The Birth of Love (8 page)

‘Good boy,’ said Brigid, kissing him on the top of his head. ‘What a very good little boy you are.’ She imagined him feeling ambivalence, but she was sure no such emotion had ever troubled her as a child. She had felt joy then sadness, bold and certain states, fleeting in their effects. She didn’t feel diffident, or troubled by something she couldn’t quite express, or any of these confusing relative states of the adult brain. In childhood she regarded her mother with awe and dependent love, with desperate need. ‘You were always crying for me, all day, all night,’ her mother later told her. ‘You were such a furious little baby, always fuming about something or other.’ Brigid had accepted this for years, had told her friends what a difficult baby she was, how her mother had perhaps never entirely forgiven her. She joked about it, though she felt it, too, as a
rebuke, something she could never atone for. Having a child had made her reassess the story, or aspects of it now resonated differently. After a few months, she began to think that babies raged not because they were inherently furious, or inherently anything at all; they cried because they wanted to tell you something, and when you didn’t hear them, didn’t respond or comprehend, they simply cried more loudly. She wondered if her mother really meant something else, if really she was saying that she had been overwhelmed. That she had felt her baby was displeased with her, because she was so uncertain of herself. ‘In the end I gave up,’ her mother said. ‘I couldn’t stop your shrieking, so at night I put you in a cot at the end of a corridor, and shut the door. At least then I could sleep.’ This had once shocked Brigid, but now she thought there might be something else her mother wanted to tell her – something about losing your grip on things, becoming detached from events you could no longer control. Calumn had never slept through a night, and this had made her more tired than she had ever been before. Yet she understood that his needs were simple; he only wanted her, or Patrick. He was lonely in the darkness. She had always loathed sleeping alone, and if Patrick went away she found it hard to sleep. So how could she blame her son for being lonely at night? For the first year, he slept in a cot by the side of the bed. If he cried she simply lifted him out and took him into bed with her. She stroked his hair and kissed his soft face. Even when she could barely open her eyes, when she moved as if drugged, she felt compelled to kiss him, to hold him as he fell asleep again. She wasn’t sure she could have done things differently, and anyway it was too late. Now she had become so huge, they had
moved him into his own room. He still cried in the night, but now it was Patrick who consoled him. If it had still been her – if, like her mother, she had never asked her husband to help, or he had never offered – what would she have done?

Whatever she thought, however her thoughts swirled and would not settle, her mother was here. She was here and she was trying to help. This was worth noting, thought Brigid. Perhaps she had always worried that her mother didn’t love her much. She had certainly been an unpredictable woman. But now, here was the evidence. She loved Brigid and she loved her grandson, Calumn. She was brimming over with love, some of it revealed clumsily, in these forays and in her determination to advise her daughter, but it was love all the same … Now Calumn was grumbling, so she handed him a carrot, said, ‘Would you like this, Calumn?’

‘Gub,’ he said, as he took it.

‘A carrot! How lovely,’ said her mother. ‘A delicious carrot!’

‘Awott,’ said Calumn.

‘Very good,’ said Brigid and her mother, together.

‘I suppose I’d better go in a minute,’ Stephanie was saying, though she had only just arrived. ‘I suppose I’d better go before Aurora wakes and we have to embark on the terrible business of breastfeeding once more. You don’t want to witness it, I’m afraid. At the moment I have about forty-five minutes from one breastfeed to another. Blissful breast-free minutes, and then it’s back to work again. Basically I might as well just put her on my breast and lie
in bed all day. It would probably be less hassle.’

‘It’ll get better,’ said Brigid. ‘It’ll get much much easier.’

Stephanie smiled as if she didn’t believe her. ‘That’s what they say. They say that about everything, really, don’t they? The first six weeks are hell, they say. Well, that’s certainly true. The breastfeeding is hell at first but it gets better. The first five years are hell but they get better. The whole thing is hell but it gets better. Well, I sure hope it does.’ She laughed again, her big round laugh, though it sounded hollow this time.

‘Are you enjoying it a bit?’ said Brigid. She looked at her more carefully. Stephanie seemed so indestructible, you assumed she would always be OK. But looking more closely, well perhaps after all she looked chastened, as if she hadn’t been prepared for this. It was hard to be certain. Her eyes were puffy, but that was just fatigue. She was holding herself carefully, as if she was very delicate, but that was the Caesarean and all her post-natal pain. Then she was bleeding, of course, and she had her heavy breasts, and her nipples all cracked and sore and she was only slowly understanding what had happened to her. The body understood but somehow the brain took a while to catch up.

