Читать книгу The Museum Of Doubt - James Meek - Страница 6

Adam on the floor opened the parcel without tearing the paper, labouring at the tape with the bitten-down pithy remnants of his fingernails to pick it off the gloss of the wrapping. Cate watched him from the settee, lying on her front, feet treading air. Soon they would need to start filling another drawer with old wrapping paper that never got reused. How could they? It was old. But they couldn’t throw it away.

A book had marbled board covers and a leather spine, with a spangled sheen on the edge of the thick, rough pages. The spine creaked when he opened it and clumps of pages fanned out with a sigh. He pressed it to his face and breathed in. It smelled of damp earth.

I know I said it was simple, but you won’t learn it by sniffing it, said Cate. If you could, all the cokeheads would have discovered perpetual motion by now.

Ellsta, he said, and leaned over to kiss her.

Ellsta! she said, wrinkling up her face.

El-lsta.

Closer but still way off. Ellsta!

He flipped through the pages. There were no pictures. There were desires and needs in other lives that had never even come within sight of their own, before electricity, when the servants had no artificial servants, and couldn’t fool themselves. Mayryng, would you adjust the bedspread? Yoshua, would you bring fresh coals? Mr Ocksyng, would you shoe the brown mare?

Brymdon anches ytr gastorst, he read out. Instead of laughing at his version of Ask that lamplighter to step over here she looked at him gravely and corrected his pronunciation.

Is there a section where the master seduces the serving wench? he said. Come thee hither, bonny lass, and rowp thy postillion?

Cate rested her head sideways on her bare arm, kicking, looking at him. Try page 228.

He turned to page 228, quarter of the way through the book. Present pluperfect, he read out. Mercian tense structure in the present follows the pattern laid down in lesson 25:the future. I thought Mercian didn’t have a future.

Read to the end and you’ll see, said Cate. Don’t be so fucking smart. If you read it to the end there will be a future, won’t there?

Rowp thy postillion, said Adam, putting the book down carefully and moving over to Cate. He put his left hand into the fair curls of her hair, warm from her scalp, and it made an ultrasound like foil streamers a million miles long and a millimetre wide, crinkling and billowing in a solar wind, which only he and dogs could hear. Their tongues tasted each other and the fingertips of his other hand were running up the back of her leg.

Y tess ley, he said. It was the only Mercian phrase he knew, the one he’d asked her to teach him the first time they went out, which was also the first time they slept together, and had learned straight off.

Y tess leya, she said, and started to take off his jeans. Before he entered her she took him in her mouth, which he didn’t like, but this time he did, he barely stopped himself coming there, her grip between the tongue and the palate was so determined. Afterwards they lay on the settee together for half an hour, dozing off and on, watching the lights blinking stupidly in the branches of the tree, the fanheater thrumming against their thighs and creaking.

It’s so old, said Cate. I was lucky to find it. A library was being merged out and they were selling off a load of old books.

It’s great.

Will you study?

Of course.

I’ll help you.

Yes.

I bought you a shirt as well.

Food for the mind and food for the eh, the other thing.

If you don’t want to learn it, it’s fine, there’s no reason for you to.

I said I would, I want to, I want to be able to speak it.

I know, it’s that I saw your face – not like you were disappointed, but that the book was old, like it’d been dug up and it’d been supposed to have stayed buried.

I was hoping there’d be pictures.

That’s because you’re a moron.

They left the house at noon and took a cab to where Cate’s dad lived. As the last but one native speaker of Mercian he was to have been living in a beehive-shaped wattle and daub hut, strengthened with stone and brick in the latter generations, on a ridge among derelict cattle-pens, out poaching in all weathers, keeping the Sabbath and standing stock-still of a late summer afternoon in a cropped meadow of thistles and cowpats and horse-flies, scoured by the shadows of the clouds passing across him.

Instead he lived in a one-room council flat in a cubic four storey block in a street with lots of space between the cars, a gasholder at one end and a triangular park with grass at the other like badly laquered hair. He had the family’s Mercian bible which he’d told Cate and Adam he didn’t read and a bronchitic black labrador. He hoarded specific items at Christmas: cans of McEwan’s Export and tins of Fray Bentos steak and kidney pudding.

