Living With It

by Lizzie Enfield

  Then my attention swings back to the television. ‘The number of reported measles cases in the area is now reaching dangerous levels, health officials are warning,’ says the newsreader. ‘And parents whose children have not been vaccinated are urged to do so as soon as possible.’

  A reporter is now doing a piece to camera from a small village in Wales. He’s standing outside a building which he says is the local primary school.

  ‘The headmaster here has asked parents to provide evidence that their children have been immunised before admitting them to school this week in a move aimed at preventing the spread of the disease,’ he says.

  The film cuts to the headmaster. ‘This is a small community. I know many of these children well. Some of them have been seriously ill. In some states in America children must be vaccinated against certain diseases before they enter school. I think it’s sensible to insist on the same here, given the numbers of very young children we are now seeing falling seriously ill.’

  I pick up my phone and begin tapping furiously into it.

  Are you watching the news before the match? Have you seen the report on this measles outbreak in Wales? Did you enjoy the party today? Did anyone tell you that Iris is deaf? Oh, and btw it’s your fault. How are you? Everyone well I hope? Do you think Man United will score?

  I look at the message and my finger hovers over the Send key.

  But I delete it.

  If I don’t hear from them, I’ve got a meeting with a solicitor in two days.

  I still haven’t mentioned this to Maggie and I’m not going to, not until afterwards, but I do feel guilty when I go up to bed, after the match, and she’s still awake.

  ‘I thought you’d be asleep by now,’ I say, as I climb in beside her.

  ‘I was worried about you,’ she says. ‘You seem a bit distracted. I know you would have liked to go to the party.’

  ‘It’s not that,’ I tell her.

  ‘Do you want to talk?’ she asks.

  ‘No,’ I say, but I feel a huge rush of tenderness towards her for noticing and for asking.

  ‘Do you want anything else?’ she asks, and I realise that she is not wearing the T-shirt she usually wears to bed; and as I pull her towards me and feel her skin next to mine, although I am tired, although we are both tired, I want to forget everything, even if it’s only temporarily. I want to hold on to those few moments when everything is right with the world.

  Isobel, Sunday morning

  When I wake up I can hear Vincent singing on his way to the bathroom and this morning I wish he wouldn’t. I wish he’d tiptoe and close the door quietly behind him. His relentless singing usually makes me smile, but today it just reinforces the awful mess that’s beginning to unfold.

  I stayed awake until the early hours, the hours the Spanish call the madrugada, a word that captures the sort of menacing wretchedness you feel when you are unable to sleep and is so much better than our word, ‘dawn’.

  Hearing Vincent sing makes the nauseous feeling rise up inside me again. It’s the way your body reacts to feeling bad about something. Guilt and fear both seem to affect the stomach directly. It had only stopped when I finally fell asleep.

  Of course Vinnie doesn’t know what’s going through my mind. It’s just another normal day, as far as he’s concerned.

  ‘And she’s climbing a stairway to heaven!’ His musical taste is wide-ranging but his lyrics are lacking in accuracy.

  ‘Buying.’ Harvey likes to get things right. ‘It’s buying a stairway to heaven.’

  We’ve woken on more than one occasion to the sound of this particular argument.

  ‘No, it’s climbing!’ Vinnie will insist, but he doesn’t really care.

  ‘Buying.’

  ‘Climbing,’

  ‘Buying.’

  ‘Buying doesn’t make sense. You can’t buy a stairway that would reach all the way to heaven.’

  ‘You can’t climb one either, because it’s a metaphor, nitbrain.’

  Why do children have to argue all the time?

  I remember saying this out loud once when the boys were working themselves up over nothing in the street and one of our neighbours was trying to ask me about planned changes to parking. It wasn’t a question. I only said it to try to indicate that I couldn’t really give her my full attention because there was a fracas over a toy car going on and if I didn’t intervene soon it was going to develop into full-scale war.

  But this woman said to me, ‘Often it’s because their emotional needs aren’t being met.’

  I was furious. They were arguing about a toy car, for heaven’s sake. What right had she to say that?

