SEVENTEEN Gus
“Would you recommend parenthood?” Marcus asked me.
We were both watching as my daughter Flora, wearing only a diaper and a pair of tiny pink jelly shoes, reached the water’s edge. She squatted down, with that amazing sense of balance that toddlers acquire so soon after they’ve started walking, to scoop seawater into her yellow plastic bucket.
Marcus had invited us for Sunday lunch on the north Kent coast. As a weekend escape from his loft apartment in a converted mattress factory in Clerkenwell, he’d recently acquired a converted fisherman’s hut in Whitstable. In line for a partnership at the big City law firm, he was able to live comfortably on his salary, while investing his eye-watering bonuses in cool properties. He was indisputably more successful than I was, or was ever likely to be, but I was already a father. There was never anything hostile about our unspoken competition, but it was always there, as if we audited our lives by comparing them.
“Unreservedly,” I replied.
“Doesn’t it stop you doing things?” he asked, picking up a stone and skimming it across the water. We both watched, counting silently. One, two, threefourfivesixseven.
I was tempted to say, “We no longer have sex in the box when we go to the opera.”
But I knew that would cross the line between friendly one-upmanship and showing off.
I picked up a stone and skimmed it. Seven.
“You kind of stop thinking that way,” I said. “Your needs aren’t so important, not compared with your child’s.”
“In what way?” Marcus was trained to cross-examine the evidence.
Picking up another stone, then discarding it for not being flat enough, I searched for a precise illustration.
“I always thought we’d go on holiday to Italy when I finally started earning, but it wouldn’t be much fun for Flora trawling around churches. To be honest, she’s as happy here as she would be in some island spa in the Maldives,” I added, which had been Charlotte’s idea of a suitable holiday destination until she’d properly imagined ten hours of Flora on a plane.
“No regrets, then?” Marcus asked.
“None,” I confirmed, unsure how he’d react if I told him that my one regret was returning to work after the parental leave I’d taken in between switching my training from hospital to general practice.
The creation of a warm and loving home had been much more rewarding than I’d anticipated. I’d enrolled in a twice-weekly mother-and-baby group, where we sang “The Wheels on the Bus” with our bewildered infants propped on our laps, making circles with their hands during the chorus. In the afternoons, I relished having the time to shop for fruit and vegetables as the market stalls were packing up, introducing Flora to real items the Very Hungry Caterpillar ate. I made it my routine to cook Charlotte something delicious for dinner each day, and diligently puréed organic produce for Flora when she started on solid food. When I brought along cookies that I’d baked to the mother-and-baby group, I became, in Charlotte’s words, “the darling of the yummy mummies.”
“You miss your old friends, obviously,” I conceded, wondering if that was what Marcus was getting at. This was only the second time we’d got together since Flora was born.
Nash was the only pre-baby friend I’d seen fairly regularly in the first few months because she’d had free time during the day to stroll around Battersea Park with me and the pram. But now she’d landed a role in an American medical drama series, she’d gone to live in LA.
“How’s the job going?” Marcus asked.
“Fine,” I said. “Steep learning curve, obviously.”
It had been difficult for me entrusting Flora to another person, but it would have been mad not to finally qualify after having worked so hard. We’d hired Kasia, a Polish philosophy graduate, as our nanny. She didn’t have any formal qualification in childcare, but she was intelligent, responsible and keen to practice English, so Flora was now taken to lots of new activities like baby gym and swimming. Charlotte was probably right when she said that I missed Flora much more than she missed me.
With no one else around and the lulling rhythm of waves breaking on the shingle, I was, for a moment, tempted to confide in Marcus that I hated general practice, but I decided not to out of a kind of loyalty to Charlotte. She’d floated the idea on the plane home from New York. Wouldn’t general practice be a more flexible career? Who could resist the new deal for GPs which made the salary of the average hospital doctor look like peanuts by comparison? Wouldn’t it be far more cost-effective if I were the one to take parental leave? Unfortunately, the reality of having to make decisions about a relentless stream of people I’d never seen before sometimes felt like a kind of nightmare. I spent far too long with each patient, which led to queues building up in the waiting room, exasperated colleagues and longer hours than I needed or wanted to do.
Marcus skimmed another stone. Eleven, possibly twelve, bounces.
I stooped to pick up an oyster shell, smoothed by the scouring of the tide.
“Come and look at this shell, Floss.”
“Sell,” Flora repeated.
“Not in your mouth, Floss,” I warned. “It’s sharp.”
“Sarp.”
“Shall we take it back to show Mummy?”
“Bucket.”
“Good idea. We’ll take a bucket of shells back to our own garden in London, shall we?”
“Mary Mary Quite Contrary...,” Flora started singing tunelessly.
“How does your garden grow?” I joined in, delighted by the spontaneous connection she’d made between shells and gardens.
Marcus looked at me as if I’d lost the plot.
“Do you have a garden in Wandsworth?” he asked.
“A very small one,” I told him.
