The Baby Group

by Caroline Corcoran

  I look down at the floor.

  I wouldn’t say we’d ever been close.

  But there are nations and continents and time zones between us now and I am not sure we’ll ever stumble back over to sit in the same country, let alone the same sofa.

  We stay only long enough to settle Poppy in and then Ed and I and our two tiny bags are dispatched to our country house twenty miles away amidst promises of happy hour mojitos and stomps in the forest.

  I don’t connect to the Wi-Fi. My marriage has my undivided attention. If I want this relationship to work, I need to put effort in.

  Ed and I sit at a table outside. I kick my sandals off and tilt my face up to the sun. I exhale, and it feels like I’ve been holding my breath for a month.

  ‘What can I get you?’ says a slightly sweaty waiter.

  It’s one of those moments that so rarely combine to mean you’re outside in an idyllic setting when it’s actually hot in England and it seems a sign. It’s helping us be fun us. The grass is cut neatly like a lawn at Wimbledon, the flowers are bright and we are the only ones here. It’s like we’ve got our own mansion with our own sprawling gardens.

  I smile, lady of the manor.

  I order a Prosecco cocktail, and I am getting into this now.

  Maybe we’ll be okay. Maybe we can spend tonight clawing it back.

  I smile, take my sunglasses out of my bag.

  But as I look up, eyes shaded now, I see a flicker of something cross Ed’s face.

  ‘Just a beer for me,’ he says, snippier than anyone in this image should be.

  Am I being paranoid or is Ed letting me know that I shouldn’t be so flash as to order a cocktail when my sexually deviant past has resulted in me leaving my job and us being short of money?

  I try to let it go but all I can think of is the thing I am trying to let go and I know it will come out in the end so I might as well speed on to the inevitable and get it out of the way. Eventually, it bursts out of my seams.

  ‘Should I not have ordered the cocktail?’ I ask. I’ve already downed half of it.

  Ed looks at my glass and laughs. ‘Bit late now.’

  I pause. ‘I’ll watch my spending,’ I say, chastised. ‘I know it’s my fault we’ve lost an income.’

  He rolls his eyes. ‘There’s no need to be a martyr, that’s not what I was saying,’ he says. ‘Jesus, we’re supposed to be getting away. Does everything have to come back to that?’

  But you did it, I think. You did it!

  We sit in silence for a minute before I change the subject.

  There is a certain type of misery you can only feel when you are in a setting so beautiful, and you can almost touch the joy you could or should feel there, if only you weren’t in a slump.

  I look around. Across from us there is a hammock between two trees.

  ‘Swing?’ I say, trying.

  ‘My allergies are playing up,’ he sniffs. ‘Being in the trees won’t help.’

  I’m embarrassed at how juxtaposed Ed and I are to the indulgent happiness of our setting. This garden needs honeymooners and dirty weekends and kissing in the hammock with one last G&T you’ll regret in the morning. It needs sunburnt shoulders and too many Aperol Spritzes and scallop starters and holding hands in the gazebo. It needs proposals and flings. Instead it has us. Wonky, unright us.

  Stroppy, I walk over to the hammock and swing alone, still nursing the first cocktail while desperate to order the indulgent second that I don’t deserve. This weekend would be better with my friends, I think, than my own husband. Cora would have ordered champagne, everyone would be piled into the hammock, I wouldn’t have a knot in my stomach like the one I have now. What does this say about my marriage?

  I feel petulant. Why come here if he was going to be like this? Across the lawn, Ed scrolls on his phone with his humble beer by his side. I slap on a smile and take a selfie for my Instagram. If I’m going to grow the numbers, I need content, whatever the mood. The equivalent of dragging yourself to work on a bad day.

  I see the waiter look between us at this picture and register its anomalies.

  Eventually Ed heads over (braving the trees) and mutters that the waiter has told him our room is ready, so I heave myself out of the hammock – no hand reaches out to help me – and we go to check in.

  The heavy wooden door slams behind us and we are alone again, face to face.

