Paulo was crushed. He had fondly imagined that Chloe would grow up loving him, just as he loved her. But she was dumping him already.
Jessica was glad that Chloe’s cuddles were off limits. When she had held her as a newborn baby, something strange happened inside her. It was far more than wanting a baby of her own. It was the terrible knowledge that she had been born to give birth in her turn, and that she might never fulfil that destiny.
For Jessica, there were a thousand humiliations in any visit to Michael, Naoko and Chloe. She couldn’t stand the pity of her brother- and sister-in-law. They were decent-hearted people, but it was bad enough feeling like a defective woman, without having to put up with all the concerned, sympathetic looks at her lack of fertility. The fact that the sympathy was genuine, and meant well, only made it worse.
She could understand their delight in their daughter – if Chloe were her baby, Jessica was certain she would never leave her side. But where did understandable, unbridled joy end, and unbearable, insufferable smugness begin?
Yet she had to be the good guest – expressing wonder at how much Chloe had grown since she had last seen her (seven days ago). Listening with rapt interest as Michael discussed developments in Chloe’s bowel movements, or Naoko went on (and on and on) about her daughter’s eating habits, and her apparently whimsical changes of taste.
Give me a break, thought Jessica. It’s bad enough that I can’t have one of my own. Do I really have to give a standing ovation to everybody else’s baby?
Jessica knew that Naoko was a good woman, and that Paulo was as close to Michael as she was to her two sisters. And, objectively, she could see that Chloe was a lovely baby – good-humoured, robust and adorable. In a bald, toothless, incontinent-old-geezer sort of way.
Jessica really didn’t want to come here for Sunday lunch any more. It was just too hard.
‘Excuse me,’ she said, with the fixed grin that she wore as protection around other people’s babies.
She fled the room with Naoko holding the red-faced, crying Chloe, and Michael stroking his daughter’s (when you thought about it) alarmingly large head, and Paulo keeping a respectful distance, like a minor courtier. Nobody even noticed her leave the room.
Jessica desperately needed to get to the bathroom, but there were these bloody baby gates all over the house. Now that Chloe was on the move, disaster had to be averted on every landing and stairway. Because of an eleven-month-old child who could just about make it from the sofa to the coffee table (the numerous remote controls were a source of endless fascination to Chloe’s sticky fingers), the Victorian terrace had been turned into a maximum-security prison.
Chloe certainly wasn’t getting through these gates. They were hard enough for an adult. You had to find the little button on top, press it down and lift up the gate all at the same time. Then you had to step over the bottom of the gate without falling flat on your face. Jessica made it through three gates and locked herself in the bathroom, where she confirmed what she already knew. Her period had started.
One more month of failure. One more month of feeling like she should be recalled by whoever had manufactured her. One more month of seeing that disappointed look in her husband’s eyes, neither of them daring to say what was in their hearts – that this marriage might be childless for ever.
And, just to rub it in, her period brought one more bout of teeth-grinding pain that would have had a grown man begging for it to stop.
I’m not crying, Jessica thought. They’re not going to see me cry.
But she had to get out of here. She had to find a place where she could remove the fixed grin and take a shower and let her husband hold her. So she almost ran out of the bathroom, stumbled over the metal bar of an open baby gate and, with a shocked intake of breath, fell flat on her face.
By the time Jessica presented herself in the living room, Michael was on his knees playing peek-a-boo with Chloe, who was now dry-eyed and shrieking with delight – talk about violent mood swings – and Naoko was alerting Michael to the latest bulletins from the kitchen.
‘I tried her on broccoli blended with sweet potato but the funny thing is that she refuses to eat anything green and – my God, Jessica, are you all right?’
Jessica laughed gaily, a lump the size of a tennis ball throbbing on her forehead, a bruise pulsing on one of her shins, the palms of her hands red and sore from carpet burns.
‘Oh, I’m fine, fine, just fine,’ she said, turning brightly to her husband. ‘Is that really the time?’
They sat in the car and Paulo listened to her pouring it out.
‘Have you noticed that everyone’s having a baby these days?’ Jessica said. ‘Gay men. Lesbian couples who wouldn’t touch anything with a penis. Sixty-year-old Italian grandmothers with one wonky ovary. I even read that they might start making babies from aborted foetuses – how about that? Someone who has never even been born can have a baby. But I can’t.’
They were sitting outside Michael and Naoko’s house in Paulo’s blue Ferrari. The car was a perk of the Baresi Brothers, but also a necessity. Michael always told Paulo that you couldn’t sell imported Italian cars when you come to work in a Ford Mundano. Michael’s red Maranello sat in the drive, as well as a BMW with a baby seat in the back.
‘They don’t do it to hurt you. To hurt us. They don’t mean to rub it in our faces. But they’re just so happy with their baby, they can’t help it. They don’t mean to hurt us.’
‘I know,’ she said, hanging her head.
We would be the same, he thought. If Jessica and I had a baby, we would love it so much that we wouldn’t care who we hurt. It seemed to Paulo that having a baby made you care less about the rest of the world.
Because the baby became your world.
‘Do you know what my brother told me? He said that he hasn’t had sex with Naoko for seven weeks.’
Jessica stared at him. ‘Are you listening to me?’
‘I’m listening to you. I’m just saying.’
‘What? What are you saying?’
‘I’m saying that it’s not perfect in there. I know Chloe’s great. I know how much you want a baby of your own. Our own. But I’m just saying. Something’s happened to them. I don’t know how to explain it. It’s like since Chloe was born, they have something between them now.’
‘She’s younger than me,’ Jessica said, not listening to him. ‘Naoko. Four years younger. Same age as Megan. When Naoko is the age I am now, Chloe will be starting school.’
‘It’s not perfect in there,’ Paulo insisted.
His conversation with Naoko had shocked him. His sister-in-law had a PhD from Reading University. She had been an archaeologist when she met Michael. And now all she talked about was how this week Chloe preferred brown mush to green mush.
Paulo loved his little niece. He had loved her from the moment he saw her. He knew that he always would. But in a secret chamber of his heart, he had his doubts.
He didn’t mind the indignities of making love to a plastic cup. He didn’t feel less of a man because apparently some of his sperm were dozy bastards who couldn’t find one of Jessica’s eggs if you gave them an A-Z.
The doctor had told him they just needed to keep banging away. Plenty of people conceived babies with far worse odds. And whatever his wife had to go through—the endless scans and tests, the laparoscopy, whatever new humiliation they came up with – Paulo would be right there at her side. He would always be there. She was the one for him. He had known from the first time he had seen her face.
But he wondered if he would really be any good at this fatherhood lark – the endless games of peek-a-boo, and in-depth analysis of ‘pooing’ (Jesus, his brother –