Free Anticipation by Tanya Moir Page A

them, Ted and Evelyn. Her white hand curled around his arm. The new Mrs Harding is dark-eyed too. The wrong side of twenty-five, but no longer a spinster. Before you know it, she’ll be in a mock-Tudor semi in Kings Close with her four children and gas oven.
    Oh yes — and a pear tree.
    In his crisp black suit, Ted looks — what? Confident. Self-conscious . Optimistic that whatever judgement he’s waiting for must surely go his way.
    ‘What do you remember about him?’ My mother presses Nanny Biggs.
    Sarah thinks for a while. At last, she waves her glass at us in triumph.
    ‘He used to come home sometimes,’ she says, ‘with rabbits in his pockets.’

    ‘Have you ever been married?’ I ask Jake.
    He shakes his head. ‘I lived with a girl for a few years. Didn’t work out though.’
    We drink in silence. I refill our glasses.
    ‘How about you?’ he asks me.
    ‘Divorced.’
    He looks slightly alarmed.
    ‘Six years ago,’ I reassure him.
    ‘Must be tough.’
    I stare across the lawn. We’re a bottle down — what the hell. ‘Actually, I like it.’

    ‘He’s just the same as your father,’ Maggie told me, the first time I brought Greg home. I pretended it was a compliment — Greg was steady and open and kind. But I knew it wasn’t. And even back then, I think, I felt more hurt for long-dead Roger than I did for my new fiancé.
    It didn’t matter, really, what Greg was. He loved me. Such a nicesurprise! It would have been churlish not to love him back, and I truly did. Not Harry-love, the insatiable kind that grows and fills your guts and eats you out from the inside. Oh no, we were better than that. Greg loved me — and I loved him back — in a sane and easy way, the way you love a piece of fruit or a bacon sandwich. I was proud of myself, of us. Our moderation.
    I wanted to show Maggie, back then when I still thought I could say or do things that would make a difference. When I thought that people could change.
See, Mummy? This is how it’s done
. So the day after Greg and I got back from London, I took him round to meet her.
    ‘He’s just like your father,’ she said, in the bedroom at Bradbury Street, perched on the precipitous candlewick edge of my old spring-base bed.
    And I realised, then, that my mother didn’t believe in Harry. Tapeworm Harry, the one who loved Violet, I mean. She’d made him up for us, a fantasy, our parable and excuse. Our lie.
See, Janine? That’s where loving someone too much will get you
. Cutting out strangers’ hearts. Blood on the ceiling. Not to mention all over your hands. But there’d been no worm in my great-great-grandfather’s head at all, not that Maggie saw, just the helical squirm of our DNA as it made its calculation. Add opportunity to desire, then subtract risk — if the sum’s above zero, put in the knife. They can’t do their times tables, our Harding cells, but this is the kind of maths we’re good at.
    Across from her, on the opposite bed — the one no one ever came to sleep in — I twisted the new diamond on my finger. Greg was good for me. Everybody said so. And I could feel it myself. I was smoother with him, more finished off. He made such a neat job of hiding my rough edges. I ran him round my life like a tube of No More Gaps and I was very grateful.
    I swore to myself, then and there — and again, six months later, to him and to God, to all of our friends and, especially, my mother — that I would never leave Greg. I hadn’t bargained, of course, on how long it would take him to leave me.
    One of our arguments — not the last, not the first — alwayssticks in my head, though I can’t recall its subject. Some point of etiquette, no doubt, the usual ticking of cogs below the pivot point of power. At the stage I remember, it’s getting late, and his voice is a mosquito whine in my head, and I can’t be arsed with the game any more.
    ‘Why don’t you just leave then.’
    ‘Jesus! Do you have to be such a bitch?’
    The