  Ed sits down on the bed, rumpling the bedspread as his own face does something similar and crumples.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, real Ed for a moment and I am caught off guard, realising that for all of his stoic appearance, he’s in pain too. I’m torn, like so often, between wanting to hug him and wanting to slap him.

  I remember when he proposed to me, in a similar setting to this one but in the Highlands. Frost not heatwave, hot toddies not Prosecco but the countryside was pretty; the hotel fancy.

  I came back from the toilet to find a piano playing and Ed on one knee in the middle of the restaurant looking so like something out of Gone With The Wind that I stood there and stared at him for a good five seconds before I remembered he needed a reply.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘I forgot to say that bit. But yes.’

  And we kissed more than was appropriate for a restaurant and then skipped dessert and moved the kissing to a more appropriate bedroom that looked similar to this one. Oak beams, sheets that felt brand new and this beautiful man with his big eyes standing in front of me, then, now.

  And now I make a split-second decision and I kiss him. It’s hard to say I want to kiss him because he’s irritated the hell out of me today but I want to want to kiss him and I think that’s enough. I want my marriage to work. I don’t want to cheat with Joseph. I want us to stick together. I want Poppy’s family to be in one place. But if I’m Sheryl Sandberg leaning in to the kiss, Ed is physically leaning out. His whole body is reacting on autopilot to pull away from me, even as his lips touch mine. His arms are flailing awkwardly out to the sides.

  I pull away and look at him and suddenly I get it.

  ‘Oh,’ I say, flat and lucid. ‘I’m repugnant to you.’

  When I made that video, I had never met Ed. I didn’t cheat on him but I may as well have. We are that couple. We want to get it back and we are making the effort but. But.

  ‘You’re not repugnant to me,’ says Ed, exasperated. ‘Do you have to be so dramatic? It’s not easy. All I can think of is you with them.’

  All he can picture when he thinks of me naked is me having sex with somebody else. All he can feel about my body is shame. I slept with somebody else – some other people – in a different lifetime but it might as well have been behind his back last week.

  My insides collapse. Because how do you come back from that?

  He lies back on the bed.

  I take a deep breath.

  ‘I realise it’s not easy,’ I say. ‘But it’s also not easy for me. In fact, having your whole life blown apart and your body splashed on the internet and your career taken away and your husband disappearing on you and not wanting to touch you is fucking hard.’

  I tell Ed to stay at the hotel alone because we have paid for it and we could do with the space and I drive home at 4 p.m., leaving Poppy at her grandparents’ house anyway and thinking that it’s a good job I didn’t get Joseph’s phone number. Tonight I would have used it.

  I go to sleep late, sad, wishing I could tell my mum friends what just happened; wishing they knew the whole story. With our marriage in such a mess now, I am aching to talk without omission to people who love me.

  19

  Scarlett

  6 June

  When Ed gets home the next morning, Poppy is still at his parents’. I couldn’t face explaining to them what had happened. Left the plans in place instead. We aren’t due to collect her until lunchtime.

  Ed stands in the doorway to the living room.

  I wipe away the flakes of black mascara that I know must be beneath my eyes. There were a
lot of tears last night, as I sat here alone, Ed at the hotel, working out if my marriage could be saved. If I even wanted to save it. I still don’t have the answer.

  Ed unframes himself and comes in. Plonks down on the sofa. I stay at the other end. A bit of space was good for us; a bit less space might be even better. Kiss me, Ed, I think. Touch my forehead. Put your arms around me. I am so tired. Make it simple again.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. He sounds exhausted. I suspect he had no sleep either.

  Then my husband slams the sofa in frustration.

  ‘I just … I need this video thing to be resolved. Then I can try to move on.’

  I nod. I. I.

  ‘It has to be one of them,’ he seethes. ‘One of them is lying, clearly.’

  I tilt my head back into the cushions. So tired. So tired.

  ‘I don’t know, Ed. They say they didn’t do it. I don’t know.’

  I look at him then, so far away, like we have never been the people in this same spot with their legs draped over each other sharing salt and vinegar crisps and arguing over who is going to put the kettle on.