  ‘Boys, let’s go inside,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t let her get to you, Bel,’ Eric said later, when I told him about it. ‘Don’t let the boys get to you, either. Let’s have a drink.’

  Eric was just back from work, still basking in the post-laboural glow of a day in the office, a day in which he achieved something more satisfying than trying to stop two small boys hitting each other.

  He didn’t get it.

  What if she was right and the boys did fight so much because their emotional needs weren’t being met. Whose fault was that?

  Mine, was the obvious answer. I was the one at home with them, trying to do my best but somehow failing them; failing to make them get along, failing to get Harvey to eat vegetables, falling to help Gabriella with her maths homework… failing to do well at the only thing that I actually did now.

  I wanted to be a good parent. That was what I set my mind to. I wanted the natural birth, the breastfeeding and the sugar-free, weapon-free upbringing. And I wanted to do it well, because that was all I was doing.

  In the fug of this morning, Eric has forgotten my latest and most serious failing. He rolls over in bed, as he usually does, spooning me in his embrace, slipping his hand under the top I wear in bed and cupping my right breast. On working days this is simply a moment of comfort before the alarm forces him up, into the shower and on his way to London. At weekends it’s often a precursor to sex. I feel him begin to harden against me.

  Will it help, I wonder? Will the silent, frosty ‘I need to get my head round it’ treatment of the night before, after Gabby had gone to bed, give way to something more conciliatory and forgiving, supportive even?

  ‘What time is it?’ His eyes move swiftly from me to the radio alarm clock beside our bed, as if he can’t bear to look at me, and I feel him go limp as he rolls away.

  ‘What’s up?’ I ask.

  He doesn’t reply but sits up in bed, rubbing his eyes.

  ‘Eric, we need to discuss this properly,’ I say, raising myself up beside him. ‘I don’t know what to do. I feel I should do something but I don’t know what.’

  ‘Not now, Bel,’ Eric says irritably. ‘I’ve only just woken up.’

  ‘Do you want a coffee?’ I ask.

  ‘No,’ Eric says and he swings his legs over the side of the bed and reaches for his dressing gown. ‘I think I’ll go for a run.’

  We can hear Vinnie now, still singing, accompanied by the rush of water as he goes to the toilet. It’s all so urgent with him first thing. Wake, hit the floor, crash out of bedroom and into bathroom, pee and head downstairs, all the while singing away at the top of his voice, as if the whole house is one giant shower.

  But this morning I am tired and frustrated, and Eric’s coolness is forcing me to keep going over the sequence of events. What if I’d done this, or this, or not done this? It was a pointless conversation I’d been having with myself the past eighteen hours, because the damage is done. I need to talk about what to do now.

  Maybe when he gets back from running Eric will be calmer and more clear-headed.

  I wish, as I wish on an almost daily basis, that Mum were still alive. And Dad too – he would have had practical advice, but Mum would have helped just by being here. I wish she’d been around to meet Eric and I wish she’d been here when the children were born. It’s differe
nt, mothering when your own mother is gone. It’s more than a subtle difference. It’s huge.

  I see friends traipsing off to the park, toddlers and grandparents in tow, sometimes looking a little stressed, as if however long their parents have been visiting is beginning to take its toll. And I think to myself, ‘You don’t realise how lucky you are. You have no idea how difficult it is being presented with this enormous challenge and having no one to refer to.’

  Even Maggie, who was forty-five when Iris was born, still has her own mother, Ruth. I met her when we first went to visit the new baby, a sprightly eighty-something who had control of the kitchen, making coffee and preparing lunch so Maggie didn’t have to do anything. But, more than that, she was just there, reassuring Maggie that she was doing everything right. Maybe that’s why Maggie has always appeared so relaxed with the baby in a way that I never was with any of mine.

  If Mum were here now, I know she’d give me some sort of reassurance that what I did was not such a terrible thing – the reassurance Eric can’t give me.

  If she’d been here when the children were born, maybe I would have felt less anxious about them.

  ‘She’s absolutely fine. You’re doing a great job.’ I can almost hear her saying it. But I never did. She died long before she had the chance to meet her grandchildren.

