‘Have you been listening to a word I said?’
‘Yes, I have,’ said Hugh. ‘It’s a decision, not a law. Nothing’s been made illegal.’
(He said the last word with a slow lingual and a long nasal vowel, like this: ill-lee-gal. It was from the maternal half of his accent, which showed up now and then like a mitochondrial gene.)
‘The point is,’ said Hope, irritated at what seemed wilful obtuseness for its own sake, ‘it sets a precedent. In effect the fix becomes compulsory.’
‘In effect, yes. But only if someone sues.’
‘Oh, come on. You know what’ll happen to insurance, social services, and everything like that.’ Hope waved her arms as if fending off midges. ‘It all closes in. And then they’ll make a law, like they did with pregnant women smoking and drinking.’
‘Yeah,’ said Hugh. ‘There is that.’
He stood up and walked over to the stove. The air in the room smelled resinous for a moment as he opened the stove door and loaded some new wood in. He worked the lever that ejected a brick of soot, added the brick to the stack by the stove, and then sat down again.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I suppose that just means we’ll have to break the law.’
Hope had been half-expecting him to argue, to suggest some compromise. He didn’t share her opposition to the fix, and had now and again expressed some mild irritation at the succession of infant ills that its absence left Nick exposed to. He had once pointed out that the medicines to cure these ills were themselves very similar in principle and effect to the fix. Having found herself pushing at an open door, Hope stumbled and flailed.
‘We could always claim we had a faith issue with it,’ she said, half in jest.
‘No, we could not,’ Hugh said, folding his arms. ‘I will not pretend to believe something just to get a conscience exemption. Because it would not be true, and because you would have to do more than claim. You would have to show evidence of practice, even if it was just muttering in front of crystals or something. And that would set a very bad example to the boy, if nothing else.’
‘I wasn’t being serious,’ said Hope, hastening to reassure.
‘I didn’t think you were,’ said Hugh. He opened his arms and smiled a little. ‘I don’t want to hear even jokes about that.’
‘All right,’ said Hope.
She knew that Hugh took religion very seriously, possibly just as seriously as had the Iranian couple whose case had brought about the whole new situation. And – all proportions guarded – for very much the same reason. He’d told her tales about the wind farms, in the wry tone of someone recounting things so absurd they were unlikely to be believed, but who insisted on their telling and their truth nonetheless. Neither old-time religion nor New Age woo-woo were, in his implacable view, deserving of any slack.
‘Damn it!’ said Hugh, vehement after a moment or two of pondering. ‘Last week we were so happy that you’re pregnant. Now we have to worry about this.’
He jumped up and prowled the carpet.
‘There’s plenty we can do,’ he said. ‘These parenting sites, there must be thousands of people in this position. There’s all the legal challenges, there’s civil-liberty groups and all that. It’s not like it’s all going to happen without a fuss. And it’ll take longer than nine months, that’s for sure.’
‘Nine months is long enough for a lot of things,’ said Hope.
‘It is and all,’ said Hugh.
Hope saw his gaze flicker to the whisky bottle on a shelf. She knew he wanted a dram, and knew he wouldn’t take one because she couldn’t. (Well, she could, but the monitor ring she wore on the same finger as her wedding band would log the violation with the health centre.) She wished she could persuade him, but knew from her earlier pregnancy that he would not be persuaded. For him it was a matter of honour, or maybe stubborn pride.
‘But you’re right,’ she said. ‘We can do lots of things.’
And there they left the question for the night.
Snow had fallen overnight, and likewise overnight the GenSip had worked its magic. Between them these phenomena made Nick eager for nursery. He didn’t even clutch Hope’s leg when she left him. She trudged home through another fall of snow, big wet soggy flakes that turned instantly to slush. She left her Mucks and cagoule to dry in the hall and padded in her mocs to the kitchen, where she tied on a floral-printed and ruffle-bordered pinafore apron in preparation for doing the housework. Hope had half a kitchen cupboard full of pinnies and half-aprons, most of them similarly retro regardless of their purpose or style or selling point: flirty, tarty, cheery, cheeky, Christmassy, shabby-chic, sophisticated, hostessy; pretty and practical; printed with flowers or sprigs or cupcakes or berries or heart shapes or vintage aeroplanes or Santa hats or polka dots or lipstick kisses or whatever.
The oldest of them, still there at the back, was a relatively plain floral-print Cath Kidston apron with matching oven gloves, which Hope’s mother had given her the day she went away to university and to live away from home for the first time. Hope still recalled the sheer disbelief and feigned gratitude with which she’d unwrapped the gift. For her mother, this sort of thing was ‘ironic’ (like that, with air-quotes). Her mother’s generation, Hope had often thought, had tried on and played dress-up in their grandmothers’ aprons as some kind of postmodern fashion statement, and left their daughters to find themselves quite unexpectedly stuck in the things, all wrapped and tied up with a neat bow at the back.
Hope resented it sometimes. It wasn’t that she didn’t like her aprons, or the working in and from home of which they were both a practical part and a clichéd symbol, but that they’d come to stand in her mind for a larger failing of her mother’s cohort, who’d somehow let their guard down for a moment of post-feminist frivolity and found a whole shadow sexist establishment just waiting to pounce, to cry, ‘Ah! So that’s what you really wanted! We were right all along!’ and before you knew it, the tax advantages of having one parent stay at home were so significant it was more than it was worth not to do it unless you were something like a lawyer – like, for instance, all those lawyers who’d dreamed up all the ostensibly child-protective legislation that had put so many workplaces outside the home off limits for women of childbearing age whether they ever intended to have children or not, which meant that nine times out of ten the parent at home was the mother.
For a moment she stood, hands behind her waist, fingers gripping the loops of the knot just tightened, and fell into a dwam as she gazed at the space in front of her. The main part of the flat consisted of the living room and the kitchen, united decades ago by the then-fashionable knock-through, an opening about three times the width of a doorway. The living room was at the front, facing the wall across a gap of about a metre or so; the kitchen to the back, facing the garden (or, as Nick called it, the back grass). Enough light came from the windows – the upper third of the front was level with the street – to give some cheering sunshine to the living room in the mornings and the kitchen in the afternoons. Today the light seemed paradoxically brighter because of the snow. At other times, and in the evenings, the flat always seemed to Hope darker than it should be, in the cold, dim light of energy-saving bulbs and tubes. The flicker of flame from behind the mica plate of the closed-system stove in the living room helped a little, lending a few cosy wavelengths of natural light to the scene.
Likewise cheering touches were added by the paintings and drawings from her student days that Hope had framed on the walls, the far larger number of Nick’s paintings from nursery tacked up all over the place; the tapestries and crochets, which Hope had made or bought, thrown over chairs and sofa, and the shelves and stacks of books: art history, cookery books, needlecraft books, textbooks from Hugh’s and Hope’s university days – more art history, engineering and science reference works – all decoration really, when you could summon their contents in an eye-blink, but good to have even if a pain to dust. You couldn’t sell them, anyway: the second-hand book trade had collapsed under the dangers of fourth-hand smoke, with most of the stock sealed in vaults or incinerated. Hope’s guitar, though also sadly gathering dust in the living-room corner where it stood propped, now and then lifted her spirits too, especially when she picked it up, blew the dust off it, and strummed a few bars or, on particularly bad or good days, sang at the top of her voice in the empty flat.