“Hello, darling,” Linda gives me an air kiss, then steps past me into the flat, followed closely by Michael. “Are we early?”
“You could say that. No one will be here for at least another hour.” My voice and expression are grim. All I wanted to do was take a relaxing bath and take my time in getting ready, and now I’ll probably have to sit here and entertain Linda and Michael. My mood, to put it mildly, is suddenly not good. And then I notice that Michael is carrying several large carrier bags from Daisy & Tom.
“Oh, good. I wanted to show you what we’ve bought for the baby.” Linda smiles. “I’m so excited and Michael wanted it to be a surprise, but I can’t wait to see what you think.”
Frankly, I haven’t got the time. Everyone I know, and a few people I don’t, will be arriving in—I check my watch—less than an hour, and here I stand, dripping water onto the carpet, my hair still soaking, the flat still needing one final tidy before the first guests—family excluded—arrive.
“Why don’t you go in the garden and find Dan while I get dressed?” I smile through gritted teeth as I eye the bags warily. Linda knows how superstitious I am, knows I purposefully haven’t bought anything yet. So what on earth is in those bags? “Have a drink.” I try to keep my voice calm. “I’ll be with you just as soon as I’m ready.”
“Righto.” Michael’s already heading out there, clearly uncomfortable around his daughter-in-law in her dishabille state.
“Don’t be too long,” Linda says, and I strongly resist the urge to hit her, knowing that I will now rush so as not to offend them, and will doubtless end up with frizzy hair and smudged eye shadow, and that already I’m more wound up than I have been in months.
But somehow, fortunately, I manage not to rush. Lying back in the now-lukewarm water—I quickly add about a gallon more of hot—a calmness comes over me again, and I take my time getting ready, only occasionally peering out the window to admire our handiwork, how lovely the garden looks as the sun sets with all the lanterns and torches come into their own, how festive it all is.
Linda and Michael are chatting animatedly to Dan, both sipping from large mojitos, Linda obviously delighted to have her son on his own—a rare occurrence these days. And, as a result, my hair doesn’t frizz, my eyeshadow is perfectly blended, and the beaded Temperley top fits beautifully, despite not being maternity. I slip my feet into newly acquired sparkly sandals—a special treat, given that I’m pretty much only able to buy shoes these days—scoop my hair back into a rhinestone clip and, feeling beautiful, walk outside to join the others.
“Oh, good,” Linda says, clapping her hands, “here she is,” as if she has spent the past forty-five minutes in pained conversation while waiting for me to arrive, instead of happily monopolizing her favored and favorite son.
Michael passes Linda the plastic bags he was carrying when he walked in, but before I sit down I pour myself a glass of iced tea, looking longingly at the mojitos but knowing that alcohol and pregnancy do not mix, and that it’s not long before I’ll be able to drink again.
The minute I sit down, off Linda goes. She reaches down into the bags and starts to pull out the contents. Out come undershirts in a rainbow of colors, as she delightedly points out their cuteness and practicality. And then come onesies, packets and packets of them, followed by hooded towels complete with rubber ducks. There are romper suits and Babygros—yellows and greens, purples and oranges.
“If you don’t like them, you can change them,” Linda keeps saying, as the pile of things on the table grows higher and higher. “I just didn’t want to get pink or blue, but once we know—”
“I know,” I say, feeling completely overwhelmed by the sheer amount they have bought.
After the clothes come toys. “I know I shouldn’t have,” Linda says, “but look! Isn’t this bear gorgeous? I couldn’t resist. And this musical thing hangs on the crib and has lights and helps them sleep—isn’t it wonderful? I saw an ad on TV, and this mobile helps their developmental skills…”
Dan, I can see, is thrilled. He keeps giving me these looks, and I know he’s looking for confirmation, reassurance, “Isn’t it fantastic, Ellie?” he says as I grunt. “Wow, Mum, that’s amazing. Isn’t it, Ellie?” But I don’t say anything, can’t say anything, because, as ungrateful as this may sound, with all of this stuff, all of these things in front of me, everything that a newborn baby could possibly want or need, what is left for me to buy?
