‘Go on.’
‘I’d had a few previous relationships with people who wanted children, but I was sure I didn’t. So they foundered.’
‘Right.’ She made a note.
‘To be honest I was pretty sure I did not want to have children,’ I carried on. ‘When it came up before, with a couple of previous girlfriends, it became the deal-breaker, even though at the time there’d never been a deal in place.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘There were a couple of women I was going out with, and we weren’t even planning to settle down and live together or anything, but the subject of having children came up. When I said I didn’t want any, they said they didn’t want to be with anyone who didn’t want to have any. So the relationships ended, amicably enough. I’m sure they found people who did want kids and settled down.’
‘So what made you change your mind?’ Hedda asked.
‘I met Maggie, for starters,’ I told her, although a child had still been far from my mind when I had. Part of the attraction of Maggie, on paper, had been that I presumed she didn’t want them either. She didn’t say anything about it either way in the information put up by the dating agency; I just presumed because of her age – forty-three when we met – that if she had ever wanted them she was past that point.
And when we met in person the attraction was Maggie herself. She was beautiful, clever and talented, and I loved being with her. I’d been doing the dating agency thing for a while and I’d always found it a bit of strain. You have to perform to a certain extent on a first date and, even though I like performing, I don’t like it when the part I’m playing is myself.
But with Maggie, even on the first date, I felt comfortable, the way I used to feel with Bel. When Bel and I first met, we were easy in each other’s company. Sometimes she’d come into my room and ask if she could read while I was writing an essay, and I liked just having here there. Even if I said nothing and carried on working at my desk while she lay on the bed, I liked her being there.
But when you go on a date you have to fill the silences, and of course more often than not there are lots to fill. But with Maggie there were silences which, rather than thinking of as awkward moments, I thought of simply as breathing spaces, time to reflect on what had just been said or what might be suggested next.
She felt right to be with. She was the first person who had felt right since Isobel, so right that even before the date was finished I was saying to her, ‘I’d really like to see you again – soon, if you’d like?’
‘Yes,’ she’d replied. ‘I’d like to see you again too. Soon.’
I felt so happy when I went home that evening. And we met up again soon after, and, after that, as often as Maggie’s touring schedule allowed. She went on a tour of Switzerland a few weeks after that first meeting, but we spoke on the phone every day. And I thought about her all the time. I was amazed by the fact that, after twenty-plus years of trying to find the right woman, it could all seemingly fall into place.
I was almost expecting something to go wrong: for Maggie to suddenly reveal that she thought Hitler had had a viable plan when he’d set out to create the master race or to tell me she was a convicted serial killer. But she never did. She just kept amazing me with her kindness and generosity, her humour, her talk and herself.
Then, one evening, when Maggie was just back from a few days playing in Lucerne, I had my first ‘oh, shit’ moment.
I’d been so looking forward to seeing her. I’d tidied my flat, been shopping, bought flowers and wine, cooked a nice meal, and she’d told me all about the concerts she’d been playing in and the concert hall in Lucerne – apparently it’s one of the best in the world – and the boat trip they’d taken across the lake.
‘It all sounds lovely,’ I said.
‘It was,’ she said. ‘But I missed you.’
And I leaned across the table to kiss her, not for the first time that evening, but for longer.
‘Pudding?’ I asked, when we broke apart.
‘Let’s go to bed first,’ Maggie replied.
So we did. The perfect end to a perfect evening, until I removed the condom I’d used and found that the end was split – a tiny, almost imperceptible split, but a split nevertheless.
The week after Maggie’s period should have come was excruciating. And the day Maggie came round to my flat for dinner, and brought with her a pregnancy test, was hellish. But the moment she came out of the bathroom and burst into tears was a bizarre relief. At least we knew now, and I didn’t feel as bad as I’d thought I would. ‘You want to keep it, don’t you?’ I asked her, just to be sure, and she nodded as she stood there, yards away from me, in floods of tears.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, through them. ‘But yes, I think I do.’
