Out of Control

Chapter 45

“Take her, please! Before I get on that bus and dump her outside the maternity ward.”

“The hospital bus doesn’t run on a Sunday.” Fiona held her arms out to receive Natalie.

“In that case I’ll spend my last pennies on an Uber.”

“Has it been that bad without me?” Fiona planted kisses all over the baby’s face and then breathed in the sweet, sweet smell of her. A little of the Meeko tension eased. She felt needed on her home ground.

“Scary, knowing there was no one to call on.”

“Your dad’s not far away. Didn’t he come on Saturday?”

“He came but he had one eye on his phone all the time, checking the football scores. We both know that domesticity and practical childrearing aren’t his strong subjects. Don’t get me wrong — he adores Natalie, and me as well, but he doesn’t have a clue and doesn’t want to learn about nappies and burping and all that stuff. He doesn’t understand what it’s like being responsible for keeping a tiny human alive 24-7. Now your Meeko on the other hand — he’d be willing to help with anything.”

“He’s not my Meeko,” Fiona whispered into the down on Natalie’s head.

“I thought you just had a dirty weekend together? Did you bother turning up to the wedding or did you spend the whole time in that massive posh bedroom? The pictures you sent were unbelievable. That one room was the size of our student flat.”

The whole occasion felt like a fairytale gone wrong. “The wedding was good.”

“Good? That’s all you can say about two nights away at the poshest do that we plebs can only dream about?”

“I’m tired, Adele. Make me a cup of tea and then I’ll watch Natalie while you get your head down for a few hours.”

“It’s a deal.”

Nuzzling Natalie was the best stress reliever. Pacing the floor with her upright and burping was even better. It stopped the mind from doubting, questioning and second-guessing. Natalie was comfort and solace personified. After a shaky start, the longer Fiona’s house guests stayed, the better.

On Monday morning reality stampeded back. Fiona’s habitual jog to the hotel and breakfast with her best friend would be too awkward. Instead, she sat at the kitchen table and ate a bowl of porridge with a giant spoonful of golden syrup (who cared if she broke her own healthy eating rules — her life was a train crash anyway) and far too many slices of toast loaded with marmalade.

“Incredibly, she’s still asleep.” Adele crept into the kitchen and filled a dish with cornflakes. “There were a couple of episodes in the night but she quietened after a feed.” She swiped at her phone as she ate. “Oh my God!”

“What?”

“Mum is back in communication. She’s on a plane home. No, that’s wrong. She sent that message in the middle of the night. She’ll now be on a train from London. She says she’ll get a taxi straight to your house.”

“Here? How does she know?”

“She must have picked up the message I sent when I first arrived here.”

“But she doesn’t know about . . . ?” Fiona pointed at the ceiling. “Or about me and Joe splitting up?”

“Not unless Dad’s told her, which I doubt.”

Life was spooling even further out of control — like the brown tape that spewed out of broken cassettes when she was a teenager. A pencil could get the tape wound back in, but sorting out Fiona’s life would take infinitely more effort than twisting a pencil round and round. “I need to clean the house. Buy food, plan what to feed her.” Get in control of the situation and then the appearance of your ex-boyfriend’s wife won’t faze you. “Should I go out and stay out? Give you time to introduce Natalie to her proper grandma?” Where to? Not Meeko’s; there’d been no word from him since they’d parted at the station. He’d even refused her offer to order him an Uber. There was only Dorothea, who’d want chapter and verse on the wedding and then lament the imminent loss of her granddaughter- and great-granddaughter-by-proxy. Fiona wouldn’t be able to talk about either without crying.

Adele looked surprised. “Why should you care about making things easier for Mum? Even though they were divorced, she was sort of your rival.”

Good question. Until Joe had started citing her domestic inadequacies compared to his ex-wife, Fiona had never seen Rose as a rival; merely someone from his past who would become increasingly insignificant as time went on. But his constant harping back to Rose had been one of the key factors in Fiona ending their relationship. Now she felt grateful to Rose for saving her from wasting any more time on a man who would never be her soulmate. And, for reasons she couldn’t understand, Fiona wanted Rose to like her. That unruly brown tape had just unwound a bit more.

She couldn’t give either of these explanations to Rose’s daughter and so she just shrugged.

* * *

Fiona had barely got back from the supermarket with the ingredients for a chicken casserole plus an expensive box of granola because Rose would have to be offered somewhere to stay for the night, when the doorbell rang.

“Take Natalie and answer it,” Fiona urged. “I’ll stay upstairs until you signal that you’ve got all the explaining out of the way.”

“Where do I start?” The girl looked terrified, and then a flash of hope passed across her face. “Perhaps it’s someone else at the door?”

