Chapter Eleven
My mum has a black belt in worrying. Every time she calls my mobile, she checks I’m not driving before she starts the conversation. When she hears an ambulance, you can see her do a mental headcount of every member of the family and their whereabouts. Whenever my sister and I roll our eyes at being told to ‘give three rings when you get there’, she always says the same thing: ‘You wait until you’re a mother! You'll understand!’
And she’s right.
It began the minute we left the hospital and drove home as if we were balancing three dozen eggs on the car bonnet. When I put our new baby in the crib beside our bed for the first time, I made Mr Baby get out of bed twenty times to check that he was still breathing.
The first time I left him with Mum, I spent the whole two hours convinced that some freakish accident was going to occur. (Quite what natural disaster was going to hit my mum’s three-bedroom semi on a Saturday afternoon, I couldn’t tell you…)
From ‘The Undercover Mother’
‘Jenny, love, I have looked after a baby before.’ Her mother’s tone was somewhere between comforting and irritated.
‘I know, I just…’ Jenny trailed off. She couldn’t explain why the thought of leaving Henry for a couple of hours while they popped to IKEA was filling her with such terror. She turned to Dan. ‘Maybe we should just take him with us?’
Dan took her hand and led her purposefully towards the front door. ‘This was your idea. You said you needed to start getting used to leaving him. You can’t take him when you go and see Ruth, can you?’
Blinking back tears, Jenny turned her head back towards Henry. Her mum smiled encouragingly and waved at her. ‘He’ll be absolutely fine. Don’t rush back,’ she called.
Halfway to IKEA, Jenny remembered that she hadn’t told her mum about the burping. ‘We have to go back.’
Dan showed no signs of screeching into a U-turn. ‘Why?’
‘I haven’t shown her the leg thing I do when he has wind.’
Dan smiled. ‘She’s had two children of her own, Jen. Plus, she’s looked after your sister’s kids. I'm sure she'll work it out.’
‘No, no.’ A rising, irrational terror bubbled in her throat. ‘She won’t. It's a new method. I only just learnt it this week. She’ll just put him over her shoulder and rub his back and… and…’
‘He’ll burp?’
Jenny wasn’t going to be put off that easily. ‘But he might not and then he’ll be in pain and then he’ll cry and I won’t be there and…’
‘Jenny. Stop.’ Dan had the calm tone of a relaxation tape. ‘We are only going to be a couple of hours. Your mum has successfully raised two children without the modern burping method, and Henry will be absolutely fine.’
Jenny took a deep breath. ‘Okay,’ she agreed. But she was far from convinced.
Wandering around IKEA, she tried not to run through worst-case scenarios in her head: Henry writhing in wind-induced pain, desperate for someone to lay him on his back and rotate his legs; an unattended Henry rolling off the sofa onto a hard wooden floor; her mum tripping and falling whilst holding him, and throwing him up into the air.
Jenny picked up kitchen utensils and put them down again without even looking at them. She felt on high alert, like a gazelle listening for dangerous predators, ears almost twitching. Why was this so terrifying? Mothers left their babies all the time. Surely they didn’t all feel like this?
After the third time she’d checked her phone for an emergency message, Dan took the multicoloured chopping board set she was holding and put it back on the shelf. ‘Shall we go and get some meatballs?’
Whilst Dan queued, Jenny looked for a table. In the far corner, she spotted a familiar face.
‘You’ve caught me.’ Gail closed her laptop. ‘I’m supposed to be looking for a cot mattress, but Jake fell asleep so I’m having a sneaky catch-up on some financial briefings. Funnily enough, I’ve just sent a text to Naomi. Jake’s had wind and she mentioned some massage techniques that might help. All alone?’
‘Dan’s in the queue, but we've left Henry with my mum.’ Jenny raised her fists in a cheer but her voice wobbled. Seeing Jake asleep in his pram made her feel worse.
Gail was sympathetic. ‘First time? It gets easier, I promise. First day back at work I cried the whole way there.’ She zipped her laptop into its case and slid it onto the shelf under Jake’s pram.
Gail’s thick, shoulder-length hair was twisted and pinned up with a large clip and her lack of make-up made her look less intimidating than usual. But crying? That was a surprise. Jenny perched herself on the chair opposite.
‘Well, that makes me feel a little less pathetic. Thanks. How are you finding it, being back at work now?’
‘It’s fine. I’m so busy I don’t have time to think.’ Gail re-adjusted Jake’s blanket. ‘When I leave, though, I’m desperate to get home and see him.’
Now she was there, Jenny could ask Gail about the man at her work function. ‘I went shopping with Antonia last week. She mentioned she saw you and Joe together.’ Somehow, in the intervening days, Jenny had convinced herself that the man Antonia had described had to be Joe.
Gail looked startled. ‘Did she? Where?’
‘At a work event. She was there with Geoff and she said she saw you with a distinguished-looking man.’ Antonia hadn’t said distinguished either, but Jenny didn’t want to say ‘old’.
Understanding dawned on Gail’s face. She unclipped her hair and brushed it through with her fingers. ‘That wasn’t Joe. That was my boss. Which I’m sure Antonia realised.’
‘Oh.’ Jenny was disappointed. ‘She did say he might have been your boss.’
‘I’m sure she did. Did she enjoy herself, dutifully following her husband around?’ Gail’s voice developed an edge any time she referred to Antonia.
‘I was a little confused.’ Jenny made herself more comfortable on the hard plastic seat. ‘You told me at antenatal that you didn’t know each other, but she said she’s seen you at work events before.’
