Once she was snuggled under the spare duvet, Rosaline fished out her phone and thought about replying to Alain’s text. In many ways, the conversation she’d had with Lauren was academic because it would be impossible for her to get away this week—either for garden-visiting or penis-touching, depending on what was actually on the table.
Sorry, she typed. I’d love to, but I don’t think I can get a babysitter at such short notice.
A brief pause. Then Another time, perhaps?
Yes, definitely.
A longer pause. Followed by an image slowly downloading: a somewhat hastily composed shot of a bright orange butterfly perched on a phlox flower.
That’s beautiful, she told him, oddly touched.
So are you.
Week Three
Bread
Friday
ROSALINE WOULD HAVE been more cut up about her abysmal weepy performance on Bake Expectations except she was having A Week. It had started—as Weeks often did—on Monday when the electricity had inexplicably cut off. She’d flipped the circuit breaker, which had fixed the problem only for exactly the same thing to happen on Tuesday. Worse, on both occasions it had ruined one of her practice loaves. Then on Wednesday, she’d finally got someone to come over about the funny noise the boiler was making—and he’d poked it unhelpfully, blown into a tube, told her it needed a full service, which wasn’t what she’d booked for, and charged her a hundred and twenty quid. The funny noise returned later that evening. And although she managed to get through Thursday with no disasters, by the time Friday rolled round she was feeling somewhere between frazzled and abject.
“Awoogaloo,” said Amelie from her spot at the kitchen table.
Oh dear. “Has Auntie Lauren been teaching you words again?”
“No.” Amelie shook her head. “I’m talking to the boiler. It just said ‘balurguhluh.’ So I said ‘awoogaloo’ to be polite. Miss Wooding says it’s important to be polite.”
“Was she including heating systems in that?”
“Well, she also said it’s important to talk to people who are different from us and I was watching the television and it said that if aliens tried to talk to us we wouldn’t always know they were trying to talk to us because they might not talk like we did. So I thought it was best to be safe.”
Rosaline was trying hard not to laugh. “Aliens are probably not trying to talk to us through our boiler.”
“We’d think that. But we’re not aliens.”
Blagugmaguh, offered the boiler.
“See,” said Amelie in her vindicated voice. “Glughalughle.”
“How do you know we’re not accidentally insulting the aliens in the boiler?”
Amelie thought for a moment. “They aren’t in the boiler. The lady on the television said they beam messages thousands of miles through space and when they get to us they just sound like noise.”
“So our boiler is some kind of alien transponder device?”
“Maybe. Or maybe it’s broken.”
Was there a parenting moment to be had here? No. No, there definitely wasn’t. And even if there had been, at that moment the doorbell rang and Amelie jumped off her stool and ran into the hall, shouting, “Grandma and Granddad are here.”
It wasn’t one of those occasions when Rosaline felt a hundred percent ready to deal with her parents—not that there were many such occasions—but since they were here to take care of her daughter for her, she had only herself to blame.
She followed Amelie into the hall and got there in time to hear her announce: “We’ve got aliens in our boiler.” This provoked an “Aliens, is it?” from St. John Palmer, who was far more indulgent with Amelie than he’d ever been with Rosaline, while Cordelia mouthed something that looked a lot like What have you been teaching her?
Rosaline’s mother, like her father, was a doctor and, like her father, had progressed far enough in the profession that the title stopped mattering. An oncologist by training, she had personally contributed to research that had led to a significant increase in five-year survival rates for several types of ovarian cancer, which made even Rosaline’s most-perfectly-turned-out cupcakes seem a little trivial by comparison. She was tall, rail-thin, and only ever smiled at her granddaughter.
“And today,” Amelie continued, “at school we learned that the Mayans lived in a place called Mesoamerica and they had a city called Yax Mutal. And they had a temple that had a big jaguar on it but it’s not there anymore.”
Say what you would about the Palmers, they went all in on the Grandparenting. “You have been studying hard.” St. John lowered himself to eight-year-old height. “You’re just like your mother when she was your age. Why’s the temple not there anymore?”
“Because it’s very very old. And very very old things fall down. Also because of the Spanish.”
“If I’d known you were interested in Mayans now,” said Cordelia, “I’d have got you a different present. Maybe I’d better take this back?”
Amelie’s eyes widened in outrage. “No. I can be interested in more than one thing. I’m polyamorous.”
“I don’t think that’s the word you mean,” put in Rosaline quickly.
“Yes it is. It means loving lots of things.” Her daughter’s expression of misplaced pride was, at once, adorable and unhelpful. “I worked it out like we were taught to in school with prefixes. Poly means many and amor means love in French and is also from Latin.”
Oh God. Now Rosaline was going to have to tell her daughter what polyamory was in front of her parents, who probably also didn’t know what polyamory was. At least not on any level beyond the etymological. “It more sort of means loving lots of people.”
“Well I do love lots of people. I love you and Granddad and Grandma and Auntie Lauren.”
“Maybe it’s better to say”—Rosaline could feel St. John Palmer’s eyes burning into her—“it means being in love with lots of people.”
“Oh.” Amelie considered this. “Then I’m not polyamorous. I’m polylikesthingsareus. Can I have my present now?”
The present turned out to be a book called Real Life Monsters: Creatures of the Deep, which was filled with pictures of supremely ugly fish. Amelie loved it. And two minutes later she was happily curled up on the sofa, looking at goblin sharks, while Rosaline tried to make her parents a cup of tea that said I am aware that your actions have created an obligation, but I would very much like this interaction to be over quickly.
“So what’s this about the boiler?” asked her father, prowling into the kitchen while Rosaline desperately washed the mugs she should have washed that morning.
She cringed into the sink. “It’s just being a bit weird. I got someone out to come and take a look at it and he said it needs a service.”
“And how much did he charge you for telling you your boiler needed a service?”
The problem with being a perfect daughter until the age of nineteen was that Rosaline had never learned the skill of lying to her parents. “A hundred and twenty pounds.”