Chapter 5
‘Hello, Mum!’ comes the greeting of the smiling woman on the doorstep as Kate opens the front door, her baby in her arms and her top still hitched up after yet another feed.
‘Oh, hi there,’ Kate replies, taken aback. The first time someone said that to her – a nurse in the hospital in the hours after her daughter was born – Kate had looked over her shoulder, looking for her own mother. The realisation that the nurse was talking to her had felt how Kate imagined a medical student might feel if the air steward on a plane yelled, ‘Is there a doctor on board?’ and the terrifying silence that followed made them realise they might just be the closest thing.
‘I’m Lydia, the new health visitor. Had you forgotten about today’s appointment? The three-month check-up?’
‘Um, I …’ Kate shifts her daughter in her arms, trying to tug down her top without disturbing her. Before she can answer, Jay is at her side, smiling brightly.
‘Sorry about that, I was just working. Come on in. Can I get you anything? Tea, coffee? I’m not sure we have any milk though …’
‘That’s fine, thanks,’ Lydia replies, reaching to take off her shoes as she steps inside.
Kate wants to tell her not to bother – the cottage is hardly a no-shoes household, or even a ‘we sometimes hoover’ household – but she’s already following Jay through to the living room in her socked feet, Kate closing the door and heading on after them with the baby.
Lydia sets some equipment out on the floor and then stands up, beaming, her arms outstretched towards Kate.
‘Let’s have a look at this little one then. Hello, Rosie!’
Kate hands her over somewhat hesitantly, Lydia taking the baby with the same casual confidence with which Kate would handle a loaf of bread.
‘So, how is she doing?’
Lydia starts to take the measurements she needs, Rosie wide-eyed but thankfully compliant.
‘She’s doing great, isn’t she, Kate?’ says Jay with a proud smile.
‘Yeah, she seems OK. She’s still not sleeping for more than two hours at a time, though, often less than that.’
‘That’s totally normal,’ Lydia replies brightly as she expertly undresses Rosie before placing her on the scales. ‘Don’t worry!’
Kate bites her tongue, not wanting to say that she hadn’t actually been worried about Rosie at all.
‘OK, that’s good to know. I was also wondering if there are any books you could recommend about looking after a newborn?’
During her pregnancy, Kate made endless notes, as though having a baby was a test she could ace if only she revised hard enough. But now that Rosie is actually here … Well, the truth is, it isn’t anything like what she read in the books. But perhaps it isn’t that the books she read weren’t helpful, but just that she hadn’t read the right ones.
It still stuns her that she and Jay were allowed to leave the hospital with the baby unsupervised. That she went in as just Kate and came out as a mother and was left to figure out everything that came next by herself. That day, she kept expecting doctors to come racing after her, telling her there’d been some mistake and she had to hand her baby back to them for safekeeping. Occasionally, she still wishes they would.
‘You can’t learn everything from books, Kate,’ Lydia laughs. ‘Your baby hasn’t read the book, after all! It’s not a bad thing to want to seek out information, but you have to trust your intuition. That’s the most important thing.’
‘That’s what I’ve been telling her,’ Jay chips in. ‘Didn’t I say not to worry, Kate? You’re Rosie’s mum, you’ll always know what’s best for her.’
Rosie lets out a little gurgle that sounds suspiciously to Kate like, yeah, right.
‘OK, thanks!’ she says, trying to make her voice sound normal. Like the voice of a calm and capable parent. She forces a smile on her face that she hopes does not at all say, But I’ve never done this before! I don’t have any intuition! If only they could see her phone browser history. All the questions typed in a panic in the middle of the night. Is it normal for my baby to make weird noises when they sleep? White-noise machines – do they actually work? Can you die from sleep deprivation?
After a few more checks, Lydia hands Rosie over to Kate. As soon as Rosie is in her arms, she starts to wriggle, twisting her head away from Kate’s body, her face scrunched in dissatisfaction.
