Pretty Ugly E-Book

Kirsty Gunn

• Herausgeber: Rough Trade Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 292

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Contradictions (both real and apparent), oppositions, enigmas, provocations, challenges——this is the kind of material that makes a life, and is the kind of material that, in fiction, one is never quite sure of. With Pretty Ugly, Kirsty Gunn reminds us again that she is a master of just such stuff, presenting ambiguity and complication as the essence of the storyteller's endeavour.   The sheer force of life that Gunn is able to load these stories up with is both testament to her unrivalled skill and an exercise in what she describes as 'reading and writing ugly', in order to pursue the deeper truths that lie at the heart of both the human imagination and human rationality.   So here we have all the strange and seemingly impossible dualities that make up real life——and pretty ugly it can be, as well as beautiful, hopeful, bleak, difficult, exhilarating. But never, ever dull.  

Leseprobe

The author is grateful for a Visiting Research Fellowship in the Creative Arts at Merton College, Oxford where she worked on this collection of stories and delivered reading and writing classes in fiction and non-fiction.

“This ugly of mine, Reader, is to do with considering how much a person’s life can bear…”

Extract from a book reading given for Pretty Ugly, London, 2024

First published in 2024 by Rough Trade Books

Design by Craig Oldham, Eliza Hart—Office of Craig

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, copied or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronically, photocopy, recording or otherwise without the permission of the copyright owners. ©Kirsty Gunn, 2024.

The right of Kirsty Gunn to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Sections 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Print ISBN   9781914236419

eISBN           9781914236433

CONTENTS

Blood Knowledge

Praxis, or Why Joan Collins is Important

Transgression

Dangerous Dog

Flight Path

Mirror, Mirror

King Country

“It’s lonely being a young man sent abroad to fight,” she said.

The Round Pool

Mam’s Tables

Poor Beasts

Dreede

All Gone

Afterword: Night Scented Stock

Blood Knowledge

There was something wrong with the garden. You couldn’t see it, nothing was obvious. There were no strange plants organised in certain shapes, or sinister looking growths and weeds; the paths were orderly, and the lawns. Roses grew, and pinks, in the places that had been set out for them, and in autumn, berries came out on the crab apple trees along the west side of the wall beside the vegetable plot. It was lovely, actually.

Even so, something was not right. And never had been. Venetia, ‘the beautiful Venice’ her husband Richard called her—might have pointed, with a long, white finger, to the stunted pines that clung together by the gate and boundary. Those stiff black branches that would wave wildly in a storm, she could have used them by way of example. But they were nothing out of the ordinary either. Douglas firs were good for a garden, Richard said; they massed and gave protection. Half the reason they could grow the things they did, he told her, was because of those strong trees that you could see from her study window. ‘Like sentinels,’ is how Richard described them. He loved it, the garden. ‘It is everything to me,’ he joked. ‘More than the house, even.’

‘Not more than me, though, surely?’ Venetia—‘the beautiful Venice’—his city of palazzos and canals, would say to him, in turn. And ‘silly’ would be his unchanging reply.

So forget about a place of odd or frightening plants with thorns or savage leaves and stalks, Richard had made it a haven, the three quarters of an acre that surrounded their home, and a haven it had been when they’d first moved here, all those years ago before the children were born. He used the word ‘haven’ then. Because after the stresses of his City job, there it was, the garden. A safe place for the two of them with everything growing and flourishing there as it should.

And they still talked about it that way, didn’t they? That the garden, like everything, everything in their life, would be as they would want it? It was a conversation between the two of them that had factored a sort of faith in the decisions that they had made together. A belief. Only the reality was, Venetia knew, that the wife who each day applied fresh make-up to her face, drawing on, before the mirror, a fine dark pink or crimson lipstick mouth, also knew the very earth from which the garden was made held something secretive and so peculiar that it could spoil everything. And that it was there, that knowledge, and that the garden had the capacity to keep it, no matter what she and Richard said, long after their deaths. Forever actually. It was bedded in.