Do they think I haven’t bought anything because I haven’t wanted to? God knows it’s been a fight every time I look at things, and each time I pass a baby store I’ve been desperate to run in and buy everything in sight, but because I’m superstitious I haven’t wanted to tempt fate before six months. And now that I’m past twenty-four weeks, now that I’ve reached viability, the point where, should the baby be born, it would have a chance of survival, all I’ve been dreaming about is going on a shopping spree, choosing all the things that are currently piled up high on my garden table in front of me.
So, yes, I know I should be grateful, and yes, I know I should be thrilled that my baby has such loving, generous grandparents, but I feel as if I’m going to burst into tears, and at this moment my overwhelming feeling is one of hatred, and it’s all directed at Linda. Hatred that Linda has stolen my thrill and excitement and joy, and is claiming it as her own.
“It’s not your child!” I want to spit. “It’s mine! I should be buying these things! Not you!” But I can’t. Instead I try bloody hard to fight back the tears, try to swallow the lump in my throat, and force a smile while saying thank you.
None of which works. What happens instead is that as I try to swallow the lump, it somehow escapes me and comes out as a sob, which then turns into full-blown sobbing. I jump up and run inside, not giving a damn that Linda looks horrified—presumably at my ingratitude—while Michael looks angry—God knows why—and Dan, poor Dan, just looks completely confused.
I calm down inside, and, from the safety of my bathroom and the open window, manage to hear exactly what is going on outside. I hold my breath and listen.
“What?” I can imagine Linda opening her eyes wide and shrugging, the picture of innocence.
“Don’t ‘What?’ me,” Michael says, his voice not the voice I’m used to hearing, but instead the powerful, firm courtroom voice, the one he uses at work, the one that intimidates and scares, that ensures his continuing reputation as one of the best QCs. “I told you Ellie would be upset. I told you this wasn’t your job, that Ellie would want to buy all this herself, but you insisted.”
Linda jumps on the defensive immediately. “How do you know that’s why she’s crying? I doubt her tears have anything to do with us. Honestly, Michael, what kind of ungrateful girl would cry just because a grandparent bought some things for the baby?”
Michael shakes his head in a warning. “Do not try that with me, Linda. You know that Ellie couldn’t wait to buy the baby things, and you know she was waiting until now because she didn’t want to tempt fate, but you couldn’t wait, could you, you had to steal her thunder.”
“How dare you,” Linda storms. “I was not trying to steal her thunder, I was trying to help them out, for God’s sake, and if you felt so strongly about it, why didn’t you say something?”
“I did,” Michael says coldly. “Repeatedly, but as usual you chose not to hear.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?” Linda is happy to turn this row into something bigger because of course she knows that Michael is right, doubtless knew it the minute she picked up the first Babygro and put it in the shopping basket. She is the matriarch in this family, and no matter how many children we end up having, how much this family grows and who else may come into it, Linda is the star around whom everyone, everything else, revolves. This child may be growing in my stomach, may be my child, but as far as she’s concerned this is first and foremost her grandchild. Make no mistake about that.
And it is at this point that Dan mutters something about
a last-minute music crisis and disappears inside to fiddle with his CDs.
“What that’s supposed to mean,” Michael continues, and I know he’s upset that I’m upset, because I know he has a soft spot for me, and he saw this coming and probably feels he could have tried harder to stop it, and didn’t only because he is so used to deferring to Linda, to letting her stronger personality win, “what that’s supposed to mean,” he says again, “is that you hear only what you want to hear, and that every time anyone says anything to you that you might not like, you just ignore it.”
Linda snorts. “You do come out with the most ridiculous things sometimes,” she says dismissively. “Maybe I don’t listen to you because you haven’t got a clue.”
“That’s right. It’s exactly what you’re doing now, dismissing what I have to say because it’s not what you want to hear. Why do you think I don’t bother speaking to you half the time? Hmm? Because there’s no point. Because you’re so bloody intransigent nothing gets through.”
