In the first week of January, Coralie and Adam were encouraged to sit on the sidelines for an hour and observe Florence “settling in,” which she appeared to do instantly, sprawling on the carpet in the Baby Room and gnawing her plastic giraffe as, around her, her peers crept or wriggled, coughing like barking seals. A staff member swooped to wipe a child’s nose with a torn-off piece of blue industrial hand towel. It was the hand towel that got Coralie, and she cried in Climpsons afterward, burying her face in her daughter’ssilky hair and breathing in her lovely smell. It wassorough, she tried to explain, the towel and the gesture; she’d never put something so rough on her girl’s beautiful face and do it—the wiping—soroughly.
“But we’d also never lie on the floor to build and rebuild a block tower,” Adam said. “Or play peekaboo for more than a minute. Or read a book in that slow, singsong voice, or have other kids her own age around and so many nice toys. She’ll havesomuch stimulus in that nursery, so much to think about and do.”
It was true Coralie couldn’t see herself doing that kind of stuff. She read, of course—various Mogs,Totally Wonderful Miss Plumberry,Possum Magic,Koala Lou: books of a vintage that could almost have been read to her (though she only remembered reading alone). But playing: no. Crying had been the order of the day for the first two months of Florence’s life, for both of them. Then their world had become more predictable. Nappies always. Sleeping sometimes. The laborious breastfeeding stuff. In between, they enjoyed companionable parallel lives: Florence on her soft sheepskin sent by Elspeth from Australia, grasping for the toys on the wooden arch; Coralie cooking and tidying, always keeping an eye on her in her small playpen in the kitchen. They listened to audiobooks over the Bluetooth speaker,Wolf Hallfirst, andBring Up the Bodies, and all the P. D. Jameses and John le Carrés, all narrated by the same man, so that the happiest time in her life would be forever linked with the voice of Michael Jayston. Zero conference calls. No client emails. No one bothered her. She was exactly the right amount of alone.
And on the weekends, when Zora came round, Coralie had the ongoing marvel and good fortune of watching her girls fall in love. Aged eight, having not cared about dolls since she was five, Zora rediscovered baby Layla from the toy box. She gently bathed theplastic parts of Layla’s body (the middle was made of cloth). She changed her nappy (a tea towel) and swaddled her (also in a tea towel). On walks, Layla was strapped to her chest in Adam’s Liverpool Football Club scarf. At the end of Year 3 assembly, Coralie found herself swamped by Zora’s peers, all stroking the soft top of Florence’s head with eager, gentle hands.
She enjoyed it too much, loved it too much, for it to begood mothering.
Adam was right: The baby needed someone who’d sit on the floor with her and gasp “Oh no!” when a tower fell down. Coralie had never heard of the songs the staff performed in the circle on the carpet. (Pull, pull, clap, clap, clap.) Soon, too soon, the jig was up. She redownloaded Outlook on her phone. Florence would be handed over to the reliable care of professionals.
The Baby Room manager talked a big game about accommodating expressed milk for bottle feeds. For day two, when “settling in” was longer and would include “snack,” Coralie defrosted a sachet from her dwindling stockpile. Her milk had dried up a few weeks before she was due to return to work, and because it had not been her choice to stop breastfeeding, and because breastfeeding had been so complicated and hard-won, she didn’t feel that sense of liberation other women described at getting their “body back.” Florence could have Coralie’s body as long as she wanted. In fact, if Coralie could have, she’d have carried her around in a pouch. The nursery provided “snack” (“handmade organic vegetable purées and finger foods”), but she’d kept the milk as a connection between mother and baby to help Florence cope with her absence and herself cope with the absence of Florence.
“She didn’t take her bottle, mama!” Liliana reported at pickup.
“Oh no—what did you do with the leftover milk?”
“I put it out—in the bin? For good hygiene.”
The logic couldn’t be faulted, but that milk wasof her body, and now it was in thebin. Florence, that other precious product of her body, was safe in Coralie’s arms, but an air of threat enveloped her, as well as a bad new smell of other children’s nappies. Even her toy cat, Catty, smelled like the nursery. For this they’d be paying £1,650 a month.
That night, after Florence’s bedtime, Coralie cried and couldn’t stop.
“It’s only hard for youbecauseyou love her,” Adam said. “Becauseyou’re such a good mother.”
“I feel bad because Iambad,” Coralie sobbed.
It was possible some hormones were at play. There hadn’t been much breastfeeding or pumping toward the end, but stopping completely was a big shock for the body. There was anxiety, too, about leaving the home—which she’d made perfect and was in charge of—and going back into the impersonal office to be at the mercy of others. Everything about her was vulnerable and soft. Her trousers still had an elastic waist. What if she was the scared one, not Florence, and Florence was actually fine?
Either way, by the second week of January, her darling baby was a full-time inmate at a lightless germ prison. Sitting on a crowded 55 bus, Coralie could either collapse crying from missing her or vow to one day brutally exact her revenge on Adam. (Why Adam? Why not? Somehow she knew he was to blame.)
Florence, Flossie, Floss-Floss, Rennie, Wren, Birdy, Cheep-Cheep.Crying and missing was too painful, so revenge it would have to be.
10
Before Florence turned one, Coralie started to joke. “This time last year, I got my first contraction.” Much later: “Ah yes, this time last year was when the hospital turned me away!” But after a while, the enormity of what she’d gone through hit her, and she cried about the birth properly for the first time.
The Sunday after Florence’s birthday, they hosted a small party for her at home: Anne and Sally were there, up from Lewes. So was Stefan from work, “on a break” from Marcus and pretending to be fine. And Daniel, now twenty-nine, had just moved to London on a Youth Mobility visa. Zora was there, of course, with Layla; Tory Tom came early with Rup. Nearly two, Rup seemed a giant, running around in a collared shirt, a thick nappy under his bulky jeans. In the space of ten seconds, he climbed to the top of the sofa, rolled onto the seat, then onto the floor with a thump.
“I never knew this, Adam—did you?” Tom dragged his sobbing son onto his lap. “But boys who are tall for their age have rather a hard time. Everyone expects Rup to behave like a three- or four-year-old.”
“No,” Anne said. “Adam didn’t have that problem.”
Tom gave Adam a sympathetic glance. Then—“Tell me, Daniel,” he said. “How are you finding London? Where do you live?”
“Tottenham,” Dan said. “In a warehouse with thirteen housemates.”
“Ooh, edgy.”
“Where do you live, Tom? I don’t know London well enough to make a joke.”
“Clapham?” Stefan guessed. “Putney?”
“Camden, actually. Surprise! It’s my wife; she’s liberal intelligentsia.”
Zora made a comically puzzled face she had learned from a tween comedy on Netflix.
“I don’t think that’s a rude thing to say,” Coralie assured her.
