Sam took India into the office for everyone to admire and even Andrew, who clearly looked terrified of babies, said she was adorable.
‘Little pet,’ said Rosalind, tickling India’s cheek.
Gareth, who talked nineteen to the dozen to Sam about the big data research he was doing on key words linked to dementia, wanted to pick India up and snuggle her.
‘Three older sisters, and therefore, plenty of nieces and nephews,’ he said, holding India expertly and nuzzling her joyfully.
She cooed back at him.
‘Aren’t you the little darling?’
While Gareth talked to India, Sam talked to Dave, her stand-in, and they discussed the Ballyglen crisis.
‘Nothing in the media yet. Andrew’s paid the debt out of his own money—’
‘Wow,’ said Sam. ‘That’s incredible.’
‘I know. It could have ruined us – still could have a terrible effect, but so far, so good. The only hangover from it all currently is a nursing home in the area, Leap of Faith. It’s a charitable trust nursing home and they got a lot of funds from us. We simply can’t cut them off because one of their prime supporters was siphoning off cash for gambling. I’ve got letters here from their director wondering if the funding cuts were going to keep continuing.’
They both winced.
‘We need to visit them,’ said Sam.
Dave nodded. ‘It sounds like a great place. They say they know the focus of our charity has changed, but if only someone could come down and see them, then we would reconsider.’
‘I’ll go,’ said Sam, feeling a frisson of excitement at the thought of taking on a little bit of work. It was as if a little bit of her was coming back. ‘We can’t leave them in the lurch. It’ll be good to ease myself back into work slowly. Don’t worry, Dave, your contract is safe. I’m not coming back early.’
‘How could you, with that little pet?’ he asked, grinning. ‘I’ve got three kids and leaving them each morning is hell. Kids change everything – total world shift on the axis sort of thing.’
Sam nodded, smiling at the tableau where Gareth was instructing a nervous Rosalind in how to hold a baby.
‘Yup: it’s a total world shift. You said it. My sister used to laugh when I said I thought life would be the same but just with a baby. I get it now.’
And she did. Even if she was offered the world’s best job, it would still come second to India.
She was still smiling at that thought when she got home and began to put a nearly asleep India, tired from her morning out, down into the cot.
The doorbell rang and the dogs started their normal manic barking.
‘Oops, someone coming to see us,’ she said, mentally planning to figure out how to make the dogs bark less noisily and the doorbell ring less loudly. But India was awake now. Sam picked her up again. When she’d dispatched the visitor, she’d do the sleeping routine once more. Outside the nursery, the dogs were dancing with excitement.
‘Hush,’ she said, as they kept dancing when she opened the door.
There, looking as dressed up as ever but not quite as calm as she normally looked, was her mother.
‘Why are you here, is it Dad? Is he OK?’ said Sam, taking a step backwards.
‘Yes,’ said her mother, ‘your father is absolutely fine. I just wanted to come and see you.’
‘Why?’ Sam’s shock couldn’t have been more evident and her mother looked uncomfortable.
‘I don’t need an excuse to come and see my daughter,’ she said and some of the recently subsided anger burned up again inside Sam.
‘Mother, you’re the woman who sent me emails to find out how I was during pregnancy,’ she said wryly. ‘You almost never visit, so yes, I’m shocked.’
‘Can I come in?’
‘Sure,’ said Sam in crisp tones.
She didn’t feel like pretending. Her mother had interrupted her lovely day.
Sam talked to her father most days, twice some days, and he made every excuse to come over and see India, bringing her books and adorable toys so that the nursery was already overstocked. Ted was worse. Every day, he came home with something new.
‘You’re a shopaholic,’ Sam teased him.
‘I’m a family-aholic,’ Ted would say, holding India in his arms and leaning against his wife, sighing.
Her mother only came on official visits with her husband.
‘Sit?’ said Sam to her mother, gesturing to a chair.
She thought if she kept this in the one-syllable department she might just be able to cope. A few minutes ago she’d been feeling better, but there was a limit to what antidepressants could do. The doctor had said no stress, after all. Perhaps stress ruined the positive effects of the drugs?
‘I came to see how you were doing since you haven’t been well,’ her mother said.