I wasn’t expecting you so early, he said. He had the kind of face that everything which had happened to him in the past sixty years had been unexpected, but he’d made the best of it. He was astonished to find his fridge full of shiny red cans of fizzy beer, and astounded to see the size of the pot of simmering water on the cooker, and the number of inverted pudding domes hottering inside it. He was incredulous that his daughter should turn out to be married to a man called Adam, and sceptical that they should decide to visit him on December 25, of all days. When Adam recognised the theme to the Guns of Navarone, as played by the band of the Coldstream Guards, he twisted round and looked at the Bush mono player in amazement.

Happy Chrismas, Dad, said Cate, handing over the socks. The incredible act of gift-giving just about sent him doing a double somersault backwards through the window. His mouth dropped open and his eyes bulged like a fish in a net. It’s from both of us.

Thanks very much, he gasped. He’d barely sat down in his armchair and started getting over the shock when he was sent reeling again by the discovery of two small parcels on the windowledge, hidden by a line of cards. He issued the gifts, a leather wallet for Adam and a gold chain for Cate. Cate went over and kissed him and Adam tried to make a joke about money not included, eh.

Anyway, he said. Eh … Ellsta.

Cate smiled and looked at her dad. He shrugged and wrestled with the arms of his chair, looking down and away, trying to smile and looking like a condemned man waiting for the second buzz after the first application of 2,000 volts had failed to finish the job.

Ellsta very much, said Adam.

Adam, said Cate.

Anyway, Mr Finzy, Cate’s given me this brilliant book so’s I can learn Mercian and next Christmas I’ll be speaking it properly.

Cate’s dad nodded slowly, calmer now but more worried-looking. It’ll take up a lot of your time, he said. It’s not going to help you find a job.

He wants to, Dad. We’ve got time.

It never helped me.

Adam took a drink of Export. There was silence in the room. Cate was checking her nails, frowning. Her dad was looking into the middle distance, nodding his head as if a spring had broken. He coughed.

Did you put the vegetables on, Mr Finzy? said Adam. Those puddings’ll be ready before long.

I forgot. Cate’s dad didn’t make a move.

Mm? said Cate, who’d been looking out the window.

I’ll go and see to it, said Adam.

I’ll do it, said Cate, not making a move.

Adam got up. Cate and her dad were looking at him. He let them sweat for a couple of seconds. The sun came out and all the glass in town blazed with cold reflected fire. He went to the kitchen, leaving the door open. This also had meaning in their festive entertainment.

He put a couple of pots of salted water on to boil, located the frozen sprouts and started peeling the tatties. The dog waddled in and collapsed panting on the lino with the effort. Adam tossed a scrap of potato peel in front of his nose. The beast didn’t even sniff it, he just looked at Adam pityingly. Don’t look so superior, said Adam. Your children will eat scraps and be glad of them. They’ll make a dog that eats all the rubbish we throw away. Eh Samm? Want to have your genes altered and eat teabags? He knelt down in front of the dog and scratched it behind its ears. You’re not a Mercian dog, are you? he whispered. Just keep listening to me havering. We had this same conversation last Christmas, eh. It’s crap, isn’t it?

Samm got up and walked out of the kitchen. Cate and her dad were talking. You couldn’t make out the words, not that you’d understand them if you could. Adam stood still for a while, listening, with his hands in the water of the basin, gripping the knife, the slivers of peel rocking on the surface tickling his wrists. Great long speeches they were making to each other. What the fuck about? It sounded eloquent and interesting. He only heard his own name mentioned once. Ad-dam. He’d never be able to prove she spoke better in Mercian, even if he learned it, especially if he learned it, what could he do but slow her down, but he knew for certain, even though she denied it, that she was better in Mercian. Her English was perfect of course in a way that you didn’t think about it but her Mercian was perfect in a way that you did. It was like an otter, there was nothing to prove they preferred land or water, but you knew they liked pussing about in the river more, you just had to look at them. Dryk, the in-law kept saying, dryk.

