“What?” I asked, not completely sure how loud I was being.
He said the something again. It was clearly meant to be a comforting something. So I just nodded and nestled into my usual trying-to-sleep position in Oliver’s arms.
* * *
“Lucien,” said Oliver the following morning. “This isn’t sustainable.”
Spud and I poked our heads out of the blanket nest that I’d built for us. “I know. I just…”
Except I couldn’t think of ajust.
There was a longish, not-great silence while Oliver gazed down at me with an expression that made me really miss anger.
“I’m running late,” he concluded.
Oliver had never run late in his life. But part of the reason for that was that he always felt like he was running late. And he always felt he was running latest when he was upset.
“Oliver,” I tried. “I—”
“Please take care of Spud. He’ll need feeding and taking outside. I’ll see you this evening.”
At which point, my amazing barrister boyfriend strode out of the house, trailing sadness like a piece of toilet paper stuck to his otherwise immaculate shoe. Toilet paper sadness that I had stuck there.
“Ruff,” said Spud, sticking his tongue in my ear.
“Not the time,” I told him.
And I must have sounded firm because he made a discouraged “Mruff?” and looked away. Which made me feel doubly shitty because while the universe had presented me with a situation where I could have a not-sad dog or a not-sad Oliver but couldn’t have them both be not-sad at once, I apparently had the power to make them both not-not-sad as much as I liked.
In an effort to be a slightly less rubbish dog owner, I fedSpud—much to his delight—and took him outside—much to his delight—and then, hoping to win back some Oliver points, filled in the Defecation Chronicle (7:05 did a poo and some wee, looked normal I think).
Despite not having any meetings at all that day, I put on trousers so I could feel at least a little bit professional while WFHing. We were a couple of weeks post–Beetle Drive, and I had a fair bit of work to do chasing up people who were dragging their feet on donations. Work that I mostly managed to do, although the whole business with the earl was still preying on my mind (no updates), as was the business with Oliver (no updates, not even at lunchtime) and Spud (updates entirely toilet- and treat-related).
By about two I’d had enough of pretending to be a serious grown-up who knew how to compartmentalise. So I flopped down on the sofa and FaceTimed my mum. Or, at least I tried to FaceTime my mum. What I actually FaceTimed was a wall that greeted me with a boisterous “Luc, m’boy.”
“Hi, Judy,” I said to the wall. “Could you maybe turn the iPad round? And,” I added, after receiving an intense close-up of her left nostril, “move it slightly farther away?”
Eventually, Judy managed to get a manageable visual. “Odile’ll be here in a minute or two. She’s just in a rather sticky situation at the moment.”
“Oh my God.” I jolted upright out of a sense of duty. Because I knew the one time I didn’t, my mum would be genuinely dead. “Is she okay?”
“Honestly, not so much. She’s perilously close to chucking it in entirely.”
My heart gave a nervy thwip. “Wait? What?”
“You know how it is. You get to a certain point, and it just doesn’t seem like it’s worth carrying on. It’s like you’ve tried everything and you can barely imagine a way forward.”
My heart un-thwipped itself. This did not sound like Mum. Or rather it did but only in a very specific context. “Is she having trouble with Wordle again?”
“How’s it going, Odile?” Judy yelled.
“Do not distract me,” Mum yelled back, despite clearly being in the same room. “This is important. I am hanging by a thread here.”
“How many guesses have you got left?” I asked.
“One. This is life and death.”
I resigned myself to temporarily communicating with my mum by shouting through an octogenarian. “Can I help?”
