Relentless.

Around us, chaos. The chaos of a world turned on its ear, where each day a new misery confronts us, more confusion, less clarity. Numbers, bigger and bigger and more terrifying every day. Great cities and towns that hold people whom I love beyond reason, essentially shut down for everyone’s good. The not knowing of how this will all unfold is almost, for me at least, as grim as the thought that pulses through my brain when I am conscious: I could lose someone I love.

I see the virus as a great behemoth of a spider with a ravenous maw, the kind of spider that despite its great girth can sprint across the room in the flash of an eye. Or like a relentless, hungry army of cloned machines, who have no thought, only action tuned to mow us down casually, like a child might run over a dandelion with her bike. The bike feels nothing, of course. And one dandelion seems no great loss; it’s only a dandelion, for goodness’ sake, and it’s so very far away. But then another is crushed beneath the wheel, and another. Three dandelions, the earth still whirls on its axis. And with startling speed, fifty dandelions, a hundred dandelions. How sad. How very, very sad, but none are mine. My flowers are safe, and dandelions are weeds.

Oh look! Thousands upon thousands of dandelions, gone in that far away place. And then the daffodils in another place, a place more like my home, a country where I have marched in the steps of ancients and whispered prayers in magnificent houses of the divine. Then the crocuses in that wild and closed off land, where they hate us. Surely they are mown down because they are not like us.

But then, then, the machine comes for those roses of my second home, the one where I fell in love with a man, two men, fell in love with a city of hills and pirates and honeyed stone. A land where my other hearts live, my friends. My family. They are like me; they are me. And one rose’s fading is a shame, what a shame, but it was weak, you know. Dying on the bush. All these roses were set to die anyway.

The machine is no longer a bike. The machine is a machine — powerful, grand, relentless, unforgiving. It is ploughing through the lilies and tulips and snowdrops and bluebells of so many, many places. My place now. It is in my land now. It is taking and tasking and obliterating and drawing us down, down, down. Our blooms wither and wilt and die, too, no matter how resilient we thought they were. These colors don’t fade. Maybe they do. Perhaps they do.

So we stay indoors, where we hope the machine will not find us, or at least that its blades — it no longer has wheels to ravage us, but great shearing blades — will nick us instead of laying us low. We panic, or try not to. We are tetchy, crotchety creatures, trying to stave off the apocalypse. We stay indoors, are ordered indoors. Flatten the curve! The machine advances anyway. More blooms here go every day, and briskly still comes the machine with its hungry, nasty, spider mouth.

I remember being a child and seeing pictures of Soviet shops before the USSR fractured and fell apart in a tumbling mess. How did they live like that? I asked my dad. Didn’t they know it wasn’t right? Of course they knew it was wrong, but they made do, he explained. They had no choice but to make do, or succumb to despair. And now here are we, the heirs of this wondrous and bountiful land, and our shelves are empty, too. But unlike in the USSR, it is not lack of food or supplies that make it impossible to buy loo roll or soup or pasta. It is fear. We are consumed by fear of the machine, that the machine will eat us, push us into its hole, and that we are safe only if we are prepared. And some of us prepare by hoarding, and will not share, will not forgo to help another.

But the machine doesn’t care if you have 100 boxes of Barilla rotini or fifteen pallets of Charmin. It will run you down and crush your lungs and light your body on fire if you’re in its way, and that old, or not so old, body is tuned to resonate in such a way that it crumples faster, more completely than someone else’s. Some bodies will be spared the full onslaught and others, well what’s a body here or there? Until it’s a hundred bodies, a thousand bodies, a thousand thousand bodies. Or a body you love. Or the body you own.

I will not succumb to despair. I will make do. I will share and be generous in the ways that are safe. I will not panic, and I will help those around me not to panic either. This is a promise I have made to my future self. There is no comfort or help in worrying about the things beyond my control. Will I be infected? Probably, even with the greatest precautions. I still need to emerge into the world beyond our blue front door occasionally, and out there? The machine, and it will find a way to sweep me into its maw if it can.

But I am young and strong, or strong enough, to come through this. What world lies beyond these days I do not know, but I suspect it will be much like the one we left behind mere weeks ago, full of gridlock and daiquiris and political tribalism and my friends’ romantic disasters and pedicures and the Daily Mail. Actually, pretty much all of that is still happening with the exception of the gridlock. I was going to say pedicures, too, but even I can do one of those at home.

It is the oddest of times, but I remember those words of my mom’s, well, Robert Frost’s words, the ones that helped Alex what seems like a lifetime ago now: “The best way out is always through.” We will make it through, him and me and most of everybody else.

