by Clare Boyd
After about ten minutes of quiet, we could hear Miranda Slater moving about the house, stamping across rooms, opening and closing doors, cupboards and drawers.
The spare room was too far away for us to hear any exchange with my mother or Noah.
When she returned downstairs I half expected her to hold up a dirty pair of knickers and place them in a plastic bag for evidence of my slovenly nature.
I had a terrible urge to laugh. I bit hard on the side of my mouth and tried to compose my features into a suitable expression for the gravity of the situation.
‘Everything all right?’
Somewhere inside me, I could probably locate the fear that had been rampaging through my mind and body all through the dark sleep-deprived night, but now it was nowhere to be found.
‘Yes, thank you,’ Miranda Slater replied, sweetening her smile.
Peter closed his newspaper.
‘I’m just going to have a quick peek,’ she said, opening our fridge. I imagined her judging me for all the expensive supermarket ready-mades stacked up in there.
After making some notes, Miranda Slater settled down opposite Peter and I at the kitchen table.
For the first time, I took in her appearance. She had a large face, with skin mottled like hamburger meat and an oddly incongruous sleek grey ponytail, a mane beautifully brushed. She wrote on paper locked into in a pink file that was covered in what looked like a child’s sparkly stickers. Her pen was topped with a hat of homemade ribbons and beads that bobbed about as she bent over to mark her pages and her ponytail dangled onto her notes. She breathed with her mouth open, her two front teeth jutting out.
I waited for her to tell me what Rosie had said, to inform us that they would be taking the new information to DC Miles, and that they would be closing the case.
When she looked up at us finally, her insincere, ever so slightly bored smile fixed itself onto her face and she continued with the questions she had begun before taking Rosie upstairs.
‘You were saying, Gemma, that you go out on day trips as a family?’
I was incredulous. Where was the information about Rosie’s changed story? Peter and I shared glances. Perhaps she had to complete the forms to tidy up the bureaucracy before they discussed dropping the case?
I answered diligently, trying to hide my frustration.
‘Yes, on holidays we do loads of day trips – like last year when we went to the Matisse chapel in Venice, and when we went to Barcelona for a couple of days, the children loved the Gaudi buildings.’
Miranda Slater cocked her head to the side, as though she was expecting so much more of me. I didn’t know if we should simply ask her what Rosie had said to her, or if that might sound pushy and intrusive.
‘And at home? At the weekends? What kind of stuff do you do?’
‘Um,’ I began to feel a little panicky, like seeing an exam paper question I couldn’t answer, and I looked to the fridge schedule for help. ‘The children do Saturday clubs until about two, and then we have swim club at the leisure centre. And on Sundays, Noah has rugby, and I go for my run in the morning while Peter takes them for a bike ride and then we have lunch at one at the White Horse.’
‘The best roast beef in the country!’ Peter bellowed. At which Miranda Slater almost grimaced.
‘And then we’re home in the afternoon when the kids can watch a film.’
‘That sounds very organised.’
‘Oh, and they have birthday parties to go to sometimes.’
‘And we do see friends,’ Peter added.
The only people who dragged us kicking and screaming out of our weekend routine, were Jim and Vics. When I thought of Vics and how she laughed at me for my love of order, the urge to giggle came over me again, at the absurdity of my rules. I wrung my hands. ‘Yes.’
‘And Gemma, do you and Rosie have any days out, just the two of you?’
‘We went out for the day just the other week.’
‘That sounds nice.’ She smiled. ‘Do you do that often?’
‘It’s an area I could definitely work on,’ I replied, trawling my brain for an example of a frivolous, happy time with Rosie. I drew a blank.
‘Okay...’ she said, marking into her page. ‘So, Gemma, tell me a bit about Rosie.’
‘Well, I know she’s a handful, and she’s said all these awful things to the police, which we just can’t understand, but she’s got this incredible spirit and determination and she’s so funny and great fun to be with,’ I burbled. I felt passionate about Rosie, charged with motherly pride.
