by Tessa Hadley
Unlike the other women at the classes, she hadn’t got everything ready. That was what they said to one another: “Have you got everything ready?” as if having a baby were a household routine like preparing a room or packing to go away on holiday. Zoe knew from novels that a new baby could sleep in a pulled-out drawer at first, as long as it was lined with soft blankets. She held off contemptuously from those practicalities that turned the baby’s arrival into another dreary opportunity for consumerism, for discussions of the purchase of prams or sterilizers or washing machines. (Her mother had washed all the nappies by hand, so she was sure she could do the same.) She changed nothing in the house, and she and Simon didn’t talk about what was coming. They made love from behind because her huge stomach got in the way; but still they didn’t actually ever mention the baby after that first terrible week of his cold furious insistence and her stubbornness, resisting him.
It was not quite true that she had made no preparations at all. At the back of the drawer where she kept her sweaters and shirts she had a little cache of baby clothes: some tiny white vests and socks her mother had sent, two little woolly coats knitted by her grandmother, a couple of secondhand Babygro suits she had bought herself from a charity shop because they looked clean and pretty and hardly used. She had blushed when she was paying for them because in spite of her big annunciatory bump she didn’t really feel she was one of the grown-up women who had the right to possess such items. Sometimes when Simon wasn’t in the house she got these things out from the drawer and unfolded them, frowning as she tried to imagine what kind of tiny creature might be fitted inside them.
* * *
And then she was on a trolley being wheeled somewhere and she was looking into Pearl’s eyes and Pearl was looking back into hers. This was not any baby she could ever have imagined herself having. It wasn’t mouselike or curled up or tender at all; it had huge strained-open eyes of dark night blue, staring at Zoe with something like the same indignant awareness of outrage and violation with which Zoe must have been staring back at her.
What was that? The mutual accusation seemed to bounce backward and forward between them. What did that to me?
The last few hours of history still seemed as loud around them as a battle, the blazing assaults of pain, the drama of doors slamming and feet running in the race to the delivery room, Zoe’s noisy vomiting into a kidney bowl, her shouting out numbers at the top of her voice, counting through her contractions. She couldn’t wait to tell her women friends never, ever, to be tempted to put themselves through this; it was much more terrible than anyone could imagine in advance. (Needless to say she quickly forgot it, in her absorption in her new life with the baby.)
—You’ve been so good, the student midwife said, squeezing her round the shoulders.
But this baby didn’t care for any of that.
Its hair was not nestling fur but a tall gingery crest. Its nose was broad with flaring nostrils. Its mouth was fat with flat squashed lips, an angry purplish red, downturned at the ends with dissatisfaction.
—Who are you? she whispered to it as they were hurried, staring at each other, down to the ward on the trolley. Where did you come from?
She knew in those first moments that this baby was never going to grow into any elf creature or spirit companion. Actually, she knew in the same moments that the spirit companion had been a silly idea. As if your child could be just a broken-off piece of yourself. Real things were always more tremendous—more unhinging—than the things that grew out of your own thoughts. Perhaps the only thing left over from the dream child was her name. Zoe clung to that, as if to attach to this new creature just a small something of her own, a memory of the wild child from Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, which she had studied at A-level: Pearl absorbed on the shore in her games with the weed and the shells, loving but free.
* * *
The week that pearl was born, simon was away giving a paper at a conference in Manchester. He hadn’t left a telephone number. Zoe lied on the phone to her mother and said that although he hadn’t been able to get back in time for the birth, he had seen the baby since and picked her up out of her little cot of transparent plastic and held her. She also lied that it was Simon who had first pointed out what now was obvious, that the baby looked like her, like Joyce. Joyce wondered, but vaguely, if she should come up and see them. Zoe, who so wanted her to come, said firmly that it would be a better idea if she gave them a few weeks to settle into their new routine.
