Tessa Hadley - Everything Will Be All Right

He shook his head in irritation at her transparent effort to distract him. He didn’t want to talk about that here. Looking around at the scene of shapeless swollen women in their nightclothes, some reading magazines, some staring dotingly into their cots, some dozing (the Sister pulled curtains around the ones who were nursing, because a man was present), a tiny spasm of distaste tightened a muscle in his cheek. Zoe imagined that the ward smelled offensively: of milk, of baby excrement, of women’s blood, of disinfectant and hospital dinners.

She put Pearl to the breast to feed, to calm her down; but there was something preposterous in doing it in front of Simon, as if this were a show she was putting on for his benefit, an ill-judged attempt at a maternal display. It was not even a very well-prepared show. Pearl wouldn’t latch on to her nipple; she gasped and blubbered and half sucked and then lost her hold in frantic breathlessness, throwing her head from side to side against the breast; she arched her back and shuddered with sobbing and got herself into a worse state than she had ever been in before. Zoe was desperate and sweating, with her distended breast exposed. The nurses had to come and help, swirling the curtains around her bed behind them to cover her shame.

In the middle of this scene, Simon turned around and left.

It was Carol from Churchill who arranged to come to the hospital at lunchtime the next day with a friend who had a car, to pick up Zoe and Pearl and drive them home.

* * *

Joyce and ray sent a check for two hundred pounds toward things for the baby. Zoe bought a pram and a cot secondhand from the Spastics shop, a bag for her nappy-changing equipment, and a plastic changing mat; she spent the rest on an automatic washing machine, which she had plumbed in to the little covered yard at the back of their terraced cottage.

The washing machine made life remarkably much easier. In fact, before she bought it, Zoe simply hadn’t been coping with the amount of housework to do. Simon would take a bag of their clothes down to the launderette every week or so, as he always had, but she never gave him anything of the baby’s, so that in the evenings (Pearl’s best time for sleeping) Zoe found herself at the kitchen sink looking out of the window into the dark yard — or at her own blurry reflection, hunched and desperate — rubbing through the little sleepsuits and Babygros and plastic pants and cardigans and muslin wiping cloths (also her own bloodied knickers for the first couple of weeks), while the nappies boiled in a pan on the gas stove, filling the house with a foul steam. Somehow nothing ever came quite clean with handwashing (she supposed it was her inexperience; she was beginning to take in the infinite amount of ordinary things she didn’t properly know how to do); the babysuits were permanently yellowed with spit-up at the neckline or stained on the legs from leaking nappies. She remembered from somewhere to soak her own knickers in salt for the stains before washing them, and that helped; but on the clothes horse in front of the gas fire everything looked dingy and dispiriting, particularly when the rest of the house was such a mess because she hadn’t had time to tidy. Sometimes in the evening the baby bath from the morning, its water cold and scummed with soap and bits of cotton wool, was still sitting on the table waiting for her to empty it.

So she was fervently thankful for the automatic washing machine.

When she had first gone to prenatal classes, they had all been given a little booklet printed on poor-quality paper with information about pregnancy and childbirth and baby care. It was illustrated with old-fashioned line drawings of mother and father and baby in which mother wore a frilly tight-waisted apron and father a tie, and both wore screwball-comedy expressions of mock joy and mock despair as they juggled with their cute cartoon infant. Zoe had despised this booklet at the beginning and almost thrown it away. She had looked at its descriptions of a day with baby and wondered whatever you were supposed to do in the long gaps between the four-hourly feed and change routines. On the list of things to take into hospital with you for the birth had been included eau-de-Cologne, and dutifully, although with no idea what she might need it for, Zoe had acquired a huge cheap bottle of this from Boots. (Years later she still had it, almost full, and the smell of it would bring back overwhelming memories of the maternity ward, the vast baths with thundering hot water where she had soaked her soreness and afterward splashed her neck and arms with the cologne she hadn’t found any other use for, the smell of it mingling with the new strange smell her sweat had in those days after the birth.)

Now, although the booklet was stuffed in the drawer where she kept Pearl’s clothes and where Simon wouldn’t look, Zoe made constant and humbled reference to it, to try and find out what she should do to manage better this new life she found herself inside. Pearl wasn’t what they called a “good” baby. This was the first question all the new mothers asked when they met at the baby clinic, looking into one another’s prams: “Is yours good?” (Zoe never saw either the hairdresser or the wife of the man in haulage again.) She knew everything was wrong with this; she was repelled by the smug relish of the mothers of the “good” ones, and she could imagine just what Simon would understand about their use of that word “good,” its repressive moralization of any behavior that didn’t fit into a convenient pattern. And yet it was a relief to confess to someone else whose baby, like hers, didn’t sleep in the day and woke up every two hours at night, who was moving like her in a fog of fatigue, falling asleep on her feet doing the washing-up, falling asleep whenever she picked up a book to read. She longed sometimes when things weren’t going well to telephone Joyce and pour out her troubles. Instead, whenever they did speak, she was careful to present herself as coping competently. (“You were such an easy baby,” Joyce had told her. “I never knew what any of the fuss was about.”) They sometimes spoke of the possibility of a visit, but they never fixed a date.

— Whenever you’re ready for us, Joyce said.

— Whenever you can make time, said Zoe.

The thought of other wakeful mothers was consoling when Zoe was walking up and down in Pearl’s room trying to get her to sleep after a night feed (on bad nights she stayed in there on the studio couch because it was pointless to disturb Simon, getting in and out of bed every time Pearl cried). She would be holding her upright against her shoulder the way she liked best, jogging her slightly and rhythmically until her right arm ached, letting her suck on the first knuckle of her left hand. After a while she would feel the alert little body dropping into softness against her, yielding up its conscious awareness, the wet mouth falling away from where it sucked. Without stopping the jogging, Zoe would lower her with slow smooth movements onto the cot, face down, rocking her against the sheet with both hands, gradually lessening and slowing the rocking and taking away the hands, one at a time, hovering ready to pounce back and rock her into sleep again if she roused. Then — silence! — Zoe would creep off to her couch and lie down. The temptation was to lie strained, awake, listening to Pearl breathe, but Zoe knew she could not afford to waste these blessed spaces of peace; she trained herself to fall almost instantly into sleep by running over and over the dates and details of the Education Acts or the clauses of the Treaty of Vienna, not testing herself, only moving her mind round and round inside the loop of known things until it fell through and was swallowed up. On bad nights it might be only five or ten or twenty minutes later that she was shocked awake again by Pearl’s hard little cry, vindictive-seeming, full of outrage.