NINETEEN Gus
Maybe, when things are going well, you shouldn’t tempt fate by trying to make them better.
Our second daughter endured a trickier start to her life than Flora had. During the pregnancy, Charlotte suffered badly from morning sickness. Then the baby was late, which upset the timetable.
As Charlotte was keen to return to work as soon as she could, I negotiated a month’s paternity leave in lieu of holiday. We’d decided in advance that this would be a good opportunity for Kasia’s annual trip back to Poland to see her family. Since the due date coincided almost exactly with the start of Flora’s new term at nursery school, the timing looked perfect. We hadn’t even considered the notion that the baby might not slot into our carefully planned schedule.
The birth was difficult because the baby’s head wasn’t curled into her chest but tilted back, as if she wanted to see where she was going. We had decided on Bella as a name for a girl, but even the most doting parent could not have called her a beautiful newborn, with her face bruised from the forceps and her scarecrow head of red hair.
It’s easy to believe, when you have a baby who sleeps as Flora always had, that you’re a naturally relaxed and competent parent. I’d allowed myself that secret thought when overhearing the yummy mummies moaning about sleep deprivation. Bella was the retribution for my smugness. With Charlotte back at work after just two weeks, and Flora less than delighted by a screaming infant grabbing all the attention that had previously been hers, I found myself regularly driving around South London in the small hours with Bella in the baby seat next to me sleeping fitfully between traffic lights.
Since training to be a GP, I’d lost the hospital doctor’s habit of long, irregular hours, so I now existed in a zombie-like state of limited consciousness, my eyelids jerkily fluttering like the wings of a dying bird the moment I sat down, my consumption of espresso driving my pulse to a level where it sometimes felt like my heart was the only muscle in my body still capable of movement.
Charlotte was open about the fact that she didn’t really “do” the baby stuff, as if it was a choice that we could all elect to make. If I was exhausted, that’s what I’d signed up for. Instead, Charlotte took on the role of making sure that Flora didn’t feel neglected, spending a lot of time reading with her in the evenings, and, at weekends, taking her to ballet matinees and butterfly houses. Flora grew more like her mother each day, from her use of expressions—“Honestly!”—to her choice of clothes. Charlotte loved to tell the story of how, when trying on a pink ballerina party dress in Selfridges, Flora had asked the assistant, “Do you have it in black?”
At six weeks old, Bella started developing eczema. For the first few days, I persuaded myself that the patches of color on her cheeks were a rosy sign of health, but when it started spreading all over her tiny body, I could no longer avoid the diagnosis.
Eczema isn’t a condition that elicits much sympathy. It’s not usually life-threatening, unless it is allowed to develop a staph infection, but it is itchy and miserable for the child, and ugly to look at. When you have a healthy baby, you don’t realize how often well-meaning strangers peer into the pram to make a cheery comment; when you have a baby with eczema, you are acutely aware of the smile sinking from their faces as they see the crusty, weeping rash.
I rued the times when desperate mothers had brought their eczematous children to the surgery and I had blithely doled out hydrocortisone cream, assuring them that their children would grow out of it. How little I’d known of their worry and how ignorant I’d been of the care required to minimize the suffering of the child. Most children do grow out of the condition by the age of two, but when your baby’s only six weeks old, that feels like a life sentence. And the likelihood is that the child will develop asthma after the eczema disappears.
I spent any down time at work searching the Internet for support organizations, which proved far more helpful than any of my GP colleagues at providing practical tips. Kasia sewed little cotton mittens onto the sleeves of Bella’s sleepsuits to minimize the damage from scratching.
If it’s your own child, you find the energy, even when you’re working full-time, to get up in the middle of the night when the only thing that soothes her is being held and rocked gently. If you’re just an employee, you don’t have those reserves of parental love to draw on. Kasia did her best to share the load for a couple of months, but she’d found a boyfriend who was keen for her to return to Poland and help with his online business, and there was no reason for her to stay in England.
When she handed in her notice, I must have looked so desperate, she promised to wait until we found someone we liked. But it was difficult. Both Charlotte and I were back at work. The only candidate who we both thought might do came for interview on a day when Bella’s skin was particularly angry, and visibly recoiled when we tried to introduce her.
