I did enroll in a prenatal class but could never make it there for the 7:30 start. Ended up going to a birthing weekend in Stoke Newington run by Beth: oat biscuits, whale music, a pelvis made out of a coat hanger and a baby from a stocking pulled over a tennis ball. Beth invited us to have a conversation with our vaginas. I said I wasn’t on speaking terms with mine and she thought I was joking. Laugh like a moose down a well.
Richard loathed the class. He couldn’t believe he had to take his shoes off, but he liked the bit with the stopwatch. You could swear he was going to be officiating at the Monaco Grand Prix.
“Knowing you, Kate,” he said, “you’ll have the fastest contractions in history.”
Beth said if you did those panting little breaths she taught us it was a way of mastering the pain. So I practiced them religiously. I practiced them secularly — at checkouts, in the bath, before bed. I didn’t know.
My waters broke on the escalator at Bank, splashing the Burberry of a Japanese futures analyst who apologized profusely. I canceled my client lunch on the mobile and took a cab straight to the hospital. They offered me an epidural, but I didn’t take it. I was the bitch who had endangered her baby’s brain development; not having drugs was my way of showing how sorry I was, showing the baby there was something its mother would bear for it. There was an ocean of pain and I dived into it again and again. The water was as hard as wood. It smacked you like a wave hitting a deck, and each time you got to your feet it smacked you again.
After twenty-five hours of labor, Rich put the stopwatch down and asked the midwife if we could see a consultant. Now. Down in the operating theater, during my emergency cesarean, I heard the surgeon say, “Nothing to worry about, this will feel a bit like I’m doing the washing-up in your tummy.” It didn’t. It felt like the baby was an oak being pulled up by the roots from claggy November earth: tug and wrench and tug again. Finally, one of the junior doctors climbed onto the operating table, straddled me and yanked her out by the heels. Held her up like a catch, a thing from the sea, a mermaid marbled with blood. A girl.
Over the next few days a number of bouquets arrived, but the biggest came from Edwin Morgan Forster. It was the kind of baroque arrangement that can only be commanded by war memorials or a City expense account. There were priapic thistles, five feet high, and giant lilies that filled the air with their pepper and made the baby sneeze. A card was attached with a message written by a florist who couldn’t spell:
God, I hated those flowers: the way they stole our air, hers and mine. I gave them to the day midwife, who slung them over her shoulder and took them home to Harlesden on her scooter.
After thirty-six hours, the night midwife — Irish, softer, more musical than her daylight counterpart — asked if she could take baby from me so I could get some rest. When I protested, she said, “Part of being a good mum, Katharine, is having enough energy to cope.” And she wheeled away my daughter, who furled and unfurled those frondlike hands in her little Perspex aquarium.
Headlong, I fell down a mine shaft of exhaustion. It could have been hours later — it felt like seconds — that I heard her crying. Up till that moment, I didn’t know I knew my baby’s cry, but when I heard it I knew I would always know it, would be able to pick it out from any other cry in the world. From somewhere down a brown corridor, she summoned me. Hitching the catheter over one arm and guarding my stitches with the other, I started to hobble towards her, guided by that sonar which had come as a free gift with motherhood. By the time I got to the nursery, she had stopped yelling and was staring, enthralled, at a paper ceiling lantern. I have never experienced joy and fear in such a combination before: impossible to tell where the pain stopped and the love began.
“You’ll have to name her,” the smiling midwife chided. “We can’t keep calling her baby, it’s not right.”
I’d thought about Genevieve but it suddenly seemed too big for the intended owner. “Emily was my grandmother’s name. She always made me feel safe.”
“Oh, Emily’s lovely — let’s try it.”
So we tried it and she turned her head towards her name, and it was settled.
Three weeks later, James Entwhistle rang and offered me a job in strategy, a nothing job going nowhere. I accepted it gratefully and put down the phone. I would kill him later. Later, I would kill all of them. But first I had to bathe my daughter.
Nine weeks to the day of the cesarean, I was back in the office. That first morning my mind was so disconnected that I actually dialed a number and asked if I could speak to Kate Reddy. A man said he didn’t think Kate was back yet, and he was right. I reckon she wasn’t really back for a year, and the old Kate, the one Before Children, never returned. But she did a great impersonation of being back, and maybe only a mother could have seen through her disguise.
Five days later, work told me I had to fly to Milan and I was still breastfeeding. All weekend, I tried to get Emily to accept a bottle. Coaxed and pleaded and finally paid a woman from Fulham a hundred quid to come and wean my daughter off me. I can remember the baby yodeling, lungs raw with fury, and Richard standing out in the garden smoking.
“She’ll take the bottle when she’s really starving,” the woman explained and, yes, she herself would prefer cash. Sometimes I think Emily has never really forgiven me.
On the drive to the airport, the cab radio started playing that Stevie Wonder song, “Isn’t She Lovely?” The one where you hear the baby crying at the start. And my blouse was soaked suddenly with milk.
I didn’t know.
33 The Note
11:59 P.M. SHERBOURNE HOTEL, NEW YORK. Unbelievable. Plane got in on time and I took a cab to the Herriot off Wall Street. The plan was to swot up for tomorrow’s presentation and get a decent night’s rest before strolling across the road to the World Financial Center. I should have known. The reception clerk — hopelessly young, trying to give himself a little authority in a cheap shiny blazer — was having trouble meeting my eye. Finally he said, “I’m afraid we have a problem, Ms. Reddy.” A conference. Overbooking. “I am happy to offer you free accommodation at the Sherbourne — midtown, great location, opposite our world-renowned Museum of Modern Art.”
“Sounds delightful, but I’m here to do business, not get a headache staring at early Cubists.”
Ended up yelling at him, of course. Totally unacceptable, frequent customer, blah blah blah….Could see his eyes darting around for a superior to save him from the crazy Brit. As though I were mad — and I’m not mad, am I? It’s these people driving you crazy with their inefficiency, wasting my precious time.
The manager was incredibly apologetic but there was absolutely nothing he could do. So by the time I get to the new hotel, it’s nearly midnight. Called Richard, who was ready with a list of queries. Thank God Paula’s better, so we don’t have to get a temp. It’s Emily’s first day back at school tomorrow.
Had I done the name tapes?
Yes.
Had I got new gym shoes?
Yes. (In her navy gym bag on the peg under the stairs.)
Where would he find her reading books?
Red library folder, third shelf of bookcase.
Had I bought a new coat? (The old one now comes up to her waist.)
Not yet; she will have to make do with Gap raincoat till I get back.
Then I dictated the contents of her lunch box — pita bread, tuna and corn, no cheese; she’s decided she hates cheese — and told him to remember the check for ballet, the amount’s written in the diary. And he needs to give Paula money to get Ben some new trousers, he’s just had a growth spurt. Richard tells me that Em was upset going to bed; she said she wanted Mummy to take her to school because it’s a new teacher.
Why does he feel he needs to share that with me when there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it? Says he’s had an exhausting day.
“Tell me about it,” I say back, and ching down the phone.
No time to go through notes for my presentation, so I will have to wing it. Tomorrow’s shaping up to be a
