by Liz Byrski
‘You must persevere, Mrs Linton,’ the nurse said disapprovingly. ‘Try again and I’ll be back shortly.’
Zoë stared down into her son’s eyes. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I’m so sorry.’
He blinked and stared up at her, and again she attempted to push her nipple into his mouth. This time his jaws locked on and he began to suck, and she leaned back against the pillow, gritting her teeth at the pain but relieved to have succeeded at last. No one had warned her that breastfeeding would be so painful; not just the soreness of her nipples but the intense waves of pain those first few sucks caused her. The antenatal classes made it seem easy; the best nourishment for the baby, convenient, hygienic and it would help her get her figure back. There was nothing about the pain or about the fact he might not want to suck. That morning, the woman in the next bed, who had just had her third baby, had told her that it could actually get even worse.
‘The nurses’ll tell you it gets easier,’ she’d said. ‘But it doesn’t, especially if your nipples crack. That’s real agony.’
Zoë closed her eyes and tears, always close to the surface, squeezed between her lids. She hadn’t seen or heard from Richard since he marched out of the delivery room; she hadn’t heard from anyone. The telephone trolley was in great demand as it served three wards, and on the few occasions she had been able to call home from it, the phone rang out. Once she called the Television Centre and asked for Richard but someone else answered his extension.
‘He’s taken a few days’ holiday,’ the man said. ‘His wife’s having a baby. Give me your name and I’ll leave a message on his desk.’
Zoë hung up.
She had never felt so entirely alone, or so utterly despised and disapproved of. It was bad enough knowing that the story of the white couple with the black baby had spread through the entire hospital, but she had become a sideshow. Several times a day, nurses or doctors from other wards would wander in, check her name on the chart, peer into the crib, smile awkwardly and disappear. With the exception of the woman in the next bed, the other patients in the ward had ignored her. When their visitors arrived, though, they would nod in her direction and whisper, and the visitors cast disapproving glances in her direction as they left. A couple of the ward nurses regularly demonstrated their disapproval by asking frequently and loudly, when her husband would be coming in. Sometimes they swapped the word ‘husband’ for ‘Daddy’.
‘No sign of your husband again today?’ one had asked this morning. ‘Got a lot on, I suppose. Expecting him this afternoon, are we?’
But no one had been to see her, or even left a message. Had Richard told anyone – Julia, his parents, their friends? Zoë was painfully aware of her own lack of friends. Sandy had taken a job with a publisher in Chicago and Jane was in Perth. Zoë’s life was built around Richard; he had always been more than enough for her.
Zoë moved the baby to her other side. He took it promptly this time, sending daggers of pain deep into her breast and making her gasp for breath. She watched in fascination as his mouth worked the nipple, sucking furiously, resting, and then sucking again. Love flooded through her in great waves. Back when she thought Richard had just gone outside to get over the shock and she had waited fearfully for his return, she hadn’t been able to take her eyes off the miracle of this tiny human being. Their eyes had met in a connection more profound and intimate than any she had ever known. He was so much like Harry; the broad forehead, the shape of his chin, something about his eyes. Looking into his face, tracing his full lips with her finger, stroking the whorls of dark hair, Zoë couldn’t think of him as anything other than the baby she had wanted and waited for.
His lids grew heavy as he finished feeding, and she lifted him to rest against her shoulder, gently rubbing his back until he delivered a sleepy burp. Holding him against her face, she sniffed his perfect baby smell, kissed him and laid him in his crib, resting her hand on his back.
What would she do if Richard left her? That morning, the registrar had arrived to register the birth and Zoë hadn’t known what to do. Should she name the baby as they had planned? Should she put Harry or Richard as the father?
‘We haven’t decided what to call him yet,’ she’d told the registrar, and the woman promised to come back in a couple of days, before she was discharged. A couple of days; what difference would that make? Richard was gone and she didn’t even know if she had a home.
A buzzer signalled the start of visiting time and the doors swished open. Zoë closed her eyes and feigned sleep as the visitors’ feet squeaked and thudded across the linoleum. There was the murmur of voices, shrieks of delight, cellophane rustling around bouquets, small children grizzling. The chairs around her bed were, she was sure, the only empty ones on the ward.
