Page 9 of Days You Were Mine

‘Hello, darling,’ she says and we attempt an air kiss with the baby lodged between us.

Hannah is sitting at the kitchen table with about one quarter of her normal presence. This is the thing I notice first when the two women in my life get together, how my mother saps my girlfriend’s energy until she becomes almost someone I can’t recognise. She says hi, limply, and immediately I know something is up.

‘When did you arrive?’ I ask Christina, trying to piece together potential disaster.

‘Oh, just after lunch. I found Hannah asleep in that chair with Samuel virtually sliding off her lap. So I persuaded her to go to bed while I looked after the baby.’

There’s a small silence, which my mother breaks with, ‘I cannot believe it was Samuel’s first time in his cot. You two are hilarious. He screamed the house down.’

I don’t look at Hannah; I know her tragic eyes will break my heart. One of the many things we are united on is our attitude to parenting. This baby – our son, no one else’s – will never be allowed to cry, not if we can help it. He will be cocooned in safety, a nest of reassurance, powered by our heartbeats. No need for psychoanalysis – I was wrenched from my natural mother’s arms and deposited in an alien environment, where, as Christina loves to recount with a seeming lack of perception, ‘you cried and cried and cried for the first few weeks’. Let’s just say I am physiologically programmed to detest the sound of a baby crying.

‘Mum, I’ve told you that Samuel doesn’t sleep in his cot.’

I fight the instinct to grab my son back and go instead to the fridge, where I take out a bottle of beer.

‘Drinks,’ I say. ‘What would you like, Mum? I think we’ve still got gin from last time you were here.’

My mother is here for forty-eight hours and already I am struggling to think of things to say to her. The conversation never flows the way it does when Hannah’s parents come up from Cornwall – those lovely, semi-drunken, laughter-filled nights when everyone talks at once. When I first met her family, I was stunned by what I initially saw as a lack of respect. Don’t they ever listen to each other? I thought, as the sisters interrupted and vaulted from one topic to the next, no sentence finished, gravity, whenever possible – even the saddest of tales – traded for their easy laughter. And the touching – my God. I’d never seen anything like it. Knee-sitting and hair-stroking and hand-holding; these people were so goddamn tactile, and not just with each other, but with me too. Maggie, Hannah’s mother, hugged me the first time I was introduced, a sluice gate, it seemed, for cheek-pinching and hair-ruffling and the regular chest punches from Peter, her father, the slightly alarming knee-sitting from her younger sister Eliza. If you wanted the North and South Pole of families, then mine and Hannah’s could step up as the perfect candidates.

I realise as I mix a gin and tonic and begin chucking ingredients from the fridge onto the kitchen table that I have slipped into my default position of high alert, a state I assumed throughout my childhood. Keep busy to stay out of trouble was the maxim I lived by. The trouble, I think, was simply my mother’s notice and the likelihood of being forced into worthy pursuits I couldn’t bear. ‘Why don’t you cycle over to Andrew’s and see if he’ll go blackberry-picking with you? We could makea pie later.’ (I was around fourteen at this time.) ‘Let’s ring up the girls from the Grange and invite them over for a game of cards.’ (A pair of sisters so beautiful and cool I’d rather have cut off my own testicles than make that phone call.)

She is a good woman, my mother, and I do love her, albeit a textbook kind of love that is layered with guilt, gratitude and frustration. Complex, like I said.

There are more shocks over supper when it transpires that she has rung up a nanny agency on our behalf and invited two prospective au pairs for interview tomorrow. Interfering doesn’t quite cover it.

‘Don’t be cross with me,’ she says, correctly interpreting our shocked silence. ‘Hannah, it’s really not that long before you go back to work and it can take time to find the right person. I thought it might help if I was here for a second opinion.’

‘Oh Christina,’ Hannah says, instant tears in her lovely eyes. ‘I can’t bear to think about leaving Samuel, not yet.’

My mother reaches out to pat her hand.

‘If you change your mind about going back to work, I’ll make sure you don’t suffer financially.’

For the best possible reasons, Christina thinks Hannah should be a stay-at-home mum. She doesn’t perceive the raging torment, the utter wrench, that is the choice for Hannah between leaving our beautiful boy and returning to a job she loves.

And so next morning to the prospective au pairs, the first one arriving at 10.15. My mother has spent the morning cleaning, and the house looks as if it belongs to someone else. She has found a home for every piece of clutter – a new cupboard for nappies, trainers rehoused in neat rows beneath the stairs – and she has even been out to buy flowers (lilies, which Hannah dislikes on account of their overpowering smell).

The way Hannah and I take against Nicole, the firstinterviewee, before she’s even taken her coat off, is pretty comical. It’s as if she marks a cross in every box on the way down.

First thing she does is marvel at Samuel sleeping on his sheepskin rug in the middle of the floor. She looks at her watch.

‘This is his mid-morning nap, isn’t it? Do you think he might sleep longer in his cot?’

‘They don’t allow the little thing to sleep in his cot,’ says my mother, laughing. ‘They cart him around everywhere they go and then wonder why they’re all exhausted!’

There follows a terse little discussion about Gina Ford, whose childcare manifesto was published last year. First present my mother gave us wasThe Contented Little Baby Book, an advocate of early starts, rigid routines and controlled crying, that last the most heinous in our minds. Nicole swears by Gina Ford, so there’s little point her even sitting down.

My mother asks the questions, the au pair provides the correct answers – certified first-aider, recent, impeccable references, experience with newborns – while Hannah and I commune with our eyes. And I realise, looking at my girlfriend slouched in her chair, punishing Nicole with her feigned indifference, that none of this really matters. Hannah, me and Samuel, our tribe of three versus the rest of the world.

We actually like the next au pair, Carla, who grew up in Buenos Aires looking after her six siblings while her parents went to work. She falls upon Samuel, now awake and tentatively smiling, and asks if she can hold him.

It’s me and Hannah asking the questions this time – equally coded – and Carla aces every one.

‘Do you think it’s good to let a baby cry sometimes?’

‘My babies hardly ever cry. I wrap them up in a papoose and keep them close to me. They are happy.’

She laughs a lot, which reminds me of Hannah, and shekisses Samuel’s cheek without asking us if it’s all right (it is).

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