Free The Museum of Doubt by James Meek Page B

a print plant and was surprised that Cate didn’t show the missing of her father more. One time the guilt got to him and he took the book down again and left it on the table where she’d see it. But she only asked him how he was getting on, and he knew she knew he wasn’t getting on, he wanted her to know he hadn’t forgotten, and that was as far as it went.
    Cate told him she was pregnant.
    I found out just after the funeral, she said, only after seeing you with Naomi I decided not to tell you for a while.
    God you talk to a stranger.
    No you laugh with a stranger when my dad’s just died. Anyway you had the hots for her.
    Ah but this is brilliant. A baby. With the job and everything. It’s too much.
    Is it too much? Others have got more. The dog smells bad.
    Do you want to move to the country?
    Why? Cate frowned.
    Maybe it’s better. I remember how you told me how the Mercian word for town and honeycomb was the same cause that was what the lights of the towns made them think of when they looked down at them at night from the hills before they lived there. And I thought maybe you were wrong and maybe they called them honeycombs because they found out that when you’d had too much of them they made you sick.
    Neither of us have ever lived in the country. You’re strange, Adam, I never had you down as a cottage with roses round the door man.
    Aye I know, said Adam. It is strange.
    He didn’t understand what he’d been after, either. But a couple of months later he came home from work, went straight into the kitchen and heard Cate speaking Mercian in the front room. He listened for a couple of minutes. She hardly paused for breath, but it wasn’t a song, it wasn’t a poem, it was the old eloquence, inspired. He went quietly out into the hallway and looked round the door. She was sitting on the settee with her hands folded across her belly, looking out into the distance, talking. She’d bend her head forward and tuck her chin into her chest so that she was talking and looking down at her navel.
    Adam went back into the kitchen and stood still for a while. Then he sat down on the kitchen floor. Cate came in and stopped sharply in the doorway when she saw him.
    God, what are you doing? she said.
    Sitting on the floor.
    I didn’t hear you come in. I was talking to the baby.
    Its ears haven’t even formed yet.
    It’ll make them come faster.
    What language?
    I don’t even remember. English, I think.
    It was Mercian. I heard you.
    Are you spying on me? What difference does it make? Don’t you want our kids to speak Mercian?
    You said you’d been speaking English.
    What the fuck would I want to do that for? I can speak to you in English, can’t I?
    But you can’t make yourself speak Mercian when you know I’m in the room.
    Why should I when you never bothered to learn it, when you couldn’t be arsed cause the only person in the world daft enough to speak it is a nonentity, your worthless wife?
    I’d be a hell of a lot keener to learn it if you didn’t go stum every time I’m around, if you weren’t so ashamed of it. Christ talk to the baby in any language you like, only not behind my back. I just want to listen, even if I don’t understand what you’re saying. I don’t want to understand. I just want to be there.
    You can’t be. You know where the book is, go and learn it, in a couple of years you’ll be perfect, but it’s not going to take any less, is it? How else can we …
    What?
    I don’t know.
    How else can we what?
    I don’t know.
    Who is we?
    You and me.
    You meant you and the baby.
    I did not.
    You did. The officer is your friend. Let’s move to the country.
    The country.
    Then I’d be outnumbered two to one instead of two to a million and still outnumbered.
    Cate turned away and shook her head. I don’t understand, she said.
    At last! said Adam. He grinned. Good.

The Queen of Ukraine
    Off Cape Hatteras the sea arched up to her, a gymnast too perfect to be had but wanting to be wanted.