Hubris? Choosing a name at sixteen weeks? Putting a fetus down for childcare? Already it seemed astounding thatsexhad resulted in a pregnancy. For a pregnancy to result in a baby, so much had to goright, and nothing could afford to go wrong. Was it true she should buy different brands of kale, all grown in different locations, to mix up her consumption of pesticides? “In 1997, before the election,” Adam said, “people all used the same phrase about Labour’s huge lead in the polls.”
“Okay.” She sighed. “What?”
“Blair was like a man carrying a priceless Ming vase across a highly polished floor.”
Actually, it was exactly how Coralie felt.
She made the mistake of confiding in Adam’s mother, who was a doctor, after all, and so might’ve had something to offer, if not emotionally, at least scientifically. “It’ll be fine,” Anne briskly said.
And was it fine? Wasshe? She was in nesting mode, warm-bath mode, cossetted by Adam, stood up for on the Tube. Popping into hospital for her scans, or the community center for her midwife appointments, she felt like a VIP, albeit one of many VIPs in an overcrowded waiting room. She transformed her pink study into a tranquil yellow nursery. From Dalston Oxfam, for £20, she found a chest of drawers exactly the right size and height for a changing table. The top drawer she filled with minuscule newborn nappies. In the other drawers, she stored cotton squares for wiping, muslin cloths for burping, a brush with the softest bristles, a floating bath thermometer in the shape of a flower, sleepsuits, nipple cream, little hats, scratch mitts—yes, she had everything (except a baby).
“I miss your pink room,” Zora said.
Coralie didn’t. She hadn’t done any of the work she’d expected to do there. Letting go had been a relief.
Eighteen months on, Zora’s relationship with her new brother remained boundaried and courteous. (Coralie imagined a bottle of champagne in a wooden gift box: “Rup, it has been a pleasuregetting to know you. I look forward to many more years of fruitful association—Z.”) Now that she read a minimum of two parenting books a week, Coralie could see that none of the adults in Zora’s life had properly “made space” for her feelings after Rup’s birth. She took Zora to Violet for a banana muffin and a chocolate milk. “I wonder if you’re worried about things changing—when your baby sister comes?”
“They will,” Zora said.
“How?”
“Grown-ups get tired and stressed. No one reads to me at night. Rabbitty doesn’t like it.”
Keep reading to Zora, Coralie mentally noted.
When she wiped and saw her mucus plug, a formless splodge at first, then (upon more wiping) something as solid as a creature washed up on a beach, she thought, with happiness, and not even a flicker of stress:This is it. She’s coming.But then she went into labor. Far from something natural, it was like a sinkhole swallowing a car, the Boxing Day tsunami, an air-raid siren, a bomb blast, an emergency. Her mind simplywent; she became not Coralie, a mother-to-be with a girl inside her, but some other fucked-up mixture: a wild creature craving the woods, desperate to run, to hide, and to die; her mother waiting for Dr. Ainslie, the sheet pulled up to her chin; a GIF she’d once seen by accident of a man run over by a truck.
A full night, a full day, and half a night at home. A journey to the hospital, where she was probed in a cubicle, the curtain half drawn. “I can offer you paracetamol,” the midwife said. Adam’s face ashen in the taxi back home.
Another journey, examined again, only three centimeters dilated but running a temp, better to be safe than sorry, we’ll have to find you a room. Gas and air: Everything turned white. She saw theboxes of books she’d gathered since she was a child, transported from boarding school to uni, to her flat with Josh in Melbourne, the freight company picking them up. She saw them as if she’d been there, watching her mother take delivery of them, storing them not in the spare room, where she’d promised, butunderthe house, uncared for and exposed. “Otherwise,” she said urgently to Adam, “whywouldthey…?” Get moldy, she meant; carted off to the dump. “No,” she moaned. “Stop!”
Adam’s worried face as he whispered with a midwife. The gas and air were taken away. Pethidine (she spewed on the floor). Curl over, that’s right. Hug the pillow. Blissful needle in the spine. Reunited with her mind. God, how she’d missed it, and those other dear companions, her thoughts.
Alert, sitting up, she monitored Florence’s heartbeat bouncing on the screen, as if she herself were a doctor. It didn’t look great. “Baby” was “finding it stressful,” the doctors said. Would Coralie agree to a cesarean? The risk-assessment document warned of paralysis, cardiac failure, death.Surgery—her mother waking up in Brisbane with half her insides gone. Still, it was time for this baby to be (in the words of the influencers she’d ill-advisedly followed on Instagram) “earthside”! On the last page of the consent form, she wrote (and seeing her own handwriting was like seeing an old friend): “Do NOT remove any organs no matter what you find inside.” She double-underlined theNOT, signed her name, and was wheeled away.
When Florence was placed on her chest, vast black eyes staring up at her, Coralie became Coralie again (broken, yes, but no longer mad) and something new altogether—a mother.
9
2017
Viewing Cotters’ Yard in high summer and signing Florence up on a whim had not given them an accurate picture of the profoundly depressing space under a railway arch that received no natural light for three hundred days of the year.
They’d also completely messed up their timing.
On Coralie’s side, Antoinette had communicated clearly through word and deed that twelve months was too long a mat leave and that nine months would be more suitable for the agencyandCoralie. What could she say to that?
On Adam’s side, his 2015 campaign book had been number eight on theSunday TimesBestsellers List for a week and his Boris book number ten. David Cameron’s majority government wouldn’t go to the polls until 2020. For a brief, shining period early in Coralie’s pregnancy, Adam had been able to construct a touching fantasy that his overwhelming lust for status, attention, and success was all behind him and that when Coralie returned to the office, Florence could do short days at nursery from ten till four and Adam could dodrop-off and pickup, perhaps with a swim at the Lido. Jogging, maybe? He might even jog?
Then came Brexit: the in/out referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union. His workload as a political commentator doubled. His stress trebled. The morning after the Brexit vote, Coralie rolled over to her bedside table and, still with her eyes closed, reached out to pick up her phone. To her surprise, Adam prized it from her hand. “Don’t look,” he said. “Stay not knowing as long as you can.”
Breastfeeding had been hard for Coralie: Whether it was the angle, or a special sensitivity, or Florence’s “latch,” or bad luck, her left breast couldn’t hack it, even with a nipple shield, and she’d had to feed the baby on the right while milking her left into a bottle with a machine, before topping up Florence with the bottle if she wanted it or filing the contents away in a sachet to freeze with the date on it. Engaged in this complex multistep operation the morning of June 24, she’d only half watched the BBC as the pound plunged and David Cameron resigned.
The dream of “short days with a swim” was over.
“Great, so now my baby’s starting nursery in January,andshe’ll be doing long days.”
“Not long days,” Adam protested. “Justdays!”
