Babyville (24 page)

“No. I'm fine. What time is your mum coming?”

“She said nine.” Sam butters the toast and sits down at the table. “Can you believe this bloody weather?” The rain drums hard against the window.

“November in London. What a pleasure.” His tone may be derisive, but he is used to spending every November, every winter, in England. His business may be getting busier, but he cannot see it stretching to exotic holidays for a very long time to come.

“I've just been lying in bed thinking of beaches. That's what I could do with now. Some sun. A proper holiday. It's been years.”

“We went to Torquay in the spring,” Chris says defensively. “Hardly years ago.”

“No,” she concedes vaguely. “It just feels like years ago. Do you think we'll ever have a proper holiday again?”

“Not unless we can leave George with your mother or bring someone along to help.”

“Well the first is definitely out of the question. You know my mother, she'd have heart failure if she thought she'd have to have George overnight, let alone for the duration of a whole holiday.”

“Yeah, I know. I can't believe she's taking George for the day,” Chris agrees. “Do you think she realizes that she'll actually have to feed him? You'd better demonstrate how a bottle is warmed up, just in case she breaks a nail in the process and sues you.”

“Oh, come on.” Sam gets defensive, for while it's perfectly reasonable for her to criticize her mother as being the mother from hell, it's not acceptable for Chris to do the same. Chris ought to just support Sam by agreeing with her when she's in mother-hating mode, and keeping quiet the rest of the time. “My mother's not that bad.”

Chris decides to keep quiet.

“Anyway,” Sam moves on, “when you said bring someone along to help, what did you mean?”

“I meant like a nanny or something. Au pair.”

“But we talked about this before George was born. I don't want to have help. I want to do this by myself. I can understand women handing their children over to be brought up by someone else if they have to work, but as long as I'm at home I need to be there for him, and I don't want anyone else involved.”

“I know, I know.” Chris is tired of this argument, still unable to understand her resistance. “The first five years are the formative ones,” he parrots. “And your mother wasn't around and you're not going to do the same to your child. It's just that I thought you might have changed your mind now you've had him.”

“What? Suddenly decide I can't be bothered to bring up my own child and hire a nanny?”

“No, I didn't mean that. I thought maybe you'd consider having some help, maybe someone who can look after him a couple of days a week, just to give you a break. You could go out for lunch with friends. Have a massage. Go shopping. Whatever you want. Simply get away from it all for a while, recharge your batteries, make yourself feel like a human being again. You're the one always accusing me of being able to get away from it. You always say you're the one who feels trapped, but it doesn't have to be like that, Sam. You don't have to spend every minute of every day with George.”

Chris takes a deep breath and continues. “And before you say anything, most of the women you know have their mothers around to help them. I'm not about to start criticizing your mother, but she's not exactly the most maternal of women, and although you've tried to hide it I know how devastated you are by her lack of interest. The fact is she's too caught up in her own life, and too selfish, to be of any real help with George. So you can't compare yourself to other women because you haven't got any help at all.

“All I'm saying is that you don't have to feel guilty about not doing everything yourself. George isn't going to suffer, and he isn't going to grow up like you and resent his mother for being completely disinterested in his life, because you're not.”

He speaks slowly, impressing the point. “You are not your mother, Sam. You never have been. If you had been anything like her I would never have fallen in love with you in the first place.” This manages to raise a small smile on Sam's face. “The point is, it's okay to admit you can't do it all yourself. It's okay to show some vulnerability and ask for help. And Sam, you need some time off. For you, for me and for us. For our marriage.”

Chris tails off, shocked at the amount he's just said, more shocked at the calmness with which he managed to deliver it. Sam too is shocked, and if she's honest, the thought of handing George over for a couple of days a week sounds like bliss. In fact Sam has never been more tempted by anything in her life.

But she has made a commitment to George. And, more importantly, she has made a commitment to herself. She is going to be the best mother in the whole wide world. And the one thing she is absolutely sure of is that the best mother in the whole wide world would never farm her children out.

Not even for two days a week.

24

“I bought the most divine
sleepsuit for my darling grandson.” Patricia glides through the door, leaving a trail of Opium in her wake. “Where is my little angel?”

Sam smiles as she hands George over to her mother, who covers his face with tiny little kisses that make him laugh. This is a side of her mother she hasn't seen, and it fills her with warmth, and hope, when she sees it now. Perhaps they are wrong. Perhaps being a bad mother does not necessarily mean you will be a bad grandmother. Perhaps Patricia will come through after all.

“So what are you planning to do today?” Sam smiles, running her fingers through her hair as she turns, sensing her mother's disapproving looks, for her mother is of the old school: the school that believes you should always look your best, just in case.

“Actually, Sam, I don't think I can have him for the day.” Sam's face falls, and Chris catches her eyes with an “I told you so” look.

“But you said you would take him out for the day.”

“I know, darling, but I'm so incredibly busy, and things have changed now. Of course I'll take him for an hour or so this morning, but there's a bridge game this afternoon and someone dropped out, and I said I'd make up the four. Don't give me that look, Sam, I have a life too.”

Sam grinds her teeth. “And your life is so much more important than your grandson, isn't it?”