Adam stuck the peeled tatties in the pot and went and leaned back against the windowsill, looking down the kitchen. He tapped the box in his jeans pocket with the flat of his fingertips and didn’t take it out. That was another Mercian word he knew: cygaret. Also televysion, radyo, VCR and wheel. Wheel! That was a giveaway. They hadn’t even changed the spelling. What’d they used before, sledges?

It was necessary to get stuck in to the grammar tables, that was all. An idea existed that he was a guest and Cate’s real lover was about to arrive and at that time it’d be time to be not there.

If Birmingham was full of Mercians and him and Cate were the only English speakers and they were talking about whatever bulk-buy crispy high-fat diet nuggets of conversation they engaged in, operational stuff, it would sound the same as Cate and her dad. They weren’t reciting poetry to each other. They weren’t talking about life and death, the limits of time, the origin and the end of things, the areas that didn’t tolerate words as English had designed them, the very colours, the very sense of the change of season, the very love there was. It just sounded like it. Dryk. He knew what they were talking about. Dead relatives. Mum. Remember Mum? She was great, wasn’t she. Yeah. Remember how she used to make those things, you know, the things she used to make. That was what they were talking about.

He heard Cate say: Y leya tess.

He moved over to the cooker and tipped the sprouts into the boiling water, hoping to blister his hands, not like he was trying, but sometimes a dose of pain and disfigurement was what you needed, that was why people carried needles and razor blades in their pockets, to prick and cut themselves when they needed their mind taking off things. He ballooned his cheeks and rubbed his palms on his jeans, looking round. It was hot. You didn’t tell your dad you loved him like you told a lover you loved him, even in Mercian, not when your husband wasn’t supposed to be listening and you knew he was.

They stopped talking and after a few minutes Cate came through to where he was standing over the pots and embraced him from behind, her hips against his bum, her cheek against his back and her palms on his chest.

OK? she said.

It’s a sauna, a sauna, a steak and kidney sauna, said Adam.

I’m sorry, she whispered. You know.

Aye, I know what I know. Get the knives and forks, eh.

At the beginning of the meal Adam said if they wanted to speak Mercian, that was fine by him, and Cate said no it was OK, and her dad said nothing, and they ate the food and Cate’s dad asked about the job hunting and when they were going up to Fife to see Adam’s family, and they got on to the price of travel, and then television subjects, and Adam asked if they could have on the Cabaret soundtrack, and Cate’s dad put it on and brought a Christmas cake out from the kitchen and Cate sliced it up for them and Adam looked at Cate’s dad, smiled and said: Y tess ley.

Don’t Adam, said Cate.

Y tess ley, said Adam again still looking at Cate’s dad and smiling. Cate’s dad didn’t look surprised any more. He looked as if he’d known this was coming since before he was born, since before the words were lost in libraries and radiowaves and dumped at the school gates, since before his folk starting coming down from the hills to the honeycombs, since before they drove the painted ones from the peaks, since before one of them said: there’s not enough room here, let’s go out west to that big island and fuck the Britons, we’re that much harder than them, the women. He rested his arms on the table on either side of his plate, cocked his head to one side, looked Adam in the eyes and said: I’m sorry son, I don’t understand you.

Y tess ley, said Adam. It means I love you. You know. It’s your language.

It’s not your language, said Cate’s dad. You don’t anyway. You only come at Christmas.

I’m family.

Adam, shut up, you’re not ready, said Cate. It’s the wrong place to start.

What’s the right place to start? said Adam. He doesn’t even answer back when I say thank you.

He’s shy! You don’t know what he went through at school.

Maybe but I know what I go through every time I’m round here, standing in the kitchen for half an hour listening to songs of old Mercia and pretending not to notice.

It’s only once a year. Who do you think you are, telling my dad you love him, Mary Tyler Moore?

I’ll tell your dad I love him if I fucking well like.

You will not.