Meeko? Don’t even go there, Fiona. That relationship is now an official mess.

The doorbell rang again. “Answer it!” Fiona hissed from the top step. She heard the door open and an unfamiliar female voice. She went into her office, closed the door and waited. The indecipherable conversation in the room below ebbed and flowed like waves in the ocean. Fiona tried to put herself in Rose’s shoes. If Amber had lived, Fiona would never have run away and left her without a single word. She’d often visualised Amber as she passed through the major milestones of life: starting school, becoming a teenager, leaving for university. When Adele had given birth, the emotion of how it might have been for Amber had been unbearable. Now Fiona tried to spool back to that moment in her imagination and panicked. She no longer saw the familiar image she had fabricated of her daughter in adulthood — instead it was a hazy female face that could fit any one of a million people. She rewound further in her mind, but as the versions of Amber grew younger, so did their genericness. Fiona gripped the edge of her office desk. She was losing the Amber of her imagination.

She lost track of how long she sat there, staring at the black screen of her laptop. No one had understood the depth of her grief over the miscarriage. And she couldn’t tell anyone about this devastating second loss, of the imagined face of her daughter. They’d think she was mad. Except . . . Meeko. She looked at her mobile. Would he even take the call? She’d implied that she only wanted him for sex, not a total emotional commitment, and yet here she was wanting to unburden a deep fear. But even that wasn’t the same as handing over her whole self to someone and trusting them to take care of it. A light of understanding came on as the indistinguishable multi-age images of Amber faded completely. The very fact that she wanted to talk to Meeko about her fear that these imagined images of her daughter were receding forever showed the level of trust she had in him. She trusted him, and only him, enough to reveal this vulnerability. From this point it was only a small step to trusting him with her whole future.

A knock made her jump and the office door opened.

“Fiona! I’ve been calling up the stairs. I’m putting the kettle on. Will you join Mum and I for coffee?”

“What? Are you sure you’re ready for me? How’s it going? Get the best chocolate biscuits — they’re at the back of the cupboard.” All introspection fled from Fiona’s head as she tried to read Adele’s face.

“It’s OK. I’ll introduce you.”

Rose stood up, holding her granddaughter, when Fiona and Adele entered the lounge. Fiona felt a stab of jealousy as she saw blood-related grandmother and granddaughter together. How would Dorothea take to their own much-diluted, if any, presence in the baby’s life?

“I’ll leave you two to talk.” Adele disappeared into the kitchen.

The two women sat awkwardly, looking anywhere but at each other. The mysterious domestic angel, Rose, looked tired, tanned and travel weary. She wore no make-up, or if she did it had disappeared during the long hours on the plane and the train. She was ordinary, not saintly.

Rose spoke first. “Thank you very much for all you’ve done for Adele.” She paused and smiled. “I never thought I’d have cause to be grateful to my ex-husband’s girlfriend.”

“Ex-girlfriend, we split up.” He’d only been gone a few days but already his previous importance in Fiona’s life had slipped away. She felt nothing: no regret, love or longing for him, and no negativity towards Rose. Meeko was right: she’d put Joe in one of her life’s compartments without emotional ties. Now she understood why Meeko didn’t want to bend himself into a similar sealed box. He wanted to be, and deserved to be, centre stage in her life. “Didn’t Adele tell you that it’s over? That I asked him to leave? He’s staying with his brother.”

“In that case, I’m even more grateful to you for continuing to let Adele and Natalie—” Rose’s expression softened as she glanced down at the baby — “stay here. Tom isn’t well known for his hospitality.”

“I don’t need gratitude. And Joe living here just didn’t work out.”

Rose nodded. “My friends think he’s Mr Wonderful because they only see him on his best behaviour, pouring wine and entertaining. Ingratiating himself, I call it. The rest of the time he has a habit of assuming the stuff in the house, or even the people, don’t need his input. I tolerated it because I loved him and I didn’t want to work outside the home and I wanted Adele and her brother to have a stable background and . . . I don’t know, sometimes marriages just work even though outsiders might struggle to understand why. But then ours stopped working as the children moved out. I’m not sure exactly why. I still miss him in an odd sort of way. When I’m over the jetlag I’m going to surprise him. Can we keep my arrival here a secret for now?”

“Are you going to take him back?” Please don’t, Rose. You can do much better than Joe.

Rose shrugged. “Sometimes what our soul craves is a purpose in life — feeling needed by other living beings. My family gave me that feeling. And, although he would never admit it, I think Joe needed me too.”

Fiona thought of Dorothea and how she’d come back to life thanks to the recent demands placed on her: Natalie, the yoga class campaign, the baby shower . . .

