Sing me to Sleep

by Helen Moorhouse

  Relief washed over Jenny. She wanted to lie back down and cry a little more. To recover – no, to savour. She realised the doctor was waiting for her to leave, however, standing expectantly by the edge of the bed. Jenny duly swung her legs awkwardly over the side and slid herself off, at the same time trying to do the buttons up on her jeans while still holding the blue paper.

  “Em, thank you,” she said. It seemed inadequate after what she had just seen.

  The doctor helpfully took the tissue from her hand.

  “This is your first baby, is it?” he smiled.

  Jenny managed a weak smile in response as she fixed her clothing. The base of her stomach felt sticky and uncomfortable where she hadn’t managed to wipe off all the gel.

  “Look, don’t worry,” the doctor said, placing a hand on Jenny’s arm. “There’s a strong heartbeat so, like I say, so far so good. Now make an appointment at the desk outside to come back for a scan in six weeks or so and we’ll get an exact due date. And get yourself a coat and a hot cup of tea and take things easy. But not too easy – there’s nothing wrong, so there’s no need for you to do anything other than get on with your life normally. Read a baby book or two and find out what’s going on. And above all, stay calm, Mrs Mycroft. And get plenty of sleep. You’re going to need all your reserves. You’re going to have a baby.”

  Chapter 11

  1999

  Jenny

  And on the first of September that year you were born, I remember, as I sit in the rocking chair in your room and watch you. Beatrice Rose Mycroft. Bee. My Baby Bee. And as I held you in my arms that night, for the first time, I knew that I could never leave you. That you’re mine. That you’re me. A part of my very body. The sum of my soul. And I still can’t leave you, my precious little girl. I cannot go anywhere. I cannot miss a second of you. My God, but I didn’t think it possible for a heart to ache this much.

  When I watch you with your dad, when I see you play together, it’s just like I’m in the room with you, soon to be allowed to take part in the game. I watch you laugh with him, my precious little girl – you barely even think of me any more, barely remember that there was once a lady who adored you. That you called ‘mummy’.

  I watch you both, and for a second I feel – no, I’m sure –- that I will be able to reach out and grab you in my arms and pull you to me, to feel your skinny arms fold about my neck, to feel your hair against my cheek, to feel your head in the crook between my chin and my shoulder, where you belong. But I can’t. I will never be able to touch you, to hold you, to smell you, to kiss you ever again, for all eternity – at least not that you will know. You will never know me, my Baby Bee. I will never be able to show you this overwhelming love that engulfs me, that makes up my actual being. I am made of love, Bee. And it’s love for you.

  Look at you. Deep asleep. Lying on your back, your leg slung over the side of your bed, your mouth open, your breathing steady. How different from the nights when you thrashed about in your sleep screaming because I was not there, because your dad wasn’t good enough for you, because you wanted your mum. How could I have left you like that, Bee? I am tortured by the thought that it was my fault you went to that place of horrors. How I wanted to climb inside your head and throw those thoughts away, to smooth your little brow and wipe away those tears.

  I long for it to just be the night when you were born, your dad gone home to get some sleep and you and I left alone for the first time in the hospital bed. How I tried to drink you in as you slept, like you’re sleeping now. How I touched your tiny, perfect face over and over, traced the shape of your eyes, your nose, your ears with my fingertips. How I held you, how I breathed you as if I was trying to inhale you back into my body.

  But I left you. Suddenly and without so much as a goodbye. Ran out the door without a second look back. I can’t forgive myself for that, Bee. I left you once but I won’t do it again, I swear. Don’t worry. Mummy’s here. And I’ll take care of you now, my beautiful girl, my precious Baby Bee.

  Chapter 12

  October 1995

  Ed and Jenny

  Jenny couldn’t believe her eyes. She had seen Ed proud in the past – at Bee’s birth a month before, at the première of Grimlet Goes Wild, when he won his Toon Award – but she hadn’t thought that this moment would rank up there with those greats. He stood at the front door of 17 Pilton Gardens, hands on hips, chest puffed – struggling, she was sure, to conceal a broad smile as he watched the skip being gently lowered onto the road outside.

