Ghosts by Daylight (9 page)

I did not do yoga, have a birth plan, or even have a firm due date – when the doctor talked to me, it was only to plan as far as the next visit: ‘Let’s see how we go,’ he said. ‘You’re probably going to deliver early.’ I was doomed to remain in the present, unable to plan for the future.

At night, I had vivid dreams, nightmares sometimes, of Africa, or the Balkans. All of the things that had never frightened me before – pain, for instance – were slowly creeping into my life like a patient waking up from anaesthetic.

A friend brought over a pile of used maternity clothes for me to borrow. ‘Have you bought a crib? And a car seat?’ she asked, looking around my flat. ‘Don’t you even have a blanket to wrap the baby in when you come out of the hospital?’ She burst out laughing. ‘You’re in denial! You’re going to be a mother! It still has not sunk in, has it?’

But I was not in denial – I was in shock. Some women know all their lives they will have children. I loved children, loved how they smelled, loved the things they said, loved the way they moved and their clothes and haircuts, and their books and music boxes. But I remembered my childhood as something distant, slightly painful and lonely.

Every time I thought about it, something told me I was not ready. Even as my friend Gillian gave me a baby shower, and all my girlfriends arrived with blue packages and tiny sweaters and onesies – how could I ever fit a baby’s arm inside a onesie without breaking it? – and a special bucket for nappies, and a blue winter coat with adorable toggles, I sat in my chair, smiling and filled with gratitude and love for my friends, all the time wondering what the hell I was doing.

My own mother, my sister, and nearly all the women in my family had full-time jobs as mothers. They were wonderful at it. They drove their children back and forth to soccer, skating lessons, piano lessons, private schools, but I sensed, even in my own mother, a kind of distant dissatisfaction.

Every time I went to the doctor when I was in my twenties, he repeated the same thing to me: don’t wait too long to have children. But since then I had spent nearly two decades seeing children wrecked and traumatized by war. I saw babies born in the middle of a siege, saw amputated limbs, kids who stepped on landmines, a young swimmer who lost her breast to shrapnel, budding 9-year-old soccer players who lost their hands to American smart bombs, kids who had breakdowns, kids who were blown up by mortars as they were building snowmen.

I saw kids orphaned from AIDS in Africa and India, and I held them and fantasized about bringing them away with me and giving them a home and food and real medical treatment, but the fact was, I was not entirely sure I – who could barely take care of myself unless it was in the midst of chaos – could care for them. And seeing all of that, as much as I protested that it had done nothing to me, alienated me from people who had never seen it at all. When I returned to London from my assignments, the only people I wanted to see were people I did not have to explain anything to, people who did not ask questions, people who had seen what I had seen. And Bruno, who knew me, who understood me, and who spoke a language identical to mine.

I played Russian roulette with my biological clock, and then when the time came and I felt capable of becoming a mother, it was almost too late. I got pregnant very easily. But the weeks would pass, I would buy special oil to rub on my belly for stretch marks, and maternity dresses, and then one night I would wake up in agonizing pain and get rushed to the hospital, and a grim-faced nurse or doctor would tell me the baby was dead.

No one could work out what was happening, why my body kept failing me, and I spent what seemed like months inside the labs of St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, having blood test after blood test. Finally, someone, a doctor in New York worked it out: my niece and my mother suffered from a rare blood-clotting disorder, and one day, I found out I had the same thing. But it took years to discover, and years for this baby to come down to earth.

In the Bible, both Sarah and Rachel who had very late and very yearned for babies are told that the child who is much desired, much waited for, is always special. And I had waited so very long for my Luca.

When I finally held him firmly inside me, I tried to act appropriately: I thumbed through my copy of
What to Expect When You’re Expecting
, but I only got through the first chapter. Nothing in it seemed to relate to me. Someone loaned me a Moses basket with long handles so I could carry the baby everywhere, which was my plan. When people asked what I would do about work, I would shrug and say I would take the baby with me in the basket. In truth, I had no clue what I would do or how I would manage my life.

When my boss, a man with many children, found out I was pregnant, he brought me into a small office, his face full of anger. ‘I’ve got a war correspondent who can’t go to war,’ he said.

‘I’m allowed to get pregnant, aren’t I?’ I responded, but he talked about contracts, and Iraq, and maternity leave and getting back to work, and I knew then that I could never do it again, not the way I had before. I knew that I would miss reporting the war that was breaking out in Baghdad, in Basra, in Mosul, but I realized for the first time I had made a choice, and that I had to stand by it.

He finally stopped talking, still angry, and I sat in my chair, slightly dazed. I’m not sure I knew then how deeply the addictions of being in those places, those times, watching countries fall apart and being put back together again, had affected me.

In my London flat with the crooked wooden floors and the windows that did not shut firmly, I lay on the bed and talked to the baby, just like every other mother-to-be. I told him everything: about his father, who was far away in Africa, about the mango tree and the green studio where I wrote, about how we met, about our wedding in the Alps during the heatwave, about how the entire wedding party had trooped through the wheat fields, past the barns, to visit the statue of Our Lady and lay flowers at her feet. I asked him to come out healthy and strong and brave.

On several occasions, before she died at the age of ninety, I met Martha Gellhorn, the third wife of Hemingway, and a war correspondent herself.

The first time I met her, in the early 1990s at the start of the war in the former Yugoslavia, she was remote. Mutual friends had warned me she was difficult: she was tricky, she did not like other women, but somehow I had convinced myself that when we met, it would be different. Above all, her friends whispered, do not mention Ernest Hemingway.

For our first meeting, I was going to interview Gellhorn for a reissue of a collection of her war reporting, and it took me all day to get from London to her remote cottage in Wales. I took trains, buses and finally a taxi, which dumped me at the edge of a field. I hiked in the blazing sun, and wondered what I would say to this woman who I was hoping would be my mentor, would tell me things about how to live my life and where to go and who to meet.

