by Rachel Cusk
When the baby sleeps I intermittently read Olivia Manning’s The Great Fortune, a novel which seems disconcertingly to be speaking to me. Harriet and Guy Pringle come as newlyweds to wartime Romania, where Guy works as a teacher at a university. The Pringles don’t know much about each other, but they soon find out. Guy is diffuse, philanthropic, unmaterialistic, socially and politically committed. Harriet is private, particular, discriminating and self-protective. Their respective understanding of the notion of marriage is polarised. Guy wants to love everybody. Harriet wants him to love her. Guy wants love to be inclusive, outward-looking, general. Harriet wants it to be specific, adoring and protective. Guy spends a lot of time failing to get them a decent apartment, holding forth to students in cafés, and running around at all hours of the night helping distressed young women. Harriet spends a lot of time being unhappy and developing strong attachments to cats. Eventually she meets another man, with whom she pursues an intense friendship. One day, caught together during an air-raid, they shelter in a nearby basement, where Harriet sees an affecting vision:
Two other people were on the basement stair: a woman and a small boy. The woman was seated with the boy on her knee. She was pressing the child’s cheek to her bosom and her own cheek rested on the crown of his head. Her eyes were shut and she did not open them when Harriet and Charles came out. Aware of nothing but the child, she enfolded him with fervent tenderness, as though trying to protect him with her whole body.
Not wishing to intrude on their intimacy, Harriet turned away, but her gaze was drawn back to them. Transported by the sight of these two human creatures wrapped in love, she caught her breath and her eyes filled with tears.
She had forgotten Charles. When he said ‘What is the matter?’ his lightly quizzical tone affronted her. She said ‘Nothing’. He put a hand to her elbow, she moved away, but the all clear was sounding and they were free to leave.
Outside in the street, he said again: ‘What’s the matter?’ and added with an embarrassed attempt at sympathy: ‘Aren’t you happy?’
‘I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it. Is one required to be happy?’
Harriet, it transpires, was unloved as a child. Her parents didn’t like her much, and when they died she went to an aunt, who didn’t like her much either. Her marriage to the undemonstrative Guy, made perhaps under the misapprehension of her lack of emotional expectation, has ensured that she will feel unloved for the rest of her life. It is to this feeling, the feeling of being unwanted, that she is drawn, and yet she displays little acceptance of it: on the contrary, she spends most of her time trying to elicit from Guy some proof that he does love her, and eventually dallies with the more sentimental Charles, who loves her and, more importantly, admits it. These admissions bring Harriet back fall circle. Having secured them she withholds herself from Charles, both in word and deed, and is as reluctant and noncommital and distracted in her dealings with him as her own husband is with her. She can’t, it is clear, help herself. Her glimpse of the woman and child on the stairs constitutes The Great Fortune’s most emotional moment by far, and it is tragically brief and subdued and unresolved. Nevertheless, it is evident that that is the love Harriet is after. Motherhood appears to her to be a way out of the labyrinth of adult emotion. Charles suddenly annoys her, mosquito-like, with his desire, his otherness, his silly constipated male questions about happiness. She wants two heads resting against each other, their physical entanglement, their silence. She wants her loneliness to be ultimately alleviated, atoned for. She can only turn away, ‘not wishing to intrude on their intimacy’.
If parental love is the blueprint for all loves, it is also a re-enactment, a revision, an investigation of self-love. When I care for my daughter I revisit my own vulnerability, my primordial helplessness. I witness that which I cannot personally remember, my early existence in this white state, this world of milk and shadows and nothingness. My survival testifies to the fact that I, too, was cared for, and yet again and again I experience images of abandonment, of lack of love, unable to stop myself from pursuing ghoulish narratives of what would happen if I left her, if I went out for the day, if I failed to pick her up when she cried or refused to feed her. Having lived for so long high up in the bickering romantic quarters of love, it is as if I were suddenly cast down to its basement, its foundations. Love is more respectable, more practical, more hardworking than I had ever suspected, but it lies close to the power to destroy. I have never before remotely felt myself to possess that power, and I am as haunted by it as if it were a gun in a nearby drawer. My numberless ministrations, the ceaseless nurture that continues regardless of hour or mood or ability, are conducted in the very shadow of their neglect.
