Linda Grant

The Clothes on Their Backs

Virago, 2008.

I ran out of the kitchen and out of the flat, turned up the High Street, crossed Marylebone Road and went into Regent's Park. The park was ringed by white palaces, lions roared in the distant zoo. Crossing the road, I came almost at once to a boating lake, with birds - geese, like the ones Alexander had studied and written his poems about...The birds were making a big noise in the early summer morning, and they demanded my attention. I sat down on a bench to look at them...Their small eyes watched me, their webbed feet padded across the grass, they clustered round crusts of bread

Alexander dies in a bizarre accident on their honeymoon, choking to death on a piece of meat in a restaurant. When Vivien discovers she is pregnant she decides on an abortion, but later comes to regret it.

If I'd kept that baby, she would have most of the things she needed to become a real person by now...This time next year I would have been wheeling her in a pram through Regent's Park, past the rose garden. I would have showed her the lake with the water birds and explained the inner life of a goose, as her daddy understood it