Alice Adams - Invincible Summer

This must be the nesting phase, Sylvie thought to herself. The wretched tiredness had finally been lifting over the last week and she’d decided with a sudden sense of urgency that it was time to get the house ready. After much nagging Lucien had agreed to hire a van to collect her belongings from the various different addresses where they had accrued over the years and bring them to the new home that she now shared with her husband, and, in a few weeks’ time, their daughter. She turned the words over in her mind. Husband. Daughter. They seemed alien to her, not words that could really apply to her life. How had she wound up here?

The answer was of course prosaic: she’d got knocked up by accident. She didn’t really know why she’d refused to even consider an abortion. It wasn’t as if her circumstances were ideal for raising a child on her own, which is the way things had initially looked like being. Perhaps it was partly that she hadn’t realized until she was so far along, when she was already sixteen weeks pregnant. What she had thought was her period had arrived only a few days late, and she’d been on the Pill, so when she missed the next period she figured it was just a hormonal blip. When the following one also didn’t arrive she went to the GP, who seemed astonished by her obtuseness. Lots of women have some bleeding in pregnancy around the time of their first missed period, he told her. About a third of them, to be precise. And no form of contraception was a hundred per cent reliable, not even the contraceptive pill. Had she had a tummy bug a few months ago?

That was the moment she finally believed she was pregnant, because suddenly she knew exactly how it had happened. That first night she’d spent with Robert, the night she went to meet Eva after work and ended up falling off the wagon, she’d drunk so much that she had thrown up several times the next day. And then the day after that she’d felt better, and that evening Robert had paid her a follow-up booty call. It was hardly the most auspicious start to a life. If she’d realized when she’d been four or five weeks along maybe things would have been different, but the GP had sent her to the hospital for a scan the very next day and there was the baby, waggling its arms and legs, and she had known immediately that, despite never having particularly liked children and regularly thinking that if she heard Tony Blair or Gordon Brown say ‘hardworking families’ one more time she might actually puke, despite all of this, she was going to be a mother.

‘Looks like a girl to me,’ the sonographer had told her, taking her hand and adding, ‘Want a tissue, love?’ when he noticed her eyes reddening.

Of course, this wasn’t exactly what she’d planned, she thought as she walked out of the antenatal clinic, but then, what in life actually had turned out as planned? She hadn’t made much of a success of anything else so far, but Sylvie found herself suffused with a weird hopefulness that she was going to make a success of this one thing. She would be a good mother, bohemian enough not to be hidebound by convention but caring and attentive enough to raise a daughter who didn’t pass through the world slashing and burning all before her as she went. Sylvie could teach her all the things she’d learned the hard way so that her daughter wouldn’t have to learn them the hard way too: how important it was to have the humility to work hard and value the things you achieved for yourself, but also the confidence and breadth of perspective not to look for happiness in the wrong places, like the bottoms of wine bottles and wraps of coke and the beds of people who couldn’t care less about you. The baby hadn’t been planned but Sylvie felt. . what was this unfamiliar sensation? That was it: she felt ready.

*

Once Robert had accepted she wouldn’t change her mind about keeping the baby, they had fallen back into the habit of tumbling into bed together several times a week. Sylvie suspected he would simply fade away to a name against an incoming amount on her bank statement each month once the baby arrived, but she was making the most of the sex and the feeling of intimacy while it lasted; it was probably going to be a long time before there was much of either of those things in her life again. Because of this, it came as a shock when, lying together in his bed one night, naked and satiated, covers tangled around their legs and both looking down at her swollen belly, he said, ‘Do you think we should just get married and have done with it?

‘No, hear me out,’ Robert continued when she snorted with laughter and whacked him with a pillow. ‘You’re having this baby and I’m on the hook for it financially whether I like it or not. I’ve always half fancied the idea of having a mini-me eventually, and it’s going to look a whole lot better at work if we go down the marriage route. You’d be surprised at how conservative some of the management are at American banks. I don’t think they actually mind that much if you’re going to strip clubs and banging some twenty-year-old, but a veneer of respectability at least is smiled upon. Christ, it would be worth it just to put an end to the evils I’m getting from Eva when I arrive at work every morning. She’s like Medusa, that one; her glare could turn a lesser man to stone.’

Warming to the idea, he went on, ‘Now, from your point of view there’s plenty of upside. There’d be a prenup of course, but I’d buy a nice house for us in some expensive spawning ground and pay for the kid to go to a decent school and all that. You wouldn’t have to live in a broom cupboard in the Outer Hebrides and shine shoes anymore or whatever the fuck it is you do for money.’ He wrinkled his nose at the thought of her living and working arrangements. ‘I can’t guarantee that I’m not going to bang the odd twenty-year-old, obviously. And you’d have to do the corporate wife bit, throw the occasional dinner party and get your nails done with the other wives or whatever the job description says. But basically it makes good sense all round, given where we are. What do you say?’

Sylvie grinned. ‘That I’ve been waiting for this moment ever since I was a little girl and it’s everything I dreamt of?’

He rolled over onto his side towards her and brushed a few strands of hair away from her face, then dropped his hand down to her stomach in a gesture that could almost be described as tender.

‘Yeah, well, we’re not really the hearts-and-flowers type, are we, you and I? No point in pretending we haven’t both been around the block a few times but maybe that’s the beauty of the thing. It might not be Romeo and Juliet, but look where that got those buggers anyway.’

And he wasn’t entirely wrong, when she thought about it. You had to admire his straightforwardness, his complete lack of guile. Robert was a shagger, but a lot of his charm lay in his unwillingness to dissemble about it, and once she’d agreed he’d been as good as his word. They’d done the deed swiftly and then bought a house in Hampstead, an area which appealed to her because of its artistic and literary associations and to him because, despite its pretentious lefty reputation, it was these days being colonized by wealthy bankers much like all the other desirable parts of London.

So that was how Sylvie had found herself in her beautiful house and enviable life, reeling from the suddenness of it all. She nudged the dancer a little closer to the hippo, picked up the now empty cardboard box, and closed the door of the nursery behind her.

*

Perhaps a townhouse hadn’t been the wisest choice, Sylvie reflected, as she hefted her ever-expanding bulk down the last flight of steps into the kitchen. Sometimes she felt that she would never get back upstairs again and would have to ask Robert to haul a mattress down to the ground floor so that she could sleep there until the baby came. She’d been intending to make a sandwich but the armchair in the corner of the room was too inviting, and with a sigh she lowered herself into it. It was impossible to get into a comfortable position to sleep at night when you were the size of a cruise liner. Outside the window, the early afternoon sunlight filtered through the leaves of the oak tree in the garden, casting a shifting filigree of shadow across the kitchen wall. How peaceful it is here, she thought, allowing her eyes to close.