We will. (I must believe this is true.)

***

The virus touches more than Al and me in our apartment, of course. He’s been at home for over a week now, pacing the hardwood floors in his Fair Isle socks, the only ones he’ll wear, wandering from room to room, patting my head distractedly when passing me resting here (as I often am) on the little blue loveseat. He’s also taken to fussing with the already-tidied stacks of magazines I’ve tidied on the walnut Jens Risom coffee table. Sensing freedom would soon be out of reach, we’d made a journey to Barnes & Noble the weekend before the lockdown just for him to get the March issue of Technical Analysis of Stocks and Commodities, followed by a mad dash east for one last meal at the Tam. “If we’re going to go down,” Alex said, slicing off a morsel of his prime rib for me and popping it in my mouth, “might as well be with a full belly.”

But he should be in what I’ve taken to calling the Prince Albert Memorial Study, i.e., his genteel-bordello-chic office, working his usual hours. And for the most part he is — I hear hour-long conference calls float under the study door, snatches of discussion about models and algorithms and stress-testing that sound for the world like the parents in Peanuts wah-wah-wah-wah-ing to me. Occasionally I’ll get a request for a cup of tea sent to me in Hangouts, but mostly he’ll stroll out, hands shoved in the pockets of his black cotton joggers, and waft into the kitchen to inspect the fridge. “Sometimes,” he’ll say, when I mention that he has snacks in his own mini-fridge, “things magically appear in this one. Ooooooo, you made aioli again? Any chance of a sandwich, sweetest?” (This usually merits a pointed lack of response from me, within reason. And then I usually relent. I can rarely deny him much of anything.)

And yes, my relenting has become something of a problem, relenting to him. For him, while the novelty of having stand-up meetings in essentially pyjamas has worn off, my proximity throughout the day has not. There’s the hair-mussing and tea-requesting, of course, but I’ve had to remind him that an “afternoon delight” of carnal embrace really can’t be a daily event. The very naughtiness of sex in the middle of the working day was what made it hot — that he’d scramble from our bed back to his work in time to take a call from Trevor, as if he’d been sitting at that gaudy Victorian banker’s desk all afternoon. But I pushed back the fifth time. To me, it was starting to feel like a regular part of his day, like his 10am cup of coffee or his 3pm break to walk around the block. It felt like I was becoming a habit for him, not a subject of his desire, not at all. I gave in though, even that fifth time, partially because making love with Alex feels like staving off the end of the world, like we’re creating something lush and alive. And right now, I need to feel the rush of creation when outside these walls is illness and decay.

I’ve relented as well to the reality that my mother will not stop seeing patients, even as protective equipment dwindles. “I’m taking every precaution I can, baby,” she assured me over the phone — no more in-person visits with Mom until the virus runs its course. My dad had been the one to hand over the keys to his ancient Mercedes biodiesel to Alex with no small reluctance — my mother had insisted we have a car immediately, just in case something goes truly wrong (the exact nature of what might go wrong remained unspoken, but I knew, I knew). To make it worse, Alex had to step in between my dad and me when we reached to hug each other.

“Hey, no,” he ordered, grabbing my hand and giving me a tug backwards as I was about to step into my father’s embrace. My dad’s face strained as I tucked myself into Alex’s arm. “I’m sorry, but I can’t risk you getting sick, just in case she’s asymptomatic. Mel would kill me. And then your wife would kill me again. Mostly for making Mel kill me.”

No matter what our current political divide, or how he still enjoys a spirited evening swim followed by a decent bourbon with Julian at least twice a week (or was until all of this) in the plush surroundings of the Jonathan Club, Phil de Mornay’s still my daddy. For as long as I was in it, his embrace would have silenced the throb of anxiety that eats at me, without a question for my need to be held. Just as it did when 10-year-old Caitlin “dumped” me, briefly, for a new best friend in Nessa Geary. Just as it did when I’d told him I didn’t love Josh anymore, never wanted to see Josh in our house again. (I’d fibbed when pressed for an explanation, concocting an imaginary new college girlfriend for Josh, on Rachel’s advice.) Or when I confessed that Julian was right, that I was in love with Alex. That was the hardest one to sob out on his oxford cloth buttondown while he pressed kiss after kiss on the crown of my head and promised me that it was better to let the truth out than keep it in, no matter how spiky and ferocious and sad it all was.

And for my father, well, my sister may have gotten his blonde hair, but he and I have always been a team. Team Introvert, Team Contrary, Team Brown. My mom used to call us the Dream Team — both of us tend to dream big and forget about the messy details of putting our plans in action. Mom’s a pragmatist, Rachel’s a schemer, but they’re both excellent at planning and execution, which is why whenever Rachel “forgets” something big (like an anniversary dinner or her sister’s wedding, almost) it’s always by design.