“Don't start. I'm helping out as much as I can. Your father and I can't be expected to stop everything for you, no matter how much we love our grandson.”

“Love him? You barely even know him.” Sam realizes there's no point in saying these things, but she's had enough, and even if her venting doesn't achieve anything, vent she must.

“What are you talking about, Sam? I have to tell you I really don't need this. I had a million things to do this morning and I'm not doing any of them because I'm spending time with George, and all you can do is try to make me feel guilty. I'm sorry that I'm not the kind of person who wants to be with their grandchild twenty-four hours a day, and I'm sorry that I have a life too, but that's just the person I am and you'll have to accept it.”

Chris leaves the room, shaking his head in disgust. He learned long ago not to get involved, but the sheer selfishness of Sam's mother never fails to horrify him. His parents live in Newcastle, in the same house he grew up in, and they try to come down to London a couple of times a month to see him. He knows that were it not for the distance between London and Newcastle, his parents would come around every day. They would offer to baby-sit every night, anything to spend time with their beloved grandson. He always knew Patricia and Henry were selfish, but he never realized quite how selfish. And anyway, everyone they had spoken to BG said that it would be different when the baby was born.

“You should never underestimate how wonderful it is to be a grandparent,” said one grandparent of six years' experience. “It's a different kind of love to when you have your own children. Quite, quite overwhelming. I think perhaps because it is love without responsibility, you are free to just give everything of yourself, to love with total abandon. Wait and see, Sam's parents will fall in love just like the rest of us once the baby's born.”

How wrong she was.

Not that he is particularly surprised, but Sam has been devastated. Devastated because she too believed that Patricia would be different. She had put up with the self-centeredness all her life, had fought for her mother's unconditional love, and had only given it up as a hopeless cause when she met and married Chris. She was starting a family of her own, she decided, and this was the family that mattered.

Sam thought she had dealt with it by slowly removing herself from her mother's life. Where once she telephoned regularly, dropped in to see her parents, sought her mother's advice on daily dilemmas, she had managed to reduce this, before George was born, to perhaps once every couple of weeks.

But George has brought all her own parenting issues to the fore. She had dealt with the pain herself, but now she was dealing with the pain all over again, only this time it was worse because it was her own child. While Sam could live with her mother not wanting to be around her, she couldn't live with her mother not wanting to be around her child.

Chris treads carefully around the subject of her parents, with the eggshells on which he steps seeming ever more fragile. He tries not to say anything, to quietly support, for if he were to say what he truly felt, the floodgates would open and the full force of his own anger and disgust would surely alienate him and Sam still further.

The best thing he can do is leave the room.

“Fine,” Sam says. “I haven't got the energy to argue with you anymore. I'm exhausted, I've been up all night for weeks and weeks, and I thought that today I'd be able to go back to bed and catch up on some sleep, but if you have bridge”—she spits the word out with disgust—“then I'll have to understand. What time will you bring him back?”

Patricia, oblivious of her daughter, looks at her watch. “Eleven? I could maybe manage eleven-thirty if that's better. I thought I could take him for a walk.”

“Fine,” Sam mutters. “I'm going upstairs to have a bath. See you later.” And up she goes, trying to contain the tears that are already welling up, knowing that the one thing she will not do, will never ever do, is cry in front of her mother, show her mother how much she cares.

There is only one plus, as far as Sam is concerned. An hour, hour and a half maximum, when you have to have a bath, sterilize bottles, wash up Tommee Tippee bowls and try to look vaguely human, means there's definitely no time for sex. Not a hope in hell.

 “You're
not serious. You and Chris are having problems?” Julia can't keep the shock out of her voice.

“Oh God. I shouldn't have said anything,” Sam moans into the phone.

“Sam, I'm your best friend, for God's sake. If you can't tell me, who can you tell?”

“I didn't mean that, I meant that saying it out loud makes it . . . I don't know. It makes it . . . real.” She exhales deeply, partly frightened, partly relieved.

Last
night they were watching television, for a change. They still haven't found a baby-sitter, and, given Patricia's reluctance to baby-sit or have anything much to do with George, they are lucky if they manage to go out once a month. If Chris's parents are down they'll baby-sit, otherwise each night follows the same routine: dinner at eight, TV until nine, Sam going to bed at ten past nine, swearing to Chris she won't go straight to sleep, that she'll wait for him to come up to bed, then promptly falling asleep as soon as her head hits the pillow.

But last night there was actually something watchable on the box. A two-part drama portraying the breakdown of a marriage. Sam found it both compelling and disturbing. She watched it with pounding heart, barely daring to breathe. Sitting on the sofa, curled up with the sort of body language that any old amateur could see meant Keep Away, she stole furtive glances at Chris every few minutes, wondering if he knew, if he could see how close to the mark this program was, but he didn't look at her.

Sam watched the actress on screen grow more and more unhappy. Her husband didn't understand her, they had drifted apart, had nothing in common, and the longer she watched the more she knew. This was her story. She hadn't slept much the night before. She climbed the stairs to bed feeling sick, knowing that her marriage was over.

“Are you okay?” Chris asked, standing in the doorway and looking at her with concern.