Linda turns to Michael, fury now in her eyes. “I. Will. Not. Have. You. Talk. To. Me. Like. This,” she says. “Do you understand?”
And this is the way it always ends. Linda will fight until she knows she can’t win, and when she runs out of steam, or it looks as if Michael may have the final word, she tells him she won’t stand for it anymore, and on the rare occasion when Michael still has more to say and the will to say it, Linda will walk out and slam the door until Michael apologizes.
Which he invariably does.
But Michael—oh thank God for Michael—won’t let her ruin our party, and when he next speaks he is sterner than I have ever heard him, sterner than I ever thought he could be, and it is all I can do not to run outside and kiss him. Instead I just sit in the bathroom and smile quietly through my tears.
“You will go inside and you will apologize to Ellie,” Michael says so coldly and quietly that I have to strain to hear him from my frozen position underneath the window. “You will offer to return everything and you will keep saying you’re sorry until Ellie forgives you.”
Linda evidently opens her mouth to speak, then closes it again in acquiescence. She stands up in silence and comes inside to find me.
“May I come in?” The door opens gently as Linda walks in, and I grind my teeth together, sure that tonight I will tell her how I feel and exactly why I find her behavior so despicable. I will tell her that I know exactly what game she is playing, that it is all a power trip, and that I will not have it anymore.
My fury is taking me beyond merely accepting her apology. Tonight I have had enough. I will make her take everything back, and I will, for the first time, get it all off my chest. No holds barred. I just don’t care anymore.
“I’m sorry,” Linda says uncomfortably, unable to look me in the eye. “I knew you were looking forward to buying the baby things, and I shouldn’t have bought them instead, and really, I didn’t mean to upset you, I just didn’t think, I was just so excited to see all those gorgeous things and I realize now how thoughtless it was and…”
I don’t believe this. Linda starts to cry.
She sits and she sobs, and she takes in great gulps of air, and it completely throws me off. Because I am ready for a fight. I am ready to shout and scream if need be, to tell Linda exactly how I feel about her, and the very last thing I expected was to see Linda in tears.
I didn’t even know Linda had the ability to cry, and it’s so alarming, so disarming, it renders me completely speechless, and I find myself placing a soothing arm around her shoulders and comforting her instead, telling her that of course she is forgiven, that I understand she was only trying to be thoughtful, that no, I don’t want her to return all those wonderful things and that in fact I was just upset because of my hormones, that I’m thrilled at her generosity and thoughtfulness.
Of course it’s all bollocks, but I do feel something I never thought I’d feel for Linda: pity.
I actually feel sorry for her, and even though I know exactly how devious and manipulative she can be, and know exactly what she was trying to do tonight, a part of me truly believes she may have just been thoughtless, that perhaps it wasn’t a malicious move, merely a tactless one, and all of my anger dissipates.
Five minutes later we are friends again, as close to a mother and daughter as this mother and daughter-in-law can be, and we rejoin Dan and Michael, who are visibly relieved to see how quickly we seem to have cast aside our differences.
And we join them just in time, it transpires, for barely have we sat down when the doorbell rings announcing Fran and Marcus—the first of our guests—and after that it seems that everyone arrives at once, and soon people are rubbing shoulders and refilling glasses and calling out to friends they haven’t seen in months.
Despite the bad start, we all have a wonderful evening. Even Linda and Michael: Linda is in her element with “the boys,” those friends of Dan she has watched grow up into strong, handsome men; and Michael, quiet, unassuming Michael, is, much to my amusement, taken aback and more than a little flattered to find himself talking with Sally, loquacious, flirtatious Sally, who, with a clever comment and a twinkle in her eye, appears to make him wish he were twenty years younger and still single.
People drink, they chat, they eat, they laugh. At some point during the evening the music is turned up and the lawn is turned into a makeshift dance floor. It is exactly the party that I wished for—a party where everyone remembers who they used to be, before life, children, and responsibility got in the way.