She never spoke about any of this out loud, of course. Instead, she went out in the mornings with her cup of coffee, her favourite cup, the one with the golden rim, and looked across the lawns, admiring the hedge by the gate with its uniform shape, the fuchsia and honeysuckle that had been planted to look wild in the far corner. It had been such a long time now, since they’d moved here and fashioned the garden to be the way it was, so why not— irrespective of her feelings—admire it? After all, nothing had changed. The family had all been well, there’d been no concerns, or disappointments. She and Richard were in good health, and he’d made so much money in that job of his they couldn’t help but feel contented; the four children grown up with families and careers of their own by now but coming home all the time for lovely holidays and visits. There was Emma, who they’d always called Baby, with a baby of her own now, living in the next village, and Tom and Susannah and Evan busy in London as ever… It’s true, Venetia, the lovely Venetia thought, as she arranged one of her pale blue or rose or emerald-coloured shawls around her shoulders before sitting down to her desk every day to work, that she’d had nothing, nothing to trouble her through this long period of marriage and family, of domestic life. In fact, you might say— and she did, she reminded herself of this often, and more now she was older, putting on her lipstick in the morning, checking before the mirror, that the colour was right—she’d had everything for herself that she might have expected. You could use this phrase, if you like: A perfect life.

In fact—‘silly’—Richard would say again, if she was to bring up the subject of doing things differently, as she used to do sometimes in the early years, talking then about moving away, maybe, or going to live abroad for a time—as though they might take a break from what they were building up around them or even escape it altogether. For ‘silly’ it must have been to think that he would leave the position he’d attained in the firm, one of the most prestigious in London, or that she herself would give up the writing commissions that by then were already creating a lifestyle for her, of working to contract, one novel every couple of years like clockwork, like a machine. Even so, she would talk sometimes back then when the children were young, and later, too, about how they might live somewhere else. ‘Be different,’ as she used to describe it, as though she knew about it already as ‘that other life.’ ‘But why would you have such a silly idea?’ was always Richard’s response. ‘Be somewhere different? As though we were different people? When we have everything as we need it here? Everything.’ ‘Because…’ she might begin, his ‘beautiful Venice,’ each of her lovely shawls a gift from him, and a new colour chosen for every passing year. ‘Because..?’

And, ‘Shhh,’ he would reply, drawing her to him, taking in his hands her long, white fingers, caressing her rings and gems. ‘My city of palazzos and canals…’ he would murmur. ‘Shhh, now. Silly.’

For this reason, Richard’s sweet ‘shhh,’ his love of quietness, and the daily routine of life, the various requirements of work and domesticity that increased over time, it had been many years since she’d talked about where they lived, suggesting that they might find another way of feeling at home. And it was hardly the time now, with Richard about to retire for good in a year’s time, to start bringing up those sorts of thoughts again, find ways of introducing them into a conversation. So why was she doing that? Just recently? Interrupting herself, and him? Why be starting to imagine at this late point in their lives, change? For it was measured out, surely it was, their remaining future, fixed, with Richard already planning certain activities in advance of all the extra time he would soon have to spend. A greenhouse, that was the next idea, built in the Edwardian style and great for parties, he said. ‘Lots and lots of parties.’ And that they’d be able to sit out there as well, just the two of them, even in the winter months if they wanted to, amongst, oh, what? Orange trees and tropical flowers? Anything. He had already spoken to architects and was laying out a ground. ‘Look darling…’ Three weeks ago he’d started digging in the back lawn. They’d be able to see from the large imagined glassed-in room, he said, all the tiny geraniums he’d grown from seed, pale pink and lemon and soft, baby blue they were pictured on the packet and that he’d been tending on the windowsill of his potting shed through the winter and early spring, promising her, that phrase she hated, ‘a show, a real show.’

Dear Richard, despite his awful job. Digging away. Preparing for something he called a ‘show.’ How he knew nothing about it. Fiddling with his little seeds. In so many ways he was like a young boy, a child, as though he’d never been the kind of lawyer he’d turned into, while all the time, throughout their marriage, she’d been fully grown. And here they were now, Venetia supposed, the pair of them, old. With a massive payout on the way, pensions, benefits… Yes, old. Though hard to believe, she found herself saying to friends, speaking in the kinds of clichés that people expected, using that easy vocabulary of a certain kind of life. ‘Hard to believe,’ when the years had ‘rushed by’ so quickly, one book after another… And there was nothing much to worry about there, either, never had been. From the first title, all that time ago when they were just married, she’d been writing the series that her publishers adored, a ‘global trend’ is how they described it. It had just gone on and on.

‘No need to stop now, sweetheart,’ her editor had joked with her on his last call. ‘The Japanese translation is about to come out over there, and that’s the beginning of a whole new market for you if you want it.’

