Free The Cuckoo's Child by Margaret Thompson

love.”
    What was I going to say? I love you, but Daniel is in the way? I know sex is your way of showing love, of taking and giving comfort, but it’s also about babies, about making new ones, and I can’t think of that, I can’t even admit the possibility of that. I blew it; I lost the child we waited so long for. How can I ever imagine replacing him? What sort of betrayal would that be, to give ourselves a substitute, a consolation prize for such unlucky losers? How could I deserve that?
    â€œI’m sorry,” I repeated. “I just can’t. I just can’t.”
    Gingerly, he removed the ice pack. His nose was scarlet and swollen. He wiped blood from his upper lip.
    â€œFeels like hell,” he said. “Must look like a freak. D’you think we could have a clean sheet?”
    It was a relief to fetch one and remake the bed. When I’d finished, Neil yawned.
    â€œI’m bushed,” he said. “If you promise not to hit me, I think I’ll go to sleep now.”
    And as I crawled back in beside him, he spoke once more in the darkness.
    â€œOne of these days, Liv, it won’t seem like treachery any more.”
    So he understood. It was typical of his innate courtesy and consideration. But I had seen the hurt in his eyes, and I cursed myself for a fool, even as I felt relief. That night confirmed his gentle, almost imperceptible recoil. He began to spend more and more time in the studio, disappearing for hours, resurfacing looking bleary and bewildered as if he’d just woken in a strange bed with no idea how he had got there.
    It was at this time, too, that his work changed significantly. He had always been a magnificent draughtsman but had a growing reputation as an abstract painter. Critics called his canvases “bold,” “confrontational,” “daring syntheses of colour and form.” One of the few things we did together then was to laugh at the overblown rhetoric, make a game of inventing more and more extravagant compliments that meant less and less. “Spot on!” said Neil when I came up with “incandescent vision of tonal nebulosity.”
    â€œPitch perfect!”
    One day, though, I wandered into the studio to find Neil hunched over his worktable in front of a very bright light, peering through a magnifying lens. Curious, I looked over his shoulder. With a fine brush he was painting on a tiny piece of board, no larger than the oversized stamps they always produce at Christmas. It appeared to be a forest scene; meticulously he was filling in the tiny dark tree trunks, no thicker than eyelashes. At first I could see nothing else. Then I saw a spot of red and blue, and there was a tiny boy, tow-headed, and by his side, standing, sitting, scratching, tongues lolling, eyes bright, were wolves tame as spaniels.
    â€œStamps?” I asked. “Are you designing stamps?”
    â€œSort of,” he said, “but not for any country in this world.”
    He hesitated, then pulled out a portfolio and opened it. More miniatures, maybe six to a page, and, yes, they did look like stamps but jewelled somehow, more like the tiny illuminations in a medieval Book of Hours. Each one had a recognizable geographic context: rivers, lakes, oceans, mountains, prairie, all discernibly North American but not specific. All the scenes glowed, as if the air in those places were rarified, so that all the colours were more intense, the shadows deeper, the sun brighter. And in every one, sometimes hard to find, but there, somewhere, was the small boy. Neil was recreating the world, and Daniel roamed it, happy and safe.
    But there was no place in it for me, and as Neil quietly withdrew into his fantasy, making it ever more subtle and comprehensive as he moved with his Boy from desert to jungle to Arctic waste, I slithered deeper and deeper into despair.
    Daily routine became a numbing grind. Getting out of bed each morning involved a draining