Matt Rudd - William’s Progress

He texts back: ‘Saskia wants a chance to talk to you. To explain.’

I don’t reply. Instead, I sing soporific nursery rhymes over and over again, right through the Lottery show (my only chance to get the money I need to hire a full-time nanny) and Casualty . Jacob loves my singing. Point-blank refuses to miss any of it by going to sleep.

My parents come round with lots of blue clothes for Jacob. Isabel explains her desire to give the poor chap a non-gender-specific upbringing. Dad rolls his eyes and bites his tongue. Then they leave.

Alex and Geoff come round minutes later. Isabel has failed to dissuade them about the bathroom. They are still promising it will be done in a jiffy and that we will hardly notice and I only just manage to stop myself pointing out that I have already noticed them because they’re here on a Sunday prattling on about bath shapes. And it’s Jacob’s nap, the only time of the day when I can lie catatonic on the sofa and pretend to read the newspaper.

Geoff likes egg-shaped.

Alex likes roll-top.

Isabel is split between the two.

When they leave, at last, I look stroppy. Isabel asks why I look stroppy. I tell her it’s annoying that our Sundays have to be intruded on by Alex and his very overbearing boyfriend.

‘Darling, I know he’s a bit crazy and I know he did all that horrible stuff last year but, well, he’s still trying to make amends. I thought you liked baths. Aren’t you excited about having an egg-shaped one?’

‘No, it will be too steep at the top. I like the one we’ve got.’

‘It’s yellowing and you complain about it all the time.’

‘I’ll paint it.’

‘You can’t paint a bath.’

‘I’m sick of Alex. Why can’t he leave us alone?’

‘Why can’t Saskia leave us alone? At least Alex is gay. And sorry. Which is more than can be said for that tart.’

I give up. ‘Cup of camomile tea, darling?’

1 Three e-mails from Andy apologising for falling in love with the Destroyer of Relationships, but also saying that Saskia is completely misunderstood and isn’t a Destroyer of Relationships at all.

2 Two e-mails from Isabel, the first delighting in the fact that Jacob is sleeping properly, the second, much shorter, lamenting the fact that he isn’t. And that the house is virtually uninhabitable. And can I please get home early, if possible.

3 One e-mail from my mum asking if I could check if it has a virus atta—oh, bugger.

Jacob smiled. And just when I was beginning to wonder if he had the same syndrome as the boy on the Channel Five documentary – the one who had to have nine operations in order to smile, or was it the boy with the face-eating bug who had the full nine? I can’t remember. But the point is, we hadn’t seen a smile yet, and Isabel’s mum’s greengrocer’s daughter’s baby smiled after the first month. I was beginning to wonder whether I’d passed the stress of an unreasonable boss, a traitorous best friend and a psychotic but newly homosexual bathroom designer on to our precious child. But it was definitely a smile. And it came at 4 a.m.

This used to be the time when you would be sound asleep or possibly clubbing or hosting a terribly good party or, very occasionally, having sexual intercourse. Used to be. Now, it is the hour of the zombie parent. It is said, although no one has reliable statistical evidence to back this up, that at least 20 per cent of traffic on the M25 at 4 a.m. constitutes exhausted parents trying to drive their insomniac babies to sleep. The figure could be far greater. It is certainly the time I am out pushing the goddam four-by-four Bugaboo round the block under the quite possibly inaccurate assumption that cold air makes our insomniac child sleepy. I loop the block twelve or fourteen times, singing nursery rhymes as boringly as possible. Why won’t he sleep? Doesn’t he know I have to pretend to work in the morning? And finally, he closes his eyes.

And then opens them again.

And this is the point, the horrible dark point, in that horrible dark hour, when you think, is this really worth it? Would adoption be such a bad thing? Maybe I could leave him in a cardboard box outside the gates of the hospital? With a blanket, of course.

Then he smiled – a beautiful smile right at me – and it was all worth it a million times over. I had the energy for another few hundred loops of the block. Or the M25.

And when he finally did nod off, I went back inside to find Isabel, anxious, in the front room. She never sleeps properly now when Jacob isn’t with her.

‘He smiled!’

‘Did he?’

‘Yes. A proper smile. It was beautiful.’ And Isabel didn’t look like a zombie parent any more, either. She looked happy, happy for me and happy for Jacob. We hugged and she took him off to bed while I checked the NHS handbook. Three months, they’re supposed to start smiling. Three months! Not five weeks. We have a genius on our hands. Cancel the Channel Five documentary. Phone Channel 4. We’re making The Child Who Smiled Seven Weeks Early .

Isabel, having read an article about the plight of the bumblebee, has signed us up as members of the Bumble Bee Conservation Trust. This despite the cost of nappies (the initial outlay for the cloth ones, plus the recurring outlay for the horrible plastic ones that will sit in a landfill for a thousand millennia because, as I had predicted, we really haven’t managed to keep up with the cloth-nappy washing demands), baby clothes, prenatal wardrobe, postnatal wardrobe and the Barn Owl Conservation Society she made us join last year when she read about barn owls being combine-harvested or something.

As sole breadwinner in this house, excluding paltry maternity leave, I have been forced to put my foot down. From now on, barn owls and bumblebees will receive our support and sympathy. All other endangered animals will have to fend for themselves…

…except, perhaps, for coral and red squirrels. And a certain type of parrot that only eats mangetout. I have conceded additional species on the understanding that I can go to the pub this evening, but only between the hours of 7 and 9 p.m.

It was Andy’s idea that they come all the way down to my local pub because I have a baby. He’s clearly trying to get back in my good books. Johnson isn’t. He arrives grumbling about it being a long way to go for a couple of hours, seeing as they both live in London and I live in the sticks. Despite Andy being a bastard and Johnson being miserable, I am delighted. I am in the pub. I am a free man.

The first pint vanishes in twelve seconds. The next two go almost as quickly. I should probably hold back: I am a dad now. But Johnson explains that it is important to wet the baby’s head, even if the baby isn’t here. And besides, I have to leave in an hour and they’ve come all this way, so we have another two pints in quick succession. We talk about nothing in particular, largely because baby talk is boring and talk about women would involve mentioning Saskia, which none of us feel like doing, given that we only have two hours.

None of us, except Johnson.

‘Andy?’ he asks after a long draw of lager. ‘Do you find it weird sleeping with a girl with whom your mate has already slept? It’s only, I did that once, back when life was fun, and the image of my mate, naked, kept popping into my head every time we shagged. It got to the point where I had to stop mid-coitus every time because it got all strange and homoerotic. I had to dump her because it felt like being in the wrong sort of threesome.’