Polly

Polly’s pregnancy and her determination to win Robbie Dexter back bring tenderness and manipulation into close proximity. After five lonely days, she is running out of strength and clings to the belief that Robbie will come to see her; when Will Raphael gently points out that it is only Wednesday, she insists Robbie will come for Rachel Elliot. Her jealousy is plain, but so is her exhaustion: cold, fogginess, and cracked lips make her isolation physical as well as emotional.

Pregnancy and Its Circumstances

Polly is nearly five months pregnant. The passage traces the pregnancy to a moonlit night in late October, the week after Robbie had ended their relationship. Behind a pub, near a vent breathing greasy kitchen vapour into the dark, she let Felipe, a visiting uncle of someone she barely knew, chat her up in the hope of finding consolatory revenge. The encounter is described through crude thrusting, groping, and obscenities; what Polly had wanted, even then, was Robbie’s tenderness. She remembers his hands and kisses as the intimacy she longed for, a contrast that makes her attempt to punish him feel unsuccessful from the start.

At supper, the pregnancy presses upward against her ribs, leaving her wheezy and full. Polly recalls that her period came after her last time with Robbie and takes that as confirmation that she is not mistaken about the pregnancy’s timing. She also considers the baby’s appearance: Felipe’s dark hair and brown eyes and fair skin, she thinks, mean that paternity will not be obvious. The child is therefore both a coming responsibility and something Polly believes she can fold into a renewed life with Robbie.

Winning Robbie Back

Polly turns her desire for Robbie into a plan. After snooping in Will’s flat while he is out, she notices Will’s portrait of Rachel, framed on the wall, and recognizes that Will is a friend of Rachel’s whom Robbie does not know about. Polly uses those details to tell Robbie that Rachel and Will are sleeping together. She admits to herself that the claim is a deliberate distortion, though she leaves room for the possibility that it might be true. The portrait and the undisclosed friendship become, in her mind, clues that make the lie plausible and a means of securing the outcome she wants.

Polly’s choice is not simply a misunderstanding she passes on: she describes the false story as an inspired move and the only way she could be sure of getting Robbie. She believes she has a right to happiness too, even while recognizing that Will’s advice was to leave Robbie alone if she truly wanted him to be happy. Her reasoning turns that counsel aside. Rather than accept Robbie’s choice, she makes herself an agent in changing it, using his ignorance of Will’s friendship with Rachel to undermine his trust in Rachel.

Reunion and Uneasy Domesticity

The deception appears to work. Robbie thanks Polly for telling him and says he would be lost without her; he pushes the telephone away, drinks his beer, and complains about Rachel. Polly blushes, pleased by his response, and serves their supper. The meal is modest and sharply specific: eight fish fingers for Robbie, five for herself, mashed potato, and frozen sweetcorn taken from a battered bag in the deep freeze. Two sets of cutlery and a bottle of ketchup are already on the table. For Polly, the arrangement feels like the old days, and the ordinary shared meal gives her hope that an earlier intimacy can be restored.

She invites Robbie to feel the baby kick, then tells him that she and the baby will always be there. Calling the child his own little lamb, she stacks the plates, kisses the top of his head, and begins washing up. These acts of care establish the domestic future Polly is offering: she presents herself and the unborn child as a family Robbie can accept. Yet the scene’s comfort depends on concealment. Robbie responds to a story Polly has knowingly falsified, and the supper that resembles their past is built around a pregnancy whose circumstances and paternity remain hidden from him.

Character and Narrative Significance

Polly’s vulnerability does not erase her capacity to manipulate, and her calculation does not make her longing for affection insincere. The narrative places her physical loneliness, remembered heartbreak, and practical scheming beside one another: she wants Robbie’s gentleness, fears losing him to Rachel, and chooses deception as a route back to him. Her claim that she has a right to happiness gives the choice a self-justifying logic, but the consequences are visible in Robbie’s misplaced confidence and in the fragile domestic scene that follows.

The child becomes the focus of Polly’s promise of permanence. Her imagined future is not presented as secure so much as asserted against uncertainty: she offers Robbie a homecoming, a baby, and familiar routines while relying on a false account of Rachel. That tension makes her reunion with Robbie both intimate and precarious, joining genuine care to an attempt to control what he believes.