The Birth of Love

by Joanna Kavenna

  Breathe and breathe, and now the pain peaked and began to ebb away.

  *

  ‘No, my brain has already been wiped. I’ve forgotten pregnancy already,’ Stephanie was saying.

  ‘It’s nerve-racking for Brigid, because she’s so overdue,’ said Brigid’s mother.

  ‘Not nerve-racking because of that,’ said Brigid, grimly. ‘Anyway, I’m not necessarily overdue.’

  ‘You can always get the little swine induced anyway,’ said Stephanie in her matter-of-fact way. ‘I went for an induction. But then I had my gross Caesarean, so don’t do anything I did.’

  ‘A friend of mine’s daughter had a very successful induction the other week,’ said Brigid’s mother, looking irritated. ‘It was over in a few hours, and she hardly needed any pain relief.’

  ‘Lucky her,’ said Stephanie, wrinkling her nose. ‘There’s always one, isn’t there?’

  ‘More than one,’ said Brigid’s mother.

  ‘How’s Jack adapting to fatherhood?’ said Brigid, with Calumn tugging at her trousers. ‘Hello sweetie,’ she added. ‘How are you? How are you sweetie? Do you want a drink?’

  ‘Neaaarrr,’ said Calumn. He was restless and she knew he really wanted to go outside. But she stroked his hair, tried to calm him.

  ‘He’s very proud. Keeps emailing photographs of Aurora to everyone. Very doting. Not so keen on the sleepless nights of course – who is? But you know, he’s pretty smitten. Rocks her to sleep, puts her in the bath; the man even sings to her. And he rushes home from work and cooks dinner – can you believe it, he actually cooks dinner every night?’

  ‘Well that’s very nice of him,’ said Brigid’s mother. ‘Lots of men wouldn’t do that.’

  ‘I think he was so amazed by labour. He tried to get down and dirty, help me to push, that sort of stuff. But often he stood there watching, as if he just couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Not wanting to stress you out, Brigid,’ said Stephanie, flexing her toes and laughing. The baby stirred again, briefly opened its eyes, then settled back to sleep.

  ‘Mum, do you want to take Calumn for a walk?’ Brigid said, thinking how much she wanted to talk to Stephanie on her own. ‘You could take an umbrella? Or maybe he’d like to hear a story?’ She wanted to confide in her friend, tell her how weary she was feeling, how she thought she was in labour, how there was a weight upon her, crushing her so she could hardly breathe and then she felt as if her mother had come to observe her, to spectate at her annihilation, she wanted to say all these things and listen to Stephanie laughing them off. ‘Can’t be that bad! Just let her make Calumn’s lunch and ignore her!’ She wanted Stephanie to be outrageous, ‘Oh mothers, I never see my mother. Callous witch that I am!’ She wished she could just ask her mother to leave them for a while. Come back in an hour, she wanted to say. Or in a day. Come back later, much later.

  *

  ‘Oh no,’ said her mother. ‘I think he’s fine here, with his mummy. Aren’t you, Calumn?’ Calumn nodded back, and so Brigid’s mother settled in, watching Brigid and Stephanie as if they were enacting a bad play, which she had bought her ticket for and might as well see to the end. And Brigid was too polite and didn’t insist. Useless, she thought to herself. You are useless.

  ‘How’s Patrick?’ asked Stephanie.

  ‘Oh, fine. Busy at work. Wants to change his job.’

  ‘It’s a good job, he’s very lucky,’ said her mother.

  ‘Of course, Mum,’ said Brigid. ‘We’re all very lucky. But he still feels like a change.’

  ‘I always thought Patrick’s life was rather glamorous,’ said her mother. ‘Always forging contacts, making deals or whatever it is he does.’

  ‘I think that’s fine for a few years, and then it palls a bit,’ said Brigid.

  ‘It’s a perfectly good job,’ said her mother.

  Now Brigid looked down and saw that Calumn was curled at her feet, playing half-heartedly with a stuffed toy. He looked listless and she felt a surge of love and pity for him. Poor Calumn, conjured into existence only to be ignored, that was how she felt when she saw him at her feet, uncertain and somehow sad. ‘Calumn, sweetie, how are you?’ she said. ‘Do you want to play a game?’ It was still raining outside, or she would have suggested they all went into the garden. ‘Do you want to play with tins?’ He lifted his head and smiled at her a little. Always he forgave her. He smiled and stood up, bashed her knee in an affectionate way. ‘Let me,’ said her mother, and took some tins from the cupboard. Now, at least, she went to work immediately. A pile of tins appeared on the floor. Calumn sat down by it. Even though he had done this a thousand times, perhaps even more, he applied himself to the business of knocking down and reassembling the tins.