If life in the tiny top-floor flat among the rooftops of Charlotte Street had been like floating, the house in Wandsworth grounded us. We’d chosen the neighborhood because it was somewhere youngish, upwardly mobile, middle-class couples like us could still just about afford a house. If you sat looking out of the small bay window at the front, you’d see a constant stream of new parents running past with babies in designer three-wheeled sports buggies like ours. But the street was gloomy and the house was dark inside.
“Why don’t you move?” Marcus asked.
“Because the areas we like are out of our price range until I start earning a full GP’s salary,” I told him. “Not a problem you’ll have,” I added, guessing why he was asking all these questions.
He’d recently married Keiko, a banking economist, and I assumed that they were applying their analytical minds to the pros and cons of parenthood.
“What about sex?” Marcus said, lowering his voice to make sure he was out of Flora’s earshot.
For a moment, it felt like we were back in the Lower Sixth at school, in the days when we still thought that sex was something you might be fortunate enough to be awarded by the strangely mysterious opposite sex.
Charlotte and I still had great sex. Just not as often and never outside the house. These days, if we did it while listening to La Bohème, it was on a CD rather than during the performance. “It’s funny, but sex doesn’t matter as much either,” I said, which was a mistake because it made it sound like we had none at all.
Marcus pulled a face.
“But you’re happy, you and Charlotte?” he asked.
I hesitated. “Happy” wasn’t a Charlotte kind of word. There wasn’t a day when I didn’t wake up feeling astonished and privileged to find her beside me, but if I’d asked her, “Are you happy with me?” I suspected she’d laugh as if she was far too busy dealing with higher-order issues. And yet there was no doubting the unique bond of our shared love for Flora.
I know that every parent thinks their child is special, but it was an objective truth that Flora was both unusually beautiful and advanced. In the little red book the government gives all new parents to chart their child’s progress, which most people forget to fill in, or lose after the first few months, Flora had reached each developmental goal well ahead of target. She had taken her first step just before her first birthday and, at eighteen months, had already acquired a large enough vocabulary to ask for most things she wanted. She had inherited her mother’s raven-haired beauty and my blue eyes, a startling combination that inspired a great deal of admiring attention.
“Mummy pretty sell!” Flora shouted as Charlotte and Keiko appeared, walking back along the beach path with oysters they’d bought at the harbor.
“That’s nice, darling,” said Charlotte, picking Flora up. I wished I’d had a camera to capture the two so-similar faces smiling right next to each other, dark hair blowing about in the sparkling breeze.
The fisherman’s hut had been renovated and greatly extended in a contemporary minimalist style, with huge windows and an open-sided staircase that looked straight out of a magazine but was a dangerous playground for a toddler. I was dismayed to see Flora’s jelly shoes leaving little clumps of wet sand on the expensive-looking rug.
“It’s such a treat to be with adults who don’t want to talk about potty training!” Charlotte said, accepting a glass of Taittinger from Marcus and reclining on a sofa upholstered in a pale turquoise velvet that Flora was getting dangerously close to. “We’re so boring these days, aren’t we, Angus?”
Amusement played around Marcus’s lips. In the floodlight of my wife’s attention, I saw my friend not as the pimply youth he had been, but as the attractive, wealthy man he had become. Charlotte knew Marcus only as charming, successful and rich. I’d noticed the gleam of approval in her eye as I parked up beside his Porsche.
“Mummy eat sell,” said Flora, pointing at Charlotte as she tipped an oyster down her throat.
“It’s called an oyster, darling,” said Charlotte.
“Sell, sell, sell!” Flora shouted, wrestling her hand from mine.
“She’s clearly got a future in the Stock Exchange!” said Marcus, glossing over the slightly awkward spectacle of our daughter’s insistence.
“Here, have a taste...” Charlotte picked up another oyster, tipping a little of the fluid into Flora’s mouth.
Flora spat it out immediately, just missing the turquoise velvet upholstery.
“Sarp,” she cried.
I loved the way her brain applied the word which I’d introduced to indicate danger to a taste that was offensive to her.
I set her own little plastic chair and table up for her to eat her lunch in the kitchen while I helped Keiko prepare the grown-ups’ meal.
“Is it a Japanese recipe?” I asked, as she took a sea bass out of the fridge, and I squeezed limes with a wooden reamer.
She gave me a small smile. “Jamie Oliver.”
In the living area, the conversation continued at slightly louder volume, ostensibly to keep us included.
“Venice! You lucky things!” Charlotte was saying.
“We’ll be there for the Biennale,” said Marcus.
“I’ve always longed to go to the Biennale!” said Charlotte. “Angus!” she called. “Why don’t we go to the Biennale? I’m sure Kasia could manage...”
I couldn’t imagine flying out of the country and leaving Flora, but I said nothing, because if I raised an objection Charlotte was far more likely to dig in her heels.
“Caroline would love it, Angus!” Charlotte called. “I don’t know why people are so horrid about mothers-in-law. Mine’s a godsend!” she told Marcus.
My mother’s hostility to our marriage had disappeared with Flora’s birth. Flora looked exactly like Ross did as a baby, she told us, when she turned up at our house unannounced the day after I’d called from the hospital to inform her she was a grandmother.
“I thought that too,” Charlotte agreed.