‘When you say she is a “handful”, tell me more about that.’
‘We do have a few issues with her tantrums, but I really feel we are working on them and they’re not happening as often these days, are they Peter?’
He shook his head, ‘No, not really,’ he replied, with an infuriating lack of conviction.
‘How often would you say they happen?’
Peter and I answered together. Peter said, ‘Two or three times a week?’ and I answered, ‘Once or twice a month.’
Miranda Slater looked up from her file and raised her eyebrows. She stretched her lips into a smile for us, ‘Which is it?’
‘Well, it is roughly once, and sometimes twice, a week, depending on how tired she gets at school.’
‘Yes,’ Peter agreed.
‘I just don’t want you to think that things are worse than they are,’ I added.
Peter squeezed my knee. He would have known that the probing was frightening me. I was under no obligation to tell Miranda Slater about Rosie’s beginnings in Prague, but I was petrified that she would prize it out of me. There was no way that this woman, this stranger, was going to know a secret that my own mother didn’t know. Anyway, I couldn’t trust her to keep it, however much she might try to reassure us about boundaries and trust.
She nodded slowly, with a half-smile that I couldn’t interpret as she wrote in her notes; concentrating hard, pressing down with her biro, her writing rounded and childish.
‘How is she at school?’
‘She always has glowing reports,’ Peter said.
‘The teachers say she is very motivated and well behaved.’
‘Good, good,’ Miranda Slater said, grinning and nodding at us. ‘That’s good.’ Seemingly we had just won some brownie points.
In response to her nodding, Peter nodded like a dope. It seemed impossible to be ourselves in front of this woman.
‘Peter, in your opinion, your job is secure?’ She was nodding again before he had even answered.
‘Yes. Well, as secure as any job is these days.’
‘Indeed,’ she said, rounding her letters on the page carefully. I could not see what she was writing, but she was pressing so hard I was surprised her biro didn’t break through the paper.
‘And your salary is what?’
Peter shifted in his seat. ‘Is this really relevant?’
‘We need to build a picture of your family’s emotional and financial stability, Peter, is that all right?’ The ponytail was flicked behind her back and her unfortunate toothy smile broadened again.
I spoke for him. ‘Peter earns £50K and I earn £100K.’
She wrote the figures down, seemingly unmoved by the enormousness of the joint income, and uninterested in who earned more than whom.
‘Would you say you had any money problems?’
I guffawed. Miranda Slater’s smile miraculously disappeared, and she tilted her head to the side slightly. ‘You do have money problems?’
‘No, no, we don’t,’ I said soberly.
I listened out for the children who had probably found my mother. Usually, they would be fighting and telling on each other by now, but they were being especially well behaved with Grandma Helen.
‘And your monthly outgoings are manageable?’
‘Mostly, I suppose they are,’ I replied.
‘Do you have any debts?’
‘We have credit cards, but nothing els
e,’ I said.
Peter stood up and began pacing around the kitchen.
‘Would you say you suffered from any stress or anxiety about money?’
‘No,’ I said, feeling stressed and anxious about Peter’s reaction to her questions about money. ‘We know what comes in and what goes out.’
Predictably, she nodded and smiled for what seemed like a long time, and then wrote in her report.
‘And who looks after Rosie and Noah when you’re at work?’
‘We have a nanny – Harriet Stock – who comes in the afternoons.’
‘Do your kids get on with her?’
‘They adore her. She is an absolute godsend,’ Peter gushed, sitting down again, as though this was the kind of question he could tolerate, while my skin crawled with the implications.
‘But mum’s coming to live with us now, so we’ve given her paid leave for now, just while...’ I trailed off, not knowing how to say it out loud.
‘I see. That’s good, good, so your mother is coming to stay,’ she said, writing more. ‘So, she’ll cover the hours Peter’s at work, is that right?’
‘Yes,’ I said, through gritted teeth. She spoke of this as if it was an acceptable infringement of my freedom.