A hand touched her arm, and her eyes flew open.
‘Hi there, Zoë, remember us?’ Gloria asked. ‘The CR group from hell?’
Zoë dragged herself upright. Gloria grinned, kissed her own hand and pressed it to Zoë’s cheek.
Behind her, her long fair plait over one shoulder and clutching a package wrapped in yellow tissue, was Claire.
‘Yes, oh yes,’ Zoë said. ‘Of course I remember.’ Her stomach knotted. She had longed for someone to confide in but not these weird almost-strangers.
‘Don’t look so horrified, hon, we’re not really that bad. Look, we bought a present for the baby.’
‘Yellow,’ Claire said, putting the package on the bed, ‘because we didn’t know if you’d had a boy or a girl.’
Zoë took the package. ‘A boy. This is really nice of you . . .’ she began. The unexpected act of kindness unleashed a dam, and a huge sob shook her body and tears streamed down her face.
‘Hey there,’ Gloria said, sinking into a low chair and taking her hand. ‘We’ve come to celebrate. Is this day three?’ She looked up at Claire. ‘Day three is when most people get the blues, I think.’
‘How did you find me?’ Zoë sobbed.
‘Your neighbour,’ Claire said, perching on the end of the bed. ‘Mrs Driscoll. Richard gave us your address when he came to see us. So, the next day I called round but there was no one there. I met Mrs Driscoll on the stairs and she said you’d gone to hospital.’
‘And then, this morning, Richard was supposed to come interview us,’ Gloria continued. ‘But some other guy, Mark – no – Martin, turned up instead. He said Richard took some time off because of the baby but he didn’t seem to know much. So we rang two or three hospitals until we found you. Zoë, honey, what is the matter – you want us to go away?’
Zoë shook her head and clung to Gloria’s hand, thankful now for human contact that wasn’t disapproving.
‘Should we phone Richard for you?’ Claire asked. ‘Or shall I get a nurse?’
‘No. Stay; please, stay. I don’t know where Richard is. He walked out two days ago, after . . . well, after the baby was born.’
‘Walked out?’
‘From the delivery room. Look,’ she said, pointing across to the crib. ‘Look at him.’
‘A boy,’ Claire said, walking around to the other side of the bed. ‘Lucky you.’ She stopped suddenly, looking down at the sleeping baby. ‘Oh, oh, I see . . .’
‘Jeezus!’ Gloria let out a low whistle and pulled the curtains around the bed. ‘Now it makes sense. Did you know?’
‘No. It was only the one time . . . I was on the pill but I messed it up, missed some days.’
‘He’s a beautiful baby,’ Claire said. ‘His eyes are open. May I pick him up?’
‘He’s perfectly wonderful, isn’t he?’ Zoë asked feeling, through her tears, a joy and pride she had so far been unable to share. ‘He’s absolutely perfect. I love him so much.’
‘He sure is the sweetest thing,’ Gloria said, stroking his tiny hand. ‘What’s his name?’
‘We were going to call him Daniel.’
‘Daniel. Hello, Daniel; hello, beautiful boy.’
‘Richard just left when he saw him a
nd . . . I mean, I know it’s terrible and he must be devastated, but I’m so scared and I don’t know what to do.’
Gloria put a hand on Zoë’s arm. ‘We’re here now, we can help you. Do you want us to find the baby’s father?’
‘No. He got married at Christmas and moved to Glasgow. I can’t tell him, I just can’t.’
Gloria and Claire exchanged a look. ‘Well, it shouldn’t be hard to find Richard,’ Gloria said.
‘He’ll probably throw me out,’ Zoë said. ‘I wouldn’t blame him. But I’ll have nowhere to go.’ She flinched at a movement in the curtains, dreading the arrival of another disapproving nurse or doctor.
‘Where’s the gap in the curtain? How do I get in?’ someone said, and Zoë’s heart leapt with joy and relief at the sound of the familiar voice.
