“And how about you, your honor? Who’ll be getting your tea tonight? It’s not you, is it?”
“For God’s sake,” splutters the judge.
“People like you don’t understand anything about women like Katharine. And you think you can sit in judgment on her. Shame on you,” says Jean Reddy quietly, but with the force that generations of children heard in her voice when she was rebuking a playground bully.
ON THE DAY THAT Seymour Troy Stratton entered the world, a coup in Qatar sent oil prices spiraling and equities plunged around the globe, helped by an unprecedented rate hike from the mighty Federal Reserve. In the UK alone, twenty billion was wiped off the value of the FTSE 100. A minor earthquake outside Kyoto caused further shock waves in an already shaken global environment. None of this had an adverse effect on mother and baby, who dozed peacefully in their curtained cubicle on the third floor of the maternity wing off Gower Street.
As I walk down the corridor towards them, I am returned powerfully to my memories of this place: the midwives in their blue pajamas, the gray doors behind which the great first act of life is performed over and over by small women and tall women and a woman whose waters broke one lunchtime on the escalator at Bank. Place of pain and elation. Flesh and blood. The cries of the babies raw and astounded; their mothers’ faces salty with joy. When you are in here you think you know what’s important. And you are right. It’s not the pethidine talking, it’s God’s own truth. Before long, you have to go out into the world again and pretend you have forgotten, pretend there are better things to do. But there are no better things. Every mother knows what it felt like when that chamber of the heart opened and love flooded in. Everything else is just noise and men.
“I just want to look at him,” Candy says. Propped up on pillows, my colleague has undone every button on my white broderie anglaise nightdress to give her son access to her breasts. The nipples are like dark fruit. She uses the palm of her right hand to cup his head while his mouth sucks hungrily. “I don’t want to do anything except look at him, Kate. That’s normal, right?”
“Perfectly normal.”
I have brought a Paddington Bear rattle for the baby, the one with the red hat that Emily always loved, and a basket of American muffins for his mom. Candy says she needs to get the weight off right away and then, because her hands are full, I feed morsel after morsel into her unprotesting mouth.
“The baby will suck all the fat out of your saddlebags, Cand.”
“Hey, that’s terrific. How long can I keep nursing, twenty years?”
“Unfortunately, after a while they come round and arrest you. I sometimes think they’d send the social services in if they knew how passionately I feel about Ben.”
“You didn’t tell me.” She rebukes me with a tired smile.
“I did try. That day in Corney and Barrow. But you can’t know until you know.”
Candy lowers her face and smells the head of her son. “A boy, Kate. I made one. How cool is that?”
Like all newborn things, Seymour Stratton seems ancient, a thousand years old. His brow is corrugated with either wisdom or perplexity. It is not yet possible to speculate on what manner of man he will grow up to be, but for now he is perfectly happy as he is, in the encircling arms of a woman.
Epilogue What Kate Did Next
I THINK AN ENDING may be out of the question. The wheels on the bus go round and round, all day long.
A lot happened, though, and some things stayed the same. Three months after Seymour’s birth, Candy went back to work at EMF and put the baby into a day-care place near Liverpool Street that charged more than the Dorchester. Candy reckoned each diaper change cost her twenty dollars. “That’s a helluva lot for a dump, right?”
On the phone, she sounded like the same old Candy, but I knew that that Candy, the Candy Before Children, had gone. Sure enough, the long brutal hours she had worked uncomplainingly all her adult life soon seemed to her stupid and unnecessary. She minded that when she tried to leave at 6:30, Rod Task called it “lunchtime.” She minded not seeing her son in daylight. When Seymour was seven months old, Candy walked into Rod’s office and told him she was very sorry, but she was going to have to let him go. She was having some problems with his level of commitment: it was too high.
Back in New Jersey, she stayed for a while with her mom until she found a place of her own: Candy said Seymour had made her understand what her mother was for. Soon after, she spotted a hole in the booming mail- order market and established a business which in a short time saw her tipped as one of
My beloved Momo stayed on at EMF, where she flew up the ladder, barely touching the rungs. That touch of steel in her nature I had noticed at our first meeting proved invaluable, as did her ability to listen and absorb what clients wanted. Occasionally, she would call me for advice in the middle of the day from the ladies’ washroom, her whispers half drowned by flushing. In the summer, she snatched a couple of days off and came up to stay with us. For the first time in her life, Emily was impressed with me. At long last, her mother had produced a real princess. “Are you Princess Jasmine from
“Actually, more Sleeping Beauty,” Momo said. “I was sort of asleep and then your mummy woke me up.”
Debra discovered that Jim was having an affair with a woman in Hong Kong. They got divorced and Deb arranged to work a four-day week at her law firm. Soon, she found some of her biggest clients were taken away from her, but she let it pass. The time for fighting back, she told herself, would come when Felix and Ruby were older. Deb and I are planning a weekend break together at a spa and so far we have canceled only four times.
Winston went on to take his degree in philosophy at the University of East London, and his ethics dissertation “How Do We Know What Is Right?” achieved the highest mark in the year. To pay his final-year fees, he sold Pegasus, which seamlessly entered a new career in stock-car racing.
Flourishing a guilty and therefore glowing reference from me, Paula landed a job as nanny to the B-movie action star Adolf Brock and his wife, a former Miss Bulgaria. The family lived for a while at the Plaza in New York, until Paula, whose room overlooked Central Park, announced that she was feeling cramped, whereupon the Brocks moved obediently to Maine.
After that morning on the ice rink, I never saw Jack Abelhammer again. I changed my e-mail address because I knew that my willpower was not strong enough to stop me returning a message from him. I also knew that my marriage would only have a fighting chance if I let go of my fantasy lover: if Jack was the place I went to play, what did that make Richard? Even so, every time I log on, part of me still expects to see his name in the Inbox. People say that time is a great healer. Which people? What are they talking about? I think some feelings you experience in your life are written in indelible ink and the best you can hope for is that they fade a little over the years.
I never went to bed with Jack — a regret the size of a continent — but the bad food and the great songs in the Sinatra Inn were the best sex I never had. When you’ve felt that much about a man and he disappears from your life, after a while you start to think it was just some foolish illusion on your part and that the other person walked clean away, no scar tissue. But maybe the other person felt the same. I still have the last message he sent me.
To: Kate Reddy
From: Jack Abelhammer
Kate,I didn’t hear from you in quite a while, so I’m working on the theory that you took up conkers and