‘I love her very much,’ said Stephanie, looking down at her baby, smiling at the sleeping little form. ‘I do love her. I just wish these weeks would rush on by. They seem to go so slowly. I wish we could all wake up in a few months’ time, with everything established and running more smoothly.’

‘The ironic thing is, later you’ll feel really nostalgic about these early days, when she was so small and completely dependent on you, and all she wanted was to be
with you,’ said Brigid. ‘You really will feel nostalgic when she gets more and more autonomous.’

‘I find that hard to believe,’ said Stephanie. ‘I don’t want her to depend on me for everything. I’d quite like her to depend on someone else.’ Now she was smiling but Brigid knew she was completely serious. She had been serious throughout, but she had been dressing it up, pretending it was all a joke. ‘I just wonder when things get sane again. But perhaps they never do get back to sanity.’

‘No, they don’t,’ said Brigid’s mother, firmly, from the floor, where she was showing Calumn how to balance a colander on top of a pile of tins. ‘They never do.’

‘Oh, that’s not true,’ said Brigid. ‘They get back to a different form of sanity. In some ways it’s a richer sort of sanity. I’m not saying it’s simple. It’s not at all. But the beginning is by far the hardest part. Aside from the bodily stuff, you’re struggling to process what has happened to you. You’re in a sort of existential crisis, as well as the rest. But it gets better and better, until you decide things are clearly running along too smoothly and you had better cast everything into chaos again by having another one …’

‘Brigid has had a wonderfully easy baby,’ said her mother to Stephanie.

‘I don’t know if I have or not,’ said Brigid. ‘I’ve always thought that people must enjoy it in the end, mustn’t they? On balance they must think it’s all worth it? Or people wouldn’t have more kids, two, three, four kids? They wouldn’t keep producing children, if there wasn’t something about it they enjoyed.’

‘Perhaps it’s just that they lose any sense that they once did other things,’ said Stephanie. She looked uncertainly at her baby, still sleeping, eyes tightly shut, pink mouth open.
The baby looked serene, even confident, and yet Stephanie looked uncertain nonetheless, as if the sight even of its serenity was troubling to her.

‘I just worried all the time,’ said Brigid’s mother. ‘All the hours of the day I was worrying.’

‘Well, you didn’t need to,’ said Brigid.

‘Perhaps I did. Perhaps if I hadn’t worried then you wouldn’t be here now,’ said her mother, defiantly. ‘Colander, Calumn, it’s a colander. We put salads in it and pasta. To dry them off. CO-LAN-DER.’

‘Oblambar,’ said Calumn.

‘Very good darling,’ said Brigid.

‘I don’t worry about Aurora,’ said Stephanie. ‘I feel somehow she’ll be OK.’

‘Oblambar coblandar oblandar.’

‘Well of course she will be,’ said Brigid’s mother. ‘She’s a sweet little thing.’

‘She’s gorgeous,’ said Brigid, quickly, because her mother sounded so tepid.

Always she was trying to force her mother back, or counteract her perceived effects. And Brigid thought how much she wanted to love her mother simply and virtuously, because she was afraid otherwise her children would grow up feeling varieties of ambivalence towards her. They would learn from her poor example, experience the same confusion of emotions as she did. And perhaps this was her mother’s fear too, that despite all her work she had only received this imperfect love from her daughter. Perhaps this was why she came round and couldn’t quite leave, couldn’t stop coming round and staying too long, because she was still trying to earn something better.

‘Would you like another cup of tea?’ she said to Stephanie.

‘Oh no, I really have to go. I really do have to feed Aurora. Thanks anyway,’ said Stephanie, struggling to get up. Calumn turned and watched her, a tin in his hand. Then he stood on tiptoe to look at the baby again, still sleeping in the pram.

‘Well, thanks for dropping by,’ said Brigid.

‘Nice to see you, Mrs Morgan.’

‘You too dear,’ said her mother.

‘Bye bye Calumn boy,’ said Stephanie, bending towards him, ruffling his hair. Calumn looked up, didn’t smile, and then went back to his tins. Under-stimulated, thought Brigid, and Stephanie thought how little she understood babies, how she couldn’t understand her own and certainly not Brigid’s. For a moment Stephanie felt appalled and longed to beg for help, but then she was kissing Brigid, saying, ‘Best of luck darling,’ and pushing the pram back along the hall.

‘Send greetings to Patrick,’ Stephanie said, as she waved goodbye on the step.