Sam felt her annoyance rise. Taking antidepressants would no doubt be a sign of weakness of character to her mother.
‘I’m fine,’ she said, which was true, now.
‘Your father told me you were suffering from post-natal depression,’ her mother said.
And even hearing the words come out of her mother’s mouth heightened Sam’s irritation.
She didn’t hide it when she spoke:
‘Failed again, have I? Are you worried that this might slow my return to my career? Because career comes first, after all. Don’t worry. I’ll drop the baby off with a baby minder as soon as I possibly can, or better still, I’ll get Ted to give up his job and he can mind her. Because that’s what men are for – to mind the babies while the women go out and rule the universe. Have I got that right?’
She glared at her mother, no longer caring that the full blast of the rage was uncoiling within her. In her arms, India fretted and began to cry.
Sam knew India was sensitive to everything that went on around her and she cradled the baby close to her chest, holding that soft little head against her, nuzzling into the beautiful downy hair. ‘Sorry, honey,’ she whispered softly.
‘What do you really want, Mother?’ she asked in louder tones.
‘I wanted to see if you were all right, but if my being here upsets you, I’ll go. I’d just like to hold her perhaps . . . I haven’t held her often,’ Jean said awkwardly.
Sam stared. Jean was in full control of every situation.
Except this one, it seemed.
‘That’s because you didn’t appear to want to,’ Sam said, truthfully. ‘You look uncomfortable when you’re holding India, as if you can’t wait for it to be over.’
Her mother licked dry lips. ‘It’s true I’m nervous, but I want to get to know my granddaughter.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I just do, please.’
It was the please that did it. Her mother never said please for anything – not in that way. Oh yes, she had perfect table manners and said please and thank you when they were at the dinner table, but please in that longing way . . .? Never.
‘You can sit beside me on the couch and you can hold India on your lap for a moment,’ said Sam, not sure why she was doing this.
It would be the quickest baby-holding ever, she decided.
Jean moved so she was sitting beside her daughter.
‘Take off those necklaces,’ Sam said irritably. ‘They’ll just get tangled up and hurt her.’
‘Oh, right,’ said her mother anxiously, messing up her hair in the process of removing the necklaces. Then she held out her arms as if she was about to accept a present.
‘Not like that,’ Sam said, ‘like this.’
‘OK.’
Sam was still not sure if this was the right thing to do or not, but she passed India over to her mother. ‘You’ve got to support her head.’
‘I know that,’ said her mother gently, and she held the baby tentatively, awkwardly. ‘I read every baby book there was, learned all the facts. But I still wasn’t very good at it.’
Sam paused. She didn’t think she’d ever heard her mother say those words before.
‘I wasn’t a good mother,’ said Jean quietly, head bent over India. ‘I’m really sorry that I wasn’t because I’m not the motherly type and you were afraid, weren’t you, you were afraid you were going to be like that? I know, I could see it in you because I was like that.’
‘Mother, spare me the psychobabble,’ said Sam, but she said it half-heartedly.
‘No, I came here to say this and I’m going to say it,’ her mother said with the air of someone who had never backed down from a challenge in her life. ‘I thought I was a failure.’
‘You thought you were a failure?’ said Sam. She reached in and adjusted India so the baby was nestling more comfortably against her mother’s bony frame.
‘This feels nice,’ said Jean. She leaned in and smelled India’s soft curls. ‘I was bad at it,’ Jean went on, ‘bad at all of it. My maternity leave was hell, I couldn’t do all the things the other women did, I felt a failure, not maternal. But you, you got to choose.’ She looked at Sam over India’s head. ‘Your generation gets to choose. You don’t have to have children, you have choices.’
‘Are you saying you didn’t want to have kids?’
‘No, no,’ said her mother, sounding slightly panicked so that India, picking up on the tension, began to fret.
‘Give her to me.’
Sam shushed the baby and took her back, feeling a sense of relief as India’s tiny body was nestled against her. She was good at this, she thought. There were so many things she could do with her baby. If the tablets meant the anxiety was kept at bay and the joy of motherhood could flood in, then she would take them as long as she needed them.