  ‘But did you push them on it?’ he says, looking irritated. ‘They’re going to say it’s not them, aren’t they? That’s obvious.’

  I bristle at the implication of my stupidity.

  ‘Well not really,’ I say. ‘If they wanted to blackmail me why wouldn’t they say it’s them?’

  Ed stares at me.

  ‘Unless he has another motive,’ Ed says. ‘Stalking you, wants to sleep with you again, wants to break us up?’

  We both look away, talk of a break-up too close to the bone.

  ‘Or wants to ruin your life,’ says Ed. ‘Bitter?’

  I shrug. ‘Nothing gave that impression,’ I say. ‘They were both all right, not mean, not cruel.’

  We are silent then. Nowhere to go.

  ‘Well, last night was a waste of time then,’ Ed says, finally. ‘I missed George’s birthday drinks for nothing.’

  And there was me thinking I couldn’t confront any more.

  I’m not tired, suddenly. I’m enraged.

  ‘God forbid that you shouldn’t go to every single event that’s ever on, Ed,’ I say. ‘That a night away to try and save our marriage was a waste of your time. I have had to leave my job – which I love, incidentally – for good through all of this and you haven’t once asked how I feel about that.’

  He looks like he might interrupt me but I can’t let him. I need to get all of this out.

  ‘Instead, I’m supposed to snap straight into my natural role as a stay-at-home mum who sits around drinking coffee all day with people I barely know …’

  This time he manages it.

  ‘Barely know?’ scoffs Ed. ‘Oh come on. What about the ones you go boozing with at any opportunity?’

  We stare at each other. Who will break?

  I want to tell him how complicated it is. How much I need my NCT friends, how much I depend on them. How close we are in some specific ways; how much we are still working each other out in others. How I do barely know even them when it comes to their pasts, their depths, their non-mum selves, but then how still, in other zones, they are everything.

  ‘Did you not make any mistakes, Ed?’ I ask, quiet. ‘Not even when you were young?’

  He doesn’t answer. Perhaps because there is no time before I am off again.

  It’s been stored up.

  ‘I’m sorry about all of this, Ed,’ I say. ‘And I’m sorry that I’ve been getting too drunk sometimes lately.’

  ‘Sometimes …’ he mutters.

  ‘Yes, sometimes. Sometimes too often, sometimes too much, but sometimes. I’m here, I’m a good mum to Poppy, I love you and, sometimes, I balls up. But you know the video? That actually wasn’t my fault, Ed.’

  Ed doesn’t reply and we stand there in our hall where we have yanked muddy boots off each other’s legs after long walks and opened the door for hot pizza in our pyjamas and now we are here, with nothing left to say and nothing left to do.

  Our home, I think, and I realise that I am starting to hate it here now, in what was supposed to be, as we drove towards it behind the removal van that day, our countryside idyll.

  Ed goes to collect Poppy and we spend the rest of the day playing with her, ignoring each other.

  When she goes to bed, I can’t take any more.

  ‘I need some air,’ I tell him, as he stares at the TV. ‘I’m going for a walk.’

  Pushing my feet into trainers, I walk out into the night without my phone and I don’t stop for hours even though there is nowhere to go.

  I stare up an eerily quiet road with five or six dark houses and this does not feel, I realise, like where I live.

  I have no idea how I got here or, as I walk, here or here or here or here and by the time I walk through the door it is the blackest, harshest part of the night and Ed is in bed and this building doesn’t feel like home any more either. I am at the dead end; the end of the road, again.

  20

  Scarlett

  9 June

  The next day, Poppy, newly on her feet, stumbles into the corner of a table and shrieks so loudly that it makes the hairs on my arms stand up as I run towards her and my insides go into shock. Another thing that’s been a victim of Ed and me not communicating: a proper plan to childproof our house ready for the toddler years.

  I scream.

  Poppy screams.

  I’m distraught. How could we have neglected our girl like this?

  Emma happens to be at our house, staying for a cup of tea as she has come round to borrow a travel cot. Emma doesn’t scream. In fact she is disconcertingly calm.