A few days after my daughter’s birth I go to a concert. I bought the tickets weeks before, not expecting her to come so soon. I have difficulty walking because of my scar, and my grasp of the principles of breastfeeding is still tentative, but nevertheless I am determined to go. During pregnancy I had plenty of time to formulate stirring resolutions concerning the maintenance in motherhood of my independence and interests, fervently imagining myself at parties and gala events, skiing in the Bundeswald, reclining in Mediterranean sunsets, sitting meditatively at my desk, all the while with the baby in a sort of cartoon thought-bubble above my head. This state of mind has extended briefly into my daughter’s life like a projection of rock overhanging a cliff. My mother-in-law is to hand to assist with the transaction, and appears nervous. Given that I am taking with me the baby’s only known source of comfort and nourishment, her resources should things go wrong are limited. I scale down my plans and promise to return during the interval. From the phonebox halfway down the road I receive hesitant but favourable reports. At the tube station, too, things appear to be holding steady and I get on the train. As the stations pass I feel slightly wild with a mounting sense of wrongdoing, as if I had stolen something, and when I arrive I hobble up the escalators and fall upon the nearest telephone as if it were an oxygen mask. When I get through, the station foyer immediately fills with the tinny, bleating sound of my daughter’s cries. My mother-in-law’s voice comes faintly through the static and the sound of crying, strained but emphatic, as if she were filing a dispatch from a war zone. She started crying about ten minutes ago, she reports, but it seems to help if I let her suck my finger. In the street outside the traffic honks and roars. People mill around me, passing out into the London night. They are not only ignorant of the strife-torn region in which now I live; they are as remote from it as if it lay on the other side of the world. Should I come home? I shout into the receiver. It’s up to you, comes the reply after a pause, I imagine she’ll go to sleep eventually. I promise to phone again in five minutes’ time from the concert hall. When I do, the news is bad. I rush deliriously home in a taxi, having bizarrely gone out for the evening in order to visit phone boxes in the West End. My mother-in-law’s lot was no better. She came all the way to London to sit with my crying, hungry child while I telephoned her incessantly.
It is not love that troubles me when I leave the baby, like a rope and harness paid out behind me wherever I go. It is rather that when I leave her the world bears the taint of my leaving, so that abandonment must now be subtracted from the sum of whatever I choose to do. A visit to the cinema is no longer that: it is less, a tarnished thing, an alloyed pleasure. My presence appears almost overnight to have accrued a material value, as if I had been fitted with a taxi meter, to which the price of experience is inseparably indexed. When I am out I am distracted by its ticking. My friends, whilst glad to see me, cannot necessarily afford me. We meet at the uncrossable border between the free world and the closed regime of motherhood. Though I have for the moment forgotten them, such divisions existed, of course, in the life I knew before. I have spent many evenings with people who were haunted by undone work, by unhappy relationships, by lack of money, by practical anxiety or grief. I have felt their restlessness, their fever, have seen things prowling behind their e
yes. The difference lies in the matter of valour, for while it is easy to encourage your friend bravely to throw off the bonds of her anxiety, to forget her troubles and hope for better things, no one is going to cheer a mother’s recovery from feelings of responsibility for her child. Instead the baby lies at home like some unintelligible goddess, luminous, pulsing, strange, an icon of lofty requirement. As her disciple I cannot but appear to have undergone some mystic conversion which distances me from those I love. I must go back to her as to something other people don’t understand, and respectfully, concernedly, they let me go.