I fucking will. And Mary Tyler Moore doesn’t speak Mercian.

How do you know?

’Cause if she did she’d be packing sandwiches for Tesco’s in Wolverhampton instead of having her own TV production company and a millionaire lifestyle. Who are you to tell me what I can say to your dad?

Tell him that you love him, then. In English. Go on.

Adam looked at Cate’s dad, focusing on the bridge of his nose. I love you, he said.

I’m not sure I like you, said Cate’s dad.

Adam folded his arms and looked down into the cake. Cate put her hand on her dad’s.

They walked home late after watching a film. Cate was quiet.

It’s true, said Adam. You do never see it in the foreign phrase books. Tell us the way to the bus station, give us five kilos of sun-dried tomatoes, escort my bags to the dental office, and I love you.

It’s something you know already before you go, and you never learn anything else, said Cate.

What I don’t understand is why the TV people never come round and make films about him. You’d think they were waiting for him to die.

They walked side by side through the raw smoky night of small infinite streets and turnings, pattering with the footsteps of the fearful, the drunk and the doubting.

What does dryk mean? said Adam after they had walked for half an hour without saying anything.

It means cancer, said Cate.

It was prostate cancer, advanced, and they would have to operate. There was a high chance Cate’s dad would die. She went to see him most days. Sometimes she stopped overnight. Adam went about once a week. He moved a chair into the kitchen and took a book but he couldn’t concentrate with the uninterrupted flow of Mercian coming from the next room. He tried sitting on the toilet with the door closed but he could still hear them. There was no doubt. Cate was eloquent in Mercian. English was for the moving of objects and the taking of decisions, for plain reason, the turning on and off of a tap. Mercian was a waterfall, interrupted by laughter. He began taking a cassette player with him and with the earphones clamped on his head and music playing he was free for a time.

At home he would open the Mercian book after tea, with a pen and a ruled notepad on the desk in the bedroom. He began by staring out at his reflection in the window that looked out on the darkness of January, a planet Adam half in darkness, half in lamplight. He went to get a coffee and started watching the news. He came back, sat down and looked through the close print. It was not as old as it seemed. It was a reprint of a book published in 1868. On the inside front cover was a stamp in faded crimson ink saying Property of the War Office, Reprinted 1916 By Order, and at the back, after the summit of Mercian language skills demanded fifty years previously, a squire’s speech at a prize-giving for agricultural labourers, was a pamphlet-thick addendum with Serving King and Country written in English and Mercian, followed by lists of vocabulary and phrases. The officers are your friends. They are on your side. Machine gun. Phosphorous shell. Mustard gas. Come on lads, up and at them! Let’s smash the Hun/Johnny Turk/Johnny X! Fix bayonets! This man has trench foot. This man has gangrene. This man is a hero. This man is a deserter. This man is a coward. You will be decorated for this. You will be court-martialled for this. Stretcher party. Dear Mrs X, I regret to tell you that your son was killed in action near X yesterday. He died doing his duty for King and country. He was a brave soldier.

He turned back to the beginning and read the introduction. Sundry gentlemen and men of affairs have turned to me in indignation over the truculence of their Mercian servants and day labourers. Their refusal to understand the simplest instructions in English. Pernicious influence of religious tracts in their own language. Ideas above their station. My answer is invariably the same: in the simplicity of their hearts and souls, they are as much God’s children as you or I. If you are to claim mastery over them, must you not demonstrate your superiority by learning their tongue, just as they have demonstrated their ignorance by failing to learn ours? Cannot all pretend to the erudition of a Milton or a Pope. Many may feel reluctant to turn once again to the syntax and parsing of their youth for an aim so much less elevated than the enjoyment of Virgil. Yet Mercian is not a difficult language. Anglo-Saxon roots. Baltic influences. Celtic strands. Pleasing rustic airs. Young children will recite their epics with unaffected simplicity. With no more than an hour’s application each day, six months will be sufficient for reasonable profiency. The Reverend G. R. Wiley.