  She takes Poppy from me and pushes her hair to one side, looking at her head closely.

  ‘Frozen peas?’ she asks and I run to the freezer. Wrap them in a tea towel.

  ‘Hold them on there,’ she says to me, with about sixty times the authority I’ve ever heard her demonstrate. ‘She’s going to be fine. But it is her head and it was a real whack so we do need to get her checked. We’re taking her to hospital.’

  I freeze, in a rare north of England twenty-five-degree heatwave that’s rolled on since Ed and I were at the hotel. Not hospital. Never hospital.

  ‘I’ll call Ed,’ I say. ‘You don’t need to take us. Pop’s car seat won’t fit in your car anyway. Don’t worry. Ed will be here. Ed will come home from work. Ed …’

  I take Poppy back from her; my baby is short of breath in panic and I know I can’t be helping. I try to breathe deeply myself.

  ‘Shhh, my love,’ I whisper. ‘It’s all okay.’

  Is it? I stare at her head, a giant lump coming up by her temple.

  ‘Ed works in Warrington, right?’ says Emma. ‘You don’t want to be sitting here worrying while you wait for him to get back. I can strap the car seat in to my car – it’s not a problem.’

  We walk outside together. She takes Poppy from me and puts her in the car seat.

  I’ve never seen her so decisive. Emma leading things, me following. It’s not the natural order.

  Emma sees me notice the difference and ducks her head. That’s more like it: more her usual body language.

  Then she looks up.

  ‘If it reassures you at all,’ she says as she straps Poppy in. ‘I work at the walk-in centre.’

  Is she serious? She’s a doctor? How could I not have known this?

  ‘Not a GP,’ she clarifies. ‘On reception.’

  I think then of messages she’s sent at strange times when I presumed she was up with Seth. How she can meet up often some weeks but never on others. When we talked about Ronnie and she said how great it was that she accommodated odd hours. Shifts, I guess, but no one’s ever asked or mentioned it, though Cora must know. Everyone’s just talked over Emma more loudly, or more urgently, or veered off to Cora’s affair or dairy allergies or that baby cinema that’s started that does the good snacks.

  Not our fault, I think, defensive – Em
ma should have spoken up more. That’s what I tell myself, anyway, when I think how awful it is that I’ve never asked.

  It’s pushed out of my head anyway as Emma is moving me towards the door and Poppy is screaming again, in pain. She sits in the back with Seth, me wedged in the middle of them so I can hold her hand.

  ‘It’s okay, Pops,’ I mutter, holding her pudgy fingers as she stares wide-eyed, not understanding the pain. ‘Emma’s coming now.’

  My heart races.

  Of all the saviours I thought we would have in life, this one, with her cheeky wines and her Slimming World points, was not it.

  I talk to Poppy all the way to the hospital while she cries, even though I am on the brink of a panic attack.

  Because my baby is hurt and I am going back to hospital.

  Poppy still screams.

  ‘It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.’

  I touch the lump on her head and feel my breath get shorter.

  In the hospital waiting room I shrink from the other people who want to make small talk and clutch Poppy to my chest as she whimpers.

  How can these people chat about their dogs and the weather and that ticket machine that isn’t working? How can they breathe? I bury my head in Poppy’s soft brown hair as she burrows into my lap, screaming abated now but not herself, sad.

  Ten minutes later we are in the triage room and I’m reminding myself that it’s not the same hospital, not the same hospital, not the one where I left her behind but it’s hard to remember it because of the smell, the sounds and because it’s another baby girl, vulnerable.

  ‘Looks worse than it is,’ says a nurse, as I struggle to breathe. ‘You’re right to come in but it’s just a bad bump. Scares you when they’re little, I know.’

  ‘So we can go?’ I ask.

  ‘Not quite so fast.’ The nurse laughs, as I am already picking my bag up. Emma is in the waiting room with Seth.

  I look up at him. What?

  ‘You still need to see a doctor,’ he says. ‘Just to get a proper check.’

  My heart is hammering.