“We got the big hearts and the big brains,” Dad would reassure me. “Not everyone can be the total package like we are, baby.” (I may be almost 35 years old, but I will always be “baby” to my mom and dad.) “Let them sweat the details. More time for you and me to think and talk and just be, you know?”

I miss my daddy. Someday when all of this is behind us — Trump, and the coronavirus, and all the poison he’s lapped up through Julian and Fox News and fucking Mark Levin (gross, Dad) — he and I can lie side by side on our sun loungers beside the kidney-shaped pool in my parents’ backyard, sunglasses and sunblock on, and talk Chet Baker and Barolos and Rembrandt and the Revolutionary War again.

But now we were six feet apart, socially distanced for his sake. He’s old enough now for cheap movie tickets and 20% off his steak and eggs at Norms. Rachel teases him about trading in his iPhone for a Jitterbug. I don’t like to think of my father being older, but he’s 65 now. It doesn’t matter that he occasionally bests Julian at squash or that his sneakers are from Vans or that he tagged along with Jen and me to a Tijuana Panthers show a few years ago because he genuinely likes the music. He’s not ready to put in a walk-in tub or for Alex to convince him that a reverse mortgage is a terrible idea. But I put the late-in-life conversion to MAGAdom down to a slight slip from the top of his game — he’s nervous. Nervous about losing power and status.

My dad’s shoulders sagged slightly in his camel brown v-neck sweater; he blew a puff of air slowly through his lips as he passed a hand over his still surprisingly bright blonde hair. “I suppose this is where the leaving and cleaving comes in,” he sighed. “I’ve been through it before with you, baby, but this time feels harder. No offense, Alex.”

“None taken. I want you and Trish around for our wedding, assuming we’re allowed to mix freely again one day, Mr. de Mornay.” A little squeeze of my hand there from Al — I’ve been worrying about the wisdom of setting a wedding day at all and sending save the date emails for October 24th. (Did I mention we’ve set a date?)

“Phil. It’s Phil.” My dad gave Al a papal wave, his ring and pinky fingers tucked in slightly. A signal as spring approached that new beginnings were possible, even if he still can’t quite trust Alex completely.

***

“Alex, please speak with your daughter. She’s being an absolute little bear of a beast.”

She really has the most amazing sense of timing sometimes, Minty. Anxiety — warranted, for a change — had kept me from uninterrupted nights of sleep for over a week, but last Monday night, sweet bliss: seven glorious hours. No dreams of locked and airless rooms, peopled with the monsters of my past and present. If Alex had made his usual 3am amble to the en suite bathroom (mine, but I’m not selfish) for a glass of water, I hadn’t clocked it. On waking, I’d even forgotten about the pandemic for two delectable minutes.

And before Al’s alarm could go off, it was me reaching for him. A chance to feel connected — closer — to the only body I can touch now, safely or not. “Morning, gorgeous,” I whispered on his neck, trailing kisses down, down to his collarbone peeping above the cream linen duvet cover. Even now, after nearly six months living together, his long body next to mine each morning is a revelation, a present I still think I hardly deserve after years of pushing him away from me. Winter is not kind to his skin — drier, paler — but it is always luscious, always wanted by me.

“Mmmmmmm, sweetest.” His lids didn’t open but a smile slowly crept across his face, creaking open his consciousness to the day. “Are we still in hell or is it over now?”

“It’s hell, but I’d like to make it a little better, if you’ll let me.” He didn’t protest when I smoothed my cold hands over his bed-warm shoulders and down his bare chest, resting a finger in his navel for a moment just to tease it out slowly. (He can’t decide if he detests this or finds it uncomfortably erotic, so I do it anyway.) And further, further, I teased another finger along the top of those foul burgundy Marks & Spencer pajama bottoms, spreading my right hand back and forth across his sharp hipbones while I straddled his legs.

“Just like that, Mel. Keep going,” he murmured.

“Where?” I slipped one finger under the waistband, and then another, just an inch. And then another finger, slinking them lower and lower, until I briefly touched the curls there before drawing my hand out again, just to linger at the waistband once more. “Not down there. I would never touch you down there, would I? Could I?”

“God, woman. Don’t do this to me.” He kept smiling as he pushed my hand where I knew he craved it. “Not only can you touch me down there, you would.” His eyes were half-shut as he rose on his elbows. “You would, you horrible, horrible tease.”

Alex was pulling me in for a kiss as I kept inching my hand down, down, when his phone rang. Coldplay’s “Trouble.”

