Dawn French
BECAUSE OF YOU
Contents
Start
Eighteen Years Later
Back to the Start
1 January 2000
The Chance
Gone
The Journey Home
Anna’s Pleas
Isaac’s Big Decision
The Press
Isaac’s Second Decision
Eighteen Years Later
Back Then: Hope
Minnie’s 1st Birthday: Isaac
Florence’s 1st Birthday: Julius
Florence’s 1st Birthday: Anna
Minnie’s 1st Birthday: Hope
Anna
Minnie Grows Up
Hope Decides
Minnie’s World Changes
Anna
The Box
Hope and Minnie: Mum and Daughter
Anna: the News
Julius: the News
Back Home: Hope and Minnie
The Morning After
Hope and Minnie to the Hospital
Nesting: Hope’s Flat
1 January 2018
The Meeting; the Mirrors
The Trial, London
Anna and Hope: April
Minnie in Hospital
The Birth
Hope
Minnie’s Heart: A Week Later
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Dawn French has been making people laugh for 30 years. As a writer, comedian and actor, she has appeared in some of this country’s most long-running and celebrated shows, including French and Saunders, The Vicar of Dibley, Jam and Jerusalem, and more recently, Roger and Val Have Just Got In. Her first three novels, A Tiny Bit Marvellous, Oh Dear Silvia and According to YES, are all Sunday Times bestsellers.
By the same author
Me. You. A Diary
According to Yes
Oh Dear Silvia
A Tiny Bit Marvellous
Dear Fatty
For my kids,
Billie, Lils & Olly,
because it’s all about being a mum
In laudem matrum
Start
Try to imagine two more different couples than these. You can’t. They are as opposite as it gets. Oil and water. Salt and sugar. Always and never. Lost and found.
As midnight came and went, so too did Julius’s hope of Anna giving birth exactly then, with the bongs and firecracks of the new millennium heralding the baby’s arrival.
‘Any chance you could push a bit harder, babe?’
‘I hope you’re joking, you weapons-grade twat,’ Anna panted.
‘Course!’ Julius chuckled.
(He wasn’t joking.)
It would’ve made a perfectly neat nice story. There might even have been some coverage, which could have boosted Julius’s stalling profile. Yes, there might. But the baby didn’t come then. So there wasn’t. And his disappointment was palpable.
Anna felt the culpability stronger than the waves of intense pain that flooded her body with each contraction. She found herself perversely welcoming the rhythmic spasms as something that was at least tangible and immediate. It was real, and happening right now, and it needed managing, something Anna was supremely skilled at. It gave her an undeniable focus, a job to do, with a result at the end of it. Something to show for her efforts, something to infill the fissures in the marriage, someone she could guide and administer. A little person who would surely listen to her, look up to her and make her feel as though she mattered. Someone to dress nicely. Someone to live because of. A purpose, finally, that wasn’t primarily about him. No one could deny her part in this. In this, she shared equal responsibility, if not more. She didn’t have to be only Julius’s wife. She could be a little child’s mother. Finally, she would have made something. With any luck, the next step might be that she could feel something …
Something.
Anything.
‘Seriously, Jules, please give it a rest.’
‘Bloody cheap crap, should’ve researched it better. Piers has got a brilliant one, got it in the airport in Dubai. Should’ve done that.’
All the time Anna was attempting to feel something other than groaning birthing pain, Julius was attempting to film his perfect family finally becoming a reality. His irritability about the missed opportunity of a stellar midnight birth was eclipsed by his irritability with his new camcorder, which seemed to be refusing to zoom. The zooming is the most important and impressive element of any successful birth video, surely? Despite Anna’s protestations imploring him to ‘put that effing thing down, please’, and help her instead, he continued to fiddle with it.
Sarah, the older and more experienced Irish midwife, rolled her eyes at her younger colleague as they both witnessed Julius resoundingly deflate their perception of him.
‘Could you just move a bit, thanks?’ he said, rudely shoving Sarah with his elbow. ‘I need to get a good shot of this …’
‘This,’ emphasized Sarah, ‘is your good wife, and quite frankly, sir, I don’t think she’s wanting any close-ups of her noonny right now, am I right, lamb?’
‘Yep. No,’ Anna confirmed between puffs.
Julius took no notice. So Sarah rudely shoved him back with her elbow as she explained to the young trainee midwife, ‘Some of our daddies forget themselves in the excitement and, sure, they become utter feckin’ pillocks.’
Julius was oblivious.
Sarah was disappointed that he was so singularly NOT the solid, supportive, wife-loving emergent politician he purported to be. Yes, tall, verbose and shiny black, but no Martin Luther King this, she thought. Sarah saw that Julius was a behemoth of self-interest. It was evident that no one could love Julius more than Julius loved himself. An interesting and somewhat terrifying prospect as a potential father …
‘Oh dear,’ Sarah muttered to herself. ‘Oh very dear.’
In another room down the corridor, a very different baby is also being hatched.
This room felt almost sacred. Even Hope’s occasional muttered blasphemies were holy in their quietly focused devotion. She was praying and cursing in equal measure, to a God that she was eternally grateful to. This baby was a happy surprise.
Ever since Hope moved to London, away from her family in Bristol, she had felt singularly singular. Her loneliness was compounded by the thrust and bustle of so many busy people all around her, all the time. Everyone was going somewhere with a clear sense of purpose, rushing and forever unfriendly. She pretty quickly gave up trying to catch anyone’s eye or even smiling. It was a thankless and vaguely humiliating effort, and left her with the sting of rejection to bolt on to her already aching isolation.
Hope was and always would be a natural stickler for high standards. After various placements heading up different cleaning teams, she had been promoted to manager of a fifty-strong team in this very hospital. Hope liked