And that was when I knew.
I stepped over the distance between us and took my sobbing girlfriend in my arms, kissed her, held her, stroked her hair, tried to calm her, so that I could tell her.
‘It’s OK, Maggie. I do too. We’ll have this baby together.’
‘You don’t have to,’ she said, pulling away slightly so that I could see her beautiful face, streaked with tears. ‘I know we haven’t known each other that long. I know you never wanted children. I know this isn’t what you wanted.’
‘It wasn’t, no,’ I told her truthfully. ‘But it is now.’
And that was true too. If Maggie hadn’t wanted to have the baby then, sure, part of me would have been relieved, but I’d have wondered, too, what it would have been like, this child of mine. And now I knew that this woman, with whom I felt more at home than I had with anyone for years, was carrying my child, I wanted to know what it would be like. I was filled with a sudden strange sense of certainty and purpose. I was going to have a baby.
‘I want to have this baby, Maggie,’ I told her again and again. ‘I want to be with you and we’re going to have a baby together. Everything will be all right. I promise.’
And, for a while, I was right.
‘When Iris was born,’ I said to Hedda – and had to pause because I found myself becoming slightly tearful remembering the moment.
‘Go on, please.’ There was something about the way Hedda said ‘please’ that invited me to try to tell her exactly what I’d felt.
‘It was like every good emotion I’d ever felt in my life, all rolled into one. I hadn’t expected it, either. I’d thought it would take me a while to love the baby. I knew that I would but initially, when it was just a baby, I wasn’t sure. But as soon as I set eyes on her I was completely overwhelmed with love. She was just the most perfect thing I had ever seen. I didn’t want anything to change that.’
I stopped because I knew if I went on I would start to cry.
Hedda said nothing. She too, I found, could make a silence seem like a breathing space.
‘But it did, didn’t it?’ I said, with an edge to my voice, a harshness that made Hedda shake her head and look away.
Isobel, Friday, later
Vincent’s beaming face has been the only thing that’s cheered me today.
‘Are you helping with the slow readers?’ he asked excitedly when Eric left to catch his train to London, his parting shot being, ‘You’d better look into finding a solicitor.’
‘I’m in Vinnie’s class this morning,’ I’d replied, and Eric had said nothing. But Vincent’s clear excitement at the prospect of my helping made me feel loved.
Vincent has what the school calls ‘additional literacy needs’. They make every effort to ensure no one feels they are less able than anyone else. The different sets are graded by shapes rather than ability. There are Squares, Diamonds, Rectangles, Triangles, Ovals and Circles: groups into which the children are divided by ability, but labelled so as to make them think it has nothing to do with that. But they all know which groups are which. Some of these children may not read as well as others, or barely at all, but they are not stupid. Vincent knows that the Squares and Diamonds hardly need
to pause for thought to grasp the meaning of the words on the page, that they can read adult books by themselves and extrapolate information from the history sheets the teacher hands out. And he is well aware of the fact that words, to him, appear a strange mishmash of shapes, making him a ‘slow reader’.
When you add in his strange synaesthetic tendencies, you begin to wonder what he does see on the page. ‘“Laugh” is such a muddy word,’ he said to me this morning, making me laugh myself.
When they first began to emerge, Vincent’s reading problems were a cause of tension between Eric and me. I wanted to find a reason.
‘I think he might be dyslexic,’ I said to Eric one evening after sitting on his bed reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar for the umpteenth time, knowing that when I asked him what the caterpillar ate and he said ‘apple’ it was the picture not the A-P-P-L-E that dictated his answer.
‘He’s not dyslexic. It’s just taking him a bit longer than average to get there,’ Eric replied. Eric read with him too. He was aware of the problems Vincent was having, but less concerned about them.
‘I think we should take him to see someone.’
‘We’ve spoken to his teacher about it, Bel. It’s not uncommon for boys of his age to be a bit slower to grasp the concept, but he will get there in the end.’