‘Want it?’ she’d replied and laughed. She had an airy, tinkling laugh her friends loved. ‘I don’t seem to have much choice.’ She was looking down at her hands splayed on the fine walnut surface of her desk, her editor on the speakerphone saying something about ‘marketing budgets.’ Her hands were so white, even after all these years; she’d looked after them. ‘What sells is what’s wanted,’ she said. ‘I know that by now.’ She flexed her long fingers, admiring them still, and all her rings. ‘But don’t worry,’ she’d finished. ‘I’ve already had some ideas that would work well in the Far East. I’ve started on something, in fact.’ ‘Good for you,’ Richard said, when she told him, as he did every time, about another sale, a new contract. It was the way her life was. A story here, then the next, and the next… Everything in order and ‘one novel every two years, like clockwork’ remember? Hadn’t she written that down somewhere? ‘No need to stop now’ like a refrain, like a machine? ‘Beautiful Venice.’ ‘My city of palazzos and canals…’ When she stood in front of the mirror sometimes, after applying her lipstick in the morning, or when removing make-up at night, she might open her mouth so wide she could see right inside herself, into her own dark workings. That was who she really was.

And the garden would keep its secret. The children had grown up enclosed by its walls and flowers—what were they to imagine anything different? That a place may have another, shrunken life within? A sort of shadow, was it? Another self? For that’s how it felt to her, stepping in the gate, whenever she’d been away, whatever time of day or night, or season, back then, or now… The feeling that she’d returned to a somewhere else that was a separate story, a place with its plots, its hidden corners, that was also home. ‘My beautiful Venice.’ She might think about the garden’s story but need never say.

People don’t speak of half the things they could, of course, or want to—she used to tell herself that was the case with the book writing, too. That you just get it down, write what you can. Let the narrative play out in the way readers want it to: a piece of information here, another detail there. Historical romance gave you all kinds of rules to follow, is what made it easy to write—is what she’d thought from the beginning and told the magazines when they came to interview her, said the same on radio and TV. Her first Home is Where… had been an instant success. ‘You’re onto something,’ her publishers had said from the beginning, historical stories with domestic themes were ‘global, marketable… What’s not to like?’ And Richard always encouraging her, of course. ‘Your editors have the right idea. Keep the books coming, darling.’ He loved the series, the beautiful predictability of it, the stately arrival of each new title and all that came with it. ‘Ah, my city of palazzos and canals,’ he toasted her, with every publication. ‘My shining star.’ And the children, too, ‘It’s true, you’re brilliant, Mum,’ they joined in. ‘My friends even say their parents read your books!’

‘And now we’ll be able to build the studio off the back of the garage.’

‘And get a classic car.’

‘And the flat in London?’

‘You’re famous, kind of.’

‘You should never stop.’

‘Yet I come in the garden gate…’ she could hear the words articulate in her mind as clearly as when she’d heard them all those years ago, whispering in the trees. ‘And I know…’ she could hear, as though reading the words now, as though they were clustered together on a page before her, ‘because I’ve proven it to myself. That it’s not right here. Not right, where I live.’

Of course, no one would believe her, they would laugh out loud if she was to come close to expressing any of this. Not that she ever would. She had never spoken much about herself; motherhood made that aspect of things easy. Children don’t want to learn, why should they, who their parents really are. And she and Richard would have no need to talk about themselves, what a bore that would be. They had a great marriage. Really, there was nothing to worry about. They wanted for nothing. She was fanciful, that’s all. Friends said it, everyone. ‘You make things up, it’s why you’re a writer’—though doing the romantic histories was not at all like real writing, she knew. The Home is Where… series wrote itself. It was a case of doing the research, compiling the characters, and the contents would play out in the same way with every title: Tough times into good. Happy ever after. Wars could rage in Renaissance England, French coasts beset by 19th century piracy and Highland estates overcome by rebellion… but all would come right in the end because it was what happened at home that counted; it was a story after all. Fanciful? ‘What is fanciful?’ the garden always said back to her, when she looked out of the window of her study some days while working on this chapter or that, editing the final section where everything becomes resolved and history settles into the one we know from books, ‘what is real and remembered and made out of truth and lies, is what I present you with here. My black branches and my twisted vines that won’t stop growing. My rich soil. The fancy you’re accused of, woman,’ the garden said, ‘is in me.’