Brigid turned back towards the kitchen and now she felt the pain so harshly that she almost cried out. Involuntarily, she stiffened. Her mother was doing something in the kitchen and couldn’t see her. Calumn was there, picking through the vegetables. Lacking any sense of what was to come, or perhaps he was somehow attuned to her, sensitive to her shifting moods. She wasn’t sure. At that moment the only thing she could be certain about was this pain. A very rising pain, shrill at its heights, really making her nerves scream and then just when she thought the
note would go on forever, this jangling shrillness, it began to diminish, slowly it faded, and then there was silence.

In the silence of the hall Brigid knew – there was no longer any doubt – that she was in labour. The battle had begun and now her body would rip itself in two.

She heard the radio in the background; her mother must have switched it on again. The pips of the hour. It was one o’clock. Through London, ordinary people were eating lunch, oblivious to the trials that awaited her. Then there were women, countless women she didn’t know, experiencing something similar, the earliest beginnings or the climactic agony or the final relief. Throughout London, and that consoled her a little even as she dreaded the hours to come. Her body was trying to douse her fear, dilute it with consoling hormones. Yet she felt it all the same. And she heard the newsreader saying, ‘And today’ – today the prime minister travels to Washington. Some sportsmen have won glory on the pitch. Some wars are raging and an earthquake has taken thousands of lives. In his office, Patrick Hayes checks his watch, and now he is taking his jacket and setting off for his important lunch – and now she heard her mother calling, ‘Brigid darling, do let me make us both another cup of tea.’

For years he had failed and failed again; he had been disappointed a hundred times and then he had the book in his hand. They told him this was the one; Sally told him. So Michael Stone put on an unfamiliar suit, and in the sweating interior of his small flat his hands trembled as he pulled a tie around his neck. He was nervous and his sense of vindication – even triumph! – had ebbed away. His nerves were bad and threatened to spoil it all, but he drew his tie into a knot, tried to smooth his lapels. He took his hat and settled it upon his head. The night before, he had sewn up a tear in his shirt. He had even clipped his beard. Yet when he glanced in the mirror he saw a grey-faced unkempt man, ravaged by anxiety and something else he couldn’t quite understand. An incongruous pink tie slung around his neck. He saw it all, in the glass before him, then he wiped his hands on his trousers, and turned away.

He had been waiting a long time – it was terrible to contemplate – but really he had been waiting all his life for this day.

In the upper dining room of an expensive London club, a gathering of literary men and women. Four of them, and Sally. They pulled out a chair for him. ‘How nice to meet you,’ they said, their hands outstretched. Sally said their
names and he nodded. Yet his nerves made everything twist and shift around him. It was as if a chasm had opened up; he was stranded on the edge, and before him was deep empty space. They were on the other side, far beyond him. They sent words across, they smiled towards him. ‘How nice to meet you, come and join us! You only have to jump!’ He was stranded on the other side, though he had longed for years to be rescued. He had written his books; again and again he hoped that one of them would find an audience. It was a ritual he performed, a devout observance. He finished something, something of which he was proud, then laboured in the photocopying shop, bound it all proudly, addressed envelopes and waited. Urgently, later in despair. He lifted his head, they shot him into his hole again. It had been like that for years. His universe was predictable, the rules seemed firm and fast – he tried, then he failed. Again he lifted his head – but this time they had seized him; Sally had drawn him upwards, into the light. And he should have been glad, but everything had moved so quickly, his consoling realities had been shattered, and this chasm had opened up before him.

‘Some wine, sir?’ said the waiter.

‘Thank you,’ said Michael Stone, and watched as wine was poured into his glass. Then the waiter twisted the bottle, and moved away.

‘Michael,’ Sally was saying. ‘This is Roger Annais, who was speaking about your book this morning on Radio 4. Roger, I haven’t yet been able to hear the programme but I’ve been told you were excellent.’

‘Well, I don’t know about that,’ said Roger Annais, a man with black hair, a sunken face, as if his features had been carved from wax, and were melting slowly. ‘I was just
trying to voice my genuine admiration. It’s often easier to demolish something than praise it, I find. One can at least be wry when something is bad. Admiration can start to sound a little … dull …’

‘Thank you for doing that,’ said Michael Stone, in his very soft, dry voice, which, though he cleared his throat, would not resonate, sounded merely like dead leaves crackling. ‘I really am … most grateful.’