“Oh, bloody hell, why now?” Alex ground out as he pushed me lightly off him to reach for his phone. “Fucking fuck fuck.”

Minty.

“I’m sorry, sweetest. It’s just… right now…and on a Tuesday morning…” Alex fumbled with his phone, dropping it in the tangle of bedclothes where I rescued it for him. “God, and I’m still hard, fuck.”

“It’s fine,” I whispered. (It was not fine.) “It’s not like she can tell anyway. Here, I’ll put her on speakerphone.” I slid the green answer button across the smeared (looked like dried mustard) screen.

“Babe.” (I hate that he still calls her that.) “What’s wrong?” Alex panted. “Is it Lou? Are you both fine?” He ran one hand through his hair repeatedly and mimed a plea for a cup of coffee with the other, raising two fingers hesitantly for the two teaspoons of sugar I know he only allows himself when he’s really unwell, or particularly anxious. Like now.

Through the speaker floated an ear-piercing shriek of excitement, at least that’s what I thought it was. “MUMMY! AUNTIE SASH MADE ME BACON!”

“Sounds like Lucy’s just fine,” I grumbled as I shoved my feet into a pair of pink shearling slippers, one of my last gifts from Julian. They’d arrived shortly after he’d made that quick visit at the end of 2018 to see me settled in Berkeley. A package from Neiman Marcus, quite unexpected, showed up on the wide-planked pine deck in front of my studio. Tucked under the silver satin bow of the inner box, a note: It’s fucking cold up there. You never did like cold feet.

“Make the Sumatra, will you Mel?” Alex stage whispered as I shuffled into his office by way of the kitchen to grab one of the dark blue mugs from his mother’s kiln. You’ll have it from the Keurig, I groused to myself as I slipped a pod into the coffee machine. And it’s Breakfast Blend for you.

Let me be clear about something: Alex is a brilliant father, a father who’d had raw strips torn from his soul when his wife took his strange girl child away. Every throb of his heart is for her, not me. That is the way it should be — she is his creation, the very best bits of him improved upon, made brighter. Like the little dark grey cloud poured sunbeams instead of rain upon the world. When it’s Lucy involved, I begrudge him nothing, no time, no amount of concentration and distraction. Precisely as my mother told me to behave: “She will be your daughter, someday, even at a distance, and you will know how much greater and more perfect his love will always be for her rather than for you. As it should be.”

Minty’s another matter altogether. Araminta Bosworth-Carr has a fantastic knack for stealing her ex-husband’s attention under the cover of just being a worried mum to their daughter, just a mother who wants the very best for their cheerfully morbid little princess. Lucy needs new tights, and did you know Gucci makes them for little girls now? (Even Alex laughed at that one, but still purchased one pair for her along with the 10 serviceable pairs from Boden.) Tutus that cost a couple hundred quid for dress-up, stabling fees for the pony, dolls with miniature steamer trunks full of clothes, shipped straight from Harrods. Trips to London to visit Aunties Man, Ran and Sash and to get her six-year-old curls snipped at the Charles Worthington salon, oh, and a full head of highlights for Minty while they were there — “I put it on the card, Alex, it’s simply impossible to find a decent colorist in Dorchester.”

Oh, to be sure, Minty still does a cracking job of being self-effacing, of giving the impression that she’d always put every other person in all of creation before herself. She’s usually the last guest at a party, helping the host clean up, wiping up red wine and tucking half-demolished cheese board remnants into plastic tubs even when she’s been told to just go home. No need for a laundry service when you have Minty in the house — she’s the only woman I’ve ever known who cheerfully ironed her husband’s dress shirts.

Minty packed Alex off to work every day with thoughtfully prepared lunches, a ploughman’s or a piece of cold salmon with dill sauce (with a reminder NOT to reheat in the microwave), mini-tubs of sliced strawberries in season, a homemade pork pie, and always a tiny note reminding him of her love and a hint about what that night’s dinner might be. She never complained about cleaning up the little black hairs he left on the sink when he shaved, never moaned about the boxers and jeans that never quite made their way to the hamper, never had a sulky word about Cora decamping to their third bedroom for nearly three months after Lucy was born. At least according to Alex.

Even when she left Alex, she said she did it to please someone else, not really herself. Miranda was right to call Theo Bosworth nasty and sleazy — and she should know better than most, having slapped his grabby hands away from her ass more times than she can count. (“He started when I was 18 and he still hasn’t gotten the hint more than 15 years later,” she reminded me the other day on a call.) When Alex and his partners in their hedge fund lost the bulk of their wealth on what was essentially a bet, Minty told everyone that no matter what, she’d stick with her husband, even if that meant seriously downsizing. After the crater in their finances opened up, she spent the next five days (according to Miranda) in a flurry of activity: running spreadsheets to figure out what assets remained and were liquid (not much) or not, making tea and pouring wine for all the friends and Alex’s now-former partners who were running in and out of the flat in the aftermath, and still making time to take Lucy to her Mummy and Me yoga sessions.

