Summerwater by Sarah Moss (top 10 motivational books .txt) 📕

It’s quiet.

It’s still quiet.

There’s wind, of course, and the rain on the roof, but she can hear her own breathing. She coughs, to make a sound. Right then, she thinks, Jon didn’t give her this hour to listen to her own lungs. She has sixty minutes, more or less, to do anything at all, to please herself. She remembers those oceans of time, in London before the children, the weekends and evenings she didn’t even notice, wasted messing around on the internet, watching shows that weren’t quite boring enough to turn off, looking at stuff she wasn’t going to buy and places she wasn’t going to visit. Not that she didn’t also cook for friends and go out dancing and to films and concerts. Which is not the point, because there’s no internet here as well as no friends, and the last thing she wants is to go to the pub, full of damp and depressed young foreign hikers and certainly without cocktail sparklers or probably even cocktail glasses, not that she wants to drink at this hour.

She could dance, she supposes, could be the kind of woman who dances when nobody’s watching, but with the French windows you can’t ever really be sure that nobody’s watching, she sometimes thinks everyone on the park is spending their entire holidays watching each other, and anyway if she wants to dance she can do it with Izzie, sometimes when she doesn’t want to dance she still does it with Izzie, for whom she should find a proper class in September. Ballet, she thinks, remembering her own pink silk shoes and a net skirt she pretended was a tutu, a pink ‘ballet wrap’ knitted by her grandmother who died while Claire was pregnant with Izzie. Gran wanted to hold out to see the first great-grandchild and failed by six weeks, Claire waddling at the funeral, trying not to let her grief seep through her bloodstream and into the baby’s unformed brain. She’s sure she read somewhere recently that they think sadness crosses the placenta, more or less, that a woman who is frightened or upset or depressed in pregnancy steeps her developing child in sorrow, setting up a lifetime of misery. Not that Izzie seems given to misery: irritation, perhaps. Impatience. And such an unfair thing to say, it’s not as if women go round being frightened and upset and depressed on purpose, what are you supposed to do if disarray and death come calling, what if things are, in fact, frightening? Anyway, Claire says out loud, come on, you’ve already spent about three minutes just standing about. If she’s just going to stand here she might as well get on with the cleaning, but that’s not what Jon meant, he’ll be disappointed, feel his gift rejected, if he gets back and finds that’s all she’s done. Have a bath, he said, seeming to forget that she doesn’t actually like baths all that much. Women’s magazines always say that, a long scented bath, as if everything from baby weight to infidelity will dissolve in enough hot water, as if you can spend enough on bath salts to cover the smell of self-loathing and repressed rage. Baths, in Claire’s opinion, are pretty boring, too hot until they’re too cold and there’s not much you can do in there, they’re not exactly comfortable for reading, your neck always at the wrong angle and your magazine going sticky in the steam. She’ll have a look for the candle, anyway, while she decides. She’d like that candlelit dinner.

But first she goes over to the window, leans against it to see as far as possible towards the shore. They’ve left the pushchair tilted disturbingly under the trees and there’s Jon with Pat on his hip – say what you like for feminism, men aren’t built to carry babies – and Izzie picking something up and showing it to him. Her breath is misting the glass and she swipes it with her sleeve. Stones, must be. Jon swaps Pat to his left arm and makes the tennis motion of someone skipping a stone across the water, and she can see from his shrug and the way he turns to Izzie that it didn’t fly; sank, in fact, like a stone, and Izzie squats down with a seriousness she will lose any day now, the seriousness accorded to the ground under our feet only by toddlers and botanists, and passes him another. That’s all right then, Claire thinks. Let’s find that candle, although it’s true that finding a candle is something she could do with all of them around, the kind of thing that might sometimes pass as a game for Izzie. Hunt the Candle. So it’s a waste of the hour Jon’s giving her, to look for a lost object, or possibly, in this case, an object that was never there in the first place, the memory of which may in fact come from some other holiday cottage because this is the only kind of holiday they’ve had since Izzie was born, she didn’t need friends to tell her that babies and hotels weren’t going to lead to relaxation and joy and hot sex, good heavens why is she thinking about sex again, she must tell Jon, it’s coming back, that’s at least twice already today which probably means her reproductive cycle is restarting at last and she doesn’t have any tampons, though as far as she can remember the days of wanting sex come around ten days before the bleeding, how it can take an egg ten days to travel about five centimetres she has never understood, but she knows from the babies that there’s somehow no gravity in there, or at least not until you stand up and find that your period started or your waters broke while you were sitting down. Buy tampons, she thinks, no great rush but next time we’re at the shops, must remember to ask Jon to remind me. At least