A Special Relationship (22 page)

‘Thanks a lot.’

‘Well, what the hell do you expect when you start saying garbage like “I’m at one with things.”’

‘But I am.’

‘You now have me very worried.’

That was typical Sandy – even more literal than I was when it came to judging other people’s moods. But I knew I was all right – though when I returned home that morning from the hospital, there was a note waiting for me from Tony, saying:

Invitation Declined With Regret. US Deputy Secretary of State in town tonight. Just received last minute invitation for dinner at the Embassy. Will make it up to you.

Great, just great. But after last night’s stupidity, I wasn’t going to call him up and hector him for turning down my invitation. Instead, I’d put a positive spin on this situation. Rather than fall into bed now for a nap, I’d force my way through the day on no sleep, then go by the hospital around seven and would be back home in bed by ten – tired out enough to sleep straight through the night without interruption. Come morning, I’d be back on a normal schedule – and ready to bring my son home.

Of course, by the time I reached the Mattingly that night, I had been up for twenty straight hours, and was starting to veer into numb-with-fatigue territory. The evening feeding session at the hospital went on longer than expected – as Mr Hughes made a surprise visit to the baby ward. He was showing a group of his students around this corner of the hospital – and when he saw me feeding Jack, his led his entourage over towards me. I had my son at my breast – and turned my wince into a look of maternal contentment as he approached us.

‘Bonding well, are we?’ he asked.

‘No problems,’ I said, all smiley.

‘And judging from the way your boy is absorbed in the task at hand, all is flowing well?’

‘Everything is working just fine.’

‘Splendid, splendid. Mind if I give the little chap a quick look over?’

Jack was not pleased to be disengaged from his source of food. As he kicked up, I quickly tucked my breast back into my shirt – especially as one of the male medical students with Hughes seemed particularly interested in my now bloated nipple. But judging from the critical way he was eyeing it, his interest was definitely more clinical than sexual. Meanwhile, all the other students were crowding around the crib. He started explaining in highly technical language about Jack’s complicated delivery, and how he had to be ventilated after birth. He then explained about how I was suffering from high blood pressure throughout my pregnancy … to the point where he wondered whether it was best to deliver the child prematurely – as high blood pressure can prove hazardous to the mother’s health.

‘You never told me that,’ I said.

Suddenly, all eyes were upon me. Hughes gave me a frown. He didn’t like to be interrupted in mid-discourse – especially by some pesky American.

‘Something the matter, Mrs Goodchild?’ he asked.

‘You never told me you were considering a premature delivery.’

‘That’s because your high blood pressure condition wasn’t pre-eclampsic … and because it did eventually stabilize. But, truth be told, when you were first admitted with high blood pressure, you were a borderline case for an emergency caesarean …’

‘Well, thanks for the information, even if it is a little after the fact. I mean, if there was a danger to me and my baby, shouldn’t I have been given that emergency Caesarean option at the time?’

‘Curiously enough, it is always better for the child if it is carried to full term. And curiously enough, Mrs Goodchild, we are rather up-to-date on modern obstetric practice on this side of the pond … which means that we did do what was medically best for you and your son. More to the point, just a fortnight or so after a most complex and perilous delivery, your son appears to be flourishing. Good evening, Mrs Goodchild.’

And he moved on to the next crib.

Brilliant. Well done. Bra-fucking-vo. I’m surprised the State Department hasn’t headhunted you for your diplomatic skills.

I put my hands against both sides of the crib, and lowered my head, wondering if all eyes were upon me, and if I should try to rectify things with an apology. But when I looked back up with the intention of saying something, Hughes & Co. were engrossed in another patient. Anyway, I had been put in my place, cut down to size,
embarrassed.

I gripped the edge of the crib even tighter – and felt myself get very shaky again: a downward swoop which, out of nowhere, transported me to a vertiginous place positioned right over a deep, gaping chasm.