  ‘Good boy,’ said Brigid, kissing him on the top of his head. ‘What a very good little boy you are.’ She imagined him feeling ambivalence, but she was sure no such emotion had ever troubled her as a child. She had felt joy then sadness, bold and certain states, fleeting in their effects. She didn’t feel diffident, or troubled by something she couldn’t quite express, or any of these confusing relative states of the adult brain. In childhood she regarded her mother with awe and dependent love, with desperate need. ‘You were always crying for me, all day, all night,’ her mother later told her. ‘You were such a furious little baby, always fuming about something or other.’ Brigid had accepted this for years, had told her friends what a difficult baby she was, how her mother had perhaps never entirely forgiven her. She joked about it, though she felt it, too, as a rebuke, something she could never atone for. Having a child had made her reassess the story, or aspects of it now resonated differently. After a few months, she began to think that babies raged not because they were inherently furious, or inherently anything at all; they cried because they wanted to tell you something, and when you didn’t hear them, didn’t respond or comprehend, they simply cried more loudly. She wondered if her mother really meant something else, if really she was saying that she had been overwhelmed. That she had felt her baby was displeased with her, because she was so uncertain of herself. ‘In the end I gave up,’ her mother said. ‘I couldn’t stop your shrieking, so at night I put you in a cot at the end of a corridor, and shut the door. At least then I could sleep.’ This had once shocked Brigid, but now she thought there might be something else her mother wanted to tell her – something about losing your grip on things, becoming detached from events you could no longer control. Calumn had never slept through a night, and this had made her more tired than she had ever been before. Yet she understood that his needs were simple; he only wanted her, or Patrick. He was lonely in the darkness. She had always loathed sleeping alone, and if Patrick went away she found it hard to sleep. So how could she blame her son for being lonely at night? For the first year, he slept in a cot by the side of the bed. If he cried she simply lifted him out and took him into bed with her. She stroked his hair and kissed his soft face. Even when she could barely open her eyes, when she moved as if drugged, she felt compelled to kiss him, to hold him as he fell asleep again. She wasn’t sure she could have done things differently, and anyway it was too late. Now she had become so huge, they had moved him into his own room. He still cried in the night, but now it was Patrick who consoled him. If it had still been her – if, like her mother, she had never asked her husband to help, or he had never offered – what would she have done?

  *

  Whatever she thought, however her thoughts swirled and would not settle, her mother was here. She was here and she was trying to help. This was worth noting, thought Brigid. Perhaps she had always worried that her mother didn’t love her much. She had certainly been an unpredictable woman. But now, here was the evidence. She loved Brigid and she loved her grandson, Calumn. She was brimming over with love, some of it revealed clumsily, in these forays and in her determination to advise her daughter, but it was love all the same … Now Calumn was grumbling, so she handed him a carrot, said, ‘Would you like this, Calumn?’

  ‘Gu
b,’ he said, as he took it.

  ‘A carrot! How lovely,’ said her mother. ‘A delicious carrot!’

  ‘Awott,’ said Calumn.

  ‘Very good,’ said Brigid and her mother, together.

  *

  ‘I suppose I’d better go in a minute,’ Stephanie was saying, though she had only just arrived. ‘I suppose I’d better go before Aurora wakes and we have to embark on the terrible business of breastfeeding once more. You don’t want to witness it, I’m afraid. At the moment I have about forty-five minutes from one breastfeed to another. Blissful breast-free minutes, and then it’s back to work again. Basically I might as well just put her on my breast and lie in bed all day. It would probably be less hassle.’

  ‘It’ll get better,’ said Brigid. ‘It’ll get much much easier.’

  Stephanie smiled as if she didn’t believe her. ‘That’s what they say. They say that about everything, really, don’t they? The first six weeks are hell, they say. Well, that’s certainly true. The breastfeeding is hell at first but it gets better. The first five years are hell but they get better. The whole thing is hell but it gets better. Well, I sure hope it does.’ She laughed again, her big round laugh, though it sounded hollow this time.

