Stella #2
Gavin has seen Rose during that time, just to be totally fair to him.
One Saturday a month, his mother, Sue, formerly (though again, still legally) my mother-in-law, arrived – tight-faced and apologetic, also clearly very embarrassed about the situation – and took Rose out in the pram to see Gavin, who apparently met them in the park.
I spent that ninety-minute window pacing up and down in the house, thinking about all the things I could be doing with my free time, achieving nothing because I felt queasy about being away from Rose, and happily the whole thing was over quickly.
It wasn’t a good system, not compared to the system where Gavin and I spend Saturday mornings walking in a sun-drenched park, sipping on oat flat whites and taking adorable candids of each other with the baby, which is how I’d envisioned our life playing out.
But it was a tolerable system. Just about.
Better, by a fucking mile, than this new system where Gavin comes to my house – our house – and I have to talk to him while wishing he would wrap his arms around me and tell me that everything from the last six months was his evil twin and that he is back and so is our life together.
The door goes and I’m standing literally behind it.
He can see the outline of my body, so the entrance I’d planned (I leave him waiting a couple of minutes then come down, pretty and flushed, in jeans and a white blouse, holding Rose) isn’t possible.
I open it and I’m knocked sideways by the bizarreness of seeing a face that I’ve studied in every possible light, moment, attitude, a face that I saw basically every day for a decade and then suddenly didn’t see at all for six months.
‘Hi,’ he says. ‘Can I come in?’
He still has keys to the house, I assume. He didn’t give them back. I’m glad he hasn’t attempted to use them.
‘Sure.’
He takes his shoes off, toeing them off, then pauses for a moment.
Instead of leaving them in the middle of the floor like he would historically have done (to my annoyance), he puts them in a neat pair, to the left of the door.
He’s wearing socks that I bought him. Well, a pair from a five-pack of striped socks from Waitrose that I bought on a Sunday morning on the basis that we might as well just share socks seeing as we shared everything else.
Rose squawks.
‘Hello, my love!’ he says, reaching for her. I want to grab her and smack his hand away. I offer her out to him. He takes her, supporting her wrongly – or if not wrongly, awkwardly. To my absolute delight, she cries.
I take her back. ‘She’s a bit clingy at the moment,’ I say, trying to pretend that I’m not pleased. ‘She really only wants to be on me.’
‘Sure,’ says Gavin, looking distraught. Now I feel guilty, and sad for him, and still completely delighted that she patently prefers me.
‘Do you want a coffee?’ I ask.
‘Yeah,’ he replies. ‘That’d be great.’
We got the coffee machine for our first wedding anniversary, our present to each other so that we could make lazy brunches at home.
Balancing Rose on my hip, I scrabble one-handed in the door of the fridge, among jars of baby food, trying to find the packet of grounds.
It’s still got a clip on it to keep it fresh.
A yellow one. Gavin put it on there, the Sunday before he left.
Did he know that he was leaving me by then?
Did he open the new packet of coffee grounds on that Sunday knowing that he’d make one coffee from it, put it in the fridge and then disappear from my life?
I try to open the clip while holding Rose and wobble. She slips slightly on my hip.
‘I’ll do it,’ Gavin says eventually, after watching me struggle. I don’t argue. I sit on the sofa at the far end of the kitchen, Rose on my lap, playing with my necklace, and watch as Gavin brings the coffee machine back to life.
‘The tank’s totally empty,’ he says, after a few moments of silence.
‘Yeah,’ I say.
‘You’re supposed to refill it fresh every time you make a coffee.’
I haven’t touched the coffee machine since he left. I couldn’t.
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘I know.’
He makes the coffees. I put Rose down for her first morning nap and we sit holding our coffee cups like props at the opposite ends of the sofa, as if we haven’t seen each other’s arseholes.
‘I wanted to talk to you,’ Gavin says eventually, looking into his latte. ‘About Rose.’
‘What about Rose?’
‘About visitation.’
I think I probably knew this was going to be about that.
It didn’t seem likely that Sue was going to play baby steward every weekend until Rose was old enough to take an Uber over to wherever Gavin ends up living.