The lying to her mother was something new (Zoe usually scrupulously told the truth); it was something that had come about in the rush of change and bloodiness and her attention focused with the nurses on her bodily functions, as if she had lost track for a moment of her higher self. But the hard-edged gap between mother and daughter, narrow but deep, which both dissimulated with bright capable voices, wasn’t new. Zoe would have liked to talk with Joyce about feeding the baby and about nappies, but Joyce’s vagueness warned her off; she remembered their truce of skeptical disapproval, how each politely withheld their verdict on the other. Zoe thought she could guess what her mother thought of her life with Simon; she could imagine her making a funny story to her friends out of how they lived on black coffee and bread and cheese, without a washing machine or an electric kettle, and with a bathtub in the kitchen; how they spent their money on books and music instead of furniture; how when Joyce and Ray came to visit, Zoe had forgotten that they would need spare sheets.
When Zoe had first told Joyce she was pregnant, she had had a sentimental idea that this would lead to a moment of closeness between them, but Joyce at the other end of the phone had seemed shocked and even irritated.
—What about your PhD? she had asked, as if she was actually disappointed, although she hadn’t ever shown much interest in it before. (Zoe, anyway, was convinced that the subject she had chosen to work on—the effects of prewar government education policies on responses to conscription in the First World War—was the wrong one. She struggled on with it, and had folders full of notes and a card index of references, but she found it hard to imagine ever writing it up. She persuaded herself it was more important for her to bring in money so that Simon could write his.)
—Oh, I can pick that up later. At the moment, anyway, it’s not practical for both of us to be studying at the same time.
—But is Simon going to be able to bring in an income to support you while you’re at home looking after the baby?
Zoe had sighed deeply.
—Mum, this isn’t what I want to be talking about, not right now, not when I’ve just told you something important.
—I’m sorry, I can’t quite take it in, that’s all. All the implications.
* * *
—It’s a girl, joyce said to ray, after zoe telephoned from the hospital. She’s going to call it Pearl.
She hesitated in the kitchen doorway as if she didn’t know where to go with the news. It was just after breakfast; Ray was reading the paper and drinking coffee at the big pine table. He took off his reading glasses.
—Good God. Pearl Deare. Sounds like something out of music hall.
—But I suppose it will be Macy.
—So we’re grandparents.
—I can’t believe that, said Joyce. I’m not ready for it. I don’t feel like a grandmother.
—We could just go, said Ray. I’ll fill up the car and check the tires; you throw some things in a bag. We’ll drive. It won’t take more than five or six hours on the motorway. We’ll book into a hotel somewhere in Cambridge.
—I don’t know how to contact her, said Joyce.
—We don’t need to, we just turn up. We know which hospital it is.
—I was seeing Ingrid for lunch tomorrow.
—Cancel her. She’ll understand.
—I’d need to have a bath and wash my hair.
—Run it in while you start to pack. I’ll ring Ingrid.
Joyce put the plug in the bath and turned on the hot tap. Slowly she moved abou
t her bedroom, listening to the tub fill up, pulling out the drawers, walking into the built-in wardrobe and running her hand along the hangers, some outfits still in their dry-cleaners’ bags. Nothing seemed right. She didn’t like anything she had. What could one possibly choose to wear on such an occasion? She pulled out her good gray wool crepe skirt and matching jacket with padded shoulders, but that might be too hot in a hospital, and it would crumple on the journey, and she remembered that the last time she wore it the skirt was uncomfortably tight. There were some black silky trousers that were always comfortable, but the material had gone cheap and snagged if you looked up close, and anyway she had a sudden fear that her thighs looked fat in them, like a barroom tart. She took down one thing after another and threw them on the bed.
Ray found her standing naked in the bathroom. She was staring in the mirror, which she had wiped clear of steam with a towel. The water was almost at the top of the tub.
—What is all this about?
—Do I look like a grandmother?
—So that’s what it is. You could have a been a grandmother at thirty-six. Some women are. It doesn’t mean anything.