Julia’s face appeared between the curtains and she pushed them open, glancing around at the other women. ‘Ah!’ she said. ‘It seems you’ve already got plenty of visitors.’
SEVENTEEN
Paris – October 1969
It occurred to Julia, as she crossed the Pont Neuf to the Left Bank, that this was exactly the same place she had walked with Simon the night she had abandoned caution and gone back with him to his room. Today, the river was sparkling in the brilliant sunshine, gulls swooped and circled, and vedettes crammed with tourists cruised back and forth. On the deck of a luxurious launch, two women, designer clad in navy and white, and wearing huge sunglasses, relaxed in deckchairs. Smaller craft ducked and weaved around the launch like mosquitoes, and Julia could see through the windows of the bridge cabin three men in faux naval attire, sipping champagne as one steered. She remembered the boat she’d seen that night with Simon, the colourful lights, the glamorous women, the romantic music drifting up from the deck. It had symbolised everything she had wanted for herself, everything she had been brought up to expect: money, status, glamour and the leisure to enjoy it all. The disappointing thing was that now that she had it all, it didn’t seem such an attractive package.
Julia had never understood why Simon had chosen her to be his wife. She was unlike the women in the Branston circle of friends: the daughters of the aristocracy of the nouveau riche, glamorous, racy jet-setters; or the daughters of the real aristocracy, who bought their clothes at designers’ private showings, flitted from one ball to another, and went hunting or sailing at weekends. They came from a gilt-edged world very different from Julia’s tweedy, Home Counties snobbery. And she was acutely aware that she was not glamorous, and only appeared sophisticated alongside someone like Zoë, who had been so easily impressed by her familiarity with London and her semblance of sophistication. It had always seemed remarkably unfair that Richard was the good-looking one, while she had inherited her father’s height and her mother’s pale freckled skin, pear-shaped body and tendency to put on weight. What she saw, every time she looked in the mirror, was a pale woman, with fine, mousey hair, and a really big bum.
‘You look rather like a Cornish pasty,’ a school prefect had commented loudly and haughtily when Julia was twelve.
The name stuck, and for the rest of her schooldays she was known as ‘Pasty’ by her friends as well as her enemies. It had been a huge triumph for Julia that she had managed to get her wedding dress absolutely right. These days, although her clothes no longer closely resembled her mother’s, they were far from high fashion, which was for women of a very different shape. Julia was not fat but neither was she small and fine-boned like Zoë, and her hips were larger than designers decreed they should be in relation to her shoulders and bust. The calm authority she had affected in the fitting room of the John Lewis bridal department was a facade. Inwardly, she had been panicking that she was going to look old fashioned and dowdy. But she had gone to her wedding looking exactly as she had hoped to look and knowing that, for once in her life, she looked her absolute best. Simon, of course, always looked good. Tall, slim and with mesmerising blue eyes, he was always immaculately and expensively dressed, and oozed style and confidence. So, Julia wondered constantly, why me?
‘You’re nice and normal, old girl,’ he’d said once. ‘And jolly pretty too, of course. You make me feel safe, very comfortable. And you’re awfully good in bed.’
It wasn’t the answer Julia had hoped for but it was honest and believable, and therefore rather comforting. But in those first weeks in Paris and then back in London before the wedding, when she was soaking up the excitement of it all, Julia had never anticipated that within months she would be feeling entirely unsuited to the life she had chosen. Nor could she have expected that she would be nursing this restless anger, which simmered beneath the surface and which she had to struggle so hard to control.
Glancing at her watch, she crossed the street at the fountain and hurried on, up the Boulvard St Michel, past the sorbonne and into a narrow side street of shops, cafés and restaurants, very different from the sort of places she visited with Simon and his friends. She had grown to love Paris. It was just her life there that was out of sync; a sanitised and superficial one in which she felt like a dowdy bird kept in a luxurious cage by kindly owners.
‘It’s not Simon,’ she’d explained recently to Hilary, with whom she had developed a close friendship, ‘although he can be really irritating. Sometimes I think he’s never really grown up. It’s the whole hotel life thing; the entertaining, the being nice to people, making small talk and just being the wife of a Branston. I feel as though I’m acting all the time.’