‘Well, she’s a perfectly healthy baby,’ says Lydia. ‘I’m really pleased with how she’s doing.’
‘That’s brilliant,’ says Jay enthusiastically. ‘I knew she’d be an overachiever, just like her mum.’
Rosie lets out a wail and Kate does her best to comfort her by bouncing her up and down on her shoulder.
‘Thanks,’ she adds herself. ‘That’s certainly a relief.’
‘And how are you settling into motherhood, Kate?’ asks Lydia as she starts to pack up her things. ‘Have you managed to see friends and family much?’
‘Well, we only recently moved here from London.’
There was a time when Kate thought she would stay in the city forever. Although it took her a while to settle in when she first moved there after university, she found her place as soon as she realised the trick about London: that, really, it’s not one city at all but a patchwork of neighbourhoods stitched together by bus routes and Underground lines. Once she realised that she didn’t need to feel at home in the whole city, just her little bit of it, things became much easier. And she loved it. The vibrant colours and smells on Electric Avenue where she did her shopping, her favourite cocktail bar in Brixton Village, the undercover market filled with places to eat, Brockwell Park that felt like a green oasis but with the jagged London skyline giving her a feeling of excitement and possibility. And her local lido, the place she went whenever she needed to switch off.
But things changed when she and Jay started talking about a baby. It had come on quite suddenly, a feeling that she could only describe as broodiness but that felt like an aching hunger, akin to homesickness, except for a home that didn’t exist yet. A sense that her life that had felt so full up until that moment was suddenly missing something. Everywhere she went, she began noticing babies. It was as though they were following her, with their cute chubby cheeks and wide eyes, and the way they stared up at their parents with such adoration and the parents looked down at them as though they were the only people in the world, even if they were packed in a busy Tube during rush hour. Kate’s heart tightened every time she spotted a family, which, in a city home to close to nine million people, meant that her heart received quite the workout.
It wasn’t just the babies that she started to spot, though. She began to notice dangers everywhere that she had previously overlooked. The pleasant buzz of traffic became an incessant symbol of pollution and danger. She started googling local crime statistics.
And deep in her gut, she felt a tug back to the Somerset countryside where she’d grown up, recalling memories of a slower pace of life that had seemed so boring when she was a teenager but took on a new appeal once she reached her thirties. It would be nice to live somewhere they wouldn’t have to carry a pram down a steep flight of steps every day, where she could hang her washing out to dry instead of having it fill their tiny flat, getting everything damp, where it didn’t take an hour to get anywhere on the Tube. Where she didn’t have to get on the Tube at all.
It makes her feel old to realise how much her priorities have changed over the last few years. But her priorities have changed. And she has changed too. More than she can get her head around recently.
‘I haven’t really had a chance to meet anyone local yet,’ she explains to Lydia. ‘But my mum and sister have both been over a lot. They’re coming over later, actually. They live nearby.’
Because that was the biggest thing that pulled Kate and Jay away from London in the end. Even though Jay’s parents lived near their place in Brixton, Kate just knew that as soon as the baby arrived she would need her own mum nearby. Thankfully, Jay had been understanding, especially once he realised how much more they could get for their money outside of London. They fell in love with the Old Post Office as soon as they saw it, the little cottage with the postbox in the front wall. When Jay saw the outbuilding that could become the photography studio that he wanted to set up to supplement his job as a freelance photographer, the deal was done.
Lydia’s face lights up. ‘I used to live in London. Tulse Hill. Where were you?’
‘That’s so funny, isn’t it, Kate?’ chips in Jay. ‘We were practically neighbours; we were down in Brixton, not far from Brockwell Park.’
The memories come back in a visceral rush. The cosy, ramshackle second-hand bookshop run by her friends Frank and Jermaine, their dog Sprout presiding over things from her basket in the window. Kate’s favourite bench at the top of the hill in the park where she went whenever she needed to think.
