Ted kept leaving the radio on in the kitchen and it was driving Sam insane.
Joanne had claimed that babies raised in total silence would only be able to sleep in total silence, so she insisted that vacuum cleaners, hairdryers and street noises were vital in making sure the mother didn’t go insane.
‘Joanne’s so good at this stuff,’ Ted said the night before, while India slept upstairs and he roamed the internet looking for more information on this baby-living-in-noisy-households theory.
Sam gritted her teeth and kept folding small baby things. Ten more minutes and she was off up to bed. She was awake only due to sheer willpower and it was dying by the moment. With luck, crossed fingers and prayers, India would sleep till one, when Ted would feed her a bottle of breast-pump milk.
Once India woke, Sam woke anyway and she couldn’t help herself listening to the sounds of Ted picking her up, talking loving nonsense to his daughter and asking the dogs to be quiet.
Sam felt as if she had two moods these days – irritation towards Ted, which he was aware of but said nothing about, and fear around India.
Sometimes her hand shook as she measured out the formula for the bottles. She was combining bottles with her own pumped milk because she had never managed to get India to drink from her breasts and she didn’t seem to be producing enough milk. One more thing to feel guilty about. When her hands shook, she tried to still them: what if somebody saw them and said she was a bad mother and took India away from her?
Most of the time, she knew this was crazy, but still, there were fragments of every day when she felt so strongly that she knew nothing. Someone would be able to tell. She’d be exposed as a bad mother and her baby would be taken from her.
There were times when she sat with India on the couch, the dogs gathered fascinated at her feet, and there was peace. India would sleep and Sam would examine the tiny little face with pure love: that button nose, her eyelashes resting on her cheeks, the softness of her skin. But those moments of calm seemed like oases in a long day of worrying.
She was lying on their bed watching afternoon TV one day while India slept and Ted was making them both sandwiches when she heard a faint ring of the doorbell. The dogs barked and Sam hoped India wouldn’t wake up.
‘Where are my special girls?’ she could hear her father ask Ted and she smiled weakly, thinking how wonderful it would be to throw herself into her father’s arms and sob: ‘I don’t know what I’m doing.’
All of which might have been a possibility if he was on his own, but then she heard her mother’s voice.
‘Ted, hello.’
She could hear the voices in the hall and all thoughts of sobbing in her father’s arms vanished.
Not with her mother anywhere near.
Her mother had never admitted to any sort of failure in her life. Failure was not one of the words in her vocabulary.
She could say things like, ‘Goodness, you’re not going out dressed like that? It makes you look cheap.’
Sam had long since got over her mother’s unfortunate way of explaining things to her.
‘I think,’ said Joanne diplomatically, ‘that what Mother was trying to say was that she feels uncomfortable with us leaving the premises wearing short skirts or tight jeans.’
‘Who died and made you a saint,’ Sam used to snap.
But over the years she’d come to accept that her mother was different from lots of other mums. It didn’t have to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, she reminded herself. Joanne was nothing like their mother had been as a parent.
‘It was the way she was brought up, Sam,’ Jo would say, ‘just get over it.’
Sam had done her very best to get over it.
In fact, up to ten months ago, she would have said that she was entirely over her mother. She had no mummy issues whatsoever. She was a cool, calm woman who understood that people were different and reacted differently in different situations, and yet now . . . now that she was the mother of a small baby and was not sure what she was doing half the time, it was different. Now that she was exhausted and failing at breastfeeding, now, she did not want to see her mother.
Her mother seemed to stand for all her fears and insecurities. Her mother had made her this way.
She stayed upstairs for a few moments, not wanting to endure Jean’s supercilious glance as she looked around the small house and found baby clothes draped over every radiator and the clothes horse laden with little vests, cushions askew on the couch and the dog bones – proper bones from the butchers’ given to the dogs to keep them calm because they weren’t getting the love and affection they were used to – all over the place, smelling like hell. Sam was not ready for her mother to stare coldly at any of that.
She wanted to stay in bed and pretend to be asleep until her mother left.
But this would not be an option. Her mother had only visited once before to see her new granddaughter.
So she plastered a fake smile on her face, went downstairs and wished she could pull in her stomach, the doughy stomach that had strangely not gone away with the birth of her baby. Many weeks had passed and she still felt as if she was carrying something inside her. Darling India may have emerged but a big load of splodgy-spongy stomach was left, so that Sam was still wearing her maternity clothes.
