I loved my growing baby. The love crept through my veins like an infusion. I dreamed of days on the Heath with my girl. Walking with Granny, or maybe Jill, once she’d graduated, because Jill’s parents also lived in London. I even allowed myself to imagine befriending other mothers at an antenatal class. I tried to imagine sleep deprivation and I wasn’t afraid. I’d be able to offset it with the cake and coffee I’d be having with all these new friends.
But then one day in September my baby came, and it wasn’t like that.
It wasn’t like that at all.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Four days postnatal
It was a Tuesday afternoon, and I hadn’t slept in days. I stood at the window of Granny’s bathroom, looking out at the sky, recording what I could see on a sheet of toilet paper.
The sun was burning at midday height, but around it, the sky was iron-black. The front of Granny’s house looked over a walled garden, inside which magnolia trees and lilac bushes slid with the breeze. But the sky itself was still as a portrait: no wind; just hammered-in sheets of black where there should have been clouds and light.
I slid up the sash for a better view, or perhaps a clearer understanding. It must be an eclipse, but there was an energy to it – something occult, that didn’t feel right for an astronomical phenomenon. Besides, the sun was not obscured. It was fat and fiery, a disco ball on the black ceiling of Hampstead.
I wanted to dance under it. I’d loved dancing, once. I’d been good at it.
I rode a wave of love, of euphoria, of deep and absolute clarity as I walked back downstairs to my grandmother and my baby girl. We’d got back from the hospital an hour ago, and my caesarean incision burned at the bottom of my empty belly. Something nasty snagged when I tried to lift my left arm, and my breasts were like unexploded bombs.
But it was all manageable. I was a woman who’d just had a baby, and we were purebred fighters, made of steel, forged in fire. We could overcome anything.
In the kitchen I found a salad, my grandmother, and my daughter. My perfect girl. And, oh God, she was perfect; a tiny ornament, a plum, a goddess in miniature. I hadn’t named her yet, but I would, when things slowed down. There were baby clothes to buy, and I needed a breast pump, and I’d promised to help several women on the postnatal ward. A lot of them were really struggling.
‘You don’t know what fear is until you become a parent,’ a mother had said to me yesterday. She’d been in the bed next to mine on ward A300. ‘You really have no idea.’
I told her I understood but that it was important not to be scared, especially now, at the height of her feminine powers. I tried to talk about it again later, but she was asleep and didn’t wake up even when I got out of bed and poked her. I asked the midwives if she was alive and they said she was just exhausted because this was her fourth child.
I’d wanted her to know that nobody need be afraid: we were women, us mothers, we were warriors. Nothing could get in our way.
Granny was holding my little girl in the worn armchair she kept in the corner, in the place any sane person would put a dishwasher. She smiled at me, above my baby’s soft head.
I went and crouched in front of her. My daughter. She was a beautiful thing; downy and warm with small red hands and feathery eyelashes. She slept for two hours and then woke to feed, just like they told me she should; she latched on well and seldom cried. I couldn’t wait to take her out for a walk. Granny had said I should wait a while but Granny was being infuriatingly cautious at the moment. Her daughter had died shortly after giving birth to me, so I supposed it was old trauma. But Granny had always been so fearless!
‘I really think we should go for a walk,’ I said now. ‘The neighbours will want to meet her. And besides, we need to talk. I’m worried that you’re anxious, Granny, I want to help.’
‘Oh, I’m fine,’ she said. ‘But you mustn’t overstretch yourself. The Heath isn’t going anywhere and Charlie’s in no hurry.’