She even had Miranda accompany her on a flat-hunting mission in Blackheath which turned up a couple of potentially suitable new homes, and if they lacked the grace of the sprawling three-bed in Cadogan Square they were about to lose, it didn’t really matter. “Min told me they could live in a one-bed in Ponder’s End and she wouldn’t care, as long as they were all together,” Miranda had mentioned at the time. “Which made me ask how she even knew where Ponder’s End was in the first place. Could you have ever guessed she once had a fling with a Latvian postman who lived there?” (I could not, honestly.)

Which made her disappearance on day six even more confounding. Alex had spent the day at the office, handing out severance checks to staff, meeting with solicitors about winding up what was left of the fund, pleading with the bank to give them a few months to wait for the partners’ illiquid assets to be sold to meet the massive obligations the four of them now owed. As she had every workday since they’d returned from their honeymoon in Corfu, Minty had pushed Al out of their cream and dove grey hallway and into the big bad world with a packed lunch and three kisses — one on both cheeks and a bigger one right on his lovely lips. Nothing out of place, even as their world had been overturned and shaken hard enough that all of the money fell out of its pockets.

“I’d called at 3, and she didn’t pick up,” Alex choked out that night he’d called for Julian and found me instead. “I s’posed she’d turned the ringer off, wouldn’t have been the first time. Terrible getting Luce to take a nap sometimes, and everyone and their dog has been calling her, trying to be helpful. Turns out Theo, that fucker, had shown up and demanded she leave me tout de suite or else.”

Theo had, from what I could make out between sobs and the slur of liquor in his voice, put the emotional equivalent of a gun to his sister’s head: if Minty didn’t leave with him that afternoon, her family would no longer welcome her home. “When I finally spoke with her, Min said Theo gave her one choice — you can be a Bosworth or a Carr, and only Bosworths get to come home. And that cunt said that went for Lucy as well. ‘Magine what a great family I married into! Cut off their own for money. Money! There’s more money to be made, Mel. Ask Jules, he’ll tell you. Always more money out there but love? Psshh. Love’s a tougher hill to climb.” Over the phone I could hear more wine sloshing into a glass. “I love her, for fuck’s sake! And that smarmy shit came up in his fucking Barbour jacket and his sodding Land Rover from Shaftesbury and frogmarched my WIFE out of our home, stole my baby and fucked off to Dorset.”

“Oh, Alex,” is all I could say as he’d cracked open at last and wept and wept so piteously that I felt my own heart splintering for their little family. “She’ll come home. I know Minty. She’ll be home soon.”

But she wasn’t home soon. She never came home again, not to that sumptuous flat with its marble bathrooms and picture railings and chamfered ceilings and cozy, brocade-cushioned windowseats overlooking the central gardens of the square. It was the very conspicuous symbol of how much Alex had achieved. Well, to be fair, most of the money that went into that home was Minty’s, but at least some of it was his own. A few years before, Theo Bosworth had managed to convince Alex that the second home in Dorset, the horses and the brand new Range Rover and the Jag should all be in Minty’s name — “never know when you’ll go tits up, old man,” and he was quite right about that, sadly — but the flat was in Al’s name alone. When the bank came calling, it called only for him.

With Theo in charge, the family — well, at least all four Bosworth boys and their father — presented Minty with two options: penury in London (if only until Alex could get another job) or comfort in Bradford Peverell, the village she’d grown up in, a safe harbor until she could rid herself of the drunken Scot who’d strolled casually into her life, stolen her money — a gift from an auntie who’d never married — and left her a single mum, dependent on her family. She chose Bradford Peverell.

“I talk to her sometimes, and she tells me she still loves me, Mel, but she has no choice. No choice! She has a choice, she just has to give me more time,” he told me a few weeks after my birthday, the one I’d spent at home while Julian was off doing a deal with a dodgy Russian in Seattle. “But you know Min. She doesn’t want to let her family down, and Theo has always been the biggest piece of shit in that pile of turds. Now that her grandmother’s gone, there’s no one left to be a voice of reason. Ellie would have marched her straight back.”

