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pertaining to the specific question or a generalised no to everything except clinging to the newel post was hard to discern.
    â€˜No. Scott’s just getting him washed. Did you want to talk to Scott?’
    â€˜Oh no, not if it’s inconvenient.’
    â€˜How are you, Audrey?’ Marilyn remembered to ask, ‘and how’s Dave?’
    â€˜Oh, fine, fine. It’s very quiet here. We went to the mall this morning. I got Aaron some new sports shoes and a winter fleece.’
    â€˜Lovely.’
    Audrey was forever buying new clothes for Aaron. She paid a lot of attention to what she saw boys and young men wearing and sought the advice of sales assistants in fashionable downtown shops. ‘My son’s about your age,’ she’d say. ‘Now which of these jeans are in fashion, which would he like?’ So Aaron wore designer label sports shirts, Timberland boots, even his underwear and socks were JM or Sean John or Calvin Klein.
    â€˜Well, we’ll leave you to it then, Marilyn. Love to all. See you soon.’
    â€˜Yes, see you soon.’
    Marilyn replaced the receiver and stood for a moment gazing out of the window. The house they stayed in each year was owned by relatives of the Clements, a distant part of the family that hadn’t left France for the New World. It was at the edge of the small town opposite a restaurant called La Coquille Bleue, which she and Scott hadn’t yet had a chance to visit. Aaron’s fussiness about food and his other fears and phobias severely limited what they did, hence the good old Canadian meatloaf, the familiar mash and carrots. Scott had suggested she go out alone some evenings, as he himself did, but it seemed a pointless exercise and one she was happy to forego, preferring, once Aaron had taken his medication and was asleep, to read or, if she wasn’t too tired, to write.
    They let Aaron go out for a little time most evenings. Scott referred to this as ‘going out to play’ and while it only consisted of Aaron standing outside holding onto a lamppost while one or the other of them kept an eye on him from the house, it did seem to give Aaron some kind of pleasure or satisfaction and calmed him before supper and bedtime.
    Scott went out for a drink or two every second or third night – once they were sure Aaron was asleep – Marilyn would have liked to go with him, but that was impossible, besides which they had all the time in the world to be alone together once they got back to Canada. Time for just the two of them. Except that soon they’d be three.
    The phone call had momentarily thrown Marilyn off her train of thought. Partly it was jetlag, partly Aaron; the annoyance at making meatloaf of all things. So she stood there for a moment by the small side table looking at the narrow turquoise glass vase which held a single white artificial rose, trying to remember the words that had danced through her mind just minutes before.
    She sighed, then looked at the restaurant opposite. As Marilyn watched a young woman crossed the road towards it. The woman seemed to illustrate the very freedom Marilyn was yearning for at that moment – it was almost as if she had sprung from Marilyn’s mind purely for this purpose and was thus dressed for the part. She was wearing a sleeveless summer dress with a full skirt that stopped just above the knee.
    A green hatchback travelling at speed appeared out of nowhere as the young woman neared the pavement. For a moment Marilyn was convinced that she was about to witness a terrible accident, such as that she had seen one summer in England when she was fifteen. Then the victims had been a man and a child whom she assumed was his son. They had been in the middle of one of those zebra crossings that lacked traffic lights and relied on the drivers travelling in both directions to notice pedestrians. It had just started raining heavily and the man was pulling the boy along at a jog.