifying. But not as terrifying as doing nothing at all.

The light had disappeared, morphing from golden into something darker, blacker. But the solar lights in the garden had come on, and beyond in the street, the lamps were glowing. Ordinarily, she loved this time of night, sometimes going out just to see the stars, loving the transition between day and night, between the fierce, hot brightness of the sun and the lower, glowing comfort that came in the evening. It made everything feel smaller, more enclosed. And somehow, it had always felt to Leah like an embrace.

Tonight, it simply marked how long Nathan had been out. Was he coming home at all? The thought of his staying out was horrifying, yet she’d practically given him permission to do whatever he wanted. She sent him another text:

Home soon?

She kept it simple, not wanting to let him know the interrogation to come. Five minutes later, she checked. It remained unread. Perhaps he was on his way home.

Perhaps he was never coming home.

Monica let herself into the flat and put her keys into the bowl on the hall table. ‘Hello?’ she said quietly.

The flat was silent; Bella was clearly asleep and her babysitter, Clemence, would probably be reading in the quiet of the living room. The girl – although she was a woman, Monica supposed, at twenty-two – still lived at home with her parents and two younger brothers while studying for her master’s and appreciated the occasional hours spent at Monica’s with a sleeping baby in the next room. ‘It is wonderful in the silence,’ she’d said to Monica earlier, and Monica had been struck by the way that the silence could be seen so differently. As an oppressor or a friend, depending on how you looked at it.

Monica still found the large apartment and its silent walls stifling at times – the noise from the street outside just serving to highlight her loneliness. But now she had the book group, and the mother and baby group were meeting again this week. Perhaps she could start to look at the silence in a different way too.

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