Ella’s face was now purple with rage. Her feet and fists flailed and pounded, protesting at the affront of the brief delay between sleep and food. Andrea – it was finally apparent which of the two women this was – deftly released several buttons and clasps concealed in her clothing, and tenderly latched Ella on to her breast. Andrea gazed at her daughter as she fed, occasionally giving her cheek tiny, adoring strokes with the back of one finger.
Although they were sitting next to Helen on a bench, Andrea and Ella seemed to be on a faraway planet of mutual adoration. The only sign they gave of any awareness of the world around them was when Andrea laid a muslin square over her breast and the baby’s head to stop people staring. Or rather, not so much to stop people staring, as specifically to stop her, Helen, staring. Only now did Helen realise she had been shamelessly gawping at this entire procedure since it began.
She forced herself to look away, and tried to think of what she could say to open a conversation. She decided to wait until the feed was over. She had to pick her moment carefully.
It wasn’t long before Ella was propped up on Andrea’s knee, Andrea gently winding her with strokes and pats on her minuscule back. In this position, Ella was looking straight at Helen, who took this as her moment.
‘Hello!’ she said to Ella, for some reason an octave higher than her usual speaking voice. ‘Hello! You’re a beauty, aren’t you? Aren’t you? Eh?’
Ella burped, loudly and with gusto.
‘Oop!’ said Andrea. ‘There we go.’
‘She’s beautiful,’ said Helen.
‘Thank you.’
‘How old is she?’
‘Three months.’
‘Three? I thought it was two.’
‘Sorry?’
‘I mean . . . I just mean I thought she looked a bit younger than that. But I don’t know anything about it. I just thought she looks so tiny and adorable, she must be a bit younger than three months.’
‘She’s quite big, actually. For her age.’
‘It doesn’t show. I mean, she’s lovely.’
‘Thanks.’
Andrea looked away, as if trying to end the conversation there.
‘What’s her name?’
‘Ella.’
‘Ella! How lovely! After Ella Fitzgerald?’
‘No. We just liked the name.’
‘Right. Well, that’s the best reason, isn’t it? The only reason, in fact.’
‘Mmm. Well, must be off.’
Andrea stood and put Ella back in the pram. Helen had to think fast. Her big opportunity was slipping away.
‘Actually, I don’t know why I asked her name, because I already knew.’
‘Oh,’ said Andrea, utterly without interest. She was now picking up her book from the bench and placing it under the pram. She kicked the brake off and began to walk away.
‘I’m Paul’s mother,’ Helen blurted.
Andrea stopped walking. ‘Sorry?’
‘I’m Paul’s mother. Ella’s grandmother. I came to meet her.’
‘What do you mean? How did you find us?’
‘I went to your flat.’
‘But how did you find me here? Were you following me?’
‘No. Not really. I just went to your door, and I lost confidence and couldn’t ring the bell because I was too worried that you’d turn me away, then while I was thinking about what to do you came out of the flat. So I just watched where you went, and when you came here I thought it might be an opportunity to say something. To meet you.’
‘But you’ve been sitting there for ages.’
‘I didn’t know how to start.’
‘Just watching us.’
‘I didn’t know what to say. I’m sorry. I don’t want to seem like a stalker, it’s just a funny situation. There’s no easy way of doing it.’
‘I suppose not.’
‘Do you mind if I have a look at her?’
Andrea stared at Helen, deep in thought. ‘OK,’ she said, eventually, putting the brake on and taking one small step back.
Helen leaned in. ‘Hiya!’ she said. ‘Hiya! Aren’t you gorgeous? Eh? Aren’t you? Aren’t you a little chicken? Eh? A wee chicky-chicken. Chicky-chicky-chicken. Eh? Aren’t you? I’ve got something for you. Wait there.’