‘Baby needs feeding again, I’m afraid,’ said a voice to my right. It was the nurse on duty – a severe, stocky woman who had been hovering in the vicinity while Hughes gave me a dressing-down, and (judging from the look she was giving me right now) thoroughly approved of his criticisms. Especially as Jack was still crying wildly, and I was just standing there, looking spacey.

‘Sorry, sorry,’ I said as I picked up Jack, settled down again in the straight-back chair, and reattached him to my left nipple. Thankfully, he had the milk duct opened within seconds.

‘Now I spoke with Dr Reynolds earlier today – and he feels that your son is ready to be discharged. So you can collect him tomorrow morning if that doesn’t present any problems.’

I avoided her gaze.

‘None at all.’

‘Very good then.’

Ten minutes later, having settled Jack back in his crib, I was in a cab rolling down the Fulham Road, crying like an idiot. The driver – a young fellow, lean and tough looking – kept glancing at me in his rearview mirror, not exactly pleased that he had this blubbering woman in the back of his cab, but still torn between asking me what was wrong and not wanting to interfere. Anyway, I’ve never been one of those
tell-all
types who confide in strangers. But yet again, I was the architect of my own mess-up … and was also wildly over-reacting to Hughes’s disparagement of me.

By the time we reached Putney, I did finally manage to get myself under a degree of control. But when I paid off the driver, he deliberately avoided looking at me.

I walked into the empty house and bolted upstairs to the bedroom. I threw off my clothes, put on a teeshirt and climbed into bed. I pulled the covers over my head. I blocked out everything.

When I jolted awake again at eight the next morning, I was so pleasantly groggy from such an unbroken period of unconsciousness that it took a moment or so to realize:
I’ve actually slept.

Tony had assured me that he would take the morning off to drive me to the hospital to collect Jack. But when I shuffled down to the kitchen, I found a post-it on top of a couple of crumpled bank notes.

Emergency at the paper. Here’s £40 for a cab there-and-back. Will try to get home ASAP this evening.

T xxx

I grabbed the phone. I punched in the number of Tony’s direct line. I got his voice mail. So I phoned his mobile.

‘Can’t talk right now,’ he said.

‘I don’t care what
emergency
you have on your hands. You’re meeting me at the hospital, understand?’

‘I can’t talk.’

Then he hung up.

Immediately I rang back. He had obviously turned off his phone after our last conversation, as I was put through directly to his voice mail.

‘How dare you –
how fucking dare you
– pull this. You get your sorry English ass over to the hospital, or I am not going to be responsible for what happens next. Do you get that?’

I hung up, my heart pounding, my head full of righteous indignation and genuine upset. More tellingly, I hated the way I sounded on the phone. I also hated the extremity of my reaction, and the way I shifted from serenity to rage in a matter of a few moments. But … I’m sorry … he just couldn’t stand me up on this one. Not on the first trip home with our newborn son.

But he did. Because I didn’t hear from him for the rest of the morning. Anyway, I didn’t have time to think about this latest example of Tony’s complete indifference, as I needed to be at the hospital on time or further darken my reputation as a harpy. So I ducked into the shower, and slapped some makeup on my face, and was at the Mattingly by eleven am.

‘Is your husband with you this morning?’ the unit sister asked, eyeing me over, evidently wondering just what my emotional temperature might be this morning.

‘I’m afraid he had a crisis at work.’

‘I see. And how do you plan to get your son home?’

I hoisted up the carry-chair, which in my crazy rush to get out of the house I had managed to remember to bring.

‘And you did bring some clothes for him?’

Oh please, I’m not a total deadbeat.

‘Of course,’ I said politely.

‘Very well then.’

Jack still reacted with upset when I touched him. And he didn’t enjoy my diaper-changing technique – which was supervised by the unit sister, just to make certain that I was doing it properly.

It was also a struggle to get him into his baby-gro. He also hated being strapped into the carry-chair.

‘I presume your local health visitor will be calling on you tomorrow,’ she said.

‘I don’t know – I haven’t heard from anyone yet.’