Gail tapped the table with her nails. ‘I said I didn’t know her and I didn’t. There are lots of wives at these things. I can’t be expected to remember all of them. I’m there to network, not chit chat.’
Jenny was more interested in finding out about Joe than Antonia. ‘Anyway, how is Joe? Enjoying fatherhood?’
‘He’s not particularly hands-on. You probably guessed that from his absence from the class.’
‘I thought you said he was working?’
‘I lied. He just refused to come.’
Was Gail going to talk about him at last? Jenny tried to make it easy for her. ‘I’m sure that’s not unusual. I had to drag Dan there kicking and screaming.’
Gail looked her in the eye. ‘Joe and I, we’re not really like you and Dan.’
Jenny was all ears. She had tried to discuss the existence of Joe several times with Dan, forcing him to give an opinion, even though he had zero interest. His conclusion was that ‘Joe’ was code for ‘sperm donor’ and didn’t actually exist. Jenny thought that maybe Joe had been a one-night stand and that it hadn’t worked out. Or they had been a couple, and he’d given her an ultimatum: if you have the child, I’ll leave. Or maybe he was her gay best friend and they had decided to conceive a child together, like Madonna and Rupert Everett in that film – what was it called? The Next Best Thing. Then Dan had suggested Jenny needed to go back to work and apply her brain to something more useful.
‘What do you mean?’ Jenny tried now to sound nonchalant.
‘Jake wasn’t planned.’
‘Oh.’ Jenny thought briefly of Ruth and her IVF. And her tragic loss. Fertility was such an unfair lottery.
Just then, Dan appeared, greeted Gail and turned to Jenny. ‘Your meatballs are served, my lady.’
‘You can have this table – I need to brave the search for the cot mattress.’ Gail pinned her hair back into place and took hold of Jake’s pram. ‘Try not to worry about Henry. I’ll bet he’s being spoiled rotten at your mum’s. I’m sure they miss us much less than we miss them.’ She kicked the brake off to release the pram and waved with her fingers. ‘I’ll catch up with you soon.’
When they collected Henry from her mum’s, Jenny’s sister was there, too. Henry was asleep on her lap. Jenny tried to resist the urge to snatch him from Claire’s arms, but she only lasted about thirty seconds.
‘Missed him, have you?’ asked Claire, as Jenny scooped Henry up and nestled her face into his neck. He smelt vaguely of her sister’s perfume. ‘So, how are you finding being a mum? Isn’t it the most wonderful thing you’ve ever done?’
Did she never let up on this saintly mother theme? Jenny did think being a mum was pretty wonderful but she wasn’t about to admit it to Perfect Pants. ‘Yeah, it’s pretty good. Don’t forget I have a very good career, too. I’m not just a mum, you know.’ Even as she said it, she felt guilty. How could she refer to the way she felt about Henry as being ‘just a mum’?
‘Oh, you are still planning on going back to work, then?’
Jenny noticed that Dan had retreated to the kitchen to help her mum make tea. ‘Of course. Why wouldn’t I?’
‘I suppose everyone is different.’ Claire was using her ‘If you don’t think like me, you’re wrong’ voice. ‘Though I have never understood why a woman would have a baby and then leave them with someone else so she could go back to work. I wanted to be there for my children.’
If Claire was so intent on ‘being there’ for her children, why wasn’t she watching them play football or at a dance practice on a Saturday afternoon, rather than sitting there preaching to Jenny about not missing out? Try not to rise to it. ‘I will be there for my child, thank you. I just want to write, too. Am I not allowed to do both?’
Claire laughed. ‘Of course you’re allowed to do anything you want. I just don’t want you to miss out. This time goes by so quickly.’ She reached out and patted Henry. ‘He’s a lovely little boy.’
Perhaps her sister was trying, in her own judgemental style, to be nice. ‘Thank you. We are pretty besotted with him.’
Besotted was the right word. It had been so hard to leave him that afternoon. Hopefully Gail was right and she’d get used to it. It was unlikely that Flair magazine would open a crèche.
‘So, who will look after Henry when you go back to this great job of yours?’ Claire wasn’t giving up. ‘I hope you’re not expecting Mum to do it every day?’
‘I’ll be able to work from home and email my column.’ This was a lie. Eva would never go for that. Jenny waved her mobile at Claire. ‘It’s called modern technology.’
At that moment, the phone pinged with a new message. It was Lucy. Just what she needed.
Reminder about the ads evo.
Stupid woman always used her own abbreviations.
Meet you there? Mark coming. Did you know?
Claire had launched into a long story about someone she knew who had gone back to work two weeks after having her baby and who was now having some kind of maternal guilt therapy. Jenny wasn’t listening.
Mark McLinley was going to be at the advertisers’ event.
Mark’s magazine, Suave, was owned by the same parent company as Flair. He liked nothing better than an industry schmoozing event, so of course he was going to be there. Jenny should have expected it.
If she hadn’t been anxious about going before, she certainly was now.
There was a large mirror over the fireplace. When Claire broke off from her story to go and remind their mum not to put milk in her camomile tea, Jenny stood up and appraised herself. The prospect of facing a room full of advertising executives when she was two stone over her fighting weight had been bad enough, but now she had to see Mark, too? She was going to need more than an Antonia-inspired outfit if she was going to show her ex-boyfriend how wonderful her life was without him. This called for more than industrial-strength Spanx.
She sent a text to Naomi. Jenny had no idea what the hell Buggy Bootcamp was, but Naomi looked good on it. When Naomi had invited Jenny to try a new group with her, Jenny had laughed. Suddenly it wasn’t such a funny idea.
She had three weeks.