‘You’ll find ways of coping,’ Hilary had said. ‘At heart I am definitely not a vicar’s wife, but I’ve learned to do it in my own way and have a life of my own as well.’
And it was in that other life, to which Hilary had introduced her a few months earlier, that Julia too was finding satisfaction.
Reaching the end of the street, she turned into a narrow doorway and made her way up the stairs, her enthusiasm rising as the babble of voices and the smoke of Gitanes floated out of a half-open door.
The Jeunes Femmes met in a couple of attic rooms above a noisy restaurant, surprisingly close to the rather more elegant street in which Julia had lived with the Le Bons. The rooms were sparsely furnished, and lit by skylights and a large window, from which glimpses of the Luxembourg Gardens appeared beyond the chaotic jumble of rooftops.
‘It was started by a group of Protestant women after the war,’ Hilary had explained. ‘It’s a place where women can talk about the things that concern them: marriage, birth control and so on. It’s rather like those consciousness raising groups that are starting in America, except that Jeunes Femmes have been doing it for a couple of decades. There are all sorts of dilemmas for women in a Catholic country if they aren’t Catholics, and often even if they are.’
At the time Julia had thought it sounded pretty dull and worthy, but she had asked Hilary for suggestions about what she could do with herself, and so she had gone along. Since then, she had never looked back.
Now, months later, as she pushed open the door, the room was buzzing with the conversation of women dressed, as usual, largely in black, deep crimson or bottle green. There were clouds of cigarette smoke, and much jangling of silver bangles and long strings of beads. There were black berets worn at rakish angles, un-coiffed hair dyed a vivid red, and a mix of accents and languages.
Julia headed for one of the pots of very strong coffee on a side table, poured some into a tiny cup, lit a cigarette and looked around to see who was there. No sign of Hilary yet but, from the other side of the room, Minette, her red hair wound into an untidy knot on top of her head, was beckoning to her. Just a few months ago, Minette had taken up a lectureship in literature at the Sorbonne, much to the dismay of her parents, a count and countess still trying to live in the style of pre-war aristocracy. They had put considerable effort into identifying a suitably aristocratic husband for her, only to have their plans dismissed with disdain. They would, Julia suspected, have been even more shocked had they met Minette’s lover, Therese; a fierce, fe
minist poet considerably older than Minette and said once to have had a fleeting affair with Simone de Beauvoir.
This was just part of what Julia loved about the Jeunes Femmes; this exotic mix of intelligent, often brilliant, women from varied backgrounds who cared passionately about what they were doing. Elbowing her way past an interior designer from Galleries Lafayette, several more students from the Sorbonne, a teacher from the English school, and a secretary from the US Embassy, she stopped to greet a couple of young mothers with whom she was working on a campaign for the liberalisation of abortion and contraception. Julia no longer just turned up at the fortnightly meetings, but volunteered her time in the adjacent office with such regularity that Simon was getting increasingly curious about what she was doing when he popped up from his office and found their apartment empty.
On her first visit, Julia had looked around the room and then back at Hilary in her neat turquoise suit and elegantly styled hair, and been confused by the contrast. It had seemed such a bizarre setting for the wife of an English clergyman, but since then, Julia had discovered so many other unlikely women there.
‘It’s not what you expected, is it?’ Hilary had asked her that first day.
‘Well . . . no, not really,’ she had hesitated. ‘Does Eric know you come here?’
‘Of course he does. It was Eric who told me about Jeunes Femmes in the first place,’ Hilary said. ‘There’s a political radical hiding behind that very conventional facade, you know. You’ll hear it if you listen carefully to some of his sermons.’
‘My father always said that the church has no place getting involved in politics,’ Julia said.
Hilary smiled. ‘A lot of people say that but I wonder if they really think about what they’re saying.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Religion is, or should be, about what we believe, what we value and how we live, so I can’t really see how it can be separated from politics. The two are inextricably bound together, for better and for worse.’