“You’re right.” But who needed Fiona? Her mother? Meeko? Rob? Adele and Natalie had done. Did she enjoy the feeling? Yes. But only when she loosened the steel band around her emotions and threw her whole self into it.

“Joe’s very malleable — I may have appeared downtrodden but actually I was in complete control of our lives, financially, domestically and socially. Everything. And that made it work. Until we became empty nesters and then, somehow, we lost ourselves in the increased space of our lives. Certainly I lost some of that feeling of being needed and thought the grass might be greener elsewhere. But I think it might work again.”

Fiona was warming to Rose’s honesty. “Did you find yourself in India?”

Rose coloured, looked down and planted a kiss on the smooth forehead of the sleeping baby. “It was an impulse decision and the first time I’d left the country alone. With hindsight, I should have done more research. But once I was there, I needed to prove to myself that I had the strength of character to stick it out.”

Adele put a tray loaded with three mugs of black coffee, milk jug, sugar bowl and the best chocolate biscuits on the low table. There was also a plate of what looked like homemade chocolate brownies. Fiona glanced questioningly at her housemate.

“Beetroot chocolate brownies made with ground almonds. They’re supposed to be healthy. I made them on Sunday morning while you were away. A sort of thank you.”

Fiona pulled the girl into a hug. “You are wonderful!”

Rose was staring at her daughter open-mouthed. “Discovering I had a granddaughter was a shock. And now I learn that you are turning into a chef.” She turned to Fiona. “I should hate you but I can’t.”

Fiona tried nonchalantly to shake off the praise but her heart was swelling in an unfamiliar way. These two women had been in need and, somehow, she’d found her way to doing the right thing instead of deciding they didn’t fit any of her labelled compartments and discarding them. She wanted more of this feeling of being needed. The sensation held faint reminders of coming up trumps for her team at work when they hit an obstacle or deadline and being bought a drink, clapped on the back or receiving a bonus. Only this was more important and the feeling of satisfaction a million times better.

“You were telling me about finding yourself?” Fiona turned the spotlight away from herself and bit into one of the brownies with a grand, and genuine, gesture of enjoyment.

“Conditions at the retreat were primitive: cold communal showers, outside toilets, dodgy electricity supply. The food was basic and didn’t always agree with me, or I didn’t agree with it. There was lots of solitude, yoga and mindfulness training. I don’t think I found myself. Maybe I got to know myself a tiny bit better but not completely — we shy away from our bad bits and pretend they don’t exist, don’t we?”

Fiona nodded. “It takes courage to recognise our weaknesses but we can’t move forward without doing that.” She was thinking how much she’d learned about herself over the previous six weeks, and the lovely feeling of those compartments inching open.

“Exactly — we are all selfish, have temper triggers and prejudices, but it takes a strong person to openly admit to them.” Rose paused and took a sip of coffee. “Ooh! That’s got a kick — we had no stimulants on the retreat.” She swallowed. “No, I didn’t find myself, whatever that means, but I did discover what is important in my life. And that is my family.” She smiled at Adele. “Whatever they’ve done.” She glanced down at Natalie. “I missed them like hell. More than I missed my comfortable bathroom or food that didn’t wreck my insides or working light switches.” Rose let out a sigh of contentment. “I want to gather them around me and have what we had before. But this time I hope all of us will appreciate it so much more.”

Adele reached over and squeezed her mother’s hand. “It’s lovely to have you back, Mum, and Natalie is pleased to meet her grandma. She’s never been this quiet for such a long time.” As if on cue the baby’s arms and legs started to curl and straighten as if preparing for a big crying session. “But . . . is it OK if we include Natalie’s grandmother- and great-grandmother-by-proxy in our extended family? You’ll love Dorothea when you meet her.”

“Absolutely. One thing I observed out there is that even a family knee-deep in poverty has love in abundance for all its extended relatives. It adds richness and perspective to their lives. And it takes a village to raise a child, as they say.”

Another layer of tension lifted from Fiona’s shoulders; neither she nor her mother were going to lose this fledgling relationship with Adele and Natalie. The sudden feeling of belonging made her feel calm and loved. Rose might not have found herself but she’d found a way forward with her life.

Rose handed the hungry baby back to her daughter. “I need to find a hotel and get some sleep. The current Airbnb let doesn’t finish for another week.”

“There’s a bed for you here until the house is available,” Fiona offered.

Adele looked at her as if to say, where? All beds are taken.

“My mum’s got a spare room that she won’t mind me filling.” Dorothea would be ecstatic to have her daughter as a house guest for a few days. “You two have got a lot to catch up on without me hanging around. And, without me here, you can have Joe over as well. And Dan, too.”