‘I thought you said I’d burn it all off breastfeeding,’ she’d said to her sister on the phone, trying to sound like her old, amusing self. She was so scared of Joanne realising something was wrong with her. She’d never been this insanely anxious before. It must be sleep deprivation.
‘You will,’ Joanne said. ‘Anyway, you don’t have time to be worrying about your belly – it will go. Come on, sis, bellies aren’t important in the grand scheme of things.’
‘Ah, Sam love,’ her father was upon her as she got to the bottom step and he hugged her tightly and then, aware in a way her mother was not that she had mastitis, because in a rather tired phone call she’d let it slip, he pulled back. ‘Sorry, love,’ he said uncomfortably, ‘I didn’t mean to hurt you.’
‘The savoy cabbage leaves are not working,’ muttered Sam, knowing she sounded a little nuts and not able to help it. Her father did not want to know.
She couldn’t quite believe that modern women with distended painful breasts were urged to stuff savoy cabbage leaves down the front of their nursing bras.
Ted had gone on a big mission looking for savoy cabbage leaves, but there were none in the corner shop, none in the local supermarket and he’d finally tracked down one measly, dead-looking savoy cabbage in the vegetable shop four streets over. It was now all used up.
‘Your father said you needed this: savoy cabbage,’ said her mother, coming up behind them, smiling and holding out a beautifully wrapped little gift, along with a plastic grocery bag containing said cabbage. ‘You’re not having a dinner party, Samantha? It’s probably a bit too early, you know, entertainment is quite difficult with small children and—’
‘No, I am not entertaining,’ said Sam, doing her best and somehow failing to hold her temper in. ‘I have—’
She couldn’t bring herself to say the word mastitis in her mother’s presence, in the same way she hadn’t been able to say things like periods or tampons or menstrual cramps. Sam had taught Jo all about those things, but nobody taught Sam. Dear Mrs Maguire next door had helped her, she thought bitterly. Not her mother. Never her mother.
Blind anger at this state of affairs suddenly ricocheted into Sam’s mind and she felt furious.
‘A present, too?’ she said frostily, taking the gift and ignoring the cabbage.
‘A little dress. I thought it would be sweet. In the photos you send your father, the baby is always in these Babygro things and I thought it would be nice to have some proper clothes,’ said her mother.
Ted, sensing danger, whisked the present away.
‘Jean, you are so kind,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you all sit down in the living room and I’ll make us a cup of tea. I’m sure India will be awake soon.’
‘Can’t wait to see her,’ said Sam’s dad. ‘If it wasn’t for the fact that I know you’d kill me, I’d go up and wake her.’
‘Please don’t,’ said Ted, laughing. ‘Her schedule is all over the place.’
‘Totally,’ groaned Sam, forgetting for a moment that she was so angry with her mother. ‘I read this book where it said that you needed to establish a routine and we were trying to have a night-time schedule. But then it turns out that if you want a night-time schedule, you have to have a daytime one too. We apparently have no schedule at all and are exhausted.’
Her mother moved some clothes off a dining table chair and sat down neatly and precisely. She was dressed as if for playing golf, in a colourful sweater, little blouse and casual perfectly creased chinos. Pearls glinted at her collar and her hair had obviously been done beautifully in the hairdresser’s the day before.
Sam knew what she looked like stuffed into her pregnancy jeans, wearing a T-shirt that had baby sick on it. She was wearing no make-up, hadn’t washed her hair for at least three days, and the only co-ordinated parts of her were the bags under her eyes, which were soon going to be joining the hollows under her cheeks. She sank down into an armchair, determined not to sit beside her mother.
‘You look worn out, love,’ said her father.
‘A maternity nurse would be a brilliant idea,’ ventured Jean.
Sam held it together to speak civilly.
‘We can’t afford a maternity nurse. I wish we could, but we can’t. We just have to manage like everybody else does, which is messily.’ What she’d liked to have said was: ‘if you were like a normal mother, you’d be around here all the time helping us, folding the endless baby clothes, doing something,’ but she didn’t, because what was the point?
