Chapter 5
MARY
By the time Beckett left, two hours after scaring the life out of me, I’d have more easily believed he was a bona fide angel than any sort of danger.
While I wouldn’t go so far as to call him charming, he’d certainly won the community midwife over as he’d hauled in more bags from the car, made her a drink and told the story of how Bob had almost been delivered in the back seat of his car, making me out to be some sort of superwoman, and him the bumbling best friend.
Because, yes, in this version Beckett was my bestie.
Which I initially felt guilty about, until I realised that at this point in my life it was the genuine truth.
He made a vague excuse about why some equipment had only arrived today while unwrapping a Moses basket and setting it up, then proceeded to convert a small chest of drawers into a nappy changing station. Following that, he unpacked more tiny clothes, muslin cloths, breast pads and a papoose.
‘Is there anything else we’ve forgotten?’ he asked with a nonchalance implying everything was under control and always had been.
‘I spotted the car seat,’ the midwife said, ignoring Beckett and speaking directly to me. ‘Are you getting a pram?’
‘Yes, absolutely,’ I stammered.
‘Well, as far as I’m concerned anything else is simply over-expensive clutter. I mean, I was bathed in the sink, my mum used an old shawl as a makeshift sling. I slept in a drawer, for pity’s sake! Can you imagine? They’d want a referral to social services if I found that happening these days.’
After she’d completed all the basic checks and declared everything ‘tickety boo’, which had me fighting back the tears because, honestly, if this was tickety boo then motherhood sucked, Bob started wailing again.
The midwife offered to check how feeding was going, which apparently turned out to be ‘beautiful!’, so in this alternate reality I’d stepped into, ‘beautiful’ now had a whole different meaning, too.
I did start crying then. Woeful, silent tears that dripped onto Bob’s head as I rubbed his back in the hope of producing a burp.
‘I’m sorry,’ I whimpered. ‘It’s all been a bit of a shock.’
‘Darling, if he’d been a planned C-section two weeks after your due date, this would still be a lot of a shock. Don’t worry. You’re doing great. It’s the mums who don’t cry that make me nervous. Besides, this fella clearly has you well looked after. You’ll be fine.’
I briefly imagined how it would go if I told her I’d met this fella less than twenty-four hours earlier, which threatened to turn my sobs into a bout of hysterical laughter, so I instead asked her a nonsense question about the umbilical cord.
As soon as she’d left, Beckett ushered me upstairs to where he’d run a bath, which I only dozed off in once, and when I came back down, he handed me an omelette stuffed full of bacon, mushrooms and tomatoes, which was quite possibly the best meal of my life.
Even if he did have to go before I’d finished eating.
‘I’m sorry, I have to get back.’
‘Of course. I wouldn’t want Tanya upset with you again.’
He gave a sheepish shrug. ‘Tanya’s gone. It’s Sonali this evening.’
‘Okay. Wow.’ Nothing about Beckett so far had made him seem like the type of man who had multiple women waiting about for him. But, then again, my track record proved that I was about as hapless at sussing out men as I was at parenting.
‘Yeah.’ He ducked his head. ‘It’s really not wow.’
His phone rang, preventing him from saying any more. ‘Sonali. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes… Okay. Twenty at the most.’
Giving me an apologetic wave, he backed out of the room, before running back in thirty seconds later and handing me a scrap of paper with a mobile number on, his own phone still held to his ear.
‘Call if you need anything,’ he mouthed, then left us to it.
* * *
I didn’t call, however much I longed to over the next few weeks, where feeding, wailing and pacing up and down in exhausted desperation blended together in what appeared to be my life now.
I laughed pitifully at the thought that I’d viewed living alone as a negative thing, back in the days when no one demanded to gnaw at my nipples or peed in my face the second I took their nappy off.
I waited almost a month, until I’d started to get the hang of the baby bath and sleepsuit poppers, how to make toast and tea one-handed and navigate the aisles in the local farm shop with a sling on my chest. I began to know this tiny person, what his cries were telling me, how best to soothe or stimulate him, when to panic – which, after a few false alarms, I discovered was pretty much never.
In our newborn bubble in the forest, I relearned how to get up, even when every muscle begged me for five more minutes of sleep, and keep on plodding through the next twenty-four hours.
As I fell more fiercely in love with my son – even as, during a few dark and desperate hours, I felt like I couldn’t stand the sight of him – my broken heart continued to mend.