‘Your generation can decide not to have kids. Or you can simply say you’re not the stay-at-home type, go out to work and people think you are amazing. In my day, that didn’t happen,’ went on her mother, as if this was a speech she’d rehearsed. ‘It was different then. Being a mother was your job and if you messed up that job, it didn’t matter how good you were at anything else.’
‘So why did you have children?’ Sam didn’t know where the words came from but it felt good to get them out. ‘What was the point of giving birth to children if you had no interest in them? Because you didn’t, you left all that to Dad. He was the one who took care of us, who brought us for ice creams and for walks in the park. You wouldn’t even let us get a dog. No dog, you said, because a dog might require looking after or walking or cleaning up of dog shit, and yes, I know you told us all often enough, was there anything worse than baby poo.’
She had put on her mother’s elegant voice for these words and Jean winced slightly.
‘You can’t know this, Sam, but in Ireland when you were born things were very different. Do you have any idea what it was like to be a working mother in this country and in those days? Now, we live in a world where you can arrange to work from home. Nobody looks at you like there’s something wrong with you if you get someone in to mind your kids because you’re out at work. But when I was working, it was totally different.
‘Did you know that when I started out in teaching, women had to leave their jobs once they got married. The marriage bar, they called it,’ she said mirthlessly. ‘No matter what the feminist movement did, that bar was there and, oh yes, it was a bar, like a damned big iron bar to stop women progressing because God forbid a married woman took a job away from a man. And even with that gone, it was still difficult. We weren’t getting even half the amount of money as men. I couldn’t take a sick day off if you or Joanne were sick.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ snapped Sam, ‘you were working in a school.’
‘Working in a school! Do you think that made the slightest bit of difference? Do you think the board of governors would have cared that we were an educational establishment and I was taking time off to look after my kids? No they wouldn’t. And do you know something really important?’ Her mother stared at Sam fiercely. ‘I wanted to work, Sam. Most mothers looked at women like me and thought we were unnatural.’ Jean’s tone was bitter.
‘Feminism wasn’t just the fight on the streets then, it was in the offices, in the classrooms, and that’s where I fought, so women like you could go out to work. Now you look at me and think I was a useless mother. Fine,’ Jean snapped. ‘I wasn’t maternal, but that’s what women my age did: we got married, we had kids and then we had to figure out where to go next.
‘I’m sorry I’m not what you wanted. I love India, you, Joanne and her children. I love all of you. I’m just not very good at showing it. I wish it was different but that’s not the way I’m made. All I’m asking is that you try to understand that.’
With that, Jean picked up her coat, her keys, her handbag and left, swishing past the dogs who’d snuffled around her heels. Neither of the dogs were terribly fond of her because Jean was not a doggy person anymore than she was a baby person. Sam sat down on the couch, breathing in heavily, holding India to her closely.
That was one hornets’ nest she had stirred up. She wished her mother had talked to her like that before. Sam had never even considered what it had been like for her mother to be at work in an era where working women were not the norm, certainly not working women in positions of power.
Still hugging India to her, she picked up her mobile phone and texted her sister:
Had the most amazing conversation with Mother. We need to talk.
‘Wow, can’t believe she said all that,’ said Joanne on the phone later. It was too late in the afternoon to drop round: she was busy feeding her three girls after playdates, extra art and Irish dancing.
Isabelle loved Irish dancing, which seemed to involve a lot of hopping energetically to Sam’s eyes.
‘I’m still reeling,’ said Sam, talking quietly because she’d finally got India to sleep. ‘I feel—’ She searched for the word.
‘Guilty,’ supplied Joanne. ‘Me too. I never thought of it that way. I just thought she was remote.’
‘Dads were supposed to be remote and mums were supposed to be warm and cuddly,’ Sam said, thinking of how they’d viewed the world from their childish imaginations.
‘No reason it couldn’t be the other way round,’ Joanne said. ‘Poor old Mother. What are you going to do?’
Sam sat down on the couch and both dogs instantly leapt up beside her, delighted with the attention. ‘Learn to forgive her, I guess. It’s not her fault I developed post-natal depression.’
‘You really can’t lay that one on her,’ Joanne agreed.
Roars broke out from Joanne’s end of the line.
‘War,’ said Joanne. ‘Gotta go and negotiate a peace deal.’
Sam laughed. ‘Me too,’ she said.