‘How many nannies have they had since they were born?’
The question riled me. Here we go. Here comes her judgement.
‘Harriet has been with us for three years.’
‘And before that?’
‘Before Harriet, we had Nicky, who was with us when we moved here.’
‘Mmmm... uh huh... okay... So, why did Nicky leave?’
‘She moved back to Australia.’
‘And you’d say the children bonded well with her?’
‘Yes. She’s a primary school teacher now.’ In truth, Rosie had screamed for half an hour every day before Nicky arrived.
‘And before Nicky did you have anyone?’
I looked to Peter, a veiled warning shot before my white lie. ‘In London, we had Jola, who helped us out until we moved out here.’
What I didn’t mention was that sandwiched in between Nicky and Jola, we had employed two more – one Filipino lady, who we soon discovered was stone deaf, and one Czech woman who fell pregnant and implied it was Peter’s – but I wasn’t ready to admit to those two mammoth mistakes.
‘So you went back to work when the children were how old?’
My mouth felt dry. ‘Rosie was six weeks old. With Noah, I took three months.’
I waited for a look of disgust from Miranda Slater, but she kept her head buried as she wrote this information down.
I wondered if she had children of her own, and how long she had taken off work. ‘How was that?’
‘What?’
‘What was it like going back to work after having Baby?’
‘Which baby?’ I was being facetious, but I couldn’t help myself.
‘Tell me about Rosie first.’
‘I had a good support network.’
‘Uh huh... Hmmm... Any family members help out?’
‘Mum sometimes, but she had a lot on at work.’
‘But she’s not so busy now?’
‘She’s decided to take a sabbatical, of sorts.’
‘Okay, right... Hmmm... Yes... But you say she wasn’t supportive when Rosie was a baby, is that right?’
‘I didn’t say she wasn’t supportive, I said she was busy. She helped out when she could.’
She nodded slowly before she spoke. ‘Did you suffer from post-natal depression after either of their births?’
I had been waiting for this question. It was the one I had worried about most in the middle of the night.
‘No,’ I said, sipping my tea, unable to look her in the eye.
After Rosie’s birth, I had barely coped. I remember pacing around with her, crying, while she cried. The soreness and tenderness in my body made everything more difficult, like I was doing the hardest thing I had ever done in my life while injured and ill. Deep down, I feared we had done the wrong thing in fighting so hard to have her. When the health visitor had come round with the ‘Is Mum Depressed?’ survey, I had lied on the form. I was transported back to our dark kitchen in London, where I had read the form that the health visitor had slid in front of me. Each tick that I had made – through bleary eyes – had been a lie: ‘5 – Do you have suicidal thoughts?’ No, tick. I was scared to tick the boxes that might reveal the true depths of my despair, and shock, and the sense of profound inadequacy. Maybe some women are not meant to be mothers, I had thought at the time. Maybe my body had been telling me something during those gruelling years of being prodded and punctured by fertility doctors.
A sense of impotence engulfed me. My ineptitude as a mother was being brought to the table – the truncated maternity leave, the flow of nannies, the lack of mummy-and-me time, Rosie’s tantrums, the big lie, the arrest. What terrible endorsements of my parenting. Gone was the urge to laugh. I suddenly wanted to give up, present Miranda Slater with my wrists. Apathy, or worse maybe, numbness, stopped me battling. How could I possibly convince this woman that I was a good mother, when I knew that I wasn’t? Could I admit to this? Would this be conceding defeat? Would this mean I would certainly face prosecution?
‘Yes, Your Honor, I love my children but I have a strong aversion to being a mother, guilty as charged.’ The crash of the gavel. ‘I sentence you to life imprisonment for fucking up your kid!’ Arguably, two life sentences.
As though Peter had sensed this in me, he spoke up, out of turn, ‘She is a wonderful mother. All of this is absolutely ludicrous. I can’t actually believe we are sitting here having to justify our decisions just because of some terrible misunderstanding. Didn’t Rosie tell you up there? That she got confused?’ he asked.