Although there’s no real doubt about eczema being an allergic disease, Charlotte developed the theory that it, and Kasia’s departure, and any other problem we had, were due to the Wandsworth house.
“It’s so low-lying and dark here. I’m sure the air is full of particulates,” she sighed, so frequently that I eventually figured out what was expected of me and asked, “Do you think we should move?”
I assumed that she was thinking of getting a place farther out of London in the cleaner air of Surrey, where we’d both spent our childhoods, but the house she had set her heart on was situated in one of the white stucco-fronted crescents off Ladbroke Grove. It was tall, elegant and way out of our price range.
“Don’t say anything until you’ve seen inside,” she whispered, as we followed the estate agent up the steps to the front door.
There were four stories, including the basement. “And potential to go into the roof,” he pointed out obligingly.
He was only about my age, but exuded the confidence of someone who drove a red sports car and wore his short black hair spiked up with gel.
“A lot of people also decide to go down these days,” he said, giving Charlotte a wink at the double entendre.
She rewarded him with a breath of insincere laughter.
An old lady had lived in the property and it hadn’t been modernized, I guessed, since at least the fifties. The kitchen, with its stand-alone oven and yellowing cupboards, had the look of a stage set for a John Osborne play. The whole place reeked of cats.
“It’s way too big for us,” I whispered to Charlotte.
“Exactly,” she said. “I’m thinking we could create two flats, one in the basement, one on the top floor, and still have a nice house in between.”
I guessed the only reason Charlotte had been able to get us through the door was that the property was practically derelict, or in the vocabulary of television estate agents, “a project.” One of the disadvantages of having two small children is that you’re so tired you’ll watch anything on TV.
“The people in the top-floor flat would have to walk through our bit,” I said, wondering why I was even entertaining the proposal. Charlotte was one of the least practical people I knew, and I’d never even put up a shelf. We were unlikely property developers. The only person I could think of who might be able to help us was my father. But we’d fallen out of touch with him and his new wife, through lack of effort on both sides, and perhaps out of loyalty to my mother, who we saw rather too often for my liking.
Charlotte dismissed this objection before I’d voiced it. “Kasia knows lots of builders. Just wait until you see the garden...”
The garden itself was fairly small and overgrown, but at the bottom, there was a gate leading into a small private park, which was shared with the other properties backing onto it. Even on a bleak late-November day, it felt like a secret oasis in the heart of the city. One of the large, well-established deciduous trees had a swing attached to its lower branches, another had a treehouse built into its sturdy trunk. The plaintive cooing of a dove made me aware of how peaceful it was. You could hardly hear the traffic.
“Wouldn’t the girls love it?” Charlotte slipped her arm through mine.
We stood there imagining ourselves sitting in this leafy Eden on summer evenings, watching our children play, with a glass of chilled Sancerre, maybe, and the smell of barbecues drifting from our neighbors’ gardens.
“Saturday mornings in Portobello Market.” Charlotte knew exactly which buttons to push. “All the museums just a walk across the park...”
“Quite a long walk,” I pointed out.
She frowned at me for spoiling her fun.
“Thoughts?” said the estate agent, without looking up from his mobile phone.
“We’ve got a bit of talking to do.”
“It’s a probate sale, as you know, so they’re eager to sell, but I’ve got people queuing up to see it,” he said. “So, if you’re interested, don’t talk for too long.”
He addressed this all to Charlotte as we walked back through the hall, then shook our hands and pointed his keys at the red sports car, which bleeped obediently.
“Wait,” Charlotte said, a ventriloquist through her forced smile, as I took our car key from my pocket.
“OK,” she said, when the estate agent had turned onto Ladbroke Grove. “I didn’t want him to think we were the type of people who drove a Picasso.”
“We are, though,” I said.
“Well, I don’t see myself in that way,” she retorted.
Charlotte saw herself as the type of person who drove a much swankier car, and lived in a beautiful stucco-fronted house in Notting Hill. She had every right to, I suppose, because she was now at the top of her profession, earning a good salary, and should have been married to someone who was earning as much as, if not more than, she was.
“When I get my first proper job,” I promised, “we’ll look in this area.”
