March #3
‘Have you spoken any more about having children?’ she probed. She knew me too well, could sense something was off balance. ‘Has something changed?’
I opened my mouth to tell her about the false alarm, if I could even call it that, and to describe how it had made me feel, or not feel. The way it had taken my vague want for something bigger and made me wonder whether that something bigger could be a baby. ‘I—’
‘Right, ready?’ Caleb was by her side, bottle in hand. He looked at her, looking at me.
‘Yes, you two should go,’ I said, clapping my hands together as if to pronounce the conversation over. Now it was my turn to glance nervously towards the stairs.
Anna tilted her head to one side, asking – like my mother, without asking – if I was sure.
This time when I looked away, I didn’t look back at her. ‘Have fun,’ I said, shrugging off my coat and slinging it onto a spare hook on the rack beside a small person’s puffer jacket.
Caleb said they would do their best, and Anna, still sounding concerned, added that they wouldn’t be late.
I had just swallowed my first forkful of grilled aubergine and saffrony yoghurt when I heard a dull thud followed by a sharp cry.
I rested the white takeaway box on the coffee table alongside a glass vase of daffodils that looked like they only had one or two days left, their petals slightly curled and beginning to crisp at the edges.
I paused my TV show on domestic violence and hurried up the stairs and onto the landing.
Straight ahead, Anna and Caleb’s room was dark, while around the corner, on the right, a wedge of dull light emerged from Theo’s door, slightly ajar.
Inside, a constellation of yellow glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling and a blue-green night light in the shape of a dinosaur plugged into a socket by its tail. Our very own northern lights.
I found him curled on the beige carpet, his face a mix of snot and tears. I scooped him up and sat on the edge of his bed with him on my knee, rocking gently from side to side, stroking his fuzzy black hair. ‘Oh Theo, what happened?’ I asked. ‘Did you fall out of bed?’
He didn’t answer, but his crying did become less urgent.
A few minutes later, his breathing had steadied, and after a few minutes more, he was quiet, drifting back to sleep with his free hand clutching my jumper and his face nuzzled into my shoulder.
I sat there for some time, listening to him, looking around his room.
There was a shelf filled with children’s books, at least half a dozen of which I’d bought myself, and a wicker basket of stuffed animals, including a fluffy white rabbit that Anna had picked up during one of several baby-related shopping trips I’d joined her on before he was born.
At the time she didn’t have any other friends who were mothers, so I was the default companion for the job.
Since having Theo, she’d fallen in with a bunch of ‘mum friends’, and now she would be making more – women who spoke the language of motherhood, whose schedules were more closely aligned with hers.
I’d noticed that some of my other friends had become less available since they’d had children, but not Anna.
Perhaps, I thought, it was a transition that, for some, happened only with the arrival of their second child, or third, or fourth.
Slowly, I unfurled Theo’s small brown fingers and rested him back down on the mattress, pulling the duvet up and over his shoulders. I kissed him on the forehead then crept out of the room, leaving the door open just a crack, like it was before.
Back downstairs, sitting on Anna and Caleb’s sofa, surrounded by their belongings, was – I think – the first time I actively envisaged what kind of mother I would be.
I thought about my own childhood, and my relationship with my mother, the days we spent together at home, in the garden, on the beach.
The days when she would lie patiently on a towel waiting for me to bury her in sand, which took some time when I refused to use a spade and the grains slipped so easily through my fingers.
When we’d search the vegetable patch for the snails that had been hungrily chomping holes in her lettuce.
We always told each other everything, often to my father’s dismay – he didn’t think, for example, that a nine-year-old needed to know that he’d lost his job as a grain merchant and we were short of money.
I closed my eyes and tried to picture myself with a baby, but when I did, the baby either wasn’t real – instead, it was one of those china dolls with tight ringlets and glass eyes – or it was missing entirely.
I could vaguely muster up an image of myself with a small child, but again, something wasn’t right ; like a video that needed to be left to buffer, the image was blurry.
I tried to push the thought to the back of my mind, but it kept creeping forward, demanding my time and attention.
Visions flashed in front of my eyes of me happy, sad, devoid of energy, centreless, complete.
By the time Anna and Caleb got home, I’d hardly touched my food and the TV show was still on pause, a woman’s tired face on the wide screen.
Theo had fallen out of bed again, and again I’d picked him up and rocked him until he’d drifted back to sleep, then tucked him in beneath the duvet.
Anna thanked me for taking such good care of him.
When Caleb opened the fridge to get some cold water, he discovered the bottle of wine they’d put in there earlier, undrunk.
He joked that I must be coming down with something.
I headed home with my leftovers on my knee and an unfamiliar ache inside me.
The day Theo was born, Noah and I were at my parents’ house in Norfolk.
It was October, and as we’d left behind the glass and concrete of the city and slid deeper into the countryside, I’d noticed the sepia and russet tones of the trees.
The hedgerows had shed their summer growth.
Freshly ploughed fields had an earthy finish.
I remember thinking that we should try to make that journey with every change of season.
We’d arrived the night before and were sitting down to a cooked breakfast of scrambled eggs and bacon that my father had proudly ‘rustled up’ when Caleb called to say Anna was having contractions.
The doctor suspected it would be at least a few hours until she was properly in labour, and in fact, it wasn’t until late that night that he called again to say she’d given birth to a boy.
I looked across the bed at Noah, who was holding a book and also his breath.
I smiled and nodded, and he sighed with relief.
I tried to continue smiling as I listened to Caleb telling me there had been a complication – something to do with Anna’s placenta – and an emergency C-section.
The hospital planned to keep them in for a few days to monitor both her and the baby.
We could visit if we liked. Something in Caleb’s voice, softer than usual, with protracted pauses, told me Anna wanted me there.
I hung up and, without discussion, Noah and I agreed we would leave first thing in the morning.
I must have been stealing glances at him in the car because he said there was no need to worry.
When he took hold of my hand and pressed it firmly to his lips, I knew he wasn’t just talking about Anna and the baby.
A week or so after he’d first told me that he didn’t want children, he’d told me the reason.
He’d been married before, when he was fifteen years younger, to a French woman he’d met during his undergraduate course.
Soon after they graduated there was a wedding, and a few weeks after that she was pregnant.
It didn’t matter that it was an accident ; she took the test and crescent smiles stretched wide across their cheeks.
They shared the good news with their friends and family and rented a two-bed flat with a small balcony.
I turned to face the window as I tried to imagine how it must have felt.
Giving birth to a baby girl who had, inexplicably, died in the womb two months before the due date.
Undoing the plans already made around her.
Feeling the emptiness where she’d once been.
My fingers found the window switch, and wind began buffeting at the car.
Noah opened his own window a crack, and the beat softened.
They’d tried to work through it, but once their grief had latched onto them, it refused to loosen its hold.
Gradually, it filed down their points of contact and picked apart the feelings, thoughts, opinions that had brought them together.
It was what the loss did to their relationship, Noah said, rather than the loss itself, that had sparked a change inside him.
After, she’d packed up her things and moved back to her family home in France, and he’d returned to Warwick to do a PhD.
To begin with, they’d kept in touch, but as time went on the communication had crumbled.
She was the person he’d planned to spend his life with.