The boyfriends and her desire for her own baby Lily-Blossom are separate things. Two fairy tales. The limerence one with the guys, and the wild pain of baby hunger.
Or maybe they’re not so separate.
The crazy, all-encompassing love affairs allow her not to think at all about having her own child. Perhapsnot at first, when she was young, but now – it all makes sense.
‘Can we stop?’ she asks. ‘I see it now but I need a break.’
‘Of course,’ says Rose. ‘Now we’ve got lunch and any spa treatments you want. As I said, I’ll be on the beach or around for a walk from one thirty, OK?’
Losing the baby changed everything. It wasn’t that he wanted one, but me losing it made things far worse. It was a failure. He hated failure, believing somebody needed to be responsible for any failure.
I didn’t see any of this then. I was so stupid. But then, I was still trying to do the impossible: please him. I thought we were normal people in a normal marriage and that I was messing it up constantly.
Everything that went wrong was my fault. Now, I know precisely what this is – but then, I merely thought I was the most useless person on the
planet.
I can see now that I was depressed.
How could I not be?
Let me tell you that feeling depressed is agonising when you’re with someone who simply doesn’t want to hear your pain.
The neighbourhood women attempted to be kind about the loss of the baby.
Nobody knew what to say, but they came around, bringing food, hugs, kindness. They really tried, I can see that. But what to say? There are no words.
He sucked all the air out of the room when they came around, pretending he was a good husband. He was an expert at it.
‘Isn’t he a pet,’ the neighbour ladies would say to me when he made a pot of coffee for them all, commenting on new hairdos, pretty dresses.
He could pinpoint what people wanted to hear.
‘Kev never notices when I get my hair done!’ they might say. ‘You’re a lucky woman to have a man like him.’
And then they’d catch themselves because every one of us knew that nothing could make up for the loss of my child.
Still, a supportive husband was seen as an enormous benefit.
If only they’d been able to see what he really was …
We moved house soon after because he couldn’t bear to live in the place where he’d thought we’d have everything. We left so quickly that we didn’t have time to say goodbye to our ‘friends’.
We were starting over and he hoped I wouldn’t be such a ‘drama queen’ in the new house. It was supposed to be a new beginning.
He got a promotion, then another. I had always seen how he could be two different people, one person to me and another one entirely to other people, but his promotions showed just how good he was at this.
There were more people in our circle in the new neighbourhood. More men and women to impress which meant he had to be careful how he treated me in public.
And the more careful he was, the more punishment came my way. He watched my spending like I was Imelda Marcos. I had to ask for money. Beg him.
When I bought groceries, I’d haul them all in,unpack and laboriously put them away as he sat unmoving in a kitchen chair, overseeing, examining the purchases forensically.
‘Why did you buy apples? We have apples.’
I’d try to explain that we had eating apples and I’d bought cookers to make him dessert.
He didn’t want an explanation: the apples were simply the weapon of the day.