Only a year after Lucy’s birth, no-nonsense, unquestioned family matriarch Ellie Bosworth had walked out to the paddock in the sweet pink dawn of an August morning to feed the horses and dropped dead from an aneurysm. What remained of the clan coalesced around the domineering, slippery Theo — Minty’s dad had begun a slow fade out after his mother’s death, and was only too relieved when his second son took charge of managing the family’s affairs in the months that followed. Minty’s mum? “Theo was always the biggest brain, so whatever he suggest must be right.”

No matter how much I’d pleaded with Jules to bail out his supposed best friend with a loan, just long enough for the Bosworths to allow Minty back in London, he refused. Alex was a grown man now, and sometimes gambles like the one he and his partners made don’t pay off. “Nature of the beast, darling,” Jules said dismissively. “That’s why as vulgar as some people think trade is, it doesn’t always turn on guesswork and gut feeling. It’s what keeps you and me safe. America’s much better about such things than Britain. They value hard work and grit, no matter what line of work you’re in. Too bad Alex didn’t hit it off with Rachel — he might have done well out here.” (I threw a pillow at his head — I was starting to recognize that the idea of Alex having sex with anyone but me was enough to make me simmer hot red with rageful envy, though I didn’t dare give voice to it.)

Cloistered in Bradford Peverell, Minty shut everyone out, even Miranda and Amanda, her supposed very best friends, for weeks. The two eventually took it upon themselves to show up at the Bosworth house, a rambling, ivy-covered villa off the main road, quite near one of the neolithic barrows that dot that part of the world. Jake Bosworth — “Bastard Number 4,” according to Alex — let them in to see Minty only after Amanda heaved her bosom with enough sobs to give him a lengthy view of her bobbing cleavage, barely contained in a strategically chosen wrap sweater.

“Min was so listless, hardly herself at all,” Miranda reported back to me. “She looked an absolute disaster, skin spotty again, hair unwashed and she was back in those appalling tracksuit bottoms she wore at uni. Lucy kept prattling on about ‘Daddy, Daddy’ which didn’t help. It’s that vile Theo’s fault — he kept wandering in and out of the kitchen where we were having tea, lingering behind her chair, making simpering noises about how we mustn’t upset Araminta too much, look how sad she is. I couldn’t let that pass the third time he said it, gave him both barrels. I yelled, ‘Of course she’s sad, you twat! She wants to be home with her husband and you fucking kidnapped her! I’ve half a mind to call the cops on you, you quivering clot of knobcheese!'”

“Miranda!” I gasped. I had to admit, “quivering clot of knobcheese” was quite good, though.

“That fuckstick stopped hovering over Min for one moment and had the nerve to slide into the chair next to me to say he always liked a woman with a dirty mouth. I almost slapped him but I don’t want to make things worse for Minty. Upshot is: she’s too afraid of losing her family, and Theo made it perfectly clear that coming back to London meant she was on her own, for good. Al made the mistake of marrying into a family even nuttier than his own. And you’ve met the Carrs, so you know it’s bad.”

And it was Theo who hired the solicitor to handle the divorce, Theo who organized the movers to collect every sofa and wardrobe and piece of the family silver from the flat, Theo who spoke to Alex nearly every day. “He says Min’s too delicate to speak with me, I’d just make it worse.” Another afternoon call from Alex, who’d by then wound up the fund and was about to close on the flat. “I begged him, Mel, just to let me hear her voice, just to let her hear mine. I need my daughter — we’re a fucking family on our own! I nearly kicked a hole in the wall when he told me he’d never allow it, not now, not until I’d paid. How much do I need to pay, Mel, how much?”

Minty didn’t pick up a call from him until the first check hit her account. “Surprise, surprise,” Alex mumbled on that afternoon’s call. I could practically smell the vodka through the phone. “All it took was two hundred grand in her account and all of a sudden there’s my wife! Oh, she sounded sheepish, yes, so sorry, so sad, you know, Mel, my lovely. But I’d put her in an impossible situation, and she couldn’t trust me anymore, no. No, not with all the money gone and Theo said I had gotten violent around him more than once. Violent!”

I poured a little more in my own glass; Julian had called earlier to ask if I wanted to come to an event at the Beverly Hills Hotel that evening (“last minute, love, so you can skip it if you don’t have time to get your hair sorted — looked a bit limp this morning”) and I’d passed. Without the threat of Julian returning home before midnight or later, expecting a hot meal on Rianne’s night off, I could get mildly soused myself and dip deep down into Alex’s despair with him. As it turned out, it was much later, about 3am, when he peeled back the duvet and slid in beside me, reeking of scotch himself. Scotch and Shalimar, but I pretended not to notice the Shalimar when he rolled me on top of him: “Show me how much you love me, darling.” (And I did, just as a good girl should.)