‘No need for gratitude. You wrote it, it’s my job to comment on it,’ said Roger, firmly. He took a sip of wine. Michael noticed his veins bulged on his arms, as if he was malnourished. But he was more likely a driven, energetic man. He imagined him, rushing from the studio to his office, his day portioned into meaningful segments. Always he must have an eye on the clock; he must move swiftly, purposefully; a radio interview and then a lunch, and then – Michael wondered what this man would do later. But he was looking back at Michael as he put down his glass, so Michael said, ‘I have been … in recent days I have been a little nervous. I keep wondering if … perhaps … I should not have published this book at all …’ as Sally shook her head.

‘Ah, the misgivings. The opening-night jitters,’ said a man Sally had introduced as ‘Arthur Grey, reviewer and friend …’ And Arthur Grey continued – resting his stocky arms on the table and speaking slowly, careful in his phrasing, as if he was dictating a letter – ‘With my first published book, a novel, I woke at dawn on the morning the first reviews were due. I pulled on my clothes, dashed out, bought all the papers. Dashed back, heart pounding, ha ha! Read through them, couldn’t find a word about it, finally found the briefest imaginable review in
The Times
.
“Not so much a promising beginning as a horrible threat that further carnage may be yet to come …” Ha, ha …!’

And the table laughed. Michael joined in, a false laugh because the story only made him more afraid. If that could happen to Arthur Grey, if this compelling man could be so emphatically dismissed, then what did he think he was doing? But they were lifting up their throats and laughing together, and he didn’t want to show them how he had lost his nerve. So he laughed and tried to swallow some wine.

‘The best review I ever wrote, the most honest, began: “By Mary and the blessed saints, this is a dreadful book”,’ said Roger Annais, and they laughed again.

On his right-hand side was Sally Blanchefleur, his agent, co-director of Blanchefleur and Scott, wearing a deep-green dress, gaunt and beautiful, striking at fifty or so, more striking than anyone else in the room. She drew attention away from Michael, with her beauty and her deep-green dress. Just some of the glare, directed towards her elegance; that was a relief. On his left, his editor Peter Kennedy, who had taken up his book, rescued it – he was meant to call him his saviour, he knew. And then an order of the just around him, like a secret society. In recent days he had been ushered around, people gripping his arm, directing him. Shielding him from something – he was not sure what it could be. One moment he felt revived, better than he had in years, and then he simply wanted to run. He didn’t want to be at the centre of anything, felt it might even have been a bad idea, to write books, only tenable when your works were never read. If they printed them up, distributed your efforts – that was a different
matter altogether. And then he wondered what it had been for, all those years of suspense and futile endeavour, and being knocked back a hundred times; he wondered why he had bothered with it all. Why had he persisted, and raged against his detractors? He had been so urgent and angry about it all. For years he could hardly read a book, because he was not published. He could not really take pleasure in anything, and then he had grown so angry with his family – really his mother – because she was so foul about it all, told him he was wasting his time, that he would never achieve anything worth the years he had taken over it all. And his father and the callow rest of them backed her up, stood firm against him, as if he was an enemy they must vanquish. A few years ago he wrote a novel in the depths of his rage, hurled everything he could at their piety and hypocrisy, and – even though that novel sank without a trace, like all the others – they never spoke to him again.

He had almost stopped thinking about his mother, until that phone call from James. That had been unexpected, a little disturbing, because James had sounded upset, and he was usually so quiet and cold. He had talked about dementia, how their mother had been diagnosed with it, ‘a bad case of it,’ James added, as if there might be another, better sort of dementia. ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Michael had said. But he was surprised to discover he felt nothing at all. It was as if they were discussing a distant relative. A month later, James had called again, saying that it would be ‘nice’ if Michael went to see her. ‘She won’t be at home much longer. She has a nurse but soon she’ll have to go into a home.’

‘She’ll hate that,’ Michael had said.

‘She barely knows where she is. She may not notice.’

He thought it was odd, that his mother was finally passive, an invalid, to be shunted from one place to another, on the advice of doctors. It was hard to imagine. The only time he felt truly sad about it all was when he received the first copies of his book. Beautiful in their dust jackets, his name on each spine in bold letters. It was an extraordinary moment, and there was no one apart from him who cared. So he sent a copy to his mother, one to his brother. He bound them up, spent a long time writing his mother a little note. Then he took the note out. He put a press release in with each copy, so they might think a functionary had sent them, some hard-working publicity person, not him at all. He hesitated in the post office, then he handed the parcels over.

He had received no response.

