17
Several months on from that conversation in my sitting room, I was in the delivery suite with Inga about to become just that—Auntie Lily. Despite an inauspicious start, Inga had sailed through pregnancy, looking glowing and fantastic, carrying on at work almost until the last minute. Sometimes it had occurred to me that she might be in denial about it all; that she did her level best not to think about the fact that she was about to become a mother. If you can be in denial about that when you turn up to house viewings looking as if the prospective house buyers might need to phone the emergency services at any minute.
But one thing was for certain, if she had been in denial, that all ended now. Because this baby was coming.
“Everything’s fine,” I said inadequately, feeling out of my depth. “You can do this, Inga.”
“Easy ... for ... you to say,” Inga said bad-temperedly, panting. “Aargh!”
Inga had asked me to be her birth partner quite early on in her pregnancy. I’d felt obliged to accept—she’d only just forgiven me for hinting to Matt about the baby. Besides, with her mother in Denmark, there really wasn’t anybody else. Plus this was Inga. Inga. Of course I had to do it. Even though I did feel supremely underqualified and unequipped for the job.
With zilch experience of childbirth, all I could offer was encouragement, a deaf ear to the cursing, and gritted teeth to cope with the pain of having my hand clutched so hard my fingers were in danger of breaking. Inga was clearly in absolute agony, and if I’d had the slightest craving to have children myself, the experience of being in that delivery room would have cured me of it, no problem at all.
But maternal or not, wanting a baby myself or not, I’d have had to be some kind of a machine not to be moved when Inga’s baby boy finally entered the world. When I first saw his dark, bewildered eyes and full head of black hair, and clapped eyes on Inga’s expression as she gazed down with the deepest joy at him in her arms.
“Oh, my God, he’s perfect, Inga,” I breathed, and she beamed at me.
“He really is, isn’t he?” she said as the baby stared at her, frowning, seeming to drink her in.
“D’you think he’s trying to work out whether I’m a good bet or not?” she asked.
“Of course you’re a good bet; you’re his mother,” I said, although I, of all people, knew it didn’t necessarily follow.
“D’you want to hold him?”
I couldn’t say I didn’t want to, not with my best friend holding her firstborn out to me like a precious gift. Inga didn’t know that a baby, for me, was like a portkey in a Harry Potter movie, transporting me someplace else as soon as I held it. To dark times. To a baby too heavy in every possible way for my eight-year-old arms.
It hadn’t always been like that. When Mum first arrived back from hospital after having Violet, I couldn’t stop gazing at the bundle in the carry cot. My new little sister, fast asleep, her mouth slightly open, looking exactly like the doll Katy Brown had brought into school one day. Except that this doll’s chest was magically rising and falling—I could see it. She was a living, breathing human being in miniature. Perfect.
I reached out one hand to touch her closed eyelids, wanting them to spring open the way the eyes on Katy Brown’s doll had done, and Mum whisper-yelled at me. “Don’t touch her, Lily!”
Startled, my hand sprang back, accidentally jolting the baby, causing her eyes to open just the way I’d wanted them to. Only I hadn’t pictured the cries of distress that came with it, or the way that perfect face would screw itself right up into a look of reproach.
“Now look what you’ve done!” Mum said, not bothering to whisper any longer. “She’s gone and woken the baby up, Kevin.”
“I can see that,” Kevin said, not budging from the sofa.
“Well,” Mum said, “can’t you do something about it? I’ve just given birth. I’m fucking whacked.”
“I would do, babe, but I’m not exactly kitted out with the right equipment, am I?” And he pulled at the front of his T-shirt to emphasise his point.
I wasn’t equipped to give Inga’s little boy what he wanted, either—for surely, even if he didn’t start rooting around against my useless breasts for milk, he would sense my reluctance to hold him.
“He won’t bite,” Inga told me, noticing my resistance. “At least, I bloody hope not, since I’ve got to breastfeed the little bugger.”
The baby made a snuffling sound as I took him from her, opening his mouth in a huge yawn before lying perfectly still. My arms accommodated him easily—a reflex action or muscle memory that came with the knowledge that his black hair would be as soft as duckling fluff and that, should I bend my head, he would very likely smell of sweet milk even though he hadn’t yet suckled. He was perfect, his whole life ahead of him. I thought of all the things he had to learn, including the things he might have to accept that he might never know, like who his father was. Just as I had done.
“Bloody hell, Lily,” Inga said, holding her arms out to take him back, “it’s meant to be me who gets emotional, not you.”
She did get emotional, though, not long afterwards. One moment she was fine, gazing gooily down at the perfection of her son’s face, and the next she was sobbing, her body shudders jolting the baby.
“Oh, Lil, I wish Matt were here,” she said, looking up at me with tragic eyes. “I wish I hadn’t stuffed up.”
I squeezed her hand, my own eyes leaking tears as I gazed down at the little boy who was so unmistakably Harry’s son. “I know.”
Had he been Matt’s, it was effortlessly easy to imagine Matt here in the room with us instead of away on a possibly deliberately timed holiday to Spain. Grinning all over his face, picking the baby tenderly up, his movements confident, his face blazing with love. It wouldn’t matter that he hadn’t been sure whether he wanted to be a father or not. He’d have loved his child when he was here, I knew he would. With all his heart. It was the only way Matt knew how to love—with everything he had, holding nothing back.
“Do you think he’ll ever even get to meet him?”
I wasn’t sure. Somewhere along the line, Matt would inevitably encounter Inga and her son. But deliberately? Maybe after he’d got over his break-up with Inga to the point where he wasn’t at risk of getting sucked back into their relationship.
“I’m sure he will,” I said, more confidently than I felt. We’d met up a few times since their break-up, me and Matt, so I knew how sore he still was about it all. “Matt’s not malicious, is he? He’ll want to make sure you’re okay. Anyway, have you decided what you’re going to call this little guy?”
“I was thinking about Noah?”
I wasn’t used to Inga’s sentences having a question at the end of them—to her being cautious or doubtful about anything. I was sure the outspoken person who rarely hesitated to voice her opinions would return at some point, but I supposed the little guy in her arms was always going to demand some compromise from her, just by nature of his existence.
“Noah sounds perfect,” I said, and Inga gave me a watery smile.
“Shit, Lily,” she said. “I’ve really gone and done this fucking thing, haven’t I?”
I laughed, tears dripping down my cheeks. “Yes, you have,” I said. “You really have.”
Noah began to stir, his whimpers quickly turning to cries of distress.
I searched Inga’s face, half expecting to see panic or resentment, relieved only to see focused love and tenderness.
“Here, little one. Come to Mummy.”
And I cried and smiled all over again when little Noah latched straight onto Inga’s breast like a champ and began to suckle, ignoring the childish voice inside my head that wanted to point out that, now that Noah was quite rightly Inga’s priority, our friendship would never be quite the same again.