Free The Winter Children by Lulu Taylor Page A

‘the babies’ – but day by day, they’re dividing into two individuals.
    Already she’s grown to know Stanley’s dark blue eyes, liquid and blurry, gazing up at her, the shape of his mouth and the flattened button of his nose. His scalp is covered in a fine dusting of dark hair and he has long fingers. Beattie’s
fuzz of hair is lighter, reddish, almost invisible, and her eyes are nearly always scrunched closed. She is longer than her brother and her skull is narrower.
    Who are you, little babies? Who’s there, inside you, waiting to come out?
    Stanley starts sucking, and she feels a rush of pleasure to be nursing him. Her nipple tingles and she thinks she can feel a gush of milk into his tiny warm mouth. This is what she has longed
for, waited for. And now it’s hers.
    Dan is watching her, his expression soft and loving. They’ve come together into this new world, equally amazed and overwhelmed.
    ‘So,’ she says with a smile, ‘which one do you think looks like you?’
    He laughs, and gazes down at Beattie and the tiny row of fingers curled round his. ‘Who knows? They look like themselves.’
    ‘Yes.’ She gazes down at Stanley and the regular movement of his jaw as he pulls and sucks for her milk. ‘That’s it. They’re just themselves.’ She had
thought she would feel ownership, but instead she feels only responsibility – they are in her care, but they don’t belong to her. They are themselves.
    The nurse comes up to check the readings on the machine monitoring Beattie, greeting them cheerfully. ‘So, you’re off home at the end of the week!’ she says. ‘Isn’t
that nice?’
    ‘Yep,’ Dan says. ‘We can’t wait to get them home.’
    ‘It’s a miserable time of year, though, isn’t it?’ she says, marking on the chart hanging on the side of the incubator. ‘I expect you won’t want to go out
much.’ She smiles over at Olivia. ‘Just snuggle up and stay warm at home.’
    Olivia nods. Warmth is what she craves. She looks over at Dan, and wonders when she’ll tell him what she wants.
    Later. When I’ve worked it out for myself.

Chapter Nine
    Francesca is pretending to read a magazine in the sitting room, but she isn’t taking in a word. Instead, her mind is whirling with the impact of what happened in London. Walt comes in,
chortling, just off a telephone call and returning from his study. He’s merry and pleased with himself, congratulating himself on the deal he’s worked out.
    When he sees her, he exclaims, ‘We got the place for a song, Frankie! I mean it – just under three million for a place like that? You can’t get a decent London flat for
less.’ He sinks down in the armchair opposite her.
    ‘Well done, darling.’ She likes seeing his pleasure, even if the project has left her cold. Walt always has had infectious happiness. It was one of the things she most liked about
him. The pleasure he takes in life warmed something in her when she thought she was dying. She remembers what it was like when she first got together with Walt and that wonderful feeling of being
brought back to life. He resurrected her when her plans for her career had collapsed and everything had begun to fail. She thought that her life was over, and that she was whirling down a plughole
towards darkness and despair. Walt brought her back into the light and made her feel whole again. He also offered her a life in which she no longer had to rely on herself for success. He would give her the
trappings: the houses, the clothes, the cars. She would be a wealthy woman. Everyone would have to be impressed by that. They would notice her, and admire the way she had guaranteed herself a
life they all aspired to: comfortable, safe, pleasant. And she found, almost to her surprise, that she loved Walt too. He was so straightforward and plain, the antidote to the young men
she’d been surrounded by for the last few years. He lacked their preening intellectual competitiveness, and concentrated