—But I’m not. I’m not thirty-six.
—You have the most beautiful body. Look at you. As beautiful as ever. I can’t resist the sight of you.
—You’re not enough, she said.
—I see. He looked crestfallen, resigned.
—Don’t be silly. I meant, you’re married to me, therefore it doesn’t count. It only counts from strangers. Only strangers see whether you look like a grandmother or not. Whether you’re someone they could want to make love to.
—So that’s why you don’t want to go and visit Zoe’s baby.
—She doesn’t want me anywhere near it, either. You know what they think of me. They think I’m a bourgeois housewife. They think all I care about is shopping and decorating.
—You’re almost certainly making all this up, he said.
—Maybe.
—We won’t go. It can wait. We’ll go when you’re ready.
He put his arms around her from behind; in the mirror, the sleeves of his suede jacket were brutal against her soft nakedness.
—Manet, he said. Déjeuner dans la salle de bain.
* * *
Other friends came to visit zoe in the hospital and saw pearl before Simon did. Probably some of the mothers on the ward thought Joshua was her husband, because he came in to see her twice at that hour when the husbands came (some alone and devoted, with flowers and lots of gazing into the crib; some with older children, being jolly with the new baby while the mother made up to the others, laughing at the clothes they were dressed in, asking what their father had been feeding them). Zoe was Mrs. Macy on the nameplate above the bed, the midwife had warned her of untold complications if she used her unmarried surname, so she had amusedly agreed to it. She didn’t however lie about this; she told the women who had become her friends in the beds to either side of her that she wasn’t married, that she and her boyfriend didn’t believe in it, that he was away and she hadn’t been able to contact him.
Joshua didn’t really make a very satisfactory husband substitute; he still wore his hair long and had a straggling beard and traipsed around in an old greatcoat, with a plastic carrier bag in which he kept his poems. He had got only low marks in his finals but seemed to find it impossible to leave Cambridge, so he took on small gardening or typing jobs and rented a dank basement room lit with a 40-watt bulb to save money. Zoe dreaded his visiting her at home because he stayed talking about books and music for hours, and if it was raining outside he took off his socks without asking and wrung them out and hung them to steam in front of the fire. Still, it was sweet of him to come to the hospital, and he got very excited about Pearl, holding her as if she were a particularly slippery kind of fish, adjusting his body position contortedly to her slightest stirrings. He asked if Zoe was planning to educate her at home and suggested that, if so, he could teach her Latin as part of a balanced curriculum. She looked forward more to visits from her friend who was a postgraduate at Churchill, and from the manageress at the bag shop, who brought her some baby sleep-suits Zoe was very grateful for. (She was beginning to wonder anxiously what she was going to do at home about the limited supply of baby clothes; they seemed to get wet and dirtied so quickly.)
None of these visitors from outside really seemed part of Zoe’s new life with the baby; she felt much closer to some of the other mothers. In the bed to her right was a good-looking blond woman with a hairdressing business. She had tried for a baby for eight years and then given up and started her business instead; just when it was really taking off she had discovered she was pregnant. She said she had cried every day of her pregnancy. Now she lay gazing in worship through the side of the transparent cot at her tiny son, although she still had no idea how she was going to manage looking after him. In the bed to Zoe’s left was a dumpy woman with a pudding-basin haircut who had three children already; they came in with her husband, who worked in haulage and wore a shiny suit to the hospital. Zoe was deeply impressed with this woman’s quiet competence at soothing and feeding her baby and managing the older ones. She confided tearfully, however, after her family had gone, that she hadn’t wanted more children but her husband wouldn’t let her use any contraceptives. Indignantly, Zoe and the hairdresser took her part.
—It’s your body, said the hairdresser. It’s you who has to go through that torture.
—Don’t get me wrong, said the woman. I will love the baby. But there’s no room for another one, and I’ve got no washing machine. And I’d just started at a little job of my own, which I won’t be able to manage now with her.
