The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life by William Nicholson Page B

back kitchen, where he eases off his boots and his damp coat and washes his hands in water from the cold tap, the only tap above the big chipped white sink. A trug of new potatoes stands on the table, the black earth still fresh on the egg-white skin. He relishes the chill of the cold water on his hands. From the kitchen next door come familiar sounds: the shrill squeal of his daughters’ voices, the racket of the dogs running round and round the table as they always do on arrival, the soft admonitory tones of his wife.
    Jenny is sitting at the table, a newspaper spread open before her. The girls see their father in the doorway and come running. He picks them both up, one in each arm, and they rub their noses against his stubble, and wriggle and squeal at the delicious prickliness. Jenny looks up and manages a smile for him.
    ‘You shouldn’t be digging potatoes,’ he says.
    ‘Oh, well.’ She’s over nine months gone now, and permanently exhausted.
    ‘Daddy Daddy Daddy,’ sing the girls.
    He lowers them carefully to the ground. They’re both in nightdresses, barefoot, ready for bed. He opens his hands and receives one small hand in each big hand. This is the ritual.
    ‘Kiss Mummy.’
    Poppy goes first, three years old, round face and blue eyes. People exclaim when they see her, ‘A cherub! An angel!’ She has a fierce and stubborn will, which her father traces back to himself, but her beauty, her sweet manipulative charm, is all Jenny’s.
    ‘There, darling. Don’t squash Bobby.’
    The baby is to be a boy called Bobby.
    Lily follows her sister in her mother’s arms: Lily the silent, Lily the grave. At five years old she has a reading age of eight. She reads My Naughty Little Sister stories over and over. Her father knows she is unusual, and will grow up to be a remarkable person, and will do great things.
    Then up the stairs they go, hand in hand, step by step, all silently counting the steps as they go. Fifteen to the half landing, fourteen more to the top. Pad-pad-pad go the bare feet along the carpetless boards of the landing to the girls’ bedroom, the pink-walled heart of the house.
    ‘Into bed, now. Cuddle up.’
    He sits in the rocking chair between their two beds and reads them their story. He dearly wants his cup of tea, and then his bath, but this nightly self-denial is one of the ways he is able to feel, as a bodily sensation, his intense love for his daughters. The book must be held on his lap just so, so that each of them, squirming under bedclothes, can hang out of the beds’ sides and follow the pictures. The stories are baby stories, for the benefit of Poppy, but Lily doesn’t mind. They remind her of when she was young.
    He reads Goodnight Moon . Their lips move as they follow the familiar words with him.
    ‘Goodnight comb. And goodnight brush. Goodnight nobody. Goodnight mush. And goodnight to the old lady whispering hush.’
    Poppy’s finger touches each item as it’s named. Martin reads slowly, because this is bedtime, and soon they’ll be asleep.
    ‘Goodnight stars. Goodnight air. Goodnight noises everywhere.’
    He kisses them, kneeling on the floor so that he can rest his head beside theirs on the pillow. Out goes the reading lamp, to leave only the soft pink glow of the night light.
    ‘Sleep tight, my darling ones.’
    ‘Daddy Daddy, what shall I dream about?’
    ‘Dream about—’
    He scours unvisited corners of his mind, all the more available notions long ago exhausted. His eyes fall on a rarely-worn pair of fluffy slippers.
    ‘Dream about slippers. A family of slippers. And they have a birthday party.’
    There’s usually a birthday party, or a wedding.
    So he leaves, pausing for a moment in the doorway to look back on the two heads, already snuffling into sleep. This is his treasure.
    Downstairs, Jenny has made his cup of tea, aware to the second how long it will take him to tuck up the girls. She is back studying the newspaper, the property pages of last Friday’s