Robbie Dexter and Polly Drayton's relationship

Robbie Dexter and Polly Drayton’s relationship turns on the difference between the past they share and the future each believes they are choosing. Polly’s longing for Robbie survives their separation, but their renewed domestic closeness is built on concealed facts: she knows the baby is Felipe’s, while Robbie believes it is his, and she helps destroy his relationship with Rachel Elliot by making him believe Rachel has been unfaithful. His decision to stand by Polly is genuine, but it rests on a story she has shaped to secure him.

A former attachment that remains active

Polly and Robbie have a history of intimacy that neither has put fully behind them. Polly remembers their former life with longing, and Robbie’s breakup with her the week before her encounter with Felipe is still central to her feelings. At the time, she lets Felipe, a visiting uncle of someone she barely knows, chat her up in the hope of taking some consolatory revenge on Robbie. The encounter takes place by the back wall of a pub on a moonlit late-October night; afterwards, Polly reflects that she had wanted Robbie’s tender hands and gentle kisses, not what Felipe offered. Her attachment is therefore not simply a wish to resume a romance: it shapes how she interprets rejection, sex, and the prospect of getting Robbie back.

Robbie, meanwhile, initially denies that he is involved with Polly. When Rachel meets her at the door, Polly delivers a small brown envelope for him and backs away rather than seeing him. Rachel is struck by Polly’s distressed appearance and understands her as a continuing presence in Robbie’s life; Robbie, recalling messages on his windscreen and items forced through his letterbox, says little about those recent attempts to contact him. This difference in what Rachel sees and what Robbie admits anticipates the larger pattern: Polly remains close to the relationship even when Robbie tries to describe it as finished.

Pregnancy and concealed paternity

The envelope contains Polly’s ultrasound photograph. Robbie studies the black-and-white image repeatedly, trying to understand what it means and whether Polly might have had an abortion. The possibility that the pregnancy might end troubles him, although he also dreads the complication of having a child with Polly. He cannot resolve those feelings from the image alone, and while Polly is away in London he is left waiting, imagining her bearing his child and feeling powerless because the decision rests with her.

Polly’s own knowledge is different. She knows the pregnancy followed the encounter with Felipe: her period came after her last time with Robbie, so she knows she is not mistaken about the timing. At supper with Robbie, she notices that Felipe’s dark hair and brown eyes, and his fair skin, make it less likely that the baby’s appearance will expose the truth. She presents the child as Robbie’s, and he accepts that claim. The gap between them is not a passing misunderstanding but the foundation of their renewed commitment.

Rebuilding a shared household

Once Polly is back with Robbie, ordinary domestic gestures make their reconciliation look settled. She lays out fish fingers, mashed potato, and frozen sweetcorn; Robbie gets eight fish fingers and she has five. The modest meal recalls their old routine for Polly, while her nearly five-month pregnancy presses physically against her ribs. She tells Robbie that the baby may have kicked and invites him to feel. He detects nothing but smiles as if he has, joining her in the appearance of shared anticipation.

Robbie’s acceptance develops alongside his own anxiety about responsibility. With Lambing season only weeks away, he is already caring for uncomfortable ewes and struggling through work that has accumulated in his absence. In the past, Polly stayed with distressed sheep after stillbirths, crying beside them until they had finished mourning; remembering that tenderness makes him more apprehensive about leaving her alone with the pregnancy. When he considers her in London, the baby, and his inability to intervene, he feels overwhelmed rather than secure. Yet at home he begins to imagine himself as the father. He is surprised by his relief that Polly has not had an abortion, and by the expectation—shared by Polly’s parents and eventually by himself—that he will stand by her.

The breakup with Rachel Elliot

Polly also intervenes in Robbie’s other relationship. Having snooped around Will Raphael’s flat, she finds Will’s portrait of Rachel Elliot and infers that he matters to Rachel, although she does not know the full nature of their relationship. She turns that discovery into a false story that Rachel and Will have been sleeping together. Because Robbie does not know about Will’s friendship with Rachel, Polly can present the allegation as a revelation; she later regards this calculated distortion as the way to make certain she will get Robbie back.

Robbie accepts the claim and ends his relationship with Rachel in anger. He believes she has had an affair with Will and tells himself that her duplicity has destroyed whatever love he had for her. His resentment also draws on a deeper discomfort: he has felt inadequate beside Rachel’s intelligence and competence, and burdened by the sense that he must meet expectations he cannot clearly identify. Polly’s account gives that existing unease a target. The breakup thus follows both from her lie and from Robbie’s vulnerability to the contrast he feels between himself and Rachel; it is not evidence that the alleged affair occurred.

Commitment and dramatic significance

After Rachel’s relationship with Robbie ends, Polly’s strategy appears to succeed. Robbie expects himself to support her and the baby, and at supper he calls it their child. Polly responds with a vision of herself and the baby staying with him, presenting the future as a return to familiar domestic life. Her confidence is undercut by the guilt she feels about having searched Will’s home and hidden her pregnancy from him, but she continues to believe that she had a right to use what she could to pursue her own happiness.

The relationship’s renewed closeness is therefore real in its effects but uneven in its knowledge. Robbie chooses responsibility and finds comfort in Polly’s deference, while Polly uses his belief in the baby’s paternity and the fabricated story about Rachel to secure a place beside him. His tenderness toward the supposed child and his willingness to take on a family life are sincere; they do not make the premises of that choice true. The novel makes their apparent reconciliation inseparable from the question of what commitment means when one partner is acting on a carefully maintained deception.