  “The day comes when every boy becomes a man,” she had whispered in his ear from where she stood behind him. “And this is yours . . .”

  Ed had batted at her gently without turning, his eyes firmly fixed on the rusting, yellow container emblazoned with the stencilled phone number of the supplier along its side.

  “‘My First Skip’ – not sure where you’re going to park for the next few weeks, however,” she remarked wryly, taking a step back before he made contact as he batted at her again.

  The skip clanged loudly on the pavement and Jenny pressed her lips tight against the laughter that longed to escape as Ed winced at the noise and inhaled sharply through his teeth.

  He shook his head and watched carefully, making sure that the final contact between waste bin and ground was smooth, before turning back to look at his wife. “Plenty of room for parking out there,” he grunted, indicating the road that ran outside the house, its trees ablaze with the golds and oranges of early autumn. He turned his attention back to the delivery driver as he climbed down from the cab of the truck and began to unhook the skip.

  Jenny snorted. “Not out there, there’s not!” she laughed. “You leave for work at the crack of dawn every day but, trust me, it’s like motorway services out there by half eight what with all the builders and painters and plumbers and delivery men and everyone else’s bloody skips! Most people on maternity leave are woken by their newborns – with me, it’s the Gentrification Squad every morning! This whole road is being flooded under a tidal wave of trendy!”

  It was Ed’s turn to laugh and he scrunched his face into a gurn. “Eeh bah gum,” he began, “in mah day, we din’t ’ave wallpaper. We licked a bit o’ th’Arrogate ’Erald and stuck it to t’wall wi’ spit . . .”

  Jenny gurned back. “Walls?”she shrieked. “You were lucky! We din’t ’ave walls. We lived in an ’ollowed-out toadstool, all seventy-seven of us – and in t’morning we’d ’ave to fight off giant slugs what would’ave our breakfast quick as look at us. And then we’d ’ave to walk eight thousand mile afore our shift down t’mine began . . .”

  “But you know we were ’appy in them days though we was poor,” finished Ed with a giggle, just in time to revert to his normal voice as the delivery man made his way up the short front path to the door to request his signature on a clipboard, throwing a puzzled glance at the tall redhead who stood further back in the hall, helpless with laughter.

  Ed waved him off with a smile before turning back to Jenny, grinning broadly as she composed herself. He reached out and wrapped his arm around her waist, pulling her closer to him as they both peered out the front door at the sun-dappled road outside. He pointed his free hand along to where Pilton Gardens curved slightly, at a house where another skip had residence on the pavement.

  “Claw-footed bath,” he stated flatly and Jenny dissolved into giggles again.

  Ed joined her. “Saw it going in yesterday morning as I was leaving for work,” he said, pointing then to another house further along the street. “New carpets Tuesday. Victorian Floors CompanyThursday. Who knows where that’ll end? And as for next door . . .”

  Jenny placed a finger on his lips, still giggling. “And now us,” she added, lowering her voice to imitate his. “Skip Saturday. What’s next? Solar panels on Sunday? Fishtank Heaven on Monday?”

  Ed responded by looking back out onto the road with a proud smile. “Can I help it if I found us a house in London’s hottest, coolest, hippest, fastes
t-growing suburb?” he said, squeezing her to his side.

  “And we’ve lived quite happily here for ages without a skip!” she replied. “You are sending us into hell, Mr Mycroft. Builders and dust and noise and disruption . . .”

  “And swatches,” Ed added mischievously. “And you like a good swatch, don’t you, Mrs Mycroft?” Jenny feigned indignation but it was true. She had – foolishly, she knew – insisted that the house renovations be postponed until after the baby’s birth, until things had settled down a bit, but now that Bee was here even Jenny had to admit that the time had most definitely come to make the improvements that Ed had longed for since the day they had first turned the key in the lock.

