In conversations with Shazia I remembered that I’d believed the baby to be female when I was pregnant, which went some way to explaining things. But of course it was Charlie – it had always been Charlie, with his black bead eyes and patchy hair, the victory-punch fist that escaped his swaddles.
I started looking after him all day, and a week or two later they let me have him at night. When he cried I would hold the soft angles of his body close and pray for him to be safe. The world was full of danger and I had no idea how to protect him.
Oh, for the life of a limpet, I wrote to Jill. Surrounded on all sides by shell and hard substrate. Only ever looking down, never up. A limpet’s contribution to reproduction involved only the release of larvae. Our tutor had been wrong: life was not remotely tough for limpets.
*
‘I curse this stinking illness,’ Granny sighed, during one of her visits. She’d brought flapjacks and a novel, only to find me miserable after another setback. ‘It’s obscenely unfair that it should happen to you, of all people.’
A nurse took her to one side and told her off. ‘It bloody well is unfair,’ she replied, loud enough for me to hear. ‘You have no idea what this girl’s been through. Did you know she was orphaned by the time she sat her A-levels?’
The nurse didn’t have a great deal to say to that.
When Granny came back, she told me Janice Rothschild wanted to visit.
‘I told her to piss off,’ she admitted. ‘But it felt unfair to keep you in the dark. What do you say?’
I didn’t know. I had no idea if I was ready for people, with their perfumes and hairstyles and opinions. Even the prospect of Jill felt overwhelming. Janice, on the other hand, had become a friend to me, at a time when no one else I knew could understand my life. Upon learning I was pulling out of the adoption arrangement she’d written an incredibly kind letter and enclosed some of the outfits she’d bought: there had been no recriminations.
And surely the Rothschilds would be on the road to adopting another child by now? They might already have one, come to think of it.
I said yes.
Janice brought a beautiful dressing gown in a stiff cardboard bag with woven handles and reams of tissue paper. She spoke easily and kept conversation simple, and for a while I forgot she was a woman people asked for autographs. She said she was sorry if I ever felt pressured into the adoption plans, that she worried it had somehow contributed to my crisis.
She told me she and Jeremy hadn’t found the right baby yet, but she seemed very positive about the whole thing. It made me feel fractionally better.
The days passed, the air was damper and cooler. I changed nappies and fed my baby. There was therapy; there were crafts, there was sleep – although never enough. I washed rompers in the laundry room, I watched television. Above all, I ached to be like the other women here, with their partners and husbands, their tentative hopes for life on the other side. I had no plans. The next fifty or sixty years loomed before me, blank as a winter sea.
With help from Granny I wrote to my university, telling them I wasn’t coming back. I was touched to hear from my tutor. He tried to persuade me to stay on, so I had Granny write a reply saying no. The offer to stay was both kind and completely unrealistic.
Charlie started smiling. He slept on my chest on slow autumn days. Jill sent me a book of tropical fish for him and we’d flick through the pages together, looking at coral reefs, emperor angelfish, purple queens. He held on to my finger and closed his warm gums over the tip. His newborn hair fell out and soft blonde wisps grew in its place. My whole body ached with love.
The mists did still descend but they were transient now; occasional visitors.
I started to believe that I might, in fact, recover.
It was then – when I thought I might be out of the woods – that it happened.