In Madame Bovary, Emma Bovary sends her baby daughter to live with a wet-nurse outside the town for the first few months of her life. Emma’s love is roving, restless. It resists confinement in her child, in her home. Her youth and beauty have known only the cage of domesticity, the bored isolation of rural France, the rudimentary, doting love of her father and then her husband. To love her baby in turn would be to proclaim the limit of herself. Emma’s urge to experience, to be the subject, the centre, draws the life out of her meanings for other people. She simply can’t stand still. As a wife she is a spectre, as a mother an absence. Who, she thinks, can blame her? Her own mother is dead; she has no debt to repay. She spends her life digging tunnels underneath her marriage, an occupation to which her child brings the threat of sabotage. Like a double, a baby can inhabit its mother’s loves, engaging unwanted affections, disrupting others, speaking on her behalf when her back is turned. Motherhood for Emma Bovary is an alias, an identity she occasionally assumes in her career as an adulterer. She is the essence of the bad mother: the woman who persists in wanting to be the centre of attention. At one point she tries to breathe some sincerity into the maternal role, perhaps thinking that it will save her from herself, and goes into immediate and precipitate decline:
She fetched Berthe home from the wet-nurse’s. Felicite would bring her down when there were visitors, and Madame Bovary would undress her to display her legs. She adored children, she said: they were her consolation, her delight, her mania. She hugged her daughter to an accompaniment of lyrical transports … Emma grew thinner, her cheeks lost their colour, her face became longer. It was as though she were passing through life with scarce an earthly contact, as though her forehead bore the signature of some predestined blessedness … But her heart was filled with greed, rage and hatred.
When the violence fomenting within this outward saint erupts, it is upon her child that it is visited.
The fire was out, the clock ticked on. She was struck with a vague wonder that outward things could be so calm when all her being was in turmoil. Between the window and the work-table, baby Berthe, in her little knitted boots, moved uncertainly, trying to reach her mother and cling to her apron-strings.
‘Leave me alone!’ exclaimed Emma, pushing her away.
But a moment later the little girl was back again, this time pressing against her knees, and staring up at her with large blue eyes, while a dribble of clear saliva ran down her chin on to her silk bib.
‘Leave me alone!’ the young woman said again in a sudden access of irritability.
The expression of her face frightened the child and she started to cry.
‘Oh, do get away!’ cried her mother, elbowing her aside.
Berthe stumbled against the foot of the chest-of-drawers, and fell, cutting her cheek against one of the brass ornaments. The blood began to flow.
Berthe, she of the little knitted boots and the displayed legs, grows up unloved, Flaubert tells us. After the deaths of her parents, she is sent to earn her living in a cotton mill. She is her mother’s blighted product, her abandoned project. She does not bear the hallmark, the authoritative stamp of maternal love. She fades away into the darkness.
It is only much later that I realise that my daughter is embarked on her own career in love, has already begun what will probably be the greatest of all the stories of her life. When did she start? How did she learn? When did love pass over her, leaving its imprint like the ghostly emanation of frost, issuing its secret invitation to the ball? Emotion lived in her, nameless, untamed, from the very start: I heard its bellows and shrieks, its purrs of satisfaction. But as her being strives towards civilisation, so this emotion begins to take forms. When she is nine months old her father and I go away for a week without her, and when we come back she does not evince pleasure or surprise or even anger, but for some minutes silently passes herself from his arms into mine and back again, over and over, like water being poured from one vessel into another: and I realise that by going away we have made her lose her shape, that with both of us gone she has lost that which contained her. By the time she is a year old she has learned to love, as she is learning to act and to speak, primitively but recognisably. She loves like a butterfly or a hummingbird, briefly bestowing herself hither and thither, zigzagging about her doting world with the irrefutable logic of pure impulse. She has learned to walk and hence to select, to flatter, running towards a loved one, throwing her short arms around a desired object in embrace, placing her small, motionless lips here and there in imitation of a kiss. We who have loved her unacknowledged for all these months are delighted. She has learned to spurn, too, to prefer. ’Da!’ she sobs histrionically if I pick her up at an inappropriate moment. ‘Ma,’ she asseverates coquettishly when she senses my interest beginning to wander.
