‘Jean, you are so kind,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you all sit down in the living room and I’ll make us a cup of tea. I’m sure India will be awake soon.’
‘Can’t wait to see her,’ said Sam’s dad. ‘If it wasn’t for the fact that I know you’d kill me, I’d go up and wake her.’
‘Please don’t,’ said Ted, laughing. ‘Her schedule is all over the place.’
‘Totally,’ groaned Sam, forgetting for a moment that she was so angry with her mother. ‘I read this book where it said that you needed to establish a routine and we were trying to have a night-time schedule. But then it turns out that if you want a night-time schedule, you have to have a daytime one too. We apparently have no schedule at all and are exhausted.’
Her mother moved some clothes off a dining table chair and sat down neatly and precisely. She was dressed as if for playing golf, in a colourful sweater, little blouse and casual perfectly creased chinos. Pearls glinted at her collar and her hair had obviously been done beautifully in the hairdresser’s the day before.
Sam knew what she looked like stuffed into her pregnancy jeans, wearing a T-shirt that had baby sick on it. She was wearing no make-up, hadn’t washed her hair for at least three days, and the only co-ordinated parts of her were the bags under her eyes, which were soon going to be joining the hollows under her cheeks. She sank down into an armchair, determined not to sit beside her mother.
‘You look worn out, love,’ said her father.
‘A maternity nurse would be a brilliant idea,’ ventured Jean.
Sam held it together to speak civilly.
‘We can’t afford a maternity nurse. I wish we could, but we can’t. We just have to manage like everybody else does, which is messily.’ What she’d liked to have said was: ‘if you were like a normal mother, you’d be around here all the time helping us, folding the endless baby clothes, doing something,’ but she didn’t, because what was the point?
Her mother looked distinctly uneasy when they trooped quietly into India’s little nursery. All the paraphernalia of a baby made it clear that this was a much-adored child. Ted and Sam had worked so hard on making the nursery beautiful, and even though their initial colour scheme had been the careful whites and yellows of would-be parents who didn’t know what sex their baby was going to be, they had since branched out. The room now burst with colour – turquoises and purples, beautiful pinks and glorious sea-blues, sap greens, all coming from the flowers, giraffes, elephants and rabbits that Ted had pasted onto the walls. It was like a living zoo.
India was asleep in her crib, lying on her back, thumb close to her rosebud mouth.
‘Isn’t she adorable,’ her father sighed. ‘You said she smiled yesterday?’
‘Absolutely,’ said Ted, ‘and no, it wasn’t wind.’
Both men laughed quietly, but Jean was merely staring into the cot.
‘That’s a sturdy piece of furniture,’ she remarked. ‘You could have had your old cot, Samantha, and saved some money.’
Sam blinked in astonishment. Her mother had looked at India and this was all she could say: save money and use an old cot?
The rage bubbled up in her.
It was not her fault she was hopeless at motherhood.
Sam knew nothing about how to be a mother. Simply nothing.
And the reason for that was in the room. Genetics.
Her father had passed along all his wonderful parenting genes to Joanne while Sam had been left with her mother’s faulty genes, the ones that would have decimated evolution had they been widespread in the population.
Sam turned and slightly rudely made sweeping-out hand gestures to her parents. A smile still nailed to her face, she whispered: ‘Let’s go. She needs her sleep.’
‘Fine.’
Downstairs, Jean perched on a chair and the dogs, who knew her of old, kept away.
‘When are you thinking of going back to work, Samantha?’ she asked.
Sam, her father and Ted all gasped.
‘Not yet,’ said Ted hurriedly.
‘Well, you want to hold on to that job. Your replacement must be handling the credit card crisis rather well – nothing in the newspapers. Mind you, they’re all full of that dreadful property investment man who’s conned so many people out of millions. Police reports say the wife isn’t involved, but honestly, how stupid could she be. Of course she knew.’
Sam had barely registered the story on the news: the outside world had so little impact on her life, but she wanted to argue that nobody ever knew the real side of any story. From the outside, their childhood had looked perfect, after all.