“At least she’s not ginger!” my mother remarked.
“Quite!”
“Just pretend I’m not here,” I’d said.
“It’s different for a girl, Angus!” the two of them chorused.
There was no denying it was useful to have a spare babysitter, because Kasia didn’t work weekends, but however much I tried to welcome my mother’s presence back into our lives, I couldn’t shake off the feeling that I was in the way whenever she was around. I particularly hated her speaking about Flora in the first person plural, as if she knew what my child was thinking, especially since most of “Flora’s” thoughts seemed to coincide with her own.
“We like carrots, don’t we? We don’t like ratatouille, no. We think Daddy puts too much garlic in his cooking, don’t we?”
“Maybe we could take Flora to Venice with us?” I called into the living room.
“Do you see what I mean?” I heard Charlotte say. “Completely misses the point!”
“Actually, you’d have a problem getting a decent hotel now,” said Marcus, gallantly refusing to gang up on me. “We booked months ago.”
“Do you enjoy contemporary art?” I asked Keiko, trying to establish our own alternative conversation.
“Yes.”
I wasn’t sure whether she was insecure about her English, or just naturally reserved. Was there always a dominant partner in a relationship? I wondered. Would Marcus actually be able to cope with someone like Charlotte?
“Will you keep an eye on her while I get the changing stuff out of the car?” I asked Keiko.
When I returned, she was crouched down beside the chair, playing peek-a-boo from behind her curtain of glossy black hair, delighting Flora, who kept trying to grab the hair with tomatoey hands, shrieking, “Kay Ko, Kay Ko!”
“There’s a lot of paraphernalia, isn’t there?” Marcus observed, as I carried Flora and the changing bag upstairs.
“With all the plastic in our house, it sometimes feels like we’re single-handedly responsible for China’s economic boom!” said Charlotte.
Marcus stood up and followed me.
“Want to practice?” I offered, spreading out the changing mat on the bathroom floor.
“You guessed!”
“I am a doctor.”
“Not ’til it’s absolutely necessary.” My friend smiled ruefully.
“Do you think Marcus and Keiko are thinking of having a baby?” Charlotte asked, in the car on the way home.
“She’s a couple of months along already,” I said.
“Really?”
I sometimes thought it was just as well that Charlotte had gone into surgery because she wasn’t particularly good at reading people unless they were under anesthesia and she’d just opened them up.
“Do you think we should have another?” she suddenly asked.
“Baby?” I asked, astonished.
“No, bottle of champagne. What did you think I meant?” said Charlotte, crossly.
“Wow,” I said.
I was aware of the general consensus that having just one child is unfair or somehow selfish. The first question I was always asked when I was out with Flora was, “Is she your first?” with the assumption that there would be more. Several of the yummy mummies were already pregnant with their second, but it had never occurred to me that we would. Charlotte freely admitted that she was not very maternal, or “mumsy” as she called it. I’d never imagined she’d want another.
Maybe I wasn’t that good at reading people either.
“It would be nice for Flora to have a little friend, wouldn’t it?” Charlotte wheedled.
I couldn’t tell whether she was trying to elicit a positive response, or simply reassurance that Flora was perfectly all right on her own. I was confused by my own feelings of ambivalence. Having Flora was certainly the best thing that had ever happened to me, and the fact that Charlotte was proposing another meant she must be satisfied with our life together; but was it a good idea to change things just when we’d got a set-up we were all comfortable with?
I glanced in the rear-view mirror and saw that Flora had fallen asleep.
Would I be able to love a second child as much?
By the time we’d found a parking space in our road, the sun was setting. I lugged all the paraphernalia inside, including Flora, sleeping in her car seat. The house was warm, Kasia was out. It felt homely, just the three of us together.
“Fancy a drink?” I asked Charlotte. “On our terrace?”
It was the big name the estate agent had given the tiny square of deck, but it was pleasant to sit there on summer evenings and it was the one place we were allowed to smoke a cigarette, as long as Flora wasn’t playing nearby.
“Vodka tonic, please,” said Charlotte, producing a packet of Marlboros from her handbag, giving me a wicked smile.
I filled two glasses with ice.
“We’re out of vodka,” I said, looking in the cupboard.
“Gin then.”
There wasn’t much gin left either. I gave it all to Charlotte, opening a fresh bottle of tonic.
The mixer cracked and fizzed over the ice.
We took our drinks outside and sat silently smoking, the tips of our cigarettes glowing in the fast-falling darkness.
“It’s lonely being an only child.” Charlotte resumed our conversation.
It can be lonely as one of two, I wanted to say.
“It’s pretty unlikely to happen anyway,” she added.
“Seemed to happen pretty easily last time,” I said.
My tacit agreement ignited a sexual charge like an electric current connecting across the space between us.
What I’d never experienced the first time, when conceiving was about the last thing on my mind, was how amazing sex is when you’re actually trying to have a baby. Obviously we’re genetically programmed to like it, but when primal instinct synchronizes with intent, it adds a new, almost spiritual dimension.
Afterwards, I was tempted to call Marcus and tell him that sex did matter just as much after all.