  ‘Are you enjoying it a bit?’ said Brigid. She looked at her more carefully. Stephanie seemed so indestructible, you assumed she would always be OK. But looking more closely, well perhaps after all she looked chastened, as if she hadn’t been prepared for this. It was hard to be certain. Her eyes were puffy, but that was just fatigue. She was holding herself carefully, as if she was very delicate, but that was the Caesarean and all her post-natal pain. Then she was bleeding, of course, and she had her heavy breasts, and her nipples all cracked and sore and she was only slowly understanding what had happened to her. The body understood but somehow the brain took a while to catch up.

  ‘I love her very much,’ said Stephanie, looking down at her baby, smiling at the sleeping little form. ‘I do love her. I just wish these weeks would rush on by. They seem to go so slowly. I wish we could all wake up in a few months’ time, with everything established and running more smoothly.’

  ‘The ironic thing is, later you’ll feel really nostalgic about these early days, when she was so small and completely dependent on you, and all she wanted was to be with you,’ said Brigid. ‘You really will feel nostalgic when she gets more and more autonomous.’

  ‘I find that hard to believe,’ said Stephanie. ‘I don’t want her to depend on me for everything. I’d quite like her to depend on someone else.’ Now she was smiling but Brigid knew she was completely serious. She had been serious throughout, but she had been dressing it up, pretending it was all a joke. ‘I just wonder when things get sane again. But perhaps they never do get back to sanity.’

  ‘No, they don’t,’ said Brigid’s mother, firmly, from the floor, where she was showing Calumn how to balance a colander on top of a pile of tins. ‘They never do.’

  ‘Oh, that’s not true,’ said Brigid. ‘They get back to a different form of sanity. In some ways it’s a richer sort of sanity. I’m not saying it’s simple. It’s not at all. But the beginning is by far the hardest part. Aside from the bodily stuff, you’re struggling to process what has happened to you. You’re in a sort of existential crisis, as well as the rest. But it gets better and better, until you decide things are clearly running along too smoothly and you had better cast everything into chaos again by having another one …’

  ‘Brigid has had a wonderfully easy baby,’ said her mother to Stephanie.

  ‘I don’t know if I have or not,’ said Brigid. ‘I’ve always thought that people must enjoy it in the end, mustn’t they? On balance they must think it’s all worth it? Or people wouldn’t have more kids, two, three, four kids? They wouldn’t keep producing children, if there wasn’t something about it they enjoyed.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s just that they lose any sense that they once did other things,’ said Stephanie. She looked uncertainly at her baby, still sleeping, eyes tightly shut, pink mouth open. The baby looked serene, even confident, and yet Stephanie looked uncertain nonetheless, as if the sight even of its serenity was troubling to her.

  ‘I just worried all the time,’ said Brigid’s mother. ‘All the hours of the day I was worrying.’

  ‘Well, you didn’t need to,’ said Brigid.

  ‘Perhaps I did. Perhaps if I hadn’t worried then you wouldn’t be here now,’ said her mother, defiantly. ‘Colander, Calumn, it’s a colander. We put salads in it and pasta. To dry them off. CO-LAN-DER.’

  ‘Oblambar,’ said Calumn.

  ‘Very good darling,’ said Brigid.

  ‘I don’t worry about Aurora,’ said Stephanie. ‘I feel somehow she’ll be OK.’

  ‘Oblambar coblandar oblandar.’

  ‘Well of course she will be,’ said Brigid’s mother. ‘She’s a sweet little thing.’

  ‘She’s gorgeous,’ said Brigid, quickly, because her mother sounded so tepid.

  *

  Always she was trying to force her mother back, or counteract her perceived effects. And Brigid thought how much she wanted to love her mother simply and virtuously, because she was afraid otherwise her children would grow up feeling varieties of ambivalence towards her. They would learn from her poor example, experience the same confusion of emotions as she did. And perhaps this was her mother’s fear too, that despite all her work she had only received this imperfect love from her daughter. Perhaps this was why she came round and couldn’t quite leave, couldn’t stop coming round and staying too long, because she was still trying to earn something better.

  ‘Would you like another cup of tea?’ she said to Stephanie.

  ‘Oh no, I really have to go. I really do have to feed Aurora. Thanks anyway,’ said Stephanie, struggling to get up. Calumn turned and watched her, a tin in his hand. Then he stood on tiptoe to look at the baby again, still sleeping in the pram.