“Were you violent?” I asked Alex. It wasn’t impossible. He’d spent a week suspended from school back in sixth form for headbutting a star of the rugby team who’d had the temerity to grope Charity Ryan as she passed him in a hallway. (“Nice tits, girl.”) It was an incident which had earned him the respect of his male classmates, and deepened his reputation as a romantic, wild boy with the girls. His infamy trailed him to Bristol, where he never actually thrashed anyone, but he had put a hole in the wall of Will and Charlie’s flat once when he’d lost a hundred quid to Will over a game of poker, a hundred quid that was to have lasted him an entire month. (Will quietly returned it to him outside of Julian’s sight — “Wouldn’t do to have Jules see I was being this kind, I’d never hear the end of it.”)

“I kicked the fucking sofa in our bedroom one fucking time in front of him. One time, when he was calling me a drunken failure of a man, couldn’t provide for my family. I’d never been good enough for his sister and he’d see every last penny taken from me if he could.” He paused for another sip of wine. “I should be grateful, he said, he was giving me money to start again in London, because I didn’t deserve it after the swindle I’d pulled off on their family. Their family! It was Min’s money, and she wanted that flat, said we should get it because we could. And she wanted me to have something of my own, something with my name on it. It was a fucking gift!” The strike of a match on its book, the light crackle of cigarette paper. I was impressed he wasn’t just lighting one off the dying embers of another one, as he often did.

“Was that the only time?” I ventured. It had been barely four months since we’d reconnected; we were about to crest the tipping point where my own concerns about remaining stuck with Julian began to outstrip Alex’s now fully-bloomed realization that he had to get out of his own marriage.

“Fine. I ripped the bloody curtains in the living room off the rod.” Another two puffs on his Silk Cut.

“And?” Surely there was an “and.”

Another puff. “Hmph. Maybe. I punched a hole in the kitchen wall. But in my defense it was not a very big hole.”

“Oh, Alex. Really?” I stifled my laughter — completely inappropriate — imagining him stomping through their sumptuous flat on a trail of destruction, jabbing at the Queen Anne wing chairs in the smaller sitting rooms, slamming his hands on the grand walnut dining table instead of swinging at Theo, swinging at the rococo candelabra Minty had brought with her from her own flat in Fulham when they’d set up home together.

“It was quite small, I assure you.” A tiny laugh, then a bigger one, and bigger, until the chuckles bloomed into a guffaw that nudged me into my own open giggles.

It was that call of Minty’s, the one that followed the check, that cast aside his unerring indulgence for her at last. No longer was she the perfect mother, the perfect but frightened wife, afraid for what the future might hold without the succor of her family. She was just as grasping as Amanda, just as crafty as Miranda. Just as weak-willed as me.

Human.

Still, I notice. I watch. I’ve gotten very good at watching over the years and saying little and perhaps I should say more. I say to others I’m proud of how well Alex and Minty co-parent, how they have something of a friendship again, one built on their shared past but also the ways in which they still appreciate each other’s best bits while being mindful of the faults that made reconciling impossible. (Of course I like to tell myself I was the largest fault preventing them from making it work when they’d given it a last push in that week in London, but it may not be wholly true. Even I don’t lie that much to myself all the time.) Doesn’t stop me from letting the craggy green hands of jealousy pull at me when he answers her every call — “Hush, it could be about Luce” — or won’t hear a ill word said against her.

Miranda’s noticed, too, not that it’s hard to spot. “You’d think the Virgin Mary and Mary Berry and Mrs. Beeton herself birthed Minty together, the way he talks about her,” she mentioned to me once, several months after he’d finally convinced me we were a couple, not two atoms that occasionally bumped into each other. “Don’t let it get to you. They were a good enough couple, but it probably would have been a horrendous marriage in the long term. It’s just a bunch of self-talk for him, an apology for letting her down.”

And I reminded myself that’s all it was as I slipped the Breakfast Blend pod in the machine, listened to the gears grind and the pump groan and the coffee spill into the cobalt mug. He loved her, but he loves you now. He always loved you. Two spoons of sugar sifted down into blackness, a one-second drizzle of the light cream he keeps in the office fridge, a brief stir with the sugar spoon, tip tip on the side of the mug to shake off the liquid that clung to the silver.

“Now, poppet, you must listen to Mummy,” Alex was pleading with Lucy as I pushed the coffee into the hand he’d thrust forward the moment I rounded the corner into the bedroom. “Thank you,” he mouthed before sucking down what seemed like half the mug’s contents. I burrowed back under the duvet and pretended to read that morning’s Washington Post headlines, but I was far more interested in whatever domestic folly was unfolding in Dorset. With my free hand I lazily rubbed the small of Al’s back.