So. ‘My beautiful Venice.’ This is where she was. In the midst of this life with its parade of family and friends taking their turns before her, sitting down at her walnut desk in the mornings, managing everything meticulously as always, with one new sentence written down, followed by the next, each new paragraph arriving on the page in orderly procession to make up the kind of fiction everyone wanted to read, only living on the surface of things, as though there was nothing dug in, no darkness inside. Was how she’d lived her calendared life. Month by month, season into season, year into year, walking through her days with her face made-up for each one of them, dressed in the shawls that were her gifts, quartz and rose and silver, emerald-coloured, her long fingers bright with gems and rings. And that there was something ‘wrong’ with the garden… Why write that down, even? Why be thinking about bringing up to the light now all the tiny pieces of paper covered in her own miniature handwriting that she’d kept closed away in boxes and files for all these years? Why be getting them out now, those tickets and bill stubs and receipts that were also maps and codes and records of the most private excitements? To be wanting to display in the wide air those scraps and bits and make something of them, another kind of history and nothing like the sort she normally produced that was hidden away in the garden in places that only she and the garden knew? ‘Imagine.’ She said the word out loud, though none of this was imagined, it was real. Because she was doing that. Getting out, from where they’d been hidden, the pieces of thin paper she’d written on all those years ago, and… ‘Imagine,’ she said it again. If she was to arrange them all now, those same papers, in sequence, and expose them. That dark mouth of hers, wide open in the mirror, letting out the secrets, telling another kind of story that had already been laid down.

For she was ‘Beautiful Venice.’ ‘My city of palazzos and canals.’ And surely so it must remain? In fact, write that down: ‘Surely so it must remain, that the story that has been written of success and beauty and marriage and wealth must be the story that should remain.’ Because it was a familiar and loved story. All of it engaging and planned and jingling with bracelets and gems. ‘All-of-it. All-of-it,’ as the children used to say. Yet here she was now, letting this other in. ‘There was something wrong with the garden…’ She’d started it already.

And there was Richard… out in the same garden digging and planting and rooting out weeds, composting from waste. Slipping fresh cuttings into the soil and they would be nurtured and allowed to grow… Richard. Richard. Richard. As far as he was concerned, there was nothing to worry about, no not at all. As far as he was concerned it was going on, their life together, as it always had. As he dug and mowed, tied back, and pruned. Out there in all seasons. He’d planted daffodils around the tree stumps down where the cherry trees were and they came up, a mass of yellow every spring and more of them each time, another ‘show.’ Speaking to her this way with his hands in the soil. As she watched him. ‘A lovely show.’

He would not say anything different because of course he didn’t know what kind of soil he was digging, or about anything, not the real knowledge, deep down. He would want everything to flourish, Richard would. That it would all grow. Lawyers were straightforward that way. They saw things in black and white, words on a page that were nothing like the words of this story that was coming together here, oh, yes. Who knew where it could go? Of course she still had the current Home is Where… to finish, and notes for the next one made, with people contacting her from all over the world as they always did to tell her how much they loved them. ‘We love the series!’ ‘We love the books!’ ‘Please write some more!’ So she would naturally seem to carry on with that, with the routine of her work, as she had always done, through all the years of sharing her life with her husband, the children growing up in the house around her, the Home is Where… years. The Home is… here, there, wherever it is years. Going on and on and on. ‘I simply can’t wait for the next Home is Where…’ a woman from New York had written to her just last week to say. ‘Whatever the period or setting, I know I’m going to love it. I’ve read them all.’ She ‘could hardly stop now,’ could she?

But one morning, she looked at herself in the mirror, and knew she could. She set down the lipstick she’d just finished applying and instead of arranging around her shoulders the soft white shawl she had chosen to wear that day she brought it up to her mouth like a great cloth and used it to wipe the cosmetic off her lips. A long dark streak of red ran down the length of the expensive fabric. The shawl was ruined. She bundled it up and put it straight in the bin, her heart racing. It was as though she’d come to life again after a long time of being asleep.

