Chapter 20 #3
‘Yes.’ I still sounded sulky, as though I’d reverted to being that ten-year-old, denied sweets and a sister.
‘You said you only ever wanted one baby.’ And they’d surrounded me with dogs and cats and ponies: small animals that needed almost constant attention and larger ones to occupy my time.
My siblings had been furry and, from listening to Chloe, far more understanding about not sharing a bedroom or taking my toys.
Why the hell had I ever wanted a brother or sister?
‘That’s… not quite true.’ Mum glanced at David again and acid burned up my gullet.
Oh God. This wasn’t going to turn into some weird daytime TV story about an adopted sibling I’d accidentally met and produced a child with, was it?
I looked at Tilly, happily dropping diamonds from a height to make the plangent noise of expensive dents.
No. No, Tilly was fine. This was stupid.
Mum took a deep breath and wound her fingers together on her lap. ‘I wanted a big family,’ she said, all on the one out breath. ‘Your father and I wanted six children at least.’
‘That’s not a family, that’s a life sentence,’ I said snippily, trying to conceal the way my leg was shaking, up and down, up and down, as though I were playing trotting horses with Tilly on my lap.
‘But when you were born,’ she went on, ignoring me, ‘I mean, after you were born… Oh this is so difficult…’ Another deep breath. ‘Libby, do you know what postpartum psychosis is?’
‘Of course. I read the books when I was expecting Tils.’ A tiny creeping chill tiptoed down my spine.
‘Well, I had it. Very, very badly. I was hospitalised, sectioned for a while, when you were only just a newborn. Luckily the doctors recognised it for what it was and they’re very good at treatment these days.’
I was still trying to move in advance of the story, to think my way through to the end. Had my mother’s sectioning meant that I’d somehow been damaged? What did any of this have to do with me?
‘Libby.’ David leaned into the conversation now.
At my side I heard Ross take a small shuddering breath and move slightly.
All sounds seemed magnified, Tilly’s bead-dropping was a titanic clash, I could swear I could even hear the sweep of feathers as the bird on the sofa moved against the torn fabric.
‘It’s a heritable condition. You fell into postpartum psychosis, and you went down so fast that we couldn’t help you in time. ’
‘Don’t be silly,’ I said. It was a good cover story, I had to give him that, but that chill had stopped tiptoeing and was now tap dancing on my spine. No. This wasn’t true. David had an angle and I just had to find out what it was.
‘I wanted to be there, I knew the signs, but when Tilly came early, and then David reassured me that you were fine, and you sounded fine when we Zoomed to meet Tilly…’ This was all on another breath.
My mother was respiring her entire half of the conversation, as though the words were something that had to be wrapped in air to come out.
‘I… we… made the mistake of thinking it was all right.’
Ross stirred. ‘Libby had postpartum psychosis?’
David looked at Ross now and I could see how tired his eyes were.
‘It happened so suddenly. Tilly was about ten weeks old and out of nowhere Libby was accusing me of having her bugged. She wouldn’t let me hold the baby, she wouldn’t eat anything I gave her.
She wouldn’t sleep. She’d spend the nights pacing the room holding Tilly and talking to herself.
I couldn’t get her to a doctor, she wouldn’t leave the house, but I got some sleeping pills to try to help her to sleep and she wouldn’t take them…
’ His voice broke, and he put his hands over his face.
‘I couldn’t leave them. I was afraid—’ He stopped very suddenly, dropping his hands to reveal an expression which told us all very clearly what he’d been afraid of.
‘It wasn’t your fault.’ Mum gently touched his shoulder.
‘But I knew!’ David jumped from his seat, the abrupt movement making Tilly look up, startled, and diamonds rolled to form an abstract pattern on the tray. ‘I knew what was happening, and I couldn’t stop it, and I should have got help faster! For Libby, for me, for all of us!’
I could see Ross out of the corner of my eye. He’d taken half a step away from me and was more of a dark presence than a person. ‘She was ill,’ he said, flatly.
‘Yes.’ Mum came back in. ‘The doctors advised us not to say anything to her – to you.’ Her eyes came back to me again. ‘I never mentioned it before because… well, because I was ashamed.’ Now she looked down at her knees. ‘People aren’t always kind about mental illness,’ she said carefully.