I didn’t know whether to feel relieved or disappointed at, apart from pale-blue eyes, how little he looked like his father.
Eventually, on a Friday evening towards the end of November, I showered, put on a relatively clean pair of pre-pregnancy yoga pants and brushed my hair before sending a message I should have sent weeks earlier, but simply didn’t have the mental energy to muster up the courage.
Mary
Hi, this is Mary – the woman who went into labour in the back of your taxi
I wanted to say thanks so much for the food and baby things
I don’t know how we’d have got through that first week without it
I waited an anxious few minutes, but there was no reply, so I sent another one.
Mary
I’m so sorry it’s taken me this long to say thank you, I hope you understand things have been full-on
I spent a fretful couple of hours still waiting to hear back, imagining Beckett was far too distracted with Sonali, or whoever it was this evening, to read it.
He was probably right this moment showing his gorgeous date the messages arriving from the hopeless woman who’d been so abysmally unprepared he’d felt compelled to help her.
They’d be in a lovely restaurant somewhere, or cosied up on his sofa with a takeaway, shaking their heads in sympathy at this sad single mother who didn’t realise that Beckett had been simply doing the decent thing for a stranger in distress, and of course he’d never meant for her to actually contact him.
Bristling with indignation, I picked up my phone the second Bob dropped off again. Yes, it had taken childbirth to force me into acknowledging to what extent I’d dropped the ball this year, but I was a strong, independent, capable woman. I didn’t need Beckett, or anyone else.
It only took me about half an hour to come up with the perfect message to convey that I was, in fact, a thoroughly competent human being who was smashing new motherhood.
Mary
If you let me know your bank details, and whether there were any other receipts apart from the ones you left on the coffee table, I’ll sort the money for all the stuff
Sorry again for the delay in getting around to this – like I said, I’ve been rather busy, ha ha!!
It was almost eleven when a reply pinged through.
Beckett
Genuinely pleased I could help. Don’t worry about the stuff.
Okay, so now I was even more irritated. That message was verging on dismissive and the full stop downright snarky. Plus, I wasn’t worrying about the stuff , I was a successful businesswoman who paid her debts.
Mary
The receipts add up to ￡315. If you don’t want me to have your details, I’ll round it up to ￡400 to cover anything else and leave cash at the Sherwood Taxis office.
Dr Beckett Bywater wasn’t the only person around here who could do snark.
This time, I didn’t have to wait for a reply.
Beckett
Please don’t do that. The office is in Bigley. You can’t get there without a car.
Mary
I can hire a taxi!
I did a quick maps search.
Mary
Or walk – It’s only seven miles
Beckett
With a pram?
Well, no, seeing as I was too busy sending petty messages to a random taxi driver to order one.
Mary
I can use the papoose
Beckett
You had a baby a month ago. I’m guessing you’re even more shattered now than you were then. Besides, there’s more snow forecast. Please don’t even think about walking to Bigley with a tiny baby.
Mary
Do you always use perfect punctuation in your messages?
There was a two-minute wait this time, which felt like twenty.
The last comment was supposed to be more light-hearted banter than a reaction to him implying I was being stubborn and foolish, but during the past few months of isolation I’d lost all perspective on these things.
I reread the conversation about fifteen times, wondering if instead I came across as slightly unhinged.
When the next message contained only his bank details, I shrivelled up in embarrassment and dismay.
After an agonising few seconds, there were two more pings.
Beckett
I only want ￡265. The Moses basket is a gift. For Bob, not you (if that’s still what you’re calling him?). If you pay me any more I’ll drive over and post the extra through your letterbox.
And yes, I always use punctuation, due to being a thirty-two-year-old doctor speaking to a friend, not a teenage boy sending offensive memes to his mates.
Oh, boy. He even spelled out his age.
But I hadn’t messed things up between us, and ￡265 felt like small change considering what he’d done for me was priceless.
Were we going to make it more than a few hours in this house without someone crying, ever again?
To my surprise, we ended up chatting for a few more minutes about Bob, how I was doing, whether the forecast was right about more snow, and then, emboldened by the combination of Beckett calling me a friend and sleep-deprived semi-delirium, I took a risk.
Mary
I really want to take the car seat back and bring a bunch of flowers or something for Yara and Patty
Fancy coming with me?