It is in some ways profoundly relieving, the development of her preferences and moods, the slow emergence, like another birth, of her character. Her self, for so long a mystery we attempted to solve, a space we filled with guesses, is taken from us like a worrying charge. Now she has arrived to claim herself, to take herself from us, and this separateness marks the end of one kind of love and the beginning of another. The one-sided passion of her infancy, that ferment of terror and responsibility, that dark flood of undifferentiated emotion, has subsided. It was love for an object, love in the mind, at once everything and nothing. I no longer find myself swept along by the waves of generalised human pity or grief that washed back and forth over the defenceless plain of my heart. This new love is banked and dammed. It is love with walls, with rooms. It is conversational, corresponding, detailed, civilised. It is more like romantic love, the love of adults, than I could have anticipated. I have to stop myself from talking about my daughter, from recounting her exploits and narrating her relation to me. There is less that I have to do for her now, and the withdrawal of her helplessness draws a veil over the murky history of my care of her. I imagine, ashamed, her caring for me when I am old, bringing the bedpans and the bottles; and I wonder what I will have scored, what undisclosed quantity of loyalty and love I have earned during these testing months. I did not know, in truth, that they were a test. I forgot that she would one day spring to life, would one day walk and talk and tell me what she thought of me. I wonder if I offended her with my reluctance, my fury. I wonder if I tormented her. I hope that I have been good, like Cinderella, when it was hard to be; not like the ugly sisters with their big feet and horny toes, whom retribution has unforgiving in its sights, who love, but too late.
Motherbaby
One day I notice that my daughter has a faint line, like a join, running from the top of her head directly down the centre of her body. It looks like the place where the two halves of her were glued together, and gives her the worrying appearance of being hand-made. During pregnancy I too developed such a line, a seam bisecting the globe of my stomach as if in preparation for some cosmic knife to cut me precisely in half. This line, the linea negra, is a common feature of pregnancy: it has a medical explanation which is nonetheless overshadowed by its atmosphere of symbolism, its prophetic bearing. My daughter’s line eerily compliments my own, as if I had been taken apart and reassembled into two people.
I read somewhere that it is inappropriate to refer to a mother and her newborn child as two separate beings: they are one, a composite creature best referred to as mother-and-baby or perhaps motherbaby. I find this claim unnerving, ev
en threatening, in spite of the fact that it perfectly describes the profound change in the co-ordinates of my being that I experience in the days and weeks after my daughter’s birth. I feel like a house to which an extension has been added: where once there was a wall, now there is a new room. I feel my heat and light flowing vertiginously into it.
Motherbaby is designed to be an entirely sustainable unit. The baby is born installed with the ability to suck. The mother, meanwhile, has received notice during pregnancy of a Change of Use. Her breasts are requisitioned, deprogrammed: work is carried out on glands, on tissues. By the time the baby comes they are like two warheads on red alert. The baby sucks; the machinery springs into action; milk is magically produced. This milk is entirely sufficient to feed the baby for the first six months of her life, until she is able to sit up and eat food. It is designed to give the baby every nutrient she might need. It is sterile and emerges at the correct temperature. It can be given anywhere and at any time. As the baby grows, the mother shrinks. The reserves of fat she accumulated during pregnancy fuel the work of the breasts. Her uterus contracts; hormones circulate and are discharged. Her body is writing the last chapter of the story of childbirth. It has the beauty, the symmetry, of a dance. By its end, motherbaby is ready for life as mother and baby. The paint has dried; the joins no longer show. Ingenious, no?
Do you want to try putting her to the breast? the midwife enquires as I am wheeled from the operating theatre. I look at her as if she has just asked me to make her a cup of tea, or tidy up the room a bit. I still inhabit that other world in which, after operations, people are pitied and looked after and left to recuperate. My daughter’s small body, bundled in blankets, is handed to me, and as I take her I experience a moment of utter, almost visionary, clarity. In this moment I realise that a person now exists who is me, but who is not confined to my body. She appears to be some sort of colony. What she needs and wants will vie with, and often take priority over, what I need and want for the foreseeable future. I put her to the breast. The word ‘natural’ appears in a sort of cartoon bubble in my head. I do not, it is true, feel entirely natural. I feel as though somebody is sucking my breast in public.