‘I’m afraid I can’t pass on what she tells me.’
‘Well, I’m telling you now, Gemma would never have slapped her. Honestly, if you knew her, you’d know she was incapable of it.’
Tears that would not fall blurred my vision. If I had looked at Peter, I would have broken down.
There was silence for a while.
‘You understand, Peter, that we are here to make sure that your children are safe,’ she said.
‘Yes, yes, the system,’ he said, dropping his hands into his lap.
And then she turned to me. ‘How do you feel about being a mother, Gemma?’
The question was like an electric shock, and I swiped an errant tear.
I remembered looking at Rosie when she was lying in her cot, her fists in little cotton mittens to stop her scratching her face with her miniscule nails, wishing she would sleep for a little bit longer, wishing I didn’t have to wake her for her feed. I did not like breast feeding her. Her hard gums on my nipple; a violation almost. Every suck gave me an unpleasant shudder. I kept these feelings to myself, ashamed of them, knowing I would sound wrongly-wired if I admitted it to anyone. A week before I returned to work, I weaned her onto the bottle. It was revelatory. I think I loved Rosie a little bit more as she gazed up at me, her lips locked around the plastic teat. I was liberated, hopeful again. The bottle helped me to feel a little bit more like me.
‘I don’t know how I feel about being a mother.’ I hesitated, knowing how I should have answered her but worn down by all these questions, worn down. Who was ‘me’? I would never be the Gemma I was before I gave birth. Gemma the mother was in her place. Rosie had needed me to be defeated and to relinquish control of that pre-baby ‘me’. Her needs were designed to consume me absolutely. It shouldn’t have been too much to ask. I had failed her. And I would probably fail the next one.
‘I suppose sometimes I feel like the worst mother in the whole universe,’ I said, pressing hard into the centre of my chest, as if pressing at the place where all my tension was held.
Peter gaped at me, outraged, as though I had just stopped dead in the middle of a running race I had been winning.
But Miranda Slater gave me her first genui
ne smile. It was a sad smile, actually, and there was recognition in her eyes, from woman to woman, from mother to mother possibly.
‘I guess that was a really hard thing to say out loud,’ Miranda Slater said gently.
I pressed my fingers into my eye sockets. It was my turn to nod excessively.
Chapter Forty-Two
Rosie’s cheeks were stuffed full of a whole slice of cake when she spoke. A hornbeam hedge leaf stuck out of the top of her head and little bits of pink-and-yellow sponge darted from her mouth. The sight of her made Mira want to laugh out loud but the girl looked sincere, and so Mira turned back to her green plant pots and pushed the sweet-pea seeds into the soft soil as she listened.
‘I just wanted to tell you it’s all fine now.’
‘That sounds lovely, Rosie Rabbit. I’m so glad for you,’ Mira nodded, knowing that she would not have snuck through the hedge to see her if everything had been fine. Mira placed a steaming cup of hot chocolate in front of Rosie.
‘Mummy and Grandma Helen both picked me up from school and Mummy gave me a set of neon pens that I always wanted.’
‘Where does your mummy think you are now?’
‘Making dens.’
‘She won’t check?’
‘I told her that grown-ups aren’t allowed past the gazebo.’
‘And Noah?’
‘That’s easy. I paid him five pounds to stay away from me.’
‘Very resourceful,’ Mira grinned.
‘Guess what?’
‘What?’
‘Grandma Helen is living with us! It’s so cool.’
‘How long is she going to live there, petal?’
‘Not sure.’
Mira remembered that bird-like woman and felt cross. The plastic green pot cracked in her hand. The two slits of the split pinched her skin. She sucked her palm and glanced over her shoulder at Rosie, whose confident smile had dropped off her face momentarily.
‘Are you okay?’
‘Now, now, chin up. No need to look like the cat’s just died. How about you help me plant some of these, eh?’