‘But what if we could get him extra help and get him there quicker?’
‘By sticking a label on him for the rest of his life? How is that helpful? Vincent is a bright kid, we know that. He’s starting to read, albeit slowly. He’s getting extra help and the teachers don’t think he is dyslexic.’
‘But what if they just haven’t realised?’
‘They know the signs. They’re trained to look for them,’ Eric insisted.
‘But if we took him to see someone we’d know for sure.’ I wanted there to be a reason why Vincent couldn’t read as well as Gabs and Harvey. We read to them all in bed every night. I’d read to Gabs as soon as she was old enough and carried on until she began reading for herself, while Eric read to Harvey in his room. Then I started reading to Vincent, but for some reason he was slow to grasp the skill himself.
But Eric and the teacher were right. He’s getting there now.
‘You know how Paddy says “laff” not “larf”?’ Vincent asks, as I sit in his circle of Circles. I have just pointed to the word and didn’t expect any of them to recognise it instantly. I’m amazed that Vinnie was the first to do so.
‘Yes, he does. It’s his northern accent.’
‘It actually looks more like “laff”,’ he goes on. ‘The A and the U like that. It should be “laff” not “larf”.’
I am so pleased with his progress that I forget about the letter, until I go to the staff room and notice a copy of the local paper lying on the coffee table. I can’t bring myself to pick it up. I can glean enough from the headline: ‘Boy, 15, Dies of Measles’, and underneath a picture of a teenage boy in school uniform. It isn’t a uniform I recognise but this is the local paper, so the boy must be from somewhere hereabouts.
And then I see one of the classroom assistants, catching me looking at the headline, and I look away because I don’t want to be drawn into conversation. But it’s too late. ‘Didn’t your eldest have measles?’ she asks, her tone critical.
‘While we were on holiday,’ I say, as if this somehow mitigates the circumstances. In fact it made them worse.
‘Yes, I heard,’ she says, and I wonder who she heard from. ‘It’s terrible, isn’t it?’ I think she is talking about me, I think she is saying that I am terrible for letting it happen, but I realise she is nodding towards the newspaper.
‘Yes. It’s awful,’ I agree.
‘It’s probably not the first and it probably won’t be the last,’ she says, and repeats, ‘It’s really terrible.’
I make my excuses and leave, her criticism ringing in my ears, even though it is unspoken.
The local swimming baths are not far from the school and I usually spend an hour or so doing laps, between finishing helping in Vinnie’s class and picking him up after school. When I’m standing in the shower afterwards I hear my name said, tentatively, as if the speaker is not sure it’s me.
‘Isobel?’
‘Hannah?’ I know it’s her: my questioning tone is surprise, because I haven’t seen her for years. I didn’t even think she lived in Brighton any more.
‘How bizarre, I was just thinking about you,’ she says.
‘Were you?’ It’s a bizarre-enough encounter anyway.
If we’d met in the street, we probably would have kissed, but here in the showers, with Hannah covered in shampoo, we just stick our heads out slightly from under the flow of water and talk.
‘I thought you’d gone away.’
‘We did,’ Hannah tells me. ‘We’ve been living in Spain. We’ve only been back a few weeks.’
‘And already you’re back in the swim of things.’ The pun is unintended, but it was in this pool that I’d first met Hannah, when Gabby and Hannah’s daughter Rosa were just a few months old. We were both part of a group that regularly attended baby swimming classes. And by a part I don’t just mean I went and met them at the pool and took our children to the class together; I mean I felt I belonged to that group of women.
At the time, I was no longer part of the team at work, no longer part of the throng of people who got up early every morning, took the tube to work and spent all day doing a job. I needed to be part of something else. And that was what I became part of – a baby swimming group.
The classes were held in the baby pool. It was heated to temperatures so warm it felt like getting into a bath and, for the babies, back into the womb. In it they seemed utterly content to be swished and swirled around the water, to be splashed and even to be dunked right under, before happily being lifted back to the surface.