‘The doctors didn’t want you to have the idea put in your head,’ David went on, picking up smoothly as though they’d rehearsed this.
‘I told your midwife about your history too, and she said that it wasn’t inevitable that you’d get PPP, and to keep an eye out for symptoms and take you to the doctor if anything flagged up.
And it didn’t,’ he said bleakly. ‘Until it did, and by then it was too late.’
‘Hang on.’ I was trying to think back, through that tangle of sleeplessness and anxiety that new motherhood had put me into. ‘Just hang on. None of this is what I remember happening.’
Over at the table, Isobel had got down onto the floor and was helping Tilly pile beads into loose heaps.
She kept shooting glances my way, but they looked sympathetic more than anything.
The bird was pecking at the sofa stuffing but I couldn’t even muster the energy to ruminate on the damage that beak could do.
‘What do you remember?’ David asked.
‘None of this! You’re just… I don’t know, trying to create a story to cover up your behaviour!’
My leg was still shaking. Up and down, up and down, as though a heavy weight was leaping above it.
I was cold, that was all. Cold and a bit shivery, hardly surprising given the damp and the clouds that were gathering beyond the window.
There was a wind rising too, I could hear it susurrating through the treetops and small twigs waved a greeting through the top panes.
‘You got… weird,’ I said finally, addressing David directly.
‘As soon as Tilly was born, you were distant. You weren’t around after she was born, you just left us.
You went off for two days!’ I hesitated.
That memory was distant. While I could remember the first few weeks of being home with a new baby, memories of the time after that were obscure, as though seen through gauze.
‘Of course I was around. I went to work, and I came straight home to you both.’ David sounded tired more than anything. ‘I’ve got the photos of Tilly’s first bath, her first smile, to prove it.’
‘And then… I was just so tired and you weren’t there…’
‘I had to work, Libby! You took maternity leave and I was covering the bills so you had money, and I was acting in the evenings and doing voice-over work during the day!’
‘And then… and then… you started stalking me.’
David sighed and looked back towards Tilly again, who, with Isobel’s help, was now drawing. ‘I really didn’t,’ he said softly. ‘It was all in your head. And we couldn’t help you because you ran away.’ His voice broke again.
‘David came home one afternoon and you’d gone.
’ Mum sounded tired too. ‘Taken almost nothing except your car and some baby things. We tried to find you but…’ She trailed off and swallowed.
‘We were very afraid something had happened to you. And because I knew how it could go, I thought…’ Now she stopped completely and shook her head.
Her expression spoke the rest of the sentence though.
I rubbed my head. I had the vaguest twitch of a memory that felt like remembering a dream, in which I’d run out of the house, strapped Tilly in the car and driven off. But I’d done that dozens of times, going to the shop, going to the library – why was this memory any different?
‘You were living in your car.’
‘With a baby.’
No. None of this was true. It couldn’t be true. I looked at Ross. ‘This is all rubbish,’ I said, but couldn’t muster any volume. ‘I need to… I just need some air.’
Nobody moved to stop me. I walked out of the house into the building gale, where hail shrapnel hail periodically cut the air into small, sharp slices.
They were lying. They had to be lying. I wanted to walk and walk until I was too tired to think, too tired to process the words that kept running through my head. Psychosis. Delusions. Inherited.
I knew about postpartum psychosis, of course I did.
I’d read about it, along with postpartum depression and postpartum anxiety, it must have been mentioned in the classes I’d— that we had done before Tilly’s birth.
But none of it had been gone into in any depth; these things were mentioned in passing, prefaced by ‘you should be aware of’ and bookended by ‘but very rare’.
Surely… no. But my mum had suffered too?
‘Hey.’ It was Ross. He must have followed me out; now he was standing under one of the trees with the last loose leaves being shaken down around him as the topmost branches flailed in the rising wind. ‘Are you all right?’
Another hail squall fled through, driving me to seek the same shelter. ‘I don’t know.’
‘No, I can understand that.’ He blinked at me. ‘Do you think it’s true?’
I sat on a small stump. ‘I don’t know,’ I echoed. ‘It all sounds stupid. It’s not what I remember at all. But what I do remember is so messed up and confusing that I’m not sure what’s memory and what’s dream any more.’
Ross shuffled a bit closer. ‘It’s not your fault,’ he said quietly. ‘They should have told you. If it’s true, I mean, they should have told you.’