“Hmm? Yes. Fine.” She avoided his gaze, and ducked under his arm to go to the bathroom. “Just tired.”

She ran a bath and climbed gratefully into the hot bubbles, staring at the cracked tile above the hot tap, wondering why she felt so detached.

My marriage is over, she kept thinking. Why don't I care more? Sighing, she held her nose and sank her head under the warm water, welcoming the muffled silence, wishing it could go on forever.

She reemerged, ran some more hot water to drown the sound of the television Chris had switched on in the bedroom, and replayed some of their married life together. She remembered how it had been in the beginning, but surely even then there were warning signs, and with sudden and shocking clarity she knew that she had married the wrong man.

Not ambitious enough, her mother had said. A cabinetmaker? “Samantha, that's someone we pay for a sideboard, not marry,” she had said in horror, when Sam announced she had met the man she knew she was going to marry.

Sam had been devastated, and desperate to prove her mother wrong, she now decided. Even though, she finally realized, lying in the bathtub, her mother had proved to be right.

The truth is, Chris should have been in the pages of the interior style magazines. He should have been charging thousands and thousands for his walnut dressers and cherry tables, selling them to the Chelsea set as fast as he could make them. Chris Martin should have been the first name on the lips of every interior designer worth his salt.

But where was Chris Martin? He was, she thought with sadness, exactly where he was six years ago when she met him. In the same Wandsworth workshop, with the same struggling furniture-makers, making the same cupboards and dressers and sideboards.

Sam had no doubt his work was beautiful. She had no doubt he was talented. But beauty and talent were nothing without ambition, and although Chris had upped his prices slightly every year, the fact was, his business only just managed to keep their heads above water.

This wasn't supposed to happen, she thought, submerging again to rinse the shampoo. She was supposed to have fallen in love with the man, not fallen in love with his potential.

But of course, lying in the bath, almost entirely submerged in misery and unhappiness and depression, Sam decided that this was exactly what she'd done. That when she got married at Chelsea Register Office, she took him for better or worse, but was pretty damn certain it would get better: All he needed was a good woman behind him. All he needed was Sam.

Perhaps, she thought, her own career provided the mitigating circumstances for his. Sam was, after all, at the forefront of the graphic design world, her designs in almost every household in the country, her salary more than enough for the three of them.

It had never seemed that important when she was working. She had always assumed that at some point Chris would fulfill his potential, and even if it took longer than she had thought, it wouldn't really matter because they had everything they could possibly need. The only time it would be a problem would be if they had a family, but even then they would find a way to cope.

And she had thought they had.

Sam and Chris had sat down when she first discovered she was pregnant, and had looked at their finances. They had looked at how much money they could afford to put away each month, and had decided that although it would be difficult, if Sam decided not to go back to work full time (as she had already decided), they could just about manage, provided she found some freelance work.

Sam had spoken to some design consultancies, and had been assured of plenty of work when she decided to start again. They had in truth all been desperate for her to work for them, and all are waiting for Sam to contact them when she decides she is ready.

If she decides she is ready.

The truth is Sam has never felt less ready for anything in her life.

She had said this to Julia already this evening, before the conversation moved on to Chris; before Sam admitted her marriage was over. She had told Julia of her fears, of how ridiculous she felt, expecting Chris to provide when she had always been such a staunch feminist, but had shrugged and said she never expected motherhood to be so wonderful, had never expected not to want to go back to work.

Although perhaps Sam is scared of going back to work. Perhaps there is more to this than merely motherhood. If anyone can see this, Julia can, Julia who knows Sam better than anyone, Julia who is shocked to hear Sam's fears about her marriage.

“You don't think,” Julia says tentatively, and somewhat wisely, given that she is not a mother herself (although she has read every book ever published on babies), “you might be suffering slight postpartum depression?”

“Don't be ridiculous. What on earth makes you say that?”

Julia thinks how different Sam is now, how the light seems to have gone out in her life. She thinks about the anxiety that seems to afflict Sam constantly about George: She reluctantly admitted to Julia that every time she walks down the stairs with George she imagines the horror of tripping and dropping him; that when she walks down the street she's convinced a car will hit them; that she no longer reads the newspapers, because every story about a baby being harmed feels like George is being harmed, and she found herself sobbing for hours about these children that were, and were not, George.

And Julia knows how isolated Sam is, how desperate she is for company, yet how difficult she finds it to leave her house. She knows all of this, yet she does not know how to say this without risking their friendship, because Sam is in no fit state to hear it.

“I just think you don't seem like yourself right now, you seem a bit down. I thought maybe you could go and see someone.”

“Absolutely not,” Sam snorts, exactly as Julia knew she would. “I've got a gorgeous baby and I'm absolutely fine. The only problem I've got is Chris, and although I'm not planning on walking just this instant, I can't see this marriage lasting out the year.”

“Are you really that unhappy?” Julia's voice is filled with sadness.

“Julia, you have absolutely no idea. I never thought I could be this lonely or this miserable with another person. The only thing that keeps me going is that there's always divorce.” She gives a resigned sigh. “That it is just a question of picking the right moment.”

And then there is a silence. Julia does not know what else to say.