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those great unwritten rules.
    John Robson stood on the pavement and looked at it ambivalently. It was a small, detached house which, thanks to the curve of the cul-de-sac, stood a little apart from the neighboring properties. He would have preferred something with a bit more character, something older, but they could afford this one easily and with a child on the way it wasn’t wise to take risks. When they had first received the estate agent’s particulars it had hardly seemed worth looking around it. The layout of the house was quite obvious from the photo; squares and rectangles, three bedrooms, one of them barely big enough to be called a closet. No surprises there.
    Gill slipped her hand inside his pocket and gave his own hand a little squeeze as if to reassure him they had done the right thing.
    “Aren’t you going to carry me over the threshold?” she asked.
    “At your size? I’m a man, not a JCB. Anyway, you only do that when you’re newly-weds.”
    “Since when did romance follow logic?”
    “Okay, maybe not logic, but definitely the laws of gravity.” He glanced at her swollen stomach; not long to go. John put his arm around her shoulders and led her towards the front door, swinging the key almost absent-mindedly with his other hand, but really thinking about romance, or the lack of it. Sometimes it hit him like a punch in the stomach. Their friends always said they had the perfect relationship, never arguing, kissing, caressing, in public, in private, two as one in perfect harmony. They married and honeymooned and lived together and gradually things changed. Sex went out of the door like an unwanted pet, not noticed until it was a neighborhood away. The touches and the hand-holding had disappeared around the time they decided to sit at opposite ends of the lounge in their rented flat. Their love didn’t really go. It just became frozen in a block of ice and by the time they noticed it, it seemed too late to chip it out. And so they carried on as they were, listening to the arctic wind that howled through their home into the night.
    Gill took the keys from his hand and slipped out from under his arm, skipping up the path with surprising lightness of foot. She stayed a few steps ahead of him throughout the house until he caught up with her in the smallest room. It was actually bigger than he expected, but not much. Gill was on her knees, plucking something from the floor in the corner when he walked in.
    “Look at this.”
    She held up a child’s dummy, covered with dust, a cobweb trailing from the ring.
    “It’s a sign,” Gill said. “This room will be the nursery.”
    John took it off her and examined it closely. “I don’t remember seeing this when we first viewed the property.”
    “You probably missed it. Give it here. It’ll be a good luck charm.” She placed it on the window ledge. Then, as she walked back into the centre of the room, she clapped her arms around her and shivered. “Is it me or is it cold in here?”
    “It’s in the seventies outside,” John replied.
    But he felt it too.
    There were a few complications at the birth, the umbilical cord looped around the baby’s neck, but nothing the doctors couldn’t handle. It was a boy, 7lbs 3ozs, and they decided to call him Christopher James after their fathers. John had been extremely apprehensive before the birth, worrying about the effect it would have on both their lives, the erosion of self, of freedom and privacy. But in the end the baby was almost a relief, a focus that kept them from having to recognise and deal with their relationship’s cancerous problem.
    During the first few weeks when Christopher slept in a Moses basket next to the bed, John diligently worked on the nursery, hanging the brilliant yellow paper with coloured building blocks which Gill had chosen when she was pregnant, fixing the work surface for the changing of nappies, hanging the mobiles. Pride of place was given to the dummy they had found. Gill