“But DADDY!” Lucy wailed. “Mummy said we have to stay in the garden to play and it’s so boring. She said that we should stay inside as much as we can and I can’t go to school anymore and she’s going to teach me, her and Auntie Sash.”

“Yes, that’s right. Mummy and Auntie Sash will do your reading with you, and I’m going to be sending you maths problems to do every day. And your mum told me the school is sending work for you to do. It’s going to be a lot of fun, you know.” Alex almost sounded convinced of this, never giving away any of the fear for her safety he shared with me in the evenings. “It’s a grand adventure.”

“Daddy, can I tell you a secret?” Lucy’s lisping whisper hissed over the speakerphone. “It’s not very nice but it’s true and I don’t want to tell Mummy.”

Where I was stroking him, Alex’s back tensed. “What did I tell you about secrets?”

“They’re not very good and I should always tell Mummy,” Lucy grumbled.

“Clever girl. Now tell me, and then you must tell Mummy, okay? Where is she?”

“In the kitchen with Auntie Sash. Auntie Sash made a terrible mess in there making me bacon and I think Mummy’s not happy.”

Towards the middle of last week, just before Johnson shut down most of Britain, Sasha had answered a pathetic bleat of a Facebook post from Minty: “If anyone knows how to stop a child from screaming WHY DO WE LIVE IN BORE-SET please send instructions. And wine.” Sash’s brother Andriy was stuck in Berlin with his girlfriend, so she figured he wouldn’t mind if she helped herself to the Mercedes van he used when he was in town to lug around his band’s gear for gigs. Stopping first at the Fulham Waitrose to load up on biscuits, ready meals, loo roll and three cases of wine, she barrelled down the M3 to Minty’s front door, set on having something useful to do during the looming lockdown. “Hello, darling,” she says she greeted Minty upon showing up on her unsuspecting hostess’ doorstep unannounced. “I hear it’s the apocalypse so I thought I’d bring some wine.”

“Don’t worry about her, Lou,” Alex coaxed. “What’s your secret?”

“Daddy, you said Mummy and Auntie Sash will be teaching me, but did you know” — Lucy’s voice dropped to a whisper again — “I don’t think they’re very bright. I don’t want to be kept behind when we go back to school.”

Alex let forth an awkward choke of a cough before bursting into a raucous tumble of laughter. “I don’t think you need to tell Mummy or Auntie Sash that, right, poppet?”

“Even though it’s a secret?”

“Yes,” he laughed. “I’ll let you keep just this one, just this one time.”

“Okay. I just want to be clever like you, Daddy.”

I remember being Lucy’s age and that’s all I wanted to be: clever like Daddy. Mommy was smart and could do everything, of course. She juggled everything perfectly, so perfectly I never saw the relentless labor behind it all. Just like a good girl does. But Daddy had the freedom to show the pyrotechnics of his brilliance, to perform his intelligence in riddles and logic puzzles for us, with us. There was work involved, and we could see it all and take part in it, too — the Lewis Carroll games and the watered-down Plato he romped through with us. It was fun stuff, not the boring things Mommy had to do — balancing checkbooks and doing taxes and pushing us out the door to school. Being clever like Daddy looked far better, far more free.

That it might have had to do with Daddy being a man did not occur to me then, but it rings true for me now and it stings, hard. And when it came time to be a wife, it didn’t matter that my grades at college had been better than Jules’, or that I knew I was more clever than him. There were domestic expectations I had of myself that Julian never had to speak of. No matter what my mother had spoken to me of feminism, or work/life balance, or speaking my mind, or equality, what she had displayed in her control of the home yelled even louder: there is woman’s work, Melissa, and it is up to you to do it or it never will be done. I want more for Lucy.

“Lucy,” I broke in. “It’s Melissa. I just want to say… I just want to say your Mummy is very, very clever. And your father thinks so, too.” I nudged Alex in the ribs and gave him the look my mom gives us all when we’re expected to up our game, cocking my head to one side and raising my eyebrows, in a gesture that says, “Really?”

“Yes! Of-of course,” he stammered. (“You know, you really looked like your mum for a moment,” he told me later. “Utterly terrifying.”) “Your mummy is very, very bright, which is how we made such a twinkly little star like you, poppet.”

Lucy tittered, a chingle of a sweet laugh. “Okay, Daddy. But what about Auntie Sash?”

“Your Auntie Sash is much, much more clever than your Auntie Man,” Alex replied. “And I highly recommend you tell everyone that.”

You know, he’s not half wrong.