We'll Always Have Paris by Emma Beddington Read Free Book Online Page B

know what he says next. Something to do with a railway station in Rome. I hear him say he hasn’t told my sister, that she isn’t home yet and that he has to get
ready to tell her, so I put the phone down and I stand up but then I don’t really know what to do with myself. I don’t doubt Joe at all; he has been admirably, devastatingly clear and I
recognize the truth of his words as soon as he says them. But she was in our flat borrowing my dressing gown and cuddling Theo only a few days ago and what now? Shock leaves me befuddled and
incompetent: I can’t make a decision and my limbs are heavy and clumsy. Eventually someone calls Olivier and someone makes arrangements to collect Theo and somehow we are quite quickly back
in our flat, and I am watching the architects in the office opposite go about their strip-lit business as Theo demands yoghurt and Olivier crouches in front of me, hands on my knees.
    ‘We should go.’
    ‘Go where?’
    ‘To York. Come on. Just get yourself ready. I’ll do the rest.’
    So we go, heading out of the city northwards, Regent’s Park then Swiss Cottage, Finchley Road and Brent Cross, as night draws in. Theo, strapped in his car seat in the back with a juice
box and a breadstick, is delighted with this break from routine and amuses himself by pointing out his favourite vans and chatting to us, like a charming cocktail party guest. He is lovely at the
moment, funny and ebullient. Having a baby so soon (I get pregnant at twenty-six, long before any of our English friends have even considered it) has been a sort of
folie à deux
,
but we have leapt into the unknown hand in hand. Some of it has been a struggle: the exhaustion, the hyper-alert anxiety of the early months, Theo’s severe eczema and the isolation of raising
a baby in the grown-up heart of central London. But our son – our long-lashed, easily amused son who flirts with everyone, from the pensioners in John Lewis to the leather queens of Soho
– is the distilled essence of delight. It’s scarcely credible that the two of us have created this marvel and we enjoy him fiercely, proudly.
    The last few months have been especially lovely. Theo’s eczema has cleared up, and now he can speak I feel as if we are both emerging from the strange, scorched-earth weirdness of early
motherhood and early babyhood. A real person is emerging with desires and opinions and a sweetly eccentric vocabulary, and every week brings a developmental leap. On my days off, Theo and I play in
the fountains in Russell Square or run around the Great Court of the British Museum, we visit the sheep in Coram Fields and hang out in John Lewis toy department when it rains. Olivier makes Theo
laugh by catching pigeons for him in Charlotte Street gardens (they can stalk them for hours). My school friend Kate sneaks out from Sotheby’s for cups of tea and Maria downstairs allows Theo
to chase her gigantic fluffy cat, Bambi, around, creating suffocating clouds of hair in her overheated flat. Early on Saturday mornings we walk down to Bar Italia for cappuccinos and pastries and
watch the wild, funny, dirty city come to life. I love where we live, in the warren of streets between Oxford Street and Regent’s Park (the Household Cavalry trot smartly up our street most
Sunday mornings in a thunderous clattering of hooves); it’s full of life and history and unexpected discoveries. I am thrilled to be pregnant again too: I feel lucky, buoyed by hormones and
anticipation.
    We arrive in York around midnight, park up and knock on my mother’s red front door. My sister opens it and her features look indistinct with shock. She is only seventeen, for god’s
sake. This kind of thing shouldn’t happen to seventeen-year-olds.
    ‘I’m so glad you’re here,’ she says and we hold on to each other in confusion and relief and misery and my stepfather comes to join us, his big nicotine-stained hands
around the two of us, and I’m so glad I’m here, too,