‘You summer folk don’t care about that.’
‘What do you think I care about?’
‘I don’t know. Lip gloss. Clothes. Magazines.’
I shake my head.
He looks at me then as I am looking at him, as if we’re different species, we’re equally curious about each other.
‘I just like learning about different things,’ I explain. ‘Plants mostly. But all kinds of things.’
I don’t tell him that ‘like’ is an understatement. That what I feel is more like a thirst, a craving for prising open plants, creatures, language. I don’t say that I am not strange at all, there are people like Daniel and me everywhere, tucked in the back rooms of museums, labs, in fields, hungry to discover nature’s secrets. I don’t say that I miss Daniel. Or that I am lonely.
He waits for one beat, two, to see if I am serious. I stare back at him.
‘I like diving for scallops best,’ he starts. ‘If you dive for them, you don’t ruin the seabed—’
I listen.
31
River
Now
London Bridge unfurls before me, empty, like I’m the only person in the world. The rain is deafening now, louder than the traffic streaming past, and the clouds are so low. At a different time, I might have been afraid of how dark and dense they are. Now, I think of all the rain they were carrying. How good it must feel to let it out.
You had a child? With this man?
I said yes when Kit said, ‘Let’s have a baby,’ but I had no idea what it meant. I took NCT classes that made me worry about the wrong things – epidurals, formula, co-sleeping – when actually, it was pain and Millie’s falling weight and breastfeeding that were the worst. Two secret fears never materialised – that my body would fail me and that I wouldn’t love the baby – hadn’t my body, my feelings always been untrustworthy, disloyal? But the birth had gone well and when the midwife laid Millie in my arms, tiny, perfect, beautiful, I thoughtFinally, finally, I feel what I am supposed to feel.
I make my way to the centre of the bridge. An open-top tour bus streams past, the destination sign broken, it flickers before spraying a wave over the pavement. I don’t move out of the way. Water crests over my trainers. Breathtakingly cold.
Maternity leave unravelled me. The intense quiet between changing Millie, feeding her, reading her books, singing her songs, plunged me into my own thoughts; I’d never allowed myself to have this much time, I liked work because it never gave me any time. I’d make Millie fruit purees and think about the food Daniel used to make me. I’d take her to the sandpit and, suddenly, I was on the beach outside the cottage. I’d tickle Millie on our bed and I’d remember playing horsey in Daniel’s bedroom, his shoes lined up neatly at the bottom of his wardrobe.
And then there were the times when I felt like I couldn’t be a mother. When Millie would cry and I would try everything – feed her, burp her, check her nappy – but she would keep going, her face tightly scrunched with pain or anger, I didn’t know, and the same thoughts would circle my head like a drain that never emptied –I don’t know what I’m doing, why don’t I know what I’m doing? Because I’m a shit mum, of course I am, no matter how much I pretend or try to move on, I’ll never get away from it, all the appalling things I’ve done.
‘I’m thinking about going back to work,’ I said to Kit, five months in.
He looked at me, astounded. ‘I thought you were enjoying it? Is anything wrong?’
I couldn’t tell him how I longed for the marble lobby of Dulwich & Sullivan, the satisfaction of finalising a memo, nocrying or failure or shame. Just the simplicity of work and reward. ‘It’s just a thought.’
I shiver against the wind, wrap my arms around myself. It’s the rain soaking through my jeans, the wind is turning them chilly. But it doesn’t matter, not now. I take my backpack off. Put my hands on the railing.
When I returned to work, I decided to go back to four days a week,I want this, I told myself,I can manage a whole Friday with her.I did for a while. Once I was officially back at Dulwich & Sullivan, there was always more work to do, no more swathes of time left to my own punishing thoughts. Then came the tantrums.
They were always on a Friday, always with me, never at nursery or the weekends or in front of Kit. Everything was a hair-trigger – books, fruit, TV, her coat. Nappy changes became brutal, those juicy thighs I adored leaving bruises on my arm. I did everything I could to help her through, I’d talk in a low, soft voice, empathise, make her feel understood, give her a healthy alternative to express her anger, I tried it all. Nothing worked except waiting it out. I’d sit mutely beside her as she smashed her heels against the floor, always thinking the same thought, a thought I fought with everything I’d read –This is normal.The terrible twos.Just a developmental phase– but they were only knives I’d brought to a gun fight and bullets were already firing, they pelted through me, they said,There is only one reason she does this with you, just one: she knows.My daughter, born from my ruined body, knew that part of me was absent, carved out, lost somewhere in a Cornwall cottage, on a beach, a field, and she wasn’t satisfied with a halved me, the me in pieces. It didn’t matter that I lovedher beyond what I thought was possible; she was constantly testing me. Because no one else needed to be tested. Everyone else had passed.
I climb onto the ledge. There is a second of vertigo, just half a metre higher up, the water is suddenly that much closer. I tip my head back to the wind; feel it lash against my face.
You had a child? With this man?
The second time Kit said, ‘Shall we have a baby?’ I opened the fridge and wished it was an oven. He slipped his hands round my waist and in the seconds he took to ask me if I’d heard what he’d said, I made a decision. It was the same one I always did: to lie. Because to tell him the truth was to unravel all my deceptions, the hundreds and hundreds I’d strung together, leading back to the first time I met him in the university café. I couldn’t tell him the person he loved wasn’t real. I was scrabbling, always, to make her real.
Then, when I lost Faye, I realised my mistake. Faye was like Millie. She’d inhabited me, she knew all my secrets, read all my thoughts, and then, she granted my deepest, darkest wish. Just when I didn’t wish it anymore.
You’ve kept so many things from him.