But also, quite a big part of me had been hoping we might be able to just keep things this way forever.
‘Right,’ I say. I panic-Googled this morning about how to talk to your ex-husband and it said to try and say as little as possible, to get him to do the majority of the talking, and to communicate exclusively about the child.
‘What were you thinking?’ I ask. How many times a month are you going to take my daughter away from me after abandoning us both?
‘I’d like to have her every other weekend.’
The oat milk burns in my throat and I think I’m going to throw up all over the green velvet sofa that I told him I didn’t want us to buy because it was such a millennial cliché.
Every other weekend? He’s seen her for twenty hours in the past six months and now he wants her every other weekend?
She’s only just become aware that my body isn’t a part of her body, she can’t spend every second weekend miles away from me.
The article I read said that you have to be calm, measured and restrained in how you speak to your ex, that you must not say an outright ‘no’ to anything. ‘No,’ I say, trying not to cry.
‘No?’
‘No. You can’t take her every other weekend – she’s too little. She’s only just stopped breastfeeding. She’s not even one yet. She’s a baby. And you don’t know how to do it, you don’t know which spoon she likes or which That’s Not My book she likes—’
‘I’m not going to learn those things unless I spend more time with her,’ he interjects.
‘She’s not a project for you to learn on, she’s a person, and these are, like, the most formative years. She’s a baby, she needs her mum.’
‘She needs her dad too, Stella.’
I mean, I was inclined to agree until he left.
I always thought that having two parents was better than having one.
But is it actually an asset to have a relationship with a man who, with absolutely no warning or explanation, just decided to disappear from your life?
Does Rose really need to spend regular time with a man who abandoned her?
Because I’m not finding it a particularly enriching experience myself.
‘Then why did you leave?’ I snap. ‘If she needs her dad, maybe you should have stuck around?’
He takes a deep breath. ‘You know why I left.’
I don’t, actually. I’ve got some badly written WhatsApps where he attempts to spell it out and I’ve got the working theories of my various friends.
But I don’t know why, and, honestly, I’m really not sure what could have been so completely horrific about our situation that it would have induced him to leave.
I can say with absolute certainty that I’d have changed anything he asked me to change, fixed anything he asked me to fix, done basically anything imaginable to convince him to give it another go.
But I wasn’t given the chance to do any of that because his decision was made without consultation.
‘Look,’ I say, trying to sound calm. ‘I know she needs both of us, I want her to have both of us, but she’s too young for weekends right now and you don’t have the experience you need, you’ve got to build up—’
‘Okay, let’s build up.’
I have a horrible feeling that he might have used some LinkedIn negotiation shit on me because I can see exactly where this is going and I don’t know how to stop it. ‘Yeah, we can build up, but slowly—’
‘Okay. Look. Why don’t I take her one evening a week?
’ he says gently. ‘I’m staying at the cabin in Mum’s garden.
It’s a two-bed, it’s nicely done, it’s all childproof.
So Mum can be around the first couple of times to make sure I know what I’m doing and then we’ll be in a routine.
I’ll pick her up in the afternoon, take her home, do her bedtime routine, get her up, give her breakfast and then drop her back with you. How does that sound?’
It sounds worse than sticking a cotton bud all the way into my eardrum until it hits my brain.
‘I don’t think you’re ready,’ I say, weakly.
‘We weren’t ready when we had her,’ he argues. ‘It’s a learning curve.’
‘If you wanted more time with her then why didn’t you just. . .’ I trail off. This isn’t dignified. I’m about to make the same point I’ve already made and it’s not going to change anything.
Gavin looks out of the window, clearly unable to meet my eye as he says, ‘I’d really hoped you’d be able to do this with me, without us needing to involve anything legal. But she’s my daughter too. And if I have to, I will.’
‘Okay,’ I say, eventually.
I want to say, ‘How is it fair that you left me, you took away my husband, my security, my stability, and now you get to take my baby away from me once a week?’ But of course, I don’t.
I say again, ‘Okay.’ I sigh, because I need him to leave before I lose the ability to hold back my tears. ‘We can try it.’