“That’ll be too late,” she said firmly, as we sat in traffic. “Don’t you see this is our one chance, Angus? It’ll be out of our reach in a matter of months. There’s a slight lull because it’s coming up to Christmas, but as soon as spring gets going, the market will take off again. We’ve only got a look-in because it requires modernization.”
“That means more money on top of the money we can’t afford!” I countered.
“But we’d be adding value. We’d make it all back and more by selling one of the flats!”
“I see the logic,” I said, trying not to sound negative. “But I don’t see the deposit.”
“Well, actually, there is a way,” said Charlotte. “If your mother sold her house and if we sold Wandsworth, we’d have enough for a deposit, and my salary would cover the remaining mortgage. The lower-ground floor has its own front door. It would be a completely independent flat.”
I finally realized where she was going. “Have my mother move in with us?”
“She’d love it, Angus.”
“You’ve dreamed up the idea with my mother?”
“Not at all,” said Charlotte. Then, slightly sheepishly, “She did say, with Kasia leaving, and us in a spot, she wouldn’t mind looking after the girls full-time. I don’t see how that would work unless she was living with us.”
From her refusal to look me in the eye, I suspected that negotiations had progressed to a more advanced stage.
The traffic started moving again. We inched forward.
“It would make things much easier all round,” said Charlotte, leaving a few diplomatic moments to let her proposal sink in. “And she’s so good with Bella. It’s logical, Angus!”
My mother had been a dental nurse. When she came up to babysit at weekends she was scrupulously hygienic with Bella’s bathing and moisturizing regime. If she was really volunteering to take over from Kasia full-time, I knew I should be overwhelmed with gratitude, and yet every fiber of my being resisted it.
Sitting serenely in the passenger seat, Charlotte said nothing for the rest of the journey home, while my instincts wrestled with my intelligence, trying and failing to formulate a rational argument as to why my mother living with us would be such a bad idea.
“We’d hardly see her, you know.” Charlotte broke the silence just at the moment my mind had run out of excuses. She should really have been a professional poker player because she knew exactly when to sit tight and when to up the stakes. “I’m sure she values her independence as much as we do.”
“We’d share a garden...”
“But what a garden!”
Sometimes you can let yourself believe that if you just change one thing in your life, then everything else will fall into place. Picturing our family in that leafy tranquil place, I allowed myself to imagine that our lives there would be magically transformed. When I finally qualified as a GP, I would find work nearby, because there was no way I could commute from north of the river to the practice in Croydon. Maybe I’d like it better at a different place; it would be a fresh start where my colleagues would think of me as an experienced family man rather than a student who’d mucked up; I’d be earning a good salary so Charlotte wouldn’t have to work so hard; the girls could safely learn to ride bikes in the garden; on Sunday mornings, the four of us would go to the Natural History Museum or rowing on the Serpentine and be a happy family together.
It was getting dark as we turned into our street, making Wandsworth’s low red-brick homes seem even more oppressive after the airy white villas of Notting Hill.
“All right then, let’s see what she says,” I said as we pulled up outside the house.
By the time my mother arrived the following weekend, it was apparent that the proposition had already been discussed at some length.
“Don’t you think you ought to see it first?” I asked her. “It’s in a terrible state.”
“Oh, most of that’s cosmetic.” My mother flushed as she realized she’d let the cat out of the bag.
The following Monday morning, Charlotte made an offer which was accepted subject to contract and my mother’s house and Wandsworth went on the market. A week later, when Kasia departed, I felt a jittery mix of terror and excitement. We’d committed ourselves to unexplored territory and there was no going back.
My mother moved into Kasia’s old bedroom from Sunday to Thursday nights, returning to her house on Friday evening to spend the weekends clearing and packing up. For a couple of weeks, the arrangement worked amazingly well. I was able to drive to work instead of getting the train because my mother had her own car to ferry the children around. Bella almost immediately began sleeping through the night. At weekends, she tended to be a little more fractious, bearing out Charlotte’s view that I pandered to her demands too much.