One day the sound Cate’s shoes made when she threw them down and they hit the skirting board was harder, and the padding of her stocking feet to the kitchen, and her shoulders in a white blouse against the black of the window, her back to him when he came in.

He’s going into hospital tomorrow, she said.

For the operation.

I don’t think there’s going to be an operation.

Why’s he going into hospital?

I don’t know. She turned round and took the tissue away from her soaking face. She looked into his eyes and sniffed. She looked down at the ground and said something to him in Mercian.

What does that mean? he said.

It means how’s it going, she said. You should know that by now.

It’s not that kind of book. They start you off with 200 different sentences starting I am a.

What are you? she said.

I am a haberdasher. Sorry, that’s the only one I can remember.

She smiled and sniffed and put out her hand to stroke his chest. It’s two months now you’ve been studying that book, she said.

I know.

I thought you wanted to speak it.

I do, but your dad. Unless I speak it like a native he doesn’t want to know.

Just for him? It wasn’t him who bought the book for you.

But when you thought you spoke the same language and then you have to start again, and one of you is super eloquent and the other one can hardly put a sentence together.

How d’you know I’m super eloquent if you don’t understand what I’m saying?

I can tell.

What does it sound like?

It sounds like the sounds the wind makes things make, or a river, or heavy rain on the street.

And what does it sound like when I’m speaking English?

Like words. Like hospitals, and bus timetables, and cups of tea, and a bit short this week, and anything good on.

You’re being sentimental. It won’t seem that way if you learn more. You talk about just the same things in Mercian as in English.

Then why am I bothering to learn it?

Why are you?

Because I don’t think it is just the same.

She liked that. She had to kiss him.

The two of them went into hospital with Cate’s dad next day. He was in a lot of pain. The hospital smelled of pain, or of the notice of pain, the smell of disinfectant and pharmaceuticals and sterilised rubber that took on just the form of what it was trying to hide. The doctors were guessing. They couldn’t bring themselves to say so, but they wanted the three of them to know they were guessing. There was body language of not having a clue and being gutted about it but that was the way it was with the human body, it was so complicated it was amazing anyone ever got beyond the cell-splitting stage. Towards the end of the day they said they were going to have to operate. Cate and Adam went in to see him together and sat down beside him on the same side of the bed. He looked at them, purged of all surprise. Cate held his hand and Adam put his hand round Cate’s waist and the other on Cate’s dad’s thigh for a moment, then took it away. After the Mercian for machine gun and brown lung it didn’t seem strange that Cate’s dad had been surprised before. Waking up in your bed at home in your own flat in the morning, that was surprising. Cancer was the hand that ended the surprise. The whip. He was a brave soldier.

Cate’s dad was dying. He was ready for it like someone who’d been waiting too long in too many offices for his name to be called. Not jumping up in relief and running to the woman behind the window any more but fed up with processes of any name or colour and wanting them all to be over and just to sleep. He was whispering to Cate in Mercian. He saw his hand tighten on hers. She turned round and looked at Adam.

What’s he saying? said Adam.

He’s talking about my mum. He says he sees her.

Sees her.

He says it hurts a lot.

Tell him he’s going to be fine.

Why?

I can’t think what else to say.

You tell him.

What, in Mercian?

He does speak English, remember.

Mr Finzy, said Adam, leaning forward, you’ll be fine.

Cate’s dad closed his eyes, turned his head towards Cate and whispered in Mercian again. The doctors came and took him away. He died the next day, after surgery, without coming round.

They were in a small room in the hospital set aside for hearing that people had died. Adam tried to hide his anger in the crying of Cate and the holding of her. She’d folded into his arms so quickly, as imagined and laid down: she hadn’t noticed. But she had.

You’re angry, she said.

No, of course not.

He wasn’t trying to hurt you.

I know.

You used to tell us you wanted us to speak Mercian while you were there. So we did.

I’m not angry. Honest.

Don’t be angry.

I’m not. But he could have told me to look after you.

Was that what you wanted him to say?

No.

You mustn’t think he didn’t like you.

He could have said something. I don’t know, goodbye.

After you’d told him he was going to be fine?

