‘Thanks, Mags. Do you know, in India ancient traditions said that the mother should stay inside for forty days after giving birth to let her recover and bond with her baby.’
‘Well, there you go then,’ replied Maggie. ‘Although I’ll have to go back to work. Tiger can step up.’
‘Step up to what?’ asked Tiger, reappearing and tossing the car keys back to Maggie.
‘I was just saying that maybe you can stick around for a few weeks whilst Angie finds her feet,’ Maggie said.
Tiger’s horror flashed across his face. ‘I wasn’t planning on being around that long,’ he said cautiously. ‘I’ve been here two weeks already and I have a ferry booked at the end of next week to head over to the Cyclades to catch the last of the heat.’
Maggie opened her mouth to object, but Angie spoke first. ‘That’s fine. I’ll be sick of the sight of you by then anyway.’
Tiger grinned at her, happy to be let off the hook, and started to investigate the travel system boxes, but Maggie caught Angie’s expression. It was a mixture of worry and sadness: she wasn’t sure which was the more dominant.
So, the task of keeping an eye on Angie over the coming weeks and months seemed to have fallen to her, Maggie thought. Tiger was only any good if your plan didn’t impinge on his, Leon was in Leeds and had his own family to contend with and there was neither hide nor hair of Jax. Angie would be fine, given time – she was far too resilient to be otherwise – but in the meantime Maggie would be there if she needed her.
26
Romany was four weeks old and there was still no sign of Jax. Angie wasn’t surprised, not really, but she was disappointed. She had hoped for more from him than he had demonstrated himself capable of, and she couldn’t help but feel let down. To be fair to him, he had made no promises about his involvement and so none had actually been broken. But still, Romany was his daughter. You would have thought that he would be just a little bit curious.
Yet it appeared not. He had rung a couple of times to make sure she was okay and to hear news of Romany, but that was all. He hadn’t offered any financial support or given any idea of when he might come to visit them. Angie teetered between cutting him some slack and cutting him out of Romany’s life entirely, depending on the day. Or sometimes, the hour. But in the meantime, he appeared to have fallen into a black hole.
And into a black hole was where Angie could feel herself slipping, too. The flat, never tidy at the best of times, was bordering on being a health hazard. Discarded plates scattered with the remains of snatched meals sat on every surface together with old coffee cups, the rancid milk forming greenish skins over their contents. She had given up with the washable nappies, although she told herself that this was only a temporary measure, but was almost at the bottom of the box of disposable ones that Maggie had bought. Nappies in little plastic sacks were overflowing from the bin, and whilst Romany’s breast-milk poos were still pale and smelled inoffensive, the sickly-sweet smell of whatever they sprayed the nappy bags with was cloying in her nostrils. She longed to throw the windows open, but she worried that the fresh air would render the flat too cold for Romany. Autumn had arrived with a vengeance, dispelling all hope of a languid Indian summer.
The main problem, as Angie saw it, was the sheer bone-tired exhaustion that she felt all the time. It left her with neither the energy nor the resolve to do anything. In her post-birth plan, carefully and optimistically made before Romany had arrived, she had been intending to go back to work on the Monday of the week to come, believing that a month at home with a newborn was more than enough time to recover from the birth and adjust to a new way of living. She had imagined taking Romany with her to Live Well and leaving her somewhere safe and quiet to sleep whilst Angie treated her clients. She would feed her in between appointments, she had thought, and build some time into the day for cuddles, too.
She could see now how ludicrously na?ve this plan had been. She was barely ready to leave the flat, let alone offer healing to her clients. Kate was doing a sterling job holding the fort, but she couldn’t offer the same treatments as Angie and so they were constantly losing business as clients drifted away to their competitors. The current situation was unsustainable. Angie had to get back to work soon, or there would be no business left to get back to.
But she was just so tired. The mere thought of getting showered and dressed was more than she could manage some days, let alone actually doing it. For the first time in her life, she realised that she almost felt some sympathy for her fallible mother, bringing her up alone for her first decade at least, before she relinquished Angie into the arms of the state, defeated. Never before had she considered the struggles that her addicted mother must have endured. She had been so busy focusing on how spectacularly she had failed instead. Now that she had had a taste of them, was she perhaps a little more inclined to understand?