Here, there were people who knew how to handle babies. The fear that resided in Sam was enveloping her.
‘Did Patrick say Joanne was going to be there?’ she asked Ted again.
Joanne had promised to be at Ted and Sam’s when they got home from hospital. And Ted’s mum, Vera, was going to be there too. Both women understood what to do.
‘I thought you’d want a bit of time on your own,’ Joanne had said when Sam asked if some of the family could be there when she and Ted brought India home.
‘It’s a celebration!’ Sam had said, injecting excitement into her voice.
It was insurance.
Without people around, people who knew about babies, she might cry. Or worse, she’d kill Ted.
He appeared to expect her to know everything now.
He looked to her as the baby guru.
‘Is this all right, the way I’m holding her?’ he’d asked anxiously in the hospital and Sam had stared at him in annoyance. He knew as much as she did. And he’d had more sleep. Bizarrely, instead of this momentous event bonding them, the birth of their baby made Sam feel that every woman-clouting-stupid-man-over-head-with-rolling-pin cliché was entirely true. She wished she had her own rolling pin around, just in case.
India cried when Sam shakily woke her from sleep. Despite how tiny she looked, she could make a lot of noise.
‘Our little yeller,’ said Ted affectionately, touching his daughter’s downy head with a large, gentle hand.
How could Ted find India’s screaming to be endearing? Sam found it frightening because she couldn’t decode the yells. Was it normal for a tiny baby to scream when she was woken up?
All her working life, she’d asked questions and studied to learn how to do her job better. But there was no MBA in being a mother, no book of diagrams and handy hints. It was on-the-job learning. In work, Sam had never minded this. She was enthusiastic and eager. But here, with India, she was such a novice.
She felt entirely out of her comfort zone, terrified of that fact, and even more terrified that this great abyss of knowledge would harm her precious baby.
This was no bank division to be run; no charity to oversee. This was a human life she was responsible for and she was singularly unprepared for it. The thought was terrifying.
She’d asked the nurses so many questions, trying to get some sort of procedural baseline for what was normal.
‘All babies are different,’ said one of the older nurses happily, a woman who had two children of her own and had worked in the maternity hospital for twenty years.
She was an expert and this was her best answer?
‘But it’s daunting, isn’t it – trying to work out what your baby wants ...?’ Sam went on in desperation.
‘Ah, Sam, you have maturity on your side. You’ll work it out: mothers do. Now, some of the very young girls who come here to have babies, they’re so young, they’re almost babies themselves: eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds who haven’t the first clue about looking after themselves, never mind a baby. A few years makes all the difference. Of course, they have the energy. You want to make sure you have a good diet and take care of yourself too, because when you’re that little bit older, your age means it can be a bit tougher from the point of lack of sleep and general energy levels. Research shows that the ideal time to have a baby is—’
‘Yeah, twenty-five,’ said Sam drily, who had heard this many times.
At twenty-five, she’d been trying not to get pregnant.
At forty, she was apparently too lacking in energy to take care of a baby.
Nobody had mentioned the fear that came with facing this exquisite little human being who would be in her sole care soon.
The fear that was overwhelming her.
Ginger
Ginger woke late and her head felt as if she had a hangover, even though all she’d had to drink the previous day was half a glass of champagne and a glass of red wine. It was an emotional hangover, she thought miserably, lying in her bed, the beautiful bed that nobody was ever going to share with her.
She should have been staying in the hotel and going down to breakfast with all her friends, happy in the aftermath of the wonderful wedding of her best friend Liza. And possibly – how had she eventhoughtthis was possible? – she might have been there holding hands with Stephen, finally part of a couple.
Instead, she was in her lonely bed and her only accompaniment in the tiny house was the sound of her guinea pigs rattling around in their duplex.
