The Last Love Note(18)
Hugh’s face falls. He couldn’t love Charlie more if he was his own nephew.
‘And I can’t promise I won’t be. You can’t lie to kids who have been forced to become miniature death experts.’
I feel this immense responsibility to stay alive.
‘Kate.’ Hugh puts his hand on my arm, which, of course, with all his boundaries and rules and standards and irreproachable work ethic, he’s never really done before, even when things were at their worst. Because we’re about to plunge to our deaths, I allow it. There are no boundaries when you’re falling out of the sky.
‘I know this must seem hypocritical after the motorbike this morning, but that was risk management,’ I explain. ‘I was more scared I’d let you down than I was of crashing.’
This admission makes him wince. We both work hard, even if my hours are all over the place, but he has never been the kind of hard-nosed boss who wouldn’t understand that car trouble is just a thing that happens.
‘So when the car wouldn’t start, I knocked on Justin’s door,’ I explain.
‘At six in the morning?’
My cheeks flame as an image of Justin lounging in the hallway in his underwear presents itself.
Hugh smiles. ‘And the poor guy just capitulated?’
Yes?
‘You didn’t think he deserved a sleepin after lugging a houseful of furniture and being dragged into your ballistics predicament?’
‘The porch light went on,’ I argue weakly. ‘In hindsight, it was probably a cat.’
‘I think this story tops the way we met.’
He has to be joking. Nothing tops that.
8
One-year-old Charlie pops off the breast, disgusted.
‘Look at him. Screwing up his face like he’s a food critic sending a dish back to a five-star Michelin kitchen.’ Cam flings a suitcase on the bed and zips opens the lid.
I’ve never been great in the kitchen, so it doesn’t shock me that what I’m cooking up here is falling short of expectations. I sit Charlie up on my lap and re-hook the clip on my nursing bra, defeated. He’s been fussy for days.
Charlie reaches straight for Cam and says, ‘Dadda!’ Cam groans as he picks him up, pretending he weighs a tonne, and I take in the two of them. Charlie’s a genetic miniature of his dad. Dark blond curls, intelligent blue eyes. Same dimpled smile that Cam flashed at me in second year uni, which Charlie now flashes at me when he should be asleep in the middle of the night.
‘I think it’s called a “nursing strike”,’ Cam suggests, reading from a breastfeeding FAQ page on his phone.
‘Oh, no you don’t, Buddy!’ I say, and Charlie giggles as Cam lowers him to the floor of our bedroom. ‘We didn’t put ourselves through that feeding gauntlet just for you to reject Mummy now.’
By ‘gauntlet’, I mean cracked nipples, blocked milk ducts, several bouts of mastitis and an in-patient stay in a maternal and baby health centre, during which I almost lost my mind. ‘How can something so natural be so painful?’ I’d cried, as a lactation consultant manhandled my stinging nipple into Charlie’s mouth for the umpteenth time, unsuccessfully. She reminded me of that string group on the Titanic, determined to keep playing, even though the ship was very clearly sinking.
Cam throws his phone on the bed and starts folding shirts. He’s packing for the Congress of Medieval Literature conference in Rome. I watch as he folds slim-fit, textured layers of brown, green and grey into neat piles on the bed, and imagine him wearing the very same clothes at the Trevi Fountain, where we once tossed in a coin and wished for the baby who’s now crawling around our floor.
I’m trying to hide just how petrified I am at the thought of him being on the other side of the world. Ten days might seem like a fast turnaround to the person having an intellectually stimulating whirlwind trip to one of the world’s most fabulous cities, but it’s a lifetime in stay-at-home-mother minutes.
But I can’t ask him to stay. He’d had to cancel a Parisian research trip earlier in the year because things had hurtled so far out of control on the maternal health front that the doctor was threatening to admit me. I’d always been so good with other people’s babies, so it had come as a huge shock when I couldn’t seem to operate my own child on instinct.
‘Postnatal depression can cause this lack of confidence,’ the doctor explained as she filled out a script for antidepressants that are safe to take while breastfeeding. Over the next few months, slowly but surely, the days became less fraught. I stopped counting down the minutes until I heard the garage door go up, signalling that Cam was home and I wouldn’t be messing this up on my own for the next few hours. It finally became an exercise in falling in love with my baby. Which I did. Hard.
‘What time are you heading to the gym?’ Cam asks. It’s a sentence he’s never uttered previously, but Grace has dragged me into her campaign to conceive. This apparently includes a 7pm BoxFit class at a strength and conditioning torture chamber in Kingston, at which she’s a card-carrying cult member.
‘I so rarely get time out from Charlie,’ I say to Cam while I’m rifling through the back of the underwear drawer, looking for some semblance of a sports bra. ‘Why would I choose to spend it getting punched?’