Helen delved into her John Lewis bags, and after a long rummage emerged with a rattle. She roughtly yanked off the price tag and leaned over the pram. ‘What’s this? Eh? What is it? Can you hear it? Can you? It’s a rattle. Yes. Rittle rattle rittle rattle. Isn’t that good? Look. This is white. That’s yellow. White. Yellow. Rittle rattle rittle rattle.’
Helen had no idea how much time had passed when she turned her attention back to Andrea, who was eyeballing her with what looked like a mixture of suspicion and contempt.
‘I’m really sorry to spring this on you,’ said Helen. ‘But I didn’t know what else to do.’
‘You phoned this morning, didn’t you?’
‘Paul did, yes. But he was a bit vague about the response. I had to come and find out for myself.’
‘He spoke to Rebecca.’
‘Yes, I think so. And he said her response wasn’t very positive, but I wasn’t going to give up. I couldn’t just give up. This is my granddaughter. I’m her grandmother. And I can’t pretend I’m not because someone I’ve never met at the other end of a phone line tells my son I’m not needed.’
‘What is it you want?’
‘I don’t want anything. I’m not asking you for anything. I’m just saying what I am, which is her grandmother. And I’d like to be a good grandmother instead of a bad one, if you’ll let me.’
‘That’s very nice of you, but she’s got grandmothers.’
‘I know she has. And I’m one of them.’
‘That’s not the arrangement.’
‘This isn’t about arrangements. This is biology. It’s a fact.’
Andrea sat back down on the bench, with a sigh. ‘I thought you’d come,’ she said, eventually. ‘We talked about it before the birth and everyone thought we could set things up exactly how we wanted them, to a plan we could make up from scratch, but now I’ve had Ella, now I know what it feels like, I . . . well, I know that when she has a baby, if she has a baby, nothing will keep me away. Nothing. War, flood, earthquake. I’ll be there.’
Helen was suddenly at a loss for what to say. Relief that she had been understood washed through her body, eradicating all other thoughts and feelings. The beginnings of a sob started to tingle at the end of her nose. She turned and rummaged frantically through her handbag for a tissue. Andrea, it seemed, did not intend to crush her hopes. This baby, in some way or other, would be part of her life. She was, after all, a grandmother.
‘I brought you some presents,’ she said, when her mind finally cleared. One by one, with trembling hands, she picked out the clothes and toys from her John Lewis bag, realising as she did so that half the clothes were in newborn size, and were already too small. ‘I’ll take those back,’ she said. ‘And those. And those. Sorry. Wasn’t thinking straight. She was such a new idea to me – I mean, I only discovered she existed yesterday – that in my head she was newborn. I knew she wasn’t, but I just got overwhelmed when I saw all the baby clothes, and I think I went kind of doolally. I might have been a bit emotional. I’m sorry. I’ll change them for something else.’
‘It’s OK. You don’t have to.’
‘I will. I will. I’d like to. It was stupid.’
Helen twigged, from Andrea’s lukewarm response to the presents, that something else about them was wrong, too. Then she realised that Ella’s clothes, hat, pram and blanket were in a range of colours, all without the slightest hint of pink.
‘I’ll get different colours next time,’ she said. ‘Something more masculine. I mean, less girly. Just not pink. I . . . I didn’t know what you’d like. But now I’ve seen her, I think maybe I can guess a little better.’
‘Don’t worry about it.’
‘Can I hold her?’
>
Andrea didn’t answer. She simply continued examining the clothes and toys as if she hadn’t heard.
‘Please.’
Andrea looked Helen up and down, as if inspecting her for flaws.
‘Rebecca would kill me,’ she said.
‘She doesn’t have to know. We can worry about that another time.’
‘I can’t really say no, can I?’
‘I hope not.’
‘I’ll lift her out and pass her to you. You have to support her head.’
‘I know.’
‘In the crook of your elbow, like this.’
‘I know.’
‘And I have to get back soon. I’m sorry, but I said I’d be home by now.’
‘That’s fine. Just a quick cuddle.’
Then, suddenly, there Ella was, a miracle of life, writhing and nuzzling in her arms, as Paul once had, and for the first time they looked into one another’s eyes.