I think it fair to say a good time was had by all.
11
…the birthday of my life
Is come, my love is come to me
—Christina Rossetti
There’s a gentle knock on the door and I softly say “Come in,” bestowing a beatific smile on Fran and Sally, who walk in and gasp, immediately coming over to the bed, where I’m cradling a tiny Thomas Maxwell Cooper in my arms.
“Oh, my God,” sighs Fran, “you forget how teeny they are.”
“He’s gorgeous,” Sally says, both of them jostling to get a closer look.
“Do you want to hold him?” I pass him gently to Fran, who sits down on the hospital bed, holding Tom ever so carefully as she marvels at all his perfect features.
“How do you feel?” Sally puts a large bunch of tulips on the windowsill, not realizing that they’ll be dead within the hour, as this bloody hospital is heated to about three hundred degrees, even though it’s mid-August and boiling outside; none of the radiators (installed, I think, in Victorian times) can be turned off, nor can the windows be opened.
“I feel fine,” I say, beaming. “Great, in fact, which I’m not sure you’re supposed to feel after a cesarean, but I’m dying to go home.”
“When are you going home?”
“Tomorrow.”
It’s been a long four days. I thought I might have a chance to catch up on my sleep. Every night I hand Tom—he’s already become a Tom rather than Thomas—to the nursery and ask them to bottle feed him so I can get a good night’s sleep. And every night at precisely 1:33 A.M. I’m wide awake, and I know I should be trying to get back to sleep, but as soon as I wake up I remember that I have a baby! And he’s here! And excitement threatens to burst out of me and before I know it I’m padding down the hallway in my slippers to reclaim him for myself.
It is much like having the greatest birthday present I have ever had—magnified a thousandfold—and I can barely stand to let him out of my arms.
I wasn’t the first to hold him. Dan was. Neither of us had expected a cesarean, but twelve hours of labor led to a diagnosis of “failure to progress,” and, frankly, I was so bloody exhausted that when they suggested a cesarean, they could have suggested amputation of all my limbs and I would have happily agreed.
I didn’t react well to the anesthetic, and as soon as they pulled Tom out I was using the little strength I had left to battle the growing nausea, and when they tried to hand me the baby
I was frightened I’d throw up all over him. So instead Dan took him, and I closed my eyes as they finally gave me Valium, enabling me to stop shaking and drift off to sleep.
When I came to I was in the recovery room, and Dan was slumped in the one chair in the corner.
“Hi.” He scraped the chair over to the bed and took my hand, kissing me softly on the forehead and smiling into my eyes.
“Hi, yourself,” I croaked. “Where’s the baby?”
“He’s fine,” he said. “He’s in the nursery. They cleaned him up and dressed him.”
“Is he beautiful?” I said.
“He’s amazing,” Dan said, as tears welled up in both our eyes. “He’s just amazing.”
“Can you believe it?”
Dan shook his head. “I can’t. I can’t believe we made anything that perfect.”
“Can I see him?” I asked. Dan rang for the nurse and within five minutes I had Tom in my arms, and spilled fresh hot tears of joy all over his new John Lewis Babygro, which, though sized for newborns, looked like it was three times too big.
“Who do you think he looks like?” I whispered, barely moving, after Tom had stopped wriggling and squeaking and had fallen asleep in my arms.
“I think he has your hands. Look. Look at his long fingers,” and we both leaned down and looked and I kissed each one gently.
“My parents think he looks like me,” Dan said, as he kissed Tom on the top of his head. “Apparently I had loads of hair when I was born too. But even if he does look like me now, I’m sure that will change. Apparently biologically all babies look exactly like their fathers when they’re born so we don’t reject them. As if!” And he laughed.
My heart started to beat rather too hard.
“Your parents think he looks like you? How do they know? They’ve seen him?”
There was a deathly pause as Dan looked at the floor. “Yes,” he said uncertainly, and I knew he was looking for a way out, a way to end this conversation now, a way of not telling me something that I didn’t want to hear.