  Eric is in the bathroom now and I go downstairs to make coffee. Gabriella is already in the kitchen. It’s early for her to be up on Sunday. Harvey must still be in bed.

  ‘Hello.’ I try to sound cheerful. ‘You’re up early.’

  ‘I couldn’t sleep,’ she says, sitting at the table, a cup of coffee already on the go.

  ‘You should have stayed in bed,’ I say. ‘Had a bit of a lie-in.’

  ‘It didn’t feel right just to be lying around doing nothing,’ she says, accusatory.

  ‘Oh,’ is the best I can think of.

  ‘Yes, “oh”,’ she mimics.

  ‘Do you have anything planned today?’

  ‘I might go and see Sam later.’

  ‘Right.’

  I put the kettle on and try to think. Gabriella has been spending a lot of time with Sam, since they’ve been going out together. It’s only been a few months but they seem close. He comes to our house, they go into town together and at weekends she often spends evenings there. Sam’s the youngest in his family so regularly has the house to himself. Cue gatherings. Not parties exactly – they are a surprisingly sensible group of young people, Gabriella and her friends. So I try not to worry too much about what they get up to. And I’m not sure that she and Sam are getting up to anything much yet.

  ‘I don’t want to be a grandmother,’ I said to her, in the early days.

  ‘Mum. I’m not like that,’ she said, sternly. ‘And neither is Sam.’

  I left it at that. I didn’t say, ‘But all boys are like that,’ which was what I thought. But I felt I would know, somehow, if something changed, if their relationship moved up a gear.

  Turns out I was worrying about the wrong thing. What if she gets pregnant? should have been What if she gets measles?

  I never thought about that until the horse had bolted.

  ‘Are you going into town with him?’ I ask her now.

  ‘Maybe. I don’t know. We haven’t really got any plans. I just wanted to talk to him.’

  ‘Right,’ I say as I busy myself with coffee and a cafetiere.

  ‘Are you going to mention to Sam about Iris being deaf.’

  ‘Yes. Of course.’ Her tone is challenging.

  ‘Listen, Gabs – ’ I begin.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Maybe it’s not a good idea to tell Sam, not just yet. Maybe we should talk about it first, you and I?’

  ‘What is there to talk about?’ she replies, standing up, ready to leave the room if I try to go down this route.

  ‘I just don’t want you to think that any of this is your fault,’ I say.

  ‘No. It’s yours.’ I’ve never heard her sound so forthright and blunt. Gabs has always been polite and well-mannered, even to us. ‘But I’m still involved, aren’t I?’ she continues. ‘And Sam is too.’

  That’s what I’m worried about – what she might say to Sam, how he might feel. He had measles first, so the chain of events involves him too. I don’t know his parents. If I did, I might call them, before she went over there.

  ‘I just think maybe you need a bit more time to think about it all,’ I say. ‘I think we all do. It was a shock, hearing about Iris. For you and for me and Dad too. A terrible shock. I think we need a bit of time to let it all sink in.’

  It was a shock when I found out I was pregnant with Gabriella too. It happened too quickly, too soon, and it took me by surprise, even though I’d come off the Pill, thinking that at some point in the not too distant future we might start trying.

  Of course Eric was delighted, when I told him after a day at work when I’d been feeling really sick and had bought myself a test kit on the way home.

  ‘That’s wonderful,’ he said, eyes all shiny with happiness. ‘We’re going to have a baby!’

  It wasn’t at all what I’d imagined that moment would be like, though. And I had imagined it, often. In my mental scenario, Eric’s words were the same. ‘We’re going to have a baby,’ he would say, and come over and hold me, and we’d stand there for a bit, enshrined in our happy moment. Schmaltz, I know, but it would have been better that way than the way it actually turned out. Because the words were right, but the way I reacted felt all wrong.

  Eric didn’t understand this at all. How could he? I didn’t understand myself really.

  I think it was partly the shock. But it was also the huge change that was about to come over me. I didn’t feel ready for it. I didn’t know anything about being a mother, and I didn’t have a mother to ask.

