Chapter Gordon
Gordon
Coming back from the registrar’s office, it’s as though a cloud has descended.
Cora looks down at the baby and feels she has broken something.
Less than an hour ago, walking in the opposite direction, his small form seemed filled with hope and possibility.
But now, that’s tainted. Where earlier she’d seen only the peach blush of his cheeks and the delicacy of blue-veined lids, now she sees a chin dribbled red and lips pinched in popeish judgment.
She could have refused to follow Gordon’s instructions, told the registrar some other name.
Julian. Bear, even. But she didn’t. And although her real resentment is with herself—with her husband—somehow, it seems easier to let it fall to this newborn lying in his pram.
Maia has run ahead to walk along the church wall, raising into relevé, extending her left leg, arms out for balance, the bulk of her autumn layers shrouding any grace in her movements.
Cora is relieved she does not have to talk.
She’s cold and tired when they arrive home.
She leaves the baby asleep in the hallway and crawls into bed with her coat still on.
She doesn’t know how much time has passed when she’s stirred by Maia calling up the stairs that he’s awake, but she sits on the edge of the bed for a minute longer, listening to him cry and trying to muster the energy to stand, only forcing herself to move when Maia calls again.
Downstairs, having wrested him from his snowsuit, Cora sinks onto the sofa, lifts her jumper and…
stops. Repulsed. As though nothing could be more alien.
The baby bangs his head against her chest in frustration until he finds his own way to nourishment, and she turns away and stares at the wall as he feeds.
A few days later, as Cora and Gordon brush their teeth before bed, she bends to spit out the paste and then says, “I wondered if I could have money to buy formula?”
When he doesn’t reply, she looks up and their eyes meet in the mirror.
He continues to move his brush in careful circles, one tooth at a time.
She has never known anyone to brush with such diligence, gums preserved in pristine arches.
She looks away, not wanting to appear captive to this pause in time, and opens her side of the bathroom cabinet, pretending she has not cleansed her face already.
She squeezes a blob of soft-pink lotion onto a cotton pad.
He rinses and spits, rinses and spits, and only then says, “Why?” A word—a question—that seems to steal the air from the room.
“Oh, I don’t know. I’m just not getting on with it so well this time,” she says, trying to sound casual.
“Not getting on with it?” He repeats her words as though they’re incomprehensible.
Perhaps if she’d said, With Maia it felt natural, but this time it feels different. Do you ever hear this from your patients? Then, he might have listened in that careful, doctorly way of his, discussed it with her, then come to the idea of formula himself. But she didn’t.
“So you want to just give up?” He is staring at her in the mirror.
“Do you know nothing about how important this time is? The nutrients and antibodies? It isn’t just this week or this month.
It’s the rest of his life—it’s protection from cardiovascular disease, diabetes, everything.
But, instead, you want to give our son some man-made rubbish from a tin?
Exactly what else is it I ask of you, other than to be a mother to our children?
But that’s too much?” he says. He takes the cotton-wool pad from her hand and crams it into her half-open mouth.
“Well, it’s not happening, Cora. You can damn well get on with it. ”
He walks from the room, and she stands for a moment, dumb.
Cora removes the pad, hooks a finger inside her cheek, trying not to gag as she sweeps the web of loose fibers from her tongue, the roof of her mouth. Then she bends and places the sodden wad into the bin, careful not to let the metal lid clang against the wall.
When they’d met over a decade ago, what had struck Cora first was his kindness.
In a café on the Strand, putting her wallet back into the zippered pocket of her bag, she’d dropped her sandwich packet and, forgetting the surgical boot she wore, nearly overbalanced as she’d gone to pick it up.
“Here, let me get that for you,” he’d said, gathering up her lunch and moving to open the door for her as he brushed off her apologies.
“What’s the injury?” he’d asked, motioning to the white boot once they were outside.
“Oh, I’ve just had a small bone removed from my foot. It’s less dramatic than it looks.”
“Which one?”
“Sesamoid?” she replied, more of a question than a statement, because so few people seemed to have heard of it.
