The Good Wife aka The Good Wife Strikes Back

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Dinner in dog.’

‘Miss me?’

I bit my lip. ‘No.’

‘I take that to be yes. Do both of you miss me?’

At my end, a smile forced its way to my lips. ‘No… Yes.’

Like an animal, I had gone underground. I had become blind and subterranean, blundering through the days. On one level I craved Will’s presence and attention but almost… almost he had become superfluous, for I was wrapped up in the female parcel, an enormous, bulky object with embarrassing aches and pains. The books had informed me about backache, varicose veins and a host of other ailments, and explained the body invasion with diagrams. None, however, owned up as to how thoroughly one’s mind was invaded. How the broad-bean-cum-ammonite sucked dry the rivers of wit, energy, calculation and inventiveness until there was nothing left except a vague, dreamy nothingness.

With Will frequently not around, and without the energy to visit friends, there was no one in whom I could confide my feelings, and I had fallen into the habit of talking aloud to myself. ‘I feel like softened butter, underdone jam, a melting snowman,’ I informed the grill pan as I cleaned it, a task that, these days, represented the level of my achievements.

So be it.

Shortly after Will, my father rang to check my progress. He sounded starded. ‘You’re alone? This is wrong. Someone should be there. What if something went wrong?’

‘Don’t panic, Dad. It’s fine.’

He sounded angry. ‘Is there anyone who could come over?’

‘Dad, it’s only six thirty and Will promised to be back later.’

‘Even so…’ In the background, his second phone shrilled. ‘Got to go,’ he said. ‘I’ll keep in touch.’

The first contraction made me shift in my seat in an effort to ease the ache. Fifteen minutes later, a second was intrusive enough to make me shove aside my plate of salad and heave myself to my feet.

I pressed my hand into the small of my back and walked the five paces or so that measured the length of the room. Then I turned and went back, feeling the weight bear down on my knees. One step too many and they’d snap, I thought. Down I would fall.

More contractions sent shocks through my body.

I would have given much to be sitting up in my tree with a bottle of bright fizzy drink, surveying my domain and practising swearing.

What if I rang up Will and said, ‘I’m handing over to you. You do this, not me?’

A phone call to the House elicited the information that Will had left half an hour previously and had not left a contact number. I tried his bleeper but it was switched off.

I rang Elaine, who came straight to the point: ‘Husbands do this. Mine’s probably with yours. Would you like me to come to the hospital?’

I thought this over. Friendship was sweet but no substitute for Will. I thanked her and asked, ‘Could you ring my father? Tell him I’m on my way to hospital.’

From then on I don’t remember the fine detail, only the general picture, for which I am grateful. The midwife said that was because it happened so fast, which was unusual for a first baby. I do have one fixed image in my memory, of hovering above a large, thrashing, sweating figure, who, with a shock, I recognized as myself. The room was licked by shadows, lit only by a dim light. A midwife merged in and out of it. Sometimes she spoke to me. Sometimes I answered.

Soon I changed my mind about wishing to be alone. I wanted someone to hold my hand and pull me back from the person on the delivery bed. I craved the touch of someone who loved me, and wept for my pain and Will’s absence.

‘Look who’s here…’ The midwife appeared by the bedside and, wild-eyed, I reared up expecting to see the tall, fair-haired figure of my husband.

‘Hey,’ said Meg. ‘Your father rang.’ She was wrapped in a black jumper that was too big for her and, despite the heat in the room, shivering. Traces of whisky hung on her breath.

I fought the impulse to turn away my face. ‘Isn’t Will coming?’

‘He’s on his way,’ she said, and picked up my hand. ‘I think.’ Her cold touch was like a burn, and I wished her anywhere but there.

Then things began to happen. Meg stood beside the bed, wiped my face and informed me I was doing fine, and it was Meg who, other than the midwife, was the first person to see Chloe.

She was born at twenty-five to twelve, without the aid of drugs. ‘What a good girl,’ said the midwife. ‘What a brave, good girl. So much better for Baby if Mummy does it all herself.’

She placed Chloe on my stomach, a still pale and muted ammonite. Until that moment, I had been preoccupied with the heroic and peculiar physical achievements of my body. Now there was a moment of hush, of expectation. I looked down. How extraordinary, I thought. This is what a forced nine-month occupation of my body and an undignified battle on a delivery bed results in. Then Chloe turned her face in my direction and screwed up her eyes.

Her hand reached into the air as if she was grasping for her life. That tiny hand unleashed an invisible silken cord, looped it into a cunning lasso, aimed it towards my heart and, with one flex of those shrimpy pink fingers, secured it.

‘She’s perfect,’ Meg leant over to inspect her, and there was a yearning note in her voice. ‘I think I should be godmother, don’t you?’

She left when Will burst into the room a short while later. ‘I’m so sorry, so very sorry.’ Unsure of whether or not to touch me, he hovered by the bed. ‘I’ll never ever do that again. I’ll never not check.’

‘Your daughter’s over there, Will.’

He took a chance and slid his arm round my shoulders and kissed me. He was very, very disappointed and furious with himself. ‘It was a late sitting. Regulations about child labour in East and British manufacturers. I don’t blame you if you are angry.’

‘Not angry… empty.’

‘I switched off the bleeper, forgot, and went off for a quick supper at Brazzi’s. I’ve missed out, haven’t I?’

His guilt was almost comic, but it was sad too. For he had missed out – on that special, perfect moment when Chloe tumbled into the world.

The backwash of exhaustion, discomfort and spent hormones was draining my strength. ‘Go and look at your beautiful daughter. Then please ring Dad… and my mother. I promised her that you would.’

‘I hope you forgive me?’

Of course I did. Chloe was here, well and safe and, set against that, there was nothing to forgive.

*

We moved into the new house in Stanwinton when Chloe was two weeks old. I had been reluctant to stir from the safety of the flat but Will had insisted we observe the agreed timetable. ‘We can manage,’ he said, when I produced excuses about feeding and crying and nappy-changing, all of which still appeared in the light of a complex mathematical theory. ‘It is the right thing to do to take our new daughter to our new house.’

Still sore and battered, I struggled to do my best and Will, still repentant for his non-showing at her birth, tried to make up for it by packing, ferrying and driving. I was not to do anything. This seemed reasonable for I did not wish to do anything.

‘I don’t want to get up, cook, wash clothes, even think.’ Since the birth, my voice had sounded different even to me. I put it down to hoarseness from my cries but I almost believed it was because I was changing so profoundly.

Will took this type of comment touchingly seriously. ‘It’s normal to feel down after a baby.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I read about it in the books.’ I did not bother to respond to that, and he pressed on: ‘You’ll feel better once you’re settled in the house. I’ll be back every Friday.’

I almost felt sorry for him, so desperate was he to make things right.