I was twenty-eight years old, and had recently left my first husband, a photographer I had met at university. I was free. I wanted her to advise me how to be an independent woman, how to work in a man’s world, how to report real issues, how not to be afraid. I had felt the same way when I met the legendary Vietnam War reporter Gloria Emerson at her home in Princeton, and she had been equally distant. Both of them were powerful writers who understood chaos and destruction and death, but both were notoriously difficult in real life, had complicated love lives and neither had ever given birth. Was it war that had done this to them, had somehow frozen them in time away from real life?

Gellhorn, who Hemingway once described as ‘grace under pressure’, opened the door, elegant and beautiful in slim trousers, a neat blouse, and a burning cigarette. She was as lovely looking as Lauren Bacall. ‘Don’t think you’re getting lunch,’ she said a bit fiercely, ‘because you’re not.’ Instead, because it was hot, she gave me a glass of iced water. Later on, she did show me her upstairs bathroom, and she had laid out a fresh towel for me, so perhaps she was not as thoughtless as she was trying to appear. In the end, we talked for many hours. She called me ‘my dear girl’ – I must have seemed very young to her – and although I longed for one of her long, slender cigarettes, I did not have the courage to ask. We watched television together. The war in Slovenia had just started, and she made historical references to Yugoslavia that I did not yet understand.

Nothing ever happens to the brave – that is what they said about her, and that day I realized above all what she had: courage. I wanted a life like hers, courageous, free and unencumbered.

I met her one more time. A few years had passed, and now I was what they called a war reporter, although I could never say it without great embarrassment, because it was not what we – the tribe I worked with, who travelled round and round the world from conflict to conflict – called ourselves. It was something other people called us. I was older, and we were on a panel together about the ethics of reporting. Although I had agreed to sit on the panel, I had done so with trepidation – after my article on Gellhorn had appeared several years back, she had written me a letter in a neat, spidery handwriting on pale blue paper with MARTHA GELLHORN embossed at the top. She hated the article. She called me a liar for describing her cottage as ‘light filled’. She said it was not full of furniture as I had described – she counted the pieces and listed them. She said I had committed the cardinal sin against journalism – lying. And worse of all, I had mentioned Hemingway when I had promised her publicist I would absolutely not. Hemingway had treated her terribly during their marriage. He had cheated on her, stolen her stories and her contacts, humiliated her, and her life after him was spent trying to live down the shadow of being the third Mrs Hemingway. My editor had insisted I mention him at some point, and I did not fight it enough. In those days, I was very intimidated by editors.

But I was more intimidated by Martha Gellhorn. I cried and cried when I got the letter. By then, I had another kind man in my life. He made me a cup of tea and rubbed my arm and told me, ‘Darling, don’t worry about it – she was probably having a bad day.’ But I did worry. I put the letter in a wooden box high on my shelf, and it stayed there, a burning shame then, and sometimes even now it hurts.

And so, with this letter in mind, I faced her. In fact, I sat next to her on the panel, and we were photographed together. Somewhere that photograph still exists. She greeted me warmly and kissed me on both cheeks. The meeting in Wales a decade earlier seemed to have been forgotten. Martha was very old but still very beautiful. She was draped in scarves, tall, slender, with snowy hair and exquisite bone structure.

She called me ‘dear girl’ again.

Martha died when she was ninety. It was whispered, but never confirmed, that she killed herself. She was found alone in her flat with a letter. Her close friends were distraught, but I remember thinking:
How much more could she have gotten from life?
The beautiful books, the beautiful words, the many men, the love affairs, the disappointments, the pain, the war, and all the things she saw.

When I met Emerson in Princeton – she killed herself, alone in her apartment in Manhattan – she reminded me of a more raw Gellhorn. She did not have Gellhorn’s beauty, but she was clever and smart and lived by herself in a lovely house, surrounded by male friends and admirers. I loved the fact that a male reporter I knew who had reported with her in Vietnam called her a ‘pain in the ass’. I loved any woman who irritated the male press corps, who was strong enough to be described like that.

I loved these women, and what they stood for. They lived alone and played alone and worked alone in a world that did not like women to do that. I wanted to learn from them how to do it. I wanted to be like them, and not – as much as I loved and admired my mother – like the women in my family.

But the thing about these amazing women was that they did not hand out their secrets, or directions of how to live one’s life because, I suppose, they did not know. I learned no secrets of how to live my own life without a map from either Emerson, or Gellhorn (or even Gloria Steinem, who I met one winter morning in Manhattan, beautiful in silk pyjamas and bare feet, a few days after her sixtieth birthday) except something I had once read that Gellhorn had written: ‘I always leaped before I looked.’

And this was how I was having my baby. There was no birth plan, no name choice, no knowledge of how to change a nappy, breastfeed, prepare a bottle or even live with the father of my baby. Gellhorn would have coped, I thought. And I could cope.

My shell-shocked husband arrived back in London from Africa the day before Christmas Eve. I was now more than six months pregnant, and he was joining me before we moved together to Paris.

He was gutted, exhausted. And while he seemed joyful and exuberant at seeing me and touching my stomach, he seemed grief-stricken about leaving Africa. He was cutting short his three-year contract. He had closed up the lovely mango-strewn house in Cocody, the place he had loved and decorated with so much pride with teak tables, ivory inlaid mirrors and bright fabrics, and packed his things. He was happy to be home – but he looked so incredibly tired.

Looking back, I wish I had seen how thin he had become, how much he was trying to hide all the turmoil that he had left behind. I did not see it. I only saw someone who was in love, who took care of all the details. But do we ever see things that we really don’t want to see?