My mother and I were careful around each other. I fought back the silent scream in my head when she said things that annoyed me; she dutifully disappeared after dinner each evening to watch television in her own room. On one occasion, late at night, when she’d clearly fallen asleep with the telly still on, I tried to slip in to turn it off, but found her door locked.
“You’re the one who wants her to be independent,” said Charlotte, when I got back into bed grumbling about the noise.
Since Flora’s birth, my mother had spent Christmases with us. It was a time of year I think we both dreaded. With snow twinkling over each channel logo on television, ski weather reports after the news, and happy extended families sitting down for banquets together during every ad break, I sometimes felt as if Ross’s ghost had managed to track us down to our living room.
However patient and solicitous a son I tried to be, I was sure my presence was an unwelcome reminder for my mother, so my solution was to hide in the kitchen for most of the day, pretending I needed to baste the bird or stir the sauces. Occasionally, I would poke my head around the door of the living room to ask if anyone would like a cup of tea or a refill of champagne, and glimpse my mother, wife and daughters doing Christmassy things together, almost as if they were someone else’s family.
Curiously, with the prospect of us moving in together in the New Year, our last Christmas in Wandsworth felt less fraught, perhaps because we were all making a conscious effort to look to the future. My mother arrived on Christmas Eve with a side of smoked salmon and an expensive Yule log from Waitrose. She stood in the kitchen with a gin and tonic talking to me instead of scuttling off immediately to chat to Charlotte, asking how my job was, and whether I’d decided on turkey or goose.
In turn, I praised the presents she had chosen for Flora and Bella. It was almost as if we had each privately decided to forgive the complaints we had against each other. Perhaps there was a statute of limitations on resentment, I thought, realizing, almost with surprise, that it was the tenth Christmas since Ross’s death.
On Christmas Day, when I saw my mother helping Flora to thread beads onto ribbon to make a necklace, I felt a rush of pride that she had been able to find joy with her grandchildren.
Flora wriggled down from her lap and ran over to me.
“Daddy, next year, we’re going to have a very tall Christmas tree!” she said. “So tall, we’ll need a stepladder to put the star on the top!”
“That’s right!” I said, imagining the high-ceilinged living room of our prospective house all painted white.
“What is a stepladder, Daddy?”
“It’s a ladder that stands on its own.”
“Can you draw it for me in my notebook, please?”
Flora had a fascination with words, so I’d bought her a notebook with a bright plastic cover in which I wrote new vocabulary down for her, often drawing an illustration. Next to the word Stepladder, I sketched a Christmas tree standing in a bay window like the one on the upper-ground floor of the Notting Hill house, with a stepladder beside it and a little girl on the top rung, stretching out with a star in her hands.
I handed the notebook back to Flora.
“St-e-p l-a-dd-er,” she said, sounding out the syllables, with her finger following the letters.
“Reading at four years old!” said Charlotte proudly.
“Ross was an early reader,” said my mother. “And Angus wasn’t far behind,” she added quickly.
“Granny may even have her own tree downstairs,” Flora said, clearly repeating something my mother had said. “So we’ll have two trees!”
“There are lots of trees in the garden, too,” I said, joining in with the plans. “So maybe we’ll be able to string some colored lights on those!”
Now Charlotte was smiling at me. She had Bella sitting on her lap, holding a soft little elephant with one ear that crackled and one ear that squeaked and a bell inside that tinkled when she shook it. Bella’s skin was having a good day, and with her halo of orange curls, she looked positively cherubic.
In my mind, I tried to capture the softly sparkling image of the three generations of women in my family, knowing that if I brought out the camera, their poses would stiffen, and the glow of contentment around them would be lost.
“Why don’t you come and sit with us?” Charlotte said. “You’ve been working so hard all morning...”
“Make a bracelet with me, Daddy,” said Flora.
The turkey was resting, the gravy was made. If the vegetables were a little overcooked, what did it matter?
Still wearing the navy-and-white striped apron, which had been her present to me, I sat down on the sofa next to my mother, and she handed me a tray of assorted beads. Flora clambered onto my lap.
In the grate, the flames of the coal-effect gas fire flickered. As the light outside the bay window faded, the colored lights on our tree seemed to glow brighter. I found myself thinking that if someone were looking in from outside, they would see a perfectly happy, harmonious family.