‘Babies don’t fear the water until they’re older,’ the teacher said, and she was right. Gabriella had seemed more contented in the water than anywhere. It was one of the few places I’d felt truly relaxed with her, in those early days.
The other women became my colleagues, the people I worked with at being a mother. And they were women who, like myself, were determined to ‘work’ at it. These women had all had good jobs. Now they were determined to apply their high standards of efficiency to raising their children. They were women who persisted with breastfeeding even if their nipples were cracked and bleeding and it caused them physical pain. These were women who pureed organic carrots at midnight rather than pollute their babies’ tiny bodies with chemicals they might encounter in a jar. These were women who read about and researched every latest trend or notion in child-rearing, discussed it among themselves in the changing rooms, and believed the opinions they formed were generally right – especially Hannah. I didn’t think to question any of this. Nor did any of these other highly intelligent, reasoned and reasoning women, because we all wanted to belong.
Hannah had also believed that vaccinations were unnecessary – all of them: the risks outweighed the benefits; they were to blame for the rise in asthma and allergies; they were actually harmful to a child’s immune system;, they were in fact a government conspiracy to coerce mothers in a way I was not entirely clear about. When the MMR scare had started, it had seemed to give weight to her view.
‘Do you fancy a coffee when you’re dressed?’ I ask Hannah now, picking up my goggles and shampoo from the floor before heading for the changing cubicles.
‘Sure, it would be great to catch up. But I can’t be too long. I need to be home by three-thirty.’
‘That’s fine,’ I say, and feel almost happy as I towel myself dry and dress. If anyone is sympathetic to the situation I find myself in now, it will be Hannah.
‘Jesus, that’s awful. You must feel terrible,’ she says, as we sip a drink the dispenser claims is coffee from plastic cups, at a table overlooking the pool. ‘I mean, that’s just so unlucky.’
‘It’s not, though, is it?’ I
say to her. ‘It’s not just bad luck. It is because we didn’t have our kids vaccinated. It could have happened to any of us.’
‘Oh, I did have mine done,’ she says, breezily, as if she’s forgotten that she was the one who expressed the strongest views against it.
I’m completely taken aback. ‘When?’ I ask.
‘Before we went to Spain,’ she says, smiling. ‘We did a bit of travelling in Africa first so we gave them the lot. They still have a lot of measles in Africa. Kids die of it. It’s terrible.’
‘Really?’ I am annoyed now and can’t think of anything else to say. Hannah had been so adamant that it was unnecessary.
‘Yes.’ She sounds almost smug. ‘It had all blown over by then anyway, the MMR thing. It would have been daft not to.’
I want to knock my cup of coffee over and let it spill on her lap. How can she sit there, so calmly, and lecture me on the stupidity of not vaccinating my own children, when she was the person who’d made me feel I shouldn’t in the first place?
But of course she’s right. I was stupid. I didn’t have to go along with what she thought just because I wanted to be part of the group.
‘I have to go now,’ I say, nursing my injured pride. ‘I’ve got to pick my son up from school.’
On my way I call Sally. I’m still livid with Hannah and even more so with Ben. The more I think about it, the more extreme his action seems.
‘Fuck,’ Sally echoes what Eric said earlier. ‘I can’t believe it. What are you going to do?’
‘I don’t know, Sally. The letter only came this morning. We haven’t really had much time to think about it.’
‘What does Eric think?’
‘I don’t know,’ I repeat. ‘Whenever I try to talk to him he just keeps going on and on about my not having had the kids vaccinated in the first place. He won’t move on. I’m beginning to hate him for it. ‘
‘He must feel bad, Bel. Ben is his best friend. You know what Eric’s like.’
‘I thought I did, but I’m beginning to wonder. He’s usually more practical. He can usually see both sides too, but he just seems to be putting all the blame on me. Even when we got the letter, it seemed to be me he was angry with, not Ben.’
Living With It Page 14