I gave a curious little half-laugh which lent nothing to mirth and everything to a kind of sarcastic agreement.
‘But then, if they’d told me beforehand, I would have brushed it off, and if they’d tried to explain to me once it got hold, I wouldn’t have listened.
I couldn’t have listened. My reality was so, well, real. ’
‘That’s how psychosis works,’ he said, patiently.
We were silent for a few moments. The hail dashed off to bother someone else and the wind rushed in to fill the gap. I shivered and Ross sat on the stump next to me.
‘I don’t know,’ I said again, stuck in a groove as I tried to make things work in my head.
‘Ross, I don’t know. All this time I’ve been thinking I escaped an abusive relationship and now…
now it looks as though I took Tilly from her dad because I was ill?
Where does that leave me now? Am I better?
Or is all this some weird kind of hallucination? ’
He reached over and lightly pinched the back of my hand. I snatched my arm away. ‘Ow!’
‘Did that feel real?’
‘Well yes.’ I stared at him. He looked a little bit more together now but cold without his jacket, which still surrounded the bird on Isobel’s sofa. ‘But you could just be a very convincing illusion.’
‘Nobody’s imagination is that good. I’m not an illusion, I’m a bloody freezing architect who is beginning to think that this house is never going to come down. I’m very tempted to lean heavily against a wall and see if I can’t shove the damn thing over.’
We sat in silence for a moment or two longer. Then I stood up.
‘Have you decided what to do?’ Ross stood up too.
‘No, but my daughter is in there and I can’t leave her for too long.’
‘Oh.’ He jiggled from foot to foot. ‘This is all very complicated, isn’t it? I mean, I only wanted to get Isobel out so I can build my house and here I am embroiled in some kind of Kramer vs. Kramer situation.’
‘You aren’t embroiled. You can walk away any time you like.’
There was more silence. Birds cawed somewhere off screen. Eventually Ross said, ‘I can’t, you know.’
The weight with which he delivered the words made my heart prickle and my eyes feel suddenly heavy and hot. ‘Oh,’ was all I could say.
‘You are… I don’t know. I’m no good at this sort of thing. Plus I’m absolutely freezing and the goose pimples have taken over my voice box.’
I laughed. Despite everything, I laughed. ‘Ross, you’re a bloody idiot.’
‘In so many ways, I agree with you.’ He turned and I was suddenly surrounded by him, with his arms behind me. ‘And you are the one woman I can’t save.’
‘I don’t need saving,’ I said slowly, and then with realisation dawning, ‘I can save myself.’
‘Well, good.’ We were face to face now. I could see every eyelash surrounding his big dark eyes and every pinprick of stubble that highlighted his cheekbones.
‘I really don’t think this is the time or place for this, but I’m feeling just a touch reckless right now.
Is it all right if I…?’ He angled his head.
I didn’t answer, I just leaned in and our lips gravitated towards each other. It was a kiss that kept the next hail shower at bay as it swept past, melting into rain as it touched our skin.
‘Well,’ I said as we straightened away.
‘Er, yes. Probably shouldn’t have done that, bearing in mind that you’re still in a bit of turmoil.’ Ross left his hands on my shoulders, where they had been cupping my upper arms. ‘Timing was never my strong point.’
‘I have to go in, Ross.’ I took another step back. ‘I have to face them.’
‘Or… or we could run away.’
I stared at him until his mouth twitched. ‘Yes, if I thought you were being serious I would have lamped you with this branch. Tilly is in there, and despite the fact her father and grandmother have a notional sense of responsibility, I need to make sure she’s all right. And hear them out properly.’
‘Of course.’
‘Ross…’ I returned the step I had just taken and reassured myself with the solid feel of his body, shivering though it was. ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know what the implications are here. I suspect David could invoke the forces of law and order against me if he wanted to.’
‘You were ill, Libby,’ he said, forcefully. ‘You can’t be held responsible for what you did. You truly believed you and Tilly were in danger.’
‘Maybe. I need to hear it from him. I need to know how bad it was.’ I turned and Ross caught at my hand.
‘All right. I’ll come in with you. You might need backup,’ he said. I raised my eyebrows. ‘All right, it might be backup from quite a way back, but I’ll be there.’
We walked back into the cottage side by side and hand in hand.