He was wearing tracksuit pants and a T-shirt and he said he’d been thinking he might give this “Tai whatchamacallit” a go, but he said he felt “shy” about turning up on his own.

I said, “Oh, yes, because you’re such a shy, retiring type.”

We went along to the Tai Chi, and he was utterly hopeless. I had to keep trying not to giggle like a naughty schoolchild. Afterward he looked so endearingly rumpled, I invited him back for a cup of tea and some of Alice’s banana muffins that she’d given me last week.

We had quite a chat. I told him how I’d recently become quite addicted to “Facebook” after an old student invited me to join. (Little Mattie Marks. Remember him, Phil? He’s some sort of IT big shot these days.) Mr. M was impressed. He said he used the Internet a lot but didn’t know anything about Facebook. It made me feel quite hip!

He told me about his two sons and how much he misses them. (One lives in the U.K. and the other is in Perth.) He said both his boys were adopted.

“My wife and I couldn’t have our own children,” he explained. “That’s why I felt so sorry for your granddaughter.”

(He says “granddaughter” so naturally, even though he knows I’m not really related to Elisabeth. It may be to do with his own children being adopted. Perhaps it’s not so presumptuous of him. Perhaps it’s rather nice. I can’t make up my mind.)

“It’s a very lonely feeling when all your friends are having babies,” he said. He told me he could still remember the expression on his wife’s face while they went to her niece’s baptism, even though it was over sixty years ago. “It made me want to punch a wall,” he said.

I wonder if he was reprimanding me for my “babies are not the be-all and end-all” comment. I wonder if he thinks I’m being a bit harsh about poor Elisabeth.

Do you know something, Phil? I had always secretly hoped that you and I might have our own little baby. Just the one. Boy or girl. Didn’t matter. I was thirty-eight, but I knew it wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility. One of the sixth-form mothers at the school had a baby at forty-one. She was almost embarrassed about it. She brought the baby to the school one day and I remember holding out my finger for the baby to clutch and suddenly thinking, I’m younger than her. I felt that sudden rush of disbelief and exhilaration you feel when your ticket number is called in a raffle. I could still be a mother, I thought, and I felt like dancing.

It was two weeks before what should have been our wedding day.

One week before the phone call.

It’s true I’ve never been pregnant, but I know what it’s like to lose the possibility of a baby. So of course I sympathize with Elisabeth, Phil! Deeply. My heart breaks for her. I’ve cried and cried for her each time she’s lost another baby.

It’s just that sometimes I want to say to her, “Darling, maybe you don’t get to be a mother, but you still get to be a wife.”

Chapter 23

“Right. Seat belts on?” said Alice. Her hand shook slightly as she turned the key in the ignition. Did she really drive this gigantic car every day of her life? It felt like a semi-trailer. Apparently, it was called an SUV.

“Are you sure you’re safe to take them to school tomorrow? Because if you think there is any risk at all to the children, I’d rather drive them myself,” Nick had said the night before when he was leaving, and Alice had wanted to say, “Of course I’m not right, you idiot! I don’t even know where the school is!” But there had been something about Nick’s tone that made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up with a powerful, strangely familiar feeling that was close to . . . fury? He had such a sneery way of talking to her now. That snippy voice spoke up again in her head: Sanctimonious bastard! Trying to make me look like a bad mother. “I’ll be fine,” she’d said. And he’d sighed his huffy new sigh, and as she watched him walk out to his shiny car, she felt something almost like relief at the same time as she thought, “But why don’t you just come up to bed with me?”

Now her three children sat in the seat behind her. They were in horrible moods. If they’d been drunk last night, now they were all suffering from terrible hangovers. They were pale and snarly, with purple shadows under their eyes. Had they slept badly because of her? She suspected she’d let them stay up way past their normal bedtimes. There had been a lot of vagueness when she asked them what time they normally went to bed.

Alice adjusted the rear-vision mirror.

“Do you remember how to drive?” asked Tom.

“Yes, of course.” Alice’s hand hovered nervously over the handbrake.

“We’re late,” said Tom. “You might have to go quite a bit over the speed limit.”

It had been a strange and stressful morning. Tom had appeared at Alice’s bedroom door at seven a.m. and said, “Have you got your memory back?” “Not quite,” Alice had said, trying to shake her head free of a night of dreams all involving Nick yelling at her. “She hasn’t got it back!” she heard Tom cry, and then the sound of the television being switched on. When she got out of bed, she found Madison and Tom lounging around in their pajamas, eating cereal in front of the television. “Do you normally watch television before school?” Alice had asked. “Sometimes,” Tom had answered carefully, without removing his eyes from the TV. Twenty minutes later, he was in a frenzy, yelling that they needed to leave in five minutes’ time. That’s when it emerged that Olivia was still sound asleep in bed. Apparently it was Alice’s job to wake her.