‘Well, no doubt, she will be visiting you very soon – so if you have any postnatal questions, she’s the person to ask …’

In other words: if you’re making a total mess of things, help will be on its way …

‘Thank you for that. In fact, thank you for everything.’

‘I hope he makes you very happy,’ she said.

One of the nurses helped me downstairs with the carry-chair. She also got one of the porters to call me a cab. On the way back to Putney, the driver spent most of his time on his cell phone, and seemed genuinely oblivious to the fact that I had a newborn in the back of his cab. But when he swerved to dodge an oncoming white mini-van, he rolled down his window and shouted, ‘Stupid cunt! Don’t you know I’ve got a little baby in the back?’

When we reached Sefton Street, the driver got out of the car and helped me with Jack to the front door.

‘Where’s your bloke then?’ he asked after I settled the fare.

‘At the office.’

‘Guess someone has to earn the dosh,’ he said.

It was so strange entering my empty house with this tiny creature.

Like all of life’s bigger passages, you expect a sense of profundity to accompany the occasion. And like all of life’s bigger passages, the event itself is a complete letdown. I opened the door, I picked up the carry-chair. I brought Jack inside. I closed the door behind me. End of story. And, once again, all I could think was: this might have been an occasion if my husband was here.

Jack had fallen asleep during the cab ride, so I hoisted him upstairs to the nursery and unfastened the straps. Exercising the utmost care, I lifted him gently into his crib. He pulled his arms tight against himself as I covered him with the little quilt which Sandy had sent me. He didn’t stir. I sat down in the wicker chair opposite the crib, my head splitting from the ongoing after-effects of the night before. I looked at my son. I waited to feel rapture, delight, maternal concern and vulnerability – all those damn emotions that every writer of every motherhood guide promises you will inhabit in the days after your child’s birth. But all I felt was a profound, terrible hollowness – and a sense that, bar the fact that this child had been literally cut out of me, I had no further connection with him.

A ringing phone snapped me out of this desperate, vacant reverie. I was hoping it was Tony – sounding contrite and suitably humble. Or Sandy – with whom I could have bitched at length about my detached, taciturn husband. Instead, I received a call from a woman with a decidedly London accent who introduced herself as Jane Sanjay, and said that she was my health visitor. Her tone was surprising – breezy, pleasant,
I’m here to help.
And she wondered if she might drop by and see me this afternoon.

‘Is there any reason why you need to see me right away?’ I asked.

She laughed. ‘Don’t panic – I’m not the baby police.’

‘But what did they tell you at the hospital?’

More laughter. ‘Honestly nothing. We don’t talk to the hospitals anyway – unless there’s something seriously wrong. And you don’t sound like the sort of person with whom there’s anything wrong.’

Don’t let the American accent fool you. I really don’t know what the hell I’m doing.

‘So,’ she asked, ‘might I come by in an hour or so?’

Jane Sanjay was around thirty with an easy smile and an unfussy manner. Having expected a real social worker type, I was rather taken aback to see this quietly attractive Anglo-Indian woman, decked out in black leggings and electric silver Nikes. Her face-to-face manner echoed her phone style – and she put me immediately at ease, making all the right jolly noises about Jack, asking me a bit about how an American ended up in London (and sounding highly impressed when she learned about my Egyptian stint with the
Boston Post),
and questioning me gently about my general postnatal state. Part of me wanted to put on a happy face and tell her that everything was just hunky-dory – out of fear of looking like the height of incompetence. But who doesn’t want to take another person into their confidence – especially someone who, though in an official capacity, seems to have a sympathetic ear. So after running through what she described as a standard checklist of baby care concerns – his feeding and sleep patterns, how often I was having to change his diapers (or nappies, to use the local parlance), and how to deal with standard infant complaints like colic and diaper rash – she then asked me (in her breezy way) how I was bearing up. And when I answered with a hesitant shrug, she said, ‘Like I said on the phone, I’m not the baby police. And everyone who has a baby always gets regular visits from a Health Visitor. So really, Sally, you mustn’t think that I’m snooping here.’