“Tibial or fibular?”
“Both. You’re a surgeon?”
“GP. Both is unusual,” he replied, appraising her, before reaching his conclusion: “You’re a dancer.”
“Maybe, maybe not. It depends on my recovery.”
“Listen, I was going to Embankment Gardens to enjoy the sunshine. Will you join me?”
And because it felt like the first day of spring, and because he was a doctor who seemed kind and trustworthy, and because he was still holding her lunch and she had nothing else to do, she agreed.
In the park, they sat on his jacket, laid out on just-damp grass. “You haven’t got anything to eat,” she said, realizing he’d left the café empty-handed.
“It’s okay, I’ve come straight from a conference with good biscuits.”
He handed her the sandwich, and as she ate, she found herself telling him about the excruciating wait.
Of knowing the removal of these tiny bones might have destroyed her balance, her ability to land jumps; how she worried her big toe might quickly deform without the sesamoid beneath.
He’d listened with a medic’s ear, asking thoughtful, precise questions about her pain, her recovery.
And when he’d crossed off a checklist of physical issues, he moved on to how it affected her as a person.
She’d told him how it felt like the slow, messy ending of an all-consuming love affair. One she’d left her family in Ireland for as a young teenager, and now found herself being abandoned by.
“It’s all I’ve been focused on for so long, I’m not sure who I am without it.
But I can see now, even if it’s not this that ends it, something will.
I may have another six months, a year, before some other part of my body gives out.
And it’s like”—she gestured to the air with both hands—“everything.”
The details of that day come back easily.
Their socks peeled off, winter-white feet sunk into the grass: his decorated with a smattering of dark hair, nails perfectly trimmed; hers calloused and battered, still red in places, even after a few months away.
Working feet, he said kindly when she apologized for the one on show.
He’d leaned forward to brush black sock fluff from one of her toes and it had felt both surprising and right for him to touch her.
She remembers how they’d passed an apple between them, turning it to take polite bites from opposite sides, until two narrow strips of shiny green skin where they met was all that was left.
She’d told him about her last performance.
How it had been set to Betjeman; how, as the poet’s words boomed through the vast auditorium, they were as metronomic as any music.
She’d beat out the first line of “A Subaltern’s Love Song” on the ground to show him, three rows of tutus rising and falling with the words, and he’d surprised her by supplying the next line.
She’d always divided people into Science or Arts, but here was someone who was both.
By the time they stood to leave the park at dusk, his hand at her waist as her booted foot prickled back to life, she also felt the unexpected tingle of…
love? She’d not imagined that just five months later she would be pregnant with their child.
When had things changed? Was it that night at dinner with his parents, when he’d dug his nails into her thigh beneath the tablecloth to stop her from speaking?
Probably, although she hadn’t realized it at the time.
Nor did she see it when, one Sunday, irritated by something she’d said, he’d thrown a half-eaten pear across the room at her—hard—its irregular shape sending it off course and bringing it to land on the sofa beside her.
She’d glared at him and said, “If that was meant to hit me, you’re going to have to improve your aim,” and they’d laughed, and he’d apologized.
She does not remember him ever apologizing again, and she does not remember them laughing about it after that either.
Would things have been different if she hadn’t laughed? If she’d threatened to leave?
When Cora comes out of the bathroom, Gordon is sitting in bed reading a thick hardback. He looks up from the book and smiles and she knows the argument about formula is over, but so, too, is any possibility of discussion.
“It’s about a guy working in Lebanon around the same time I was there,” he says. “He went on to help in the Falklands, San Salvador after the earthquake. I wonder if he’s in Somalia now…”
In a parallel life where she and Maia hadn’t come along, he, too, would have gone to help in those places—humanitarian sabbaticals in between his work as a GP.
She knows she’s meant to acknowledge this, but she just wants to sleep before the baby wakes again, so only nods and makes some noise intended to approximate interest. Since coming home from the registrar’s office three days ago, she’s found it hard to play her role.
Her face feels like hardened wax, smile lines fixed in repose, impossible to reanimate.