The children had said for a while that she might want to write something for herself—a break from the contract work she’d been tied to for all the years. They’d encouraged it even, giving her pretty notebooks and sets of Moleskines for Christmas; Evan once brought home a big stack of yellow legal pads for ‘your life project’ as he called it. The new activity had nothing to do with being that sort of a mother, though. The phrases and lines being scribbled in secret on scraps of paper and on the back of bills reminded her of the hidden writing from all those years ago, the same nameless words coming out into the open and being got down frantically, breathlessly, between other tasks and they frightened her, as they’d frightened her before, though she was exhilarated, too, quietly, privately, by what she discovered she had done. When she found herself in her study going through a bin for a bit of gift wrap that was crumpled and torn, and smoothing it out, and writing quickly, frenziedly even, an awful little group of words on the back of that, before a family lunch one day in early spring… Then she knew things had become turned for her indeed.

So she fell behind, deliberately, with the Home is Where… They asked about it, her publishers first, then the family, but she was vague in her answers. She said at first she was still working on it, then that she’d had an extension, that the contract had been re-drafted, that was it, and anyhow, yes, she was a bit bored, but of course she would get onto it and the book would be finished in time for the autumn launches as usual.

‘Dad will be retiring next year,’ one of the boys, Tom, said, helping her in the kitchen. It had been his birthday; the paper she’d written that last strange piece on had been a leftover from the length of brightly coloured gift wrap she’d used for his new jersey. ‘So why not just give up the series if you want to?’ He’d been helping her tidy up after the party, after they’d finished celebrating, sung Happy Birthday, eaten most of the cake. ‘Both of you can start taking it easy, spend more time in the garden or whatever. Dad told me he wants to build you a conservatory…’ She’d moved away from him, she remembers now, so he couldn’t see her face.

‘Mum?’

An image of that part of the lawn, where Richard had told her the new building was to be, rising up at her, not grass at all but graves… ‘Mum, I was talking to you. Is everything alright?’

Was where she was so far. She stopped wearing the shawls, her bracelets, the rings. Her hands were white, but they were unadorned, and by now she could see quite clearly how old they were. She laid them down before her again on the fine walnut surface of her desk and splayed her fingers. What do you do, she thought, here in her study, or when she woke in the night, or stepped in the front gate with it all there before her… what do you do if the life you are living right now, that always seemed to be enough… what do you do if you know, as the garden knew, that there was more? On the piece of paper, the wrapping paper from the bin, she’d written the word ‘garden’ three times, underlining it, and then arranging the words backwards, around and about as though an anagram, finding other words in the letters that she could use: ‘den’ yes, and ‘rag,’ and then also ‘red.’ She circled each one and then folded the paper into a tiny square no larger than a postage stamp. It was something she knew she would be able to use.

Back in the beginning, when she’d first married, she’d spent a lot of time in the garden. She’d helped Richard then, on the weekends when he started going out there as much as he could, and during the week as well, in the summer, as a break from work, how he’d needed it. Together they’d planted that forsythia by the back wall, making a kitchen garden beside the path leading to it, walling it in and building raised beds. She herself had designed and planted the rose circle in the middle of the front lawn—an idea she’d had since she was a little girl, she told Richard, out of a book of fairy tales. These activities, a narrative of sorts running along beside the other, was when she was expecting Susannah, her firstborn child, that one, carried to term and then safely delivered; three more following over the next five years in neat succession. It had been busy, that period of her life, with the babies and the work involved in looking after them; she’d been almost stilled into submission by how much there was to do… until she reverted again to the other habit. A set of telephone bills, cut up into strips and covered in her beautifully inked and finished microscopic writing that was not easy to decipher reminded her of that time. For she had tried, she had. But she’d researched so much for her books about gardens and herbs and flowers and what women could do with them it had been almost too easy, from the outset, to turn her work with Richard into another kind of planting. He had always loved that she had ideas for the various beds and variations of seed and would never know about the amount of stuff she had in there, amongst the geraniums and clouds of baby’s breath, that could poison.

This was all being written down now, and on different papers and bits, the order of it, the sequence, of what she’d done. How early it had started. How long. How, despite trying to stop it, when life had seemed to get better and better, the other thing had never ceased happening. Not before the children, when she was newly married, and not after. She kept doing it, over and over. She worked out once it may have been as many as nine times. The cramping and the morning sickness, that feeling, and being dizzy and nauseous, having to lie down suddenly, in the middle of the day, or finding herself vomiting what looked like black bile… Sometimes it felt continuous. She’d made it seem as though she was taking care of herself in the way people said you should at that time of your life—‘A special, special time in the life of a woman,’ they all said, ‘—to get plenty of rest, eat properly, to take a bit of gentle exercise…’ But she’d been able to twist it, change it, without anyone knowing, and the feeling of attainment each time—as she’d recorded, so carefully, in writing so small—was absolute.