  ‘Well, thanks for dropping by,’ said Brigid.

  ‘Nice to see you, Mrs Morgan.’

  ‘You too dear,’ said her mother.

  ‘Bye bye Calumn boy,’ said Stephanie, bending towards him, ruffling his hair. Calumn looked up, didn’t smile, and then went back to his tins. Under-stimulated, thought Brigid, and Stephanie thought how little she understood babies, how she couldn’t understand her own and certainly not Brigid’s. For a moment Stephanie felt appalled and longed to beg for help, but then she was kissing Brigid, saying, ‘Best of luck darling,’ and pushing the pram back along the hall.

  ‘Send greetings to Patrick,’ Stephanie said, as she waved goodbye on the step.

  *

  Brigid turned back towards the kitchen and now she felt the pain so harshly that she almost cried out. Involuntarily, she stiffened. Her mother was doing something in the kitchen and couldn’t see her. Calumn was there, picking through the vegetables. Lacking any sense of what was to come, or perhaps he was somehow attuned to her, sensitive to her shifting moods. She wasn’t sure. At that moment the only thing she could be certain about was this pain. A very rising pain, shrill at its heights, really making her nerves scream and then just when she thought the note would go on forever, this jangling shrillness, it began to diminish, slowly it faded, and then there was silence.

  *

  In the silence of the hall Brigid knew – there was no longer any doubt – that she was in labour. The battle had begun and now her body would rip itself in two.

  *

  She heard the radio in the background; her mother must have switched it on again. The pips of the hour. It was one o’clock. Through London, ordinary people were eating lunch, oblivious to the trials that awaited her. Then there were women, countless women she didn’t know, experiencing something similar, the earliest beginnings or the climactic agony or the final relief. Throughout London, and that consoled her a little even as she dreaded the hours to come. Her body was trying to douse her fear, dilute it with consoling hormones. Yet she felt it all the same. And sh
e heard the newsreader saying, ‘And today’ – today the prime minister travels to Washington. Some sportsmen have won glory on the pitch. Some wars are raging and an earthquake has taken thousands of lives. In his office, Patrick Hayes checks his watch, and now he is taking his jacket and setting off for his important lunch – and now she heard her mother calling, ‘Brigid darling, do let me make us both another cup of tea.’

  The Hermit

  For years he had failed and failed again; he had been disappointed a hundred times and then he had the book in his hand. They told him this was the one; Sally told him. So Michael Stone put on an unfamiliar suit, and in the sweating interior of his small flat his hands trembled as he pulled a tie around his neck. He was nervous and his sense of vindication – even triumph! – had ebbed away. His nerves were bad and threatened to spoil it all, but he drew his tie into a knot, tried to smooth his lapels. He took his hat and settled it upon his head. The night before, he had sewn up a tear in his shirt. He had even clipped his beard. Yet when he glanced in the mirror he saw a grey-faced unkempt man, ravaged by anxiety and something else he couldn’t quite understand. An incongruous pink tie slung around his neck. He saw it all, in the glass before him, then he wiped his hands on his trousers, and turned away.

  *

  He had been waiting a long time – it was terrible to contemplate – but really he had been waiting all his life for this day.

  *

  In the upper dining room of an expensive London club, a gathering of literary men and women. Four of them, and Sally. They pulled out a chair for him. ‘How nice to meet you,’ they said, their hands outstretched. Sally said their names and he nodded. Yet his nerves made everything twist and shift around him. It was as if a chasm had opened up; he was stranded on the edge, and before him was deep empty space. They were on the other side, far beyond him. They sent words across, they smiled towards him. ‘How nice to meet you, come and join us! You only have to jump!’ He was stranded on the other side, though he had longed for years to be rescued. He had written his books; again and again he hoped that one of them would find an audience. It was a ritual he performed, a devout observance. He finished something, something of which he was proud, then laboured in the photocopying shop, bound it all proudly, addressed envelopes and waited. Urgently, later in despair. He lifted his head, they shot him into his hole again. It had been like that for years. His universe was predictable, the rules seemed firm and fast – he tried, then he failed. Again he lifted his head – but this time they had seized him; Sally had drawn him upwards, into the light. And he should have been glad, but everything had moved so quickly, his consoling realities had been shattered, and this chasm had opened up before him.