  The house was fine for the two of them, she knew – the rooms habitable, if old-fashioned. Ed’s plans were ambitious, too – another reason that she had insisted they hold back. He wanted new wooden floors throughout – in some cases the original floors of the house could be restored and where that wasn’t possible he wanted authentic replacements. There was practical work to be done – insulation, for starters. Even Jenny had to admit that the thought of heading into winter with a newborn in an uninsulated house was unappealing. There was also some roofing work and plenty of plumbing to be done.

  The small dining room behind the living room was to be converted into a study, the kitchen extended out into the long garden to open up into a glass-walled sunroom which would house the new dining area, the two bedrooms on the first floor modernised and equipped with small en suites and then the attic converted into a guest room. The thought of it all made Jenny slightly breathless – the mess, the weeks of work, the expense – despite the fact that Ed assured her that all was fine. She just wasn’t used to this sort of thing, she had to admit. When she had grown up, they had to make do and mend – put up with the wallpaper which had last been changed sometime in the late 1970s. Her dad was a practical man, not aesthetically minded in the least, and Jenny had always learned to treat money with extreme caution – to work hard, to spend sparingly, to save. She couldn’t conceive of the speed and extent of Ed’s renovation plan – she had never done up anything in her life – and it made her anxious to think that it would all be done in a single swoop – and the chunk that it would take out of their – his – savings.

  Deep down, however, she was buzzing with excitement at the thought of it all. A new home. A modern home – underfloor heating, Ed had said – a brand-new kitchen – a study, for heaven’s sake! And it was to be her job to decorate.

  Smiling, she released herself from the crook of Ed’s arm and took a step backwards to peer in through the living-room door, retracing her plans and ideas for the room in her mind while simultaneously being unable to envision it any other way than it was now, as it had been since they had moved in, with the floral wallpaper and bare floor where Ed had ripped up the hideously patterned carpet on their very first night there. She would keep it neutral, she had decided. Ignore the current vogue for bright and vibrant greens and yellows and terracottas. Instead, she would keep her base colours pale and bring it to life with cushions and curtains, keep it free of clutter and ornaments and Constable prints, such as the type favoured by Ed’s mother.

  Jenny’s mind turned to the garden out the back – a much bigger space than she had anticipated. She had plans for that too. And for the dining room where she envisioned family meals – dinner parties even, although she had never hosted such a thing in her life.

  Her thoughts were interrupted by a small cry and she made her way along the hall and down the three steps that took her to the kitchen, where Baby Bee lay in her Moses basket. Behind her, Jenny heard Ed finally close the front door and turn to follow her down.

  * * *

  It took months for the house to turn from building site to anything even beginning to resemble the cosy haven that it would become. But it happened. Soon the house fell silent from the constant hammering, the drilling, the bustle of builders. And soon Jenny was hard at work redecorating.

  By the spring of 1996, when Jenny’s maternity leave finished, she reluctantly prepared herself to go back to Movie Kingdom with the knowledge that she had done something really special. She had created a home.

  As expected, of course, Ed’s family had hated it. His sisters sniped about how dull it was.

  “It’s so boring, Ed,” sniffed Betty, looking around with a curled-up nose. “I mean no one has magnolia walls any more. And how could you like it so bare? It’s like a bloody prison cell. Couldn’t you brighten it up or something? Put a bit of colour here and there?”

  Diplomatically Ed ignored her suggestions, thinking of her ochre-orange kitchen walls and her surfaces cluttered with candle-holders, porcelain angels and baby photographs. Yet he snorted with laughter when Vicky joined in the commentary – the last place that she called home was a flat-share in Camden, which she simply used as a dosshouse while she lurched from party to party. It had been only a matter of time before she had slunk back to Eileen, disillusioned by independent living and the fact of having to pay rent. It was much easier, she had observed, if you lived a busy life like hers, to stay somewhere that was nice and clean – and where there was someone who liked doing your washing for you.