  ‘You must be so pleased,’ people kept saying to me, kindly, in their congratulations, and I’d smile back and say that I was and try to look pleased.

  But I felt like crying, most of the time.

  Dad was delighted when I told him.

  ‘If it’s a girl, we’re thinking of calling her Gabriella, after Mum.’ I could see his eyes growing moist, although he was from the generation who never cry.

  I wished I could be happier myself. But I was filled with anxiety throughout the pregnancy, unable to enjoy it because I was too worried about all the unknowns that came with it.

  It’s a total wonder to me how Gabby entered the world so calm and smiley. Given the way I was when I was pregnant with her, I’d have expected her to be a total infant nervous wreck, not quite so serene and self-contained.

  But she’s agitated now.

  ‘So what are you going to do?’ she says, as I set my coffee down on the table and she prepares to leave the room.

  ‘I don’t know, Gabs. I need to talk to Dad about it.’

  On cue Eric comes down the stairs and goes straight out, without coming into the kitchen first. He slams the door behind him as he sets off on his run.

  ‘He’s angry with me at the moment.’ I say to Gabby.

  I don’t know if this is a wise admission.

  ‘He’s not the only one,’ she snaps.

  ‘I know, and I’m sorry you feel that way, and I’m sorry you feel caught up in it. But none of this is your fault, Gabs.’

  ‘I was the one who was ill. I was the one who made Iris ill. It might not be my fault I was ill but I still passed it on.’

  She turns and marches out of the room and up the stairs, still uncharacteristically stroppy.

  ‘What’s that coming up the stairs, is it a monster?’ I hear Vincent singing from the landing.

  ‘Out the way,’ Gabriella says.

  ‘No, it’s a Gabster,’ Vincent sings, and he carries on singing his own mutated version of the song by The Automatic as he comes down the stairs.

  ‘Vinnie. That’s enough,’ I say as he comes into the kitchen.

  ‘Why?’ he asks, blissfully unaware but se
nsitive to something being wrong. ‘Is everyone a bit green today?’

  Ben, Monday morning

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’

  Maggie is not angry. She’s miffed. This is her way. She never really gets angry, just upset and a bit hurt which, ironically, makes me angry. ‘Same thing,’ I’ve taunted her, on occasion, but she always maintains it’s not.

  It frustrates me because sometimes I need to have a full-blown, let-it-all-out angry session, and Maggie never responds in a way that makes that possible. Rather she retreats into her own thoughts. ‘I didn’t want to upset you,’ I say, which is partly the truth. The other part is that I didn’t want her to try to talk me out of it, which I know she is going to do now.

  There’s been a whole thirty-six hours in which I could have told her about my encounter with Hedda, in which I could have told her I have a meeting after school today, in which I could have told her I am thinking about suing Isobel and Eric.

  I have thought of pretty much little else since I came back from my walk on Saturday afternoon. But I haven’t shared my thoughts with my partner. So she could be angry if she wanted to. But she’s gone for quietly miffed, which is having the effect of making me cross. And, if I let it show, she’ll have the moral high ground.

  ‘I wasn’t going to say anything until I’d had the meeting.’ I try to make myself sound considerate. ‘I didn’t want you to have to worry about it unless anything came of it.’

  ‘You should have told me. I don’t like the idea of it. It seems all…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t know. Unhelpful? Wrong? I don’t get it. I spent the whole day yesterday trying to get my head round the various options for Iris, and unbeknown to me you spent your whole day thinking about how to get back at Isobel.’ Maggie says this with defiance, daring me to contradict her view of my motives.

  ‘That’s not fair.’ I rise to the challenge but Maggie turns away, busies herself with the banana which will form the basis of our daughter’s breakfast, refuses to give me the satisfaction or something.

  She had a bad night. Iris was fretful. She had to get up and go to her several times, and ended up sleeping in the spare bed in the room with her cot. She does this so that I can sleep through the night. ‘You have to work all day,’ she always says. ‘It’s more important that you sleep. And anyway, in a funny way, I rather like it when she wakes.’