He could have told me to look after the dog. Adam was angrier now. Cate’s dad hadn’t mentioned him to her in Mercian either.

Do you know how to say goodbye? said Cate.

Yes.

What is it?

Adam couldn’t remember.

What’ve you been doing with that book open on your desk all this time?

Y tess ley.

That’s not enough.

I thought it was.

You know what I mean.

He got up the next morning and stood naked at the table. Rain spat across the window and wind shook the glass. He closed the Mercian book and put it up on the shelf, on top of an album of Picasso paintings someone had given them for a wedding present. He turned round. Cate was sitting up in bed looking at him.

You learned it when you were growing up, said Adam. It was easier. You didn’t have to study it. You just picked it up. It takes so much time. It’s not as if you’ve ever sat down to learn French or German. He waited for Cate to say something but she only looked at him. There has to be a reason. A reward. It’s not as if once I’d learned to speak Mercian I’d be able to do anything with it. I won’t be able to go somewhere and be understood. Your dad said so himself.

Am I not a reward? said Cate.

But there’s only one of you.

If you learned it there’d be two, and we’d have children. How many more do you need? How many women do you love?

Adam sat down on the bed with his back to her. She poked him sharply in the side. How many women do you love?

Just you.

But you don’t love me enough to learn to speak my language? You wouldn’t do that for me?

It’s not a small thing.

Would you only do small things for me? And love me? What would you do for me?

Adam turned round. You said my language, he said. You said my language.

It is my language. I’ve got two of them.

I’m in love with the one that speaks English.

Cate lay down, pulled the quilt over her and turned away from him. Don’t tell me you love me in Mercian any more, she said.

He did say it to her again, two or three times, in the couple of days before the funeral. He said it to comfort her but it made both of them sick to hear it. Y tess ley had been his effort and his promise of a great labour, and meant love in itself to both of them and in the promise of what he’d do, and now it was only a sign of his still being there, like a lighthouse without rocks.

Don’t, she said, I told you. Tell me in English if you mean it.

The TV people did come to the funeral, they filmed Cate reading in Mercian from the Lay of Kenelm. Walking out of the chapel with his arm round Cate Adam lifted his eyes from his shoes sinking into the gravel to see the legs of the woman walking by herself in front of them. The legs in black tights were slender and moved in short, light steps. Above that was a short black coat and a black wide-brimmed hat. When they had arranged themselves at the graveside Adam was facing her, the same age as Cate but not a friend he’d ever met, and not a relative that he could think of, with her long North African face, black eyes and dark lips. He spoke to her at the buffet afterwards and was reminded how Cate’s dad’s sister had married an Ethiopian and gone to live in Addis Ababa and had a daughter before she died. The daughter was called Naomi.

Do you speak Mercian? said Adam.

I can count up to ten, said Naomi. My mum died when I was young.

Her eyes were fixed on him. He felt the blood surge through him and his skin prickled.

I’ve been trying to learn it, he said. But the only phrase I can remember is y tess ley.

She asked him what it meant.

It means I love you, he said.

She smiled and put her fingers over her mouth. He grinned and looked away. He was looking at Cate and he was grinning after her dad had just been put in a hole in the ground and buried in earth for ever.

He went over to her and she wasn’t speaking to him. They shook the hands of the guests together while they left. Naomi smiled at them both and neither of them smiled back. She said she was at university in Leicester and they should come over. They nodded and she left.

I see what you mean now about an incentive, said Cate.

What?

Don’t be a bigger prick than you are.

If you’re talking about Naomi, we were just talking.

I know, but seeing how you were talking it’s all become much clearer. It’s too much for you to learn it just for me, your time’s too precious, your mind’s too precious, but if you knew every time you went somewhere there’d be someone like Naomi to speak Mercian with, it’d be worth your while.

She doesn’t speak Mercian.

Jesus, it’s not the fucking point, is it?

Cate was cold and down for a week and for longer than that Adam would think about Leicester University and went into a bookshop to read a few pages of a book about Ethiopia. But he got a decent job in 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.