  Jenny tried to keep the invitations to Ed’s family as few and far between as possible, which she knew rankled with her mother-in-law as John Adams ate with Ed and Jenny every Sunday. It made her feel better to feed him at least once a week, she had explained to Ed. Made her feel less like she had deserted him. Ed always told her not to feel guilty – that she was a married woman with a child of her own, for heaven’s sake – but years of worry, of being his primary caregiver, were hard to cast aside. A roast chicken here or a joint of beef there didn’t make up for it, she knew, but the least she could do was make sure that her dad knew that she still loved him and that she wanted him around.

  Ed’s parents, on the other hand, were invited to join them only once every couple of months, more for them to see Bee than to enjoy Jenny’s housekeeping. “The Wendy House,” Eileen called 17 Pilton Gardens. Ed’s mother didn’t know that Jenny knew that. And that Jenny knew only too well that she still resented the taking away of her only son – her baby – to “play house”. Eileen resented every part of Jenny, most of all the fact that Ed, at the age of twenty-five, was successful and well off – and that it was Jenny who was the beneficiary of it.

  Because of this, she also hated that Jenny worked, doing what Eileen liked to call a “good job”. But she would also have hated if Jenny quit the “good job”, because then she would have been simply “sponging off” Ed. Jenny knew she couldn’t win with her mother-in-law. “Landed on your feet, girl,” Jenny was told after Bee was born. As if their beloved baby girl was the final part of some greater plan to hook a wealthy husband, as if she had been created purely for the purpose of ensuring that he couldn’t escape. It was exhausting, Jenny had to admit, to constantly endure the resentment and suspicion of her in-laws. Always to be damned if she did, and damned if she didn’t.

  Ed, too, was well aware of it, even though he was better equipped, after years of practice, to ignore it.

  “You could really show her, you know,” he mused one Sunday morning, the remains of a cooked breakfast pushed to one side and a Sunday supplement spread out over the kitchen table.

  “Hmm?” asked Jenny, bending down to wipe rusk from Bee’s face.

  “My mum,” said Ed, sitting back and looking at his wife and daughter with a smile, at his constant source of pride. “If she annoys you so much you could really rub her nose in it if you went off and did something you were actually really good at.”

  Jenny straightened and regarded her husband with furrowed eyebrows. “Like what?” she asked, genuinely puzzled.

  “I dunno. Something that you really loved – if you changed your career, I mean.”

  Jenny frowned. She hated this argument. It wasn’t the first time they’d had it.

  “But I do like my job,” she protested, and t
urned away, back to the counter-top where she was making Yorkshire Puddings for her dad who was due in an hour.

  Ed sighed heavily. “Come on, Jen!” he snapped. “We have this conversation a thousand times a year. When are you going to do what it is you actually want to do for the rest of your life? You can’t stay in your bloody student job forever.”

  Jenny felt herself tense, felt her heels literally digging into her shoes. “I’m doing absolutely fine where I am, Ed. The money’s good –”

  “We don’t need the money, Jen!” he protested. “The Grimlet sequel is out next month and –”

  He stopped speaking suddenly as Jenny slammed a wooden spoon down on the granite counter-top and turned to glare at him.

  “All right,Ed!” she said through gritted teeth. “I get it. You’re a massive, bloody, roaring success. You’re doing what you’ve dreamed of since you were a boy and I’m some sort of loser who doesn’t meet your expectations.”

  Jenny turned back to the mixing bowl while Ed stared at her, open-mouthed. Silence reigned in the kitchen for a few moments, eventually broken by Jenny, her voice trembling. Ed felt his stomach sink. He’d gone and pushed this conversation too far again. He hated it when she cried.

  “I see you when I meet your colleagues, or when we have to go to those work dinner things and meet your contacts. ‘And what do you do, Jenny?’ they ask, and you butt in and say that I work in the movie industry too, and then you brush over what it is I do and get immediately back to what it is you do. I’m an embarrassment to you, Ed. I don’t know why you bloody married me.”

  Jenny’s voice grew loud and Bee, playing on the floor, looked up at her mother, sensing that something was wrong. Her chin began to wobble and, although she seemed to try to suppress it, she couldn’t, and a long wail came from her mouth, her eyes filling instantly with tears. Jenny pressed a hand to her own forehead and ignored her.