Her mother looked distinctly uneasy when they trooped quietly into India’s little nursery. All the paraphernalia of a baby made it clear that this was a much-adored child. Ted and Sam had worked so hard on making the nursery beautiful, and even though their initial colour scheme had been the careful whites and yellows of would-be parents who didn’t know what sex their baby was going to be, they had since branched out. The room now burst with colour – turquoises and purples, beautiful pinks and glorious sea-blues, sap greens, all coming from the flowers, giraffes, elephants and rabbits that Ted had pasted onto the walls. It was like a living zoo.
India was asleep in her crib, lying on her back, thumb close to her rosebud mouth.
‘Isn’t she adorable,’ her father sighed. ‘You said she smiled yesterday?’
‘Absolutely,’ said Ted, ‘and no, it wasn’t wind.’
Both men laughed quietly, but Jean was merely staring into the cot.
‘That’s a sturdy piece of furniture,’ she remarked. ‘You could have had your old cot, Samantha, and saved some money.’
Sam blinked in astonishment. Her mother had looked at India and this was all she could say: save money and use an old cot?
The rage bubbled up in her.
It was not her fault she was hopeless at motherhood.
Sam knew nothing about how to be a mother. Simply nothing.
And the reason for that was in the room. Genetics.
Her father had passed along all his wonderful parenting genes to Joanne while Sam had been left with her mother’s faulty genes, the ones that would have decimated evolution had they been widespread in the population.
Sam turned and slightly rudely made sweeping-out hand gestures to her parents. A smile still nailed to her face, she whispered: ‘Let’s go. She needs her sleep.’
‘Fine.’
Downstairs, Jean perched on a chair and the dogs, who knew her of old, kept away.
‘When are you thinking of going back to work, Samantha?’ she asked.
Sam, her father and Ted all gasped.
‘Not yet,’ said Ted hurriedly.
‘Well, you want to hold on to that job. Your replacement must be handling the credit card crisis rather well – nothing in the newspapers. Mind you, they’re all full of that dreadful property investment man who’s conned so many people out of millions. Police reports say the wife isn’t involved, but honestly, how stupid could she be. Of course she knew.’
Sam had barely registered the story on the news: the outside world had so little impact on her life, but she wanted to argue that nobody ever knew the real side of any story. From the outside, their childhood had looked perfect, after all.
‘Tea?’ said Ted, desperately.
‘No thank you. I have a lot to do,’ said her mother, not really lowering her voice. ‘Do enjoy the savoy cabbage,’ she said, and with a frosty smile, she headed for the door.
‘I’ll drop over tomorrow,’ Sam’s father said, hugging her. ‘I’ll text first and you can tell me what would be good. You could have a sleep and I’ll be on baby duty.’
Sam leaned against her father, feeling his warmth and strength.
‘Thank you,’ she whispered, ‘Thank you.’
‘Lie down, Sam,’ Ted said when they were gone.
Mutely, she did just that. But she couldn’t rest, couldn’t concentrate on the TV show.
Thoughts of her first period earlier meant she found herself remembering that very time. Not that she’d known much about periods, mind you. Her mother’s version of the mother-daughter talk was to give her a booklet on menstruation when Sam hit twelve and leave Sam to it.
‘You might find this useful,’ her mother had said with a hint of distaste as if the female body and its menstrual carry-on was not suitable for any conversation.
When the thirteen-year-old Sam had found blood in her knickers, she’d been at home, scared and with only Dad and Joanne there. She wouldn’t, couldn’t, ask her father what do to. So she’d stuffed toilet roll into her knickers and had braved her next-door neighbour’s house, where a lovely woman with grown-up kids and grandkids lived.
All her fears had come out in a flood of tears.
Mrs Maguire had provided clean knickers, sanitaryware and made it all seem entirely normal. A hot-water bottle on her belly, and a seat curled up by the fire with the family’s cat had helped too.
‘Don’t tell my mother,’ Sam had begged. ‘Please.’
‘But where does she think you are?’
‘She’s not home. She’s working late.’
‘This is important, she’d come if you phoned her,’ said Mrs Maguire, somewhat doubtfully.
Sam thought of her friends’ mothers who had jobs and how they somehow made their children come first in spite of it all. Her mother was not of that tribe.
‘She wouldn’t, Mrs Maguire,’ said Sam. ‘She’s busy.’
And Mrs Maguire had wondered again about her coldly polite neighbour who looked after other people’s daughters but had not managed to teach her own child that real mothers would walk through fire for their own daughters, job or no job.