Zoe confessed to them about how she had accidentally on purpose lost her cap and not mentioned it to Simon. She was very moved by her intimacy with these women and by what seemed to her their quiet heroism (everything in those hormone-heady few days was heightened). She thought how glad she was to get away from everything associated with the university: she felt as though she was recovering in a grateful rush her conviction of how deep and complex and sustaining people’s lives were outside the lit circle of intellectual thought.
On the last day of the week she spent in the hospital, Simon came. It wasn’t even visiting hours; the Sister pursued him down the ward and wanted to send him away but relented when he shrugged and charmed her with what Zoe could tell was his mock-courteous, most exaggeratedly upper-class manner. People responded to this presumption of authority in him as part of his disconcerting physical appeal: he was tall and very thin, and his hair these days was cut so short it was like moleskin against his scalp, flickering with the change of his facial expressions. Zoe was changing Pearl’s nappy on the bed; Pearl was squirming and crying. Until she was aware of Simon coming down the ward toward her, Zoe had been dealing quite calmly with this, tucking under and pulling tight, with her fingers inside to safely guide the pin as she had been shown by the nurses, knowing she could calm her down afterward with feeding. When she saw Simon her hands were suddenly hot and fumbling, and the nappy fell open, so that when he came up to the bed he saw the whole raw little body, quivering and flailing in its distress, with the long slit up between its legs and the big plastic clip on its cord, which was drying out (nicely, the nurses said) into a greenish stump. The huge night-blue eyes fixed balefully upon Simon, and the baby’s whole head suffused with blood as she redoubled the intensity of her squalling.
Zoe knew that he was thinking the baby was ugly.
—So it’s a girl.
—It’s Pearl.
—Pearl Deare? That’s ridiculous. It sounds like a wartime cabaret singer.
—Not Deare. Pearl Macy. I thought she’d have your name. Officially.
—Officially? I see that officially you’ve taken my name too. (How had her nameplate caught his eye so quickly? She had been going to take it down when she knew he was coming in.) Is there some conspiracy to implicate me here?
He sounded as if h
e was joking, but she knew he wasn’t.
—The midwife said it would make things easier.
—I’ll bet she did.
—Anyway: how are you? she said brightly, trying to carry on with the nappy as if it were something ordinary to her. How did the paper go?
He shook his head in irritation at her transparent effort to distract him. He didn’t want to talk about that here. Looking around at the scene of shapeless swollen women in their nightclothes, some reading magazines, some staring dotingly into their cots, some dozing (the Sister pulled curtains around the ones who were nursing, because a man was present), a tiny spasm of distaste tightened a muscle in his cheek. Zoe imagined that the ward smelled offensively: of milk, of baby excrement, of women’s blood, of disinfectant and hospital dinners.
She put Pearl to the breast to feed, to calm her down; but there was something preposterous in doing it in front of Simon, as if this were a show she was putting on for his benefit, an ill-judged attempt at a maternal display. It was not even a very well-prepared show. Pearl wouldn’t latch on to her nipple; she gasped and blubbered and half sucked and then lost her hold in frantic breathlessness, throwing her head from side to side against the breast; she arched her back and shuddered with sobbing and got herself into a worse state than she had ever been in before. Zoe was desperate and sweating, with her distended breast exposed. The nurses had to come and help, swirling the curtains around her bed behind them to cover her shame.
In the middle of this scene, Simon turned around and left.
It was Carol from Churchill who arranged to come to the hospital at lunchtime the next day with a friend who had a car, to pick up Zoe and Pearl and drive them home.
* * *
Joyce and ray sent a check for two hundred pounds toward things for the baby. Zoe bought a pram and a cot secondhand from the Spastics shop, a bag for her nappy-changing equipment, and a plastic changing mat; she spent the rest on an automatic washing machine, which she had plumbed in to the little covered yard at the back of their terraced cottage.