Yet this morning he was rushing to the door when the phone rang. He grabbed it, thinking it might be Sally, but then he heard James saying, ‘Ah Michael, I thought you might not be at home.’

‘I’m just about to leave …’

‘I was just sent a copy of your book,’ said James. ‘For which, my thanks. I see that today is the date of its official publication. You must be busy …’

‘Yes,’ said Michael, wondering why his brother was always so formal, but then he supposed he was too. ‘How is our mother?’

‘She is being moved into a home in a few weeks’ time.

I’ll send you the details of her address when she has settled in.’

‘All right.’

‘Then if you want to visit …’

‘I don’t think she would …’

‘She’s very different now. You’d see if you came.’

The call made him late, so then he had been forced to hurry to the Underground, sweating and certain he would offend them all, but everyone was late, apologising to each other, and it hadn’t mattered. They had drawn him into a private room in an expensive restaurant, where there was a waiter at his elbow, asking would he like the fish or the lamb.

Lamb, he said.

For the question must be answered.

Sally was saying something to him, and he turned to listen. ‘The first reviews,’ she said. ‘I have them in my bag. I must warn you …’ and she leaned closer to him, dropped her voice to a whisper. ‘They are not marvellous. Not quite what we hoped for. But there are many more yet to come.’

‘What did they say?’

She shook her head at him. ‘I’ll show them to you later. Dismiss them from your mind. Now, Michael …’

‘Yes?’

‘Drink up. We’ve a long day ahead.’ And she clinked her glass on his.

Briefly he panicked, felt his heart fluttering in his breast, thought how difficult it was even to breathe, to lift the chest, fill the lungs and empty them again – he sat there, looking at his hands, paying careful attention to the rising and falling of his chest, and after a few minutes he was able to lift his head. Someone was speaking, but not to him. ‘I
liked your programme about George Lamott,’ a woman was saying. Alice Mortimer, he remembered now, a woman with auburn hair, tiny arms wrapped in silver. She was speaking to Roger Annais, who was nodding back at her as she said, ‘One element which has become apparent during this episode is that we are losing any sense of values worth fighting for. Because we have no sense of these values, we are constantly buffeted by the values of others, or by our perceptions of these values. We are over-conciliatory, imagining these values to be more and more absolute the more confused we become.’

‘I agree,’ said Roger Annais, nodding still. ‘When the religious tell us that their “beliefs” must be respected, we acquiesce carefully. We don’t dare to ask “Why?”’

‘The funny thing is, that even on your programme, Roger, they were so reluctant really to discuss the heart of the matter. I was amused to see how nervous they were, how they censored themselves even as they debated the issue of self-censorship,’ said Alice Mortimer.

‘George Lamott’s point is very simple, as I understand it,’ said Arthur Grey. ‘He argues that it has become usual to fudge the whole thing. Instead of being prepared to say, “No, this is wrong, it is simply wrong-headed to find any of this offensive,” we say, “Well, there may be those who misinterpret these words, and thereby, we cannot proceed.”’

‘It’s not entirely their fault,’ said Roger Annais. ‘Things sometimes do get blown out of proportion. Suddenly, the thing becomes a cause célèbre. Perhaps someone says something misguided in an interview, irritates someone or a group of people.’

‘Nonetheless we are losing our grip,’ said Alice Mortimer, with a wave of her arm, so her bracelets chimed
and sparkled. ‘So many ideas are mediated for people. So you can have a small enclave – a highly intelligent enclave – deliberately misrepresenting something, in order to get people fired up. They know that these people won’t ever read the original. They will just respond to the call to anger, in essence.’

‘It’s the way of elites everywhere. The ordinary people never know what’s really going on,’ said Arthur Grey.

Michael listened, though he wasn’t sure what they meant. He had a sense of drama, something they all regarded as significant. They leaned towards each other; they had forgotten him. It was right, too, that he should be so easily forgotten. He had sequestered himself for too many years, he had never heard of George Lamott. They had opened the door to him – just a crack – he had squeezed himself through. He had crawled into this elegant lunch, because the door was slightly open, and he had been hammering on it for years.

‘It will be interesting to see whether this type of affair becomes quite common, whether publishers will continue in this vein,’ Arthur Grey said.

‘And then you will have authors censoring themselves before anyone else does,’ said Roger Annais. ‘Perhaps this is already happening.’

‘All you need is fear. You don’t even need legislation. You just need everyone a bit worried, glancing over his or her shoulder. It’s a marvellous way to change a society, without having to go through the boring process of campaigning for legislative change,’ said Alice Mortimer.