The first time it happened, realising she could do this—could force—obtain an outcome that would be different to what nature intended and have it effected by her own hand, was when they’d been in the house for just six months, newly married and everything going so well; she’d just signed the contract for the first two book deal. Life had seemed secure. Richard was on track to be made partner and though working all hours the money was going to be out of this world, an amazing opportunity for him, he said. He would never be able to walk away. She remembered him in those early years, how he would come home at night to her, how they had been together. He’d talked about having a family from the moment they’d first met, about being parents, with lots of children and a busy happy home… These were words and phrases he’d been using with her since she’d met him. Being a mother, a father someday—Isn’t that what most people wanted, what we were here for, after all? ‘Who knows?’ he would say, as he headed out the door to work the next morning. ‘Any minute now darling, you’re going to tell me you’re pregnant.’

Venetia wrote that down, as a complete sentence, ‘Any minute now, darling…’ then put a line through it and hid it away with a doll’s size stack of papers in the back of the drawer of her desk, along with her old notes and receipts.

‘I suppose…’ she’d answered him, all those years ago, her face turned away or her back to him as she worked… while the garden was there outside the window, looking in on her, coming in at the windows of the house, forcing itself, that low dark branch… ‘I suppose…’ and ‘Of course…’ and ‘I agree…’ she’d said. All of it coming together by now as though it was happening again as she read it, written in her own way, in her own way and full of her own rich content…

Every bit as much a narrative as any of the other fiction she used to write, and more—exposed in tiny words on a small piece of paper clipped to others with a pin—than the first time, using their own flowers and herbs, it was actually breathtakingly easy. She had not told Richard she thought she was pregnant, not knowing why, when she knew how much he wanted it, but the minute she confirmed it for herself had gone immediately to the health food shop in the village and bought the only other part of the recipe she needed, aware exactly of how much to use and what to do. ‘All my historical research…’ she had written down on the back of a shopping list she’d kept from that time. It had worked, instantly, easily. She miscarried after just one week, and it was as nothing to bury the dirtied towel out by the back wall. On a torn off corner of an envelope she’d drawn a tiny map and stitched a cross to mark the spot. ‘Here,’ it said. How she loved seeing it again. The next time, too, was straightforward—though the one after that, not long after, took more time. She’d been worried when nothing happened that she must have built up some kind of immunity to the herbs she’d been using, or women would have used them all the time, wouldn’t they? Back in those hardened days of endless pregnancies and life-threatening manual labour? She waited one week, as before, then two, five… Finally it was in the sixth week when the discharge came and she couldn’t stop vomiting endlessly, shamelessly. Richard kept asking if it might be morning sickness and she could only shake her head. The minute he was out the door to work, she gathered up the mess she’d hidden in the laundry basket and found another secret place to bury it, away from the others, over in the corner of the lawn where it was already being turned over for a new rose bed and the earth was soft and warm when she laid the pieces of her work into it. ‘Finished,’ she read now, written on the back of a cinema ticket, where she had drawn another tiny map and made a mark. When she looked down again at those hands of hers she could see how it was as though they were drenched in dirt.

After that, she didn’t buy the fixatives and other herbs she needed in the village; she could no longer justify that amount of research. So she drove to London and purchased a whole trolley full of things she didn’t need by way of disguising the amount of little brown bottles and extracts, concentrates, she’d bought in one go. The girl ringing them up at the till had given her a look, ‘You know what this is for, right?’ she’d said. ‘Just be careful—you probably know—if you’re ever wanting to get pregnant. It’s not great, this stuff, for that.’ It had been like a short story, Venetia had thought, the visit, the shop… Though not quite. For the way she’d written about it. The sensation of being in the shop, in wide, at large in the wide supermarket-like aisles of the place, buying these things, knowing what they could do, the sense of achievement… That wasn’t something anyone would want to read. Nor how, with the bought ingredients, easily, efficiently, twice more, and with the same combinations but in greater quantities, she’d been able to get the same result. She knew about certain exercises, things you could do, so when the usual doses didn’t seem to fix on the sixth pregnancy, she used a kind of prod she’d made herself in the bath one night, when Richard was out at a Christmas do for work. Its effect was immediate and terrible to see, all through the warm water, and she’d had to get up straightaway to put on her outdoor things to go out into the garden and find a place where she could dig before he came home.