‘Oh, Brockwell Park is so nice. Did you ever go to the lido there?’ Lydia asks. ‘I’d left before it all happened, but I hear it nearly closed down a few years ago. It would have been a massive shame if it had gone – I loved going there in the summer. It was like going to the beach, but without the travel.’
Kate closes her eyes briefly and can see glittering turquoise water and a smiling woman swimming beside her with white hair and eyes as blue as the lido itself, the smell of chlorine like perfume on her own skin, the feeling of ease spreading across her body as she slipped from the steps into the cool water.
When she opens her eyes, Jay and Lydia are looking at her expectantly and Rosie is still twisting in her arms. It feels like just yesterday that she was swimming at the lido every morning. And yet, despite how easily she can picture it all, there’s a disconnect, as though she has fallen into another person’s dream.
When Kate fails to say anything, Jay answers for her, flashing her a warm smile. ‘Kate was one of the people who campaigned to keep the lido open. It’s how we met, actually. Kate and I both covered the story at the newspaper we used to work at. She wrote the story and I took the photos. But it became more than a story for you, didn’t it, Kate? In the end, she was basically spearheading the whole thing.’
Is it just Kate’s imagination or does Lydia look at her a little differently? Assessing whether this woman with the unwashed hair and faint aroma of stale milk could really have once been a headstrong campaigner.
Kate doesn’t blame her. She hardly believes it either.
‘Well, it wasn’t just me.’ The face of that same woman with the sparkling blue eyes surrounded by smile lines pops into her head again, although this time she is holding a placard and raising her voice in a rallying cry. Rosemary. Even after all these years, Kate still misses her. To many outsiders, their friendship might have seemed an unconventional one, with forty years between them. But somehow that didn’t seem to matter. Their friendship had changed Kate. She liked to think it changed them both.
Her attention darts to a framed photo on the mantlepiece of her and Rosemary standing on the poolside on the day that they found out the lido would remain open. They are beaming at one another, arms around each other’s shoulders, and their joyful expressions sum up the happiness of that entire summer. The whole of Brixton seemed to turn up after that, as if everyone had needed the nudge of potential loss to remind them of what they had on their doorstep. Kate and Rosemary kept to their morning swims, going early before the crowds descended and before Kate headed to work. Until, suddenly, Kate was left swimming alone.
‘Still, what a great thing to have been involved with,’ says Lydia, and Kate blinks quickly, tilting her face down towards Rosie and quietly using the same breathing technique she used down by the river this morning.
It’s because of the lido that she’s been so drawn to the river. She swam at the lido through her pregnancy, right up until their move from London to Somerset the month before Kate’s due date. There was no time for swimming after that, what with desperately trying to get the cottage ready for the baby’s arrival. And since then … Well, there hasn’t been time for anything.
She’d seen photos online of the popular local river swimming spot before they moved – it’s one of the things that drew her to this village in the first place. If moving to a village with a lido wasn’t an option (and goodness, she had tried), then at the very least she needed to have water nearby. She loved the look of the buzzing atmosphere on that particular stretch of river.
As yet, she hasn’t had a chance to visit in normal daylight hours, or found the confidence to actually go swimming on any of her secret early-morning visits. The river seems a very different beast to her beloved lido with its regimented lanes and clear blue water. And she’d even been nervous the first time she swam there. Although, back then, she wasn’t swimming alone. She had Rosemary as her guide.
‘Anyway, I’ll leave you three to it now,’ says Lydia, picking up her bag. ‘But do make sure you keep in touch with your friends, Kate, and maybe you could try to make some here too? There are lots of mum and baby groups in the area that you might like to try. It can be overwhelming being a new mother and it’s important to stay connected.’
Jay nods eagerly.
‘Thanks, I’ll think about it,’ says Kate.
Rosie has started to cry again, but Kate does her best to smile, shifting her arms to try to find a position that feels more natural. It’s only when Jay shows Lydia out that Kate lets the frozen smile melt away from her face. She only realises the effort it had been taking when she doesn’t have to do it anymore.