The Whole Truth

When I get home, the house is in shadow. Inside, there’s a single light on in the kitchen, and a note saying there’s salad in the fridge if I want it. I pour myself a glass of Merlot and slip upstairs. The door to the baby’s room is ajar. It was Jake’s, before. A couple of months ago we spent a whole weekend carefully packing all his things away. We didn’t discuss it – we didn’t need to. We just knew it was time. And now, everything in there is new. Wallpaper, furniture, bedding, curtains; the piles of baby clothes still in their packaging, even the mobile hanging over the cot. The smell of paint lingers. Yellow paint. Everything is white or yellow – not a scrap of blue or pink in the whole place. Alex has known the sex of our child for months but she’s never let it slip, not once. Downstairs, the list of names stuck to the fridge is as busy with girls as it is with boys. Added, scratched through, question-marked, ticked. We seem to have finally agreed on Lily Rose for a girl, but we’ve been brought up short when it comes to boys. Literally: she wants Stephen for her dad, but I hate Steve; I like Gabriel, but she can’t stand Gabe. Impasse.

I move softly across the landing, inch open our bedroom door and stand for a moment, listening in the twilight.

Outside, I can hear a distant siren, the murmur of traffic on the ring road, a late last burst of blackbird song.

But here, in the room, my sleeping wife moans softly in her sleep, restless in unquiet dreams.

* * *

At just gone 9.00 the following morning Anthony Asante is sitting in the bay window of his apartment, talking to his mother on the phone. He’s pulled one of the blinds to screen out the sun but it’s already too hot for him to sit there much longer. ‘Bay window’ probably has you picturing him in a flat in one of those classic Oxford Victorian houses – four storeys, red brick and stone mullions – but you could hardly be more wrong. This bay window is rectangular and juts from the wall like a half-open door, and the flat is a sleek wood-and-white duplex which anyone visiting can hardly believe even exists in this town, especially this close to the centre. But visitors of any kind are largely notional as yet, since Asante has only been here a few weeks. Even if that weren’t the case, he’s always preferred to keep his private space private. Though he knows he’s going to have to make an exception for his parents. He shifts the phone to his other ear, scrolling all the while on his tablet. He’s good at multitasking, and in any case, talking to his mother doesn’t require too much brain capacity. She’s saying something now about taking him for lunch next weekend. Something about a gaudy at her college the night before.

‘Don’t worry,’ she says quickly before he can reply. ‘We’re going to stay there overnight.’

Asante tries to keep the relief out of his voice. He loves his parents and – rarer – he admires them, but he really doesn’t want them staying here. If she’d pushed it, he’d have said he hasn’t got round to buying a spare bed (which also happens to be true), but he’s grateful, not for the first time, for his mother’s ability to work these things out for herself.

‘There are plenty of undergraduate rooms available,’ she’s saying now. ‘We may not have had gargoyles or boys, but one thing EL always did have was space.’

‘How about The Perch?’ he says. ‘For lunch? Dad’s always liked it there.’

‘Perfect,’ she says. ‘Though we’d better book – it’s bound to be packed in this weather. Especially at the weekend.’

‘OK, I’ll sort that out. Leave it with me.’

‘We’re so looking forward to seeing your new place, Anthony – are you sure you don’t want us to bring anything? We’ve loads of spare furniture – the loft is practically bursting –’

Asante smiles, but not unkindly. Anything that suits his parents’ stucco-fronted Holland Park town house is really not going to fit in here.

‘It’s fine, Mum, I really don’t need anything.’

He finishes the call and wanders through to the kitchen, where the side of the castle mound rises cliff-like only a few feet from the window. His neighbour’s black-and-white cat is halfway up the path, prowling for mice. He has one eye and extravagant moustaches, making him look dashingly piratical. The Mound is one of the main reasons Asante bought the place. For some people, the main attraction would have been the bars and coffee shops of the now-chic prison quarter only a few hundred yards away; for others, the five-minute walk from the station. But Asante likes the sheer improbability of the Mound, a thousand-year-old man-made hillock right in the heart of the city. He likes the old brewery and the converted malthouse, and he likes the evocative street names – Paradise Street, Quaking Bridge, Beef Lane. There was a horse hospital round here, in the nineteenth century, and a marmalade factory in the twentieth. The place is not very well known, eclectic and unexpected; rather like Asante himself.