Helen had once read that a woman’s heart becomes physically bigger during pregnancy, to pump round the extra blood needed for the foetus. She felt, at this moment, as if the same thing was happening to her now. This soft, dense, utterly there little person in her arms was made of her blood. They were the same. Apart from Paul, every other human being on the planet was just another person. But Paul was also part of her, and now so was Ella. From this moment on, there were two living creatures who would not exist without her, two lives made from her life, two people she would die to save.
This was beyond love. This compared to mere love in the way amputation compared to cutting your fingernails. This was as far as you could go, as much as you could feel, as irreversible as birth.
Gillian and Daniel
you cannot know the egg in one step
Quite why he got in touch with Alison, the mother of the child who went to playgroup with the son of the nephew of the sister of the woman whose dog bit Daniel when he was a child, he didn’t know. It may have been to appease his mother; it may have been because he found himself agreeing with some of the criticisms she’d made of him. She was right that he had become a hermit, and he knew he wouldn’t be happy staying like that indefinitely, even if at any given moment the hermit option seemed preferable to a sociable alternative. He had to think more about the future, less about the past. He had to force himself out.
So out he went, to Sardi’s, a restaurant low-key enough for the evening to feel informal, but with good enough food for there to be some pleasure to fall back on should the conversation fail.
The conversation, in the end, didn’t so much fail as blow up. At first, Alison seemed pleasant enough. He was surprised to find, when she first walked into the restaurant, that she was actually attractive, so much so that he assumed it couldn’t be her. The idea that his mother might be capable of putting him in touch with a woman he’d find alluring was simply not plausible. She was wearing a sweeping, asymmetric coat, and a glossy heap of thick black hair sat high and slightly chaotically on top of her head, clipped into place in a manner that could have taken ten seconds or an hour. The coat came off to reveal a swoopingly low-cut dress and a genuine somewhere-to-hide-a-letter cleavage.
Daniel was not, historically, a tit man, but this was quite a sight. He couldn’t look at breasts like these without thinking about sex, and he couldn’t sit opposite this woman without looking at her breasts. He instantly regretted his choice of restaurant. Perhaps he should have chosen somewhere more classy, more datey, more cleavagey. Perhaps the meal would not constitute their whole evening together, after all, but might be a prelude to further adventures.
The first five seconds of the date were superb. From there on, it went downhill. The descent began in earnest when Daniel asked about Alison’s divorce.
‘You don’t want to know,’ she said, with, as Daniel would discover too late, some accuracy. He made the mistake of inviting her to explain, if she felt like it, what she had been through.
She explained. Thoroughly.
‘You cannot imagine,’ she said, ‘you simply cannot imagine what it is like to be married to a man who denies you. Who negates you. Do you know what I mean?’
This was the only chance he was given to bail out, but he failed to take it. He didn’t react fast enough. He didn’t say anything.
‘We married too young. That was the problem. It was an accidental pregnancy. It should have been our cue to split up, but I couldn’t go through with another abortion, I just couldn’t. You don’t want to know this. I’m sorry. I’ll skip the gory details. But I just couldn’t. And maybe I could have had it on my own and things might have been OK, but we were young and stupid, and I was afraid of being alone, and I hated my job, so I thought maybe it was good timing and it would be a chance to spend some time at home and think about what to do next, and he said that he couldn’t let me down or his unborn child, so he would stand by me and marry me and be a proper father to the baby, which sounds nice enough if you put it like that, but I now know that’s how he works. That’s him all over. He’s an alpha male. He sees himself as dominant, and his mission was to crush me. The child was just an excuse. I mean, when you quote exactly what he said, it never sounds like he’s saying anything bad, but that’s what makes him so evil. It’s like everything on the surface is kind and decent and understanding, but what he’s doing all along is undermining you and taking away your choices and ruining your ability to think for yourself and live your own life. Do you understand? Because now there I was, alone at home all day with a baby, which, I don’t know if you know this . . . do you? Maybe you don’t. It’s wonderful but it’s awful and no one’s ever allowed to say it, but it’s also the most boring thing ever, and then he’d come back from work, having had his exciting day, and be all full of how great it was to be a father, and he never knew what it was really like, and he’d just smother us completely. Do you understand? It was just, "Do you want this? Do you want that?" I can’t explain it. Do you know what I’m saying? Everything he did just undermined me. He had a way of being mean that was just so insidious, because he’d be mean by being kind, and the more I resented it, the more I could never explain it, and the worse it got, the more my status as an intelligent, independent woman just got completely eroded by his need to provide and nurture and smother and he never understood that his behaviour was killing me. But the thing was, I didn’t even understand it myself at the time, because I was internalising all my negative feelings for him into self-hatred, which is apparently very common. I was falling out of love with him, but all I thought was happening was that I was falling out of love with myself. And the most evil thing you can ever do to anyone is kill their self-love. It’s taken me a lot of therapy to realise this. Do you get what I mean?’
