Tessa Hadley - Everything Will Be All Right

After an hour she tried to phone the hospital, in case Pearl had been taken ill and Simon had rushed her in; but she could find only one number for the hospital in the phone book, and when she dialed it she got the tone that meant it had been disconnected. On an impulse, her heart hollow and her mind dazzling with panic, she dialed her parents’ number; she thought she would ask them what she ought to do. Some pent-up anguish welled in her like a billowing behind silk; she didn’t know what confession might rip out of her if she heard her mother’s voice. The phone rang but they didn’t answer. Probably they were asleep. She pictured the nook where their phone sat on a blackened old antique chest beside a lamp made out of a stoneware bottle and a plateful of painted eggs; she pictured their bed, with its old throw of Irish white crocheted lace over the humps of their shapes in the dark. She let the phone ring for as long as it took her to pace out in her mind the distance between the two. That sleeping other house seemed an unattainable happiness in her present distress.

Retreating upstairs to sit on the bed with her arms hugged round her knees, she was seized by one terrible imagining. She seemed to see Simon pushing the pram down by the river in the dark to where there was a gap between thickly clumped trees, and the moon shone on the water; she heard Pearl’s frantic bleating cry, knowing how it could wind crushingly tight around your sane awareness; she imagined she saw Simon lift a squalling bundle out of the pram and douse its noise in the dark water like putting out a light, holding it under for a long time. She knew there was no rational foundation for imagining this, but once she had glimpsed it so vividly the scene acquired a persuasive reality all its own; when she tried to suppress it, the moment of the dipping of the bundle in the black river flickered over and over compulsively in her mind like a stuck film.

— What other reason, she half convinced herself, could he have for being out so long? For two hours, with a baby, in the middle of the night?

Somehow, from sitting up on the bed she keeled over so that her face was against the pillows; and then even in the midst of frantic anxiety she lost herself in her exhaustion and tumbled into obliviousness (a voice came: “If it’s all over, then at least I can sleep”). Sometime later she woke to the sound of the back-door latch and the well-known nudging of the pram wheels through the narrow entrance to the yard. By the time she got downstairs, Simon was parking the pram carefully in its space under the kitchen window, reaching with his foot for the brake.

— What have you done with her? cried Zoe wildly.

He even sounded pleased with himself.

— She wouldn’t take the bottle, and I couldn’t calm her down. So I thought if I pushed her in the pram it would probably be the most soothing thing.

— And where is she now?

An instant’s hesitation while he took in her tone, and then a different coldness in his voice.

— She’s here, of course. It did work. She’s asleep.

— But you’ve been hours! You can’t have been pushing her around for all this time!

— On the contrary. That’s exactly what I’ve been doing. It was an extraordinary night. There was a moon: I could see everything clearly. We went a long way down the cycle path beside the river.

— Good God! It’s freezing cold out there. What were you thinking of?

Now they were frankly enemies; there was a terrible liberation in it.

— Actually, I think she was cold in her cot and that’s why she woke up, she’d kicked the blankets off. I put her outdoor suit on. I wrapped her up well. I felt her every so often, to make sure she was warm enough. Whatever have you been imagining?

— What did you think I’d think? Why didn’t you leave a note?

He shrugged.

— I didn’t think we’d be out long. And then it was good, walking. I thought you’d be glad of the chance to get some sleep when you came back from work.

— Which just shows how much you’ve taken in of our routine. She has a feed at midnight, when I get home.

— Oh, obviously I didn’t quite appreciate how tight a timetable you run on. My apologies if I’ve thrown the whole system out of sync by taking the baby for a walk. I have to say, she hardly seems to be desperate from starvation. One wonders if the baby isn’t being managed to suit the system, rather than the other way around.

— Don’t think I don’t know what you think about my life. But you’re wrong; you have no idea of how this has to be done. Why can’t you just for once take it from me?

— This is intolerable, Simon said. (They weren’t shouting but hissing in whispers, so as not to wake Pearl.) We shouldn’t let this go any further, in decency.

— Oh, absolutely. I absolutely agree, we shouldn’t.

— Just what exactly were you imagining had happened?

— How was I to know? I thought you might have had to rush her to hospital, I thought you might have done something to her—

— Done something to her? Simon let those words settle around them where they stood, squeezed between the bulk of the washing machine and the bikes and the pram in the ghostly gray yard; they could see because Zoe had left all the lights on inside the house. In the shadows the deep-set eyes and lean hollows of Simon’s face were exaggerated.

— I think you’re slightly unbalanced. Motherhood has made you sick.

He found the brake under the pram and put it on.

— Perhaps you should talk to somebody.

— But not to you?

— I don’t think we have anything left to say.

When Simon had gone (he took a couple of books down from his shelves and then went out by the front door, which they never used), Zoe left Pearl sleeping in the pram. She moved around the house in a high bright humming lightness, as if something had been resolved; she took down her rucksack from the top of the wardrobe and began efficiently to pack clothes and necessities for her and for Pearl. She did wonder whether Simon would wake up his friend and borrow the car again and drive to Dina’s; Dina’s husband would no doubt conveniently be away and she would move over for him in the big marital bed, glad to be relieved by this adventure from the boredom of life in the middle of nowhere with only small children for company. Zoe thought through all this without any feeling about it whatsoever, simply as if a clear light glanced upon possibilities; in her mind’s eye she saw the pair of them coupling busily, tiny and far off.

She put together a travel kit in a separate bag for Pearl, with jars of homemade pureed vegetables and made-up baby rice and a spoon and a wet flannel in a plastic bag for wiping her face; and clean nappies and cotton wool and baby oil and a towel to change her on and more plastic bags for wrapping up the dirty nappies. “He just doesn’t realize how complicated it has to be,” she said to herself once, but that didn’t seem to start up the old lumbering train of accusation and counteraccusation inside her thoughts; the wrangling with Simon’s way of seeing things had subsided. Simon was right. Something horrible had happened to them, and in all decency they must end it. Making her plans — she would have to wait in the morning until the banks were open, then ask her taxi to stop on the way to the station so she could cash a check — she was as light-headed as if she were escaping on holiday.

When she eventually fell asleep, it was curled up on the side of the bed expecting to be roused at any moment: she dreamed a succession of rapid anxious dreams including one about trying to get ready for a party with a kind of tickertape machine strapped to her belly, trailing yards of readout (there had really been one of these at the prenatal clinic, to measure the baby’s heartbeat). In the pram Pearl slept all through the night without a feed for the first time, and only woke at seven the next morning.