‘I’m not sure I do.’
‘Look – think of yourself as an egg.’
‘An egg?’
‘Yes.’
‘How do I do that?’
‘Just think of yourself as an egg.’
‘I’m finding that a bit hard. I don’t really –’
‘WILL YOU LET ME FINISH?’
‘Sorry.’
‘Think of yourself as an egg.’
‘I’m trying.’
‘This egg is you. It’s your self-love. It’s your self-worth.’
‘Is it?’
‘Yes. Can you picture it?’
‘I’m not sure. I can see an egg, if I try.’
‘Will you stop interrupting? Now Good Love presses on the ends of the egg. And what happens when you press on the ends of an egg?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Exactly. Good Love challenges the egg, it puts pressure on the egg, but it allows the egg to stay whole. To remain itself. Under the forces of Good Love, the egg retains its essential eggness. And what does it take for Good Love to turn into Bad Love?’
‘Er . . . I’m not sure.’
‘The egg twists. That’s it. The pressure is on the sides, and what happens?’
‘Omelette.’
‘Exac
tly. And the key question is, who twisted the egg? That’s all you need to know.’
‘And?’
‘And what?’
‘Who did twist the egg?’
‘HIM! Weren’t you listening?’
‘I was, I just –’
‘And what happens when an egg is broken?’ she continued.
‘I . . . I don’t know.’
‘Can you put it back together?’
‘Er . . . I wouldn’t think so, no.’
‘That’s the wrong question.’
‘What is? I didn’t ask a question.’
‘No, I did. Can you put it back together? No. That’s what people try to do. Put it back together. But they’re wasting their time, aren’t they?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘So what’s the alternative?’
‘What alternative? To what?’
‘This is what it all comes down to. This is what I’m trying to tell you.’ She leaned over the table, revealing an extra inch or so of cleavage, which Daniel was rapidly deciding was an overrated crevice, bearing as it did far too close a resemblance to bum. She began to whisper, enunciating with precise, actorly care. ‘You don’t fix the egg. You let it go. And when you have truly, in your heart, bid it farewell, you will find that it is not gone. You will find a new egg.’
Alison gave Daniel a one-day-you’ll-understand smile and leant back in her chair.
Daniel didn’t know what to say. He also had no idea what to do with his face, the muscles of which suddenly seemed determined to behave as if he had a lemon on his tongue. He decided to resort to silent eating, which Alison would be allowed to interpret however she chose, either as rudeness or as plain gastronomic intensity.
It did not occur to him that she would see this as philosophical reflection. She, too, ate in silence for a while, before saying, ‘You know what I’m seeing?’
Her obscure choice of tense threw him. ‘I’m not sure.’
‘In you.’
‘In me?’ he said. ‘You’re seeing something in me?’
‘A broken egg.’
Daniel laugh-coughed. ‘Oh. OK.’
‘I’m right. Aren’t I?’
Otherhood Page 22