Baby Love

Jim’s face was set, still.

Nora looked up at her and started to laugh.

‘Oh, what a little darling!’ she exclaimed. Lily is a darling. A dark golden creature, with long dark hair and curving golden cheeks. She’s quite like an animal: furry, tempestuous on occasion. Clever, kind, but won’t be patronized. I suppose she got her darkness from Jim, but the quality of it was so different. His is Celtic, hers is like blondeness made dark. Like honey.

‘Hello, Lily,’ said Jim. He held his arms out as if to hug her. Nora leaned forward to take her arm. These fuckwits know nothing about children. Lily went behind my legs, twining like a cat. I sent her ‘hate them’ messages through my knees, and regretted them, and didn’t regret them. It is wrong to make a child hate her father. With any luck she’ll hate him of her own accord.

Nora looked at me as if she expected me to shoo Lily off my legs and into their arms. Expect on, sunshine. I did nothing. Lily twined, and wanted to climb me. I picked her up, put her on my hip, went to a chair on the far side of the table, and pushed a plate of biscuits towards them. What the hell do they expect?

‘What a beautiful little girl,’ said Nora again. Lily didn’t look at her. Jim looked as if he couldn’t believe that I wasn’t even going to say ‘come on, darling’, as mothers do whenever they ask their children to betray themselves.

Nora was flummoxed. She looked at Jim. Jim looked at me. Nora looked at me. Lily looked at the stitching on my shirt. Almost visibly, Nora fell back and regrouped.

‘I brought you a present,’ she said to Lily’s back. Oh, so it’s going to be like that.

The present, like the clothes, was expensive. Harrods bag, tissue paper, little tag (wrapped by shop assistants, at a guess). Lily uncoiled enough to accept it, and murmur thank you.

‘Aren’t you going to open it, then?’ said Jim, in a Father Christmas voice. Lily looked at him for the first time. He flushed. With his face so determined and his voice so fake I considered sympathizing with him, but decided against.

He has a wife for Christ’s sake! They can have their own damn child!

Lily pulled at the tissue paper.

‘Here, let me help,’ said Jim, suddenly standing and coming round the table. Lily pulled the package away from him. He sat down, squashed. So small, and yet so effective when it comes to squashing people four times their size.

It was a Polly Pocket Fairy Princess Ballroom; pink, plastic, spangly, shiny, with electric lights that worked. It had four little dolls a quarter of an inch high with fairy dresses on, and wings. It had a balloon that went up and down, with a basket you could put the dolls in. It had a dancefloor that spun round when you turned a tiny silvery knob. The whole thing closed up into a pink star-shaped handbag that you could carry with you wherever you went. It was beautiful. Lily gazed at it.

‘Thank you,’ Lily murmured, and climbed down between my feet to play with it on the floor.

Nora wanted more than that.

‘Do you like it, Lily?’ she said, calling down to between my knees.

‘Yes,’ came the reply. Nothing more.

Nora looked at Jim again. I touched Lily’s head gently, and said, ‘I’ll make some tea.’ They couldn’t leave immediately and actually I didn’t want them to. I wanted them to see exactly how difficult, uncomfortable and completely out of their depth this situation was. I wanted them to know in their blood that Lily was nothing to do with them; to present them with a clear view of the shining armour that encircled the two of us, protecting us and hiding us yet at the same time revealing with brilliant and brutal clarity that secrets and intimacies and love such as they could never hope to know dwelt within. I wanted them to go home crying.

Lily shuffled herself and the new toy over to be between my feet at the cooker as I poured the water into the teapot. ‘Move back, love, it’s hot,’ I said, but she shook her head. I moved the teapot to the very back of the work surface. I will not be faulted.

After shuffling back with me to the table, not looking up, she jumped up and whispered to me that she wanted to show the ballroom to the teddies, and ran upstairs.

‘She seems a very affectionate little girl,’ offered Nora. Yes, to me. I murmured a nothing.

Jim’s face was set again. He too had prepared, and had had no idea what would happen.

‘Love’s not automatic, you know,’ I said suddenly. ‘It’s not like eyes meeting across a crowded room. You have to earn a child’s love.’ I stopped just as I realized that my words might come over as a comfort, rather than a gibe.

Nora took them as comfort.

‘I’m sure we will earn it. Won’t we, darling?’

Won’t we, darling. Won’t we, darling. The mantra of the happily nuclear. I don’t hate their being happy. The happiness they have is not the happiness I don’t have. Anyway, I am happy. Quite. I think.

‘Uh, yes, yes,’ Jim said.

He wanted to see pictures of her as a baby. I pointed to one stuck in the door of a glass-fronted cupboard, then relented and handed it across to him. It showed her grinning and curly-mopped in front of a Christmas tree, a dark pixie aged about six months.

‘She’s so beautiful,’ he said. Then, ‘How’s it been? Practically? Financially, if you like?’

I didn’t like.

‘Fine,’ I said.

‘You go to work and everything? Who looks after her?’

Do I have to answer these questions?

Well I decided I would. My reluctance to do anything civil was apparent enough. I wasn’t going to give them actual ammunition.

‘I work from home. She goes to a nursery, and spends some afternoons with a friend’s children.’

‘But that can’t give you enough time, surely …’

‘It does.’ I work in the evenings sometimes, while she sleeps. But I’m not going to tell him that.

‘But you don’t have a nanny or anything …’

‘We don’t need one,’ I said. ‘Do you work, Nora?’

It turns out she is a travel agent. Turns out she is rather high up, actually, in travel agenting. Well, I suppose someone has to be.

Actually I am glad. Judges don’t take babies away from happy homes to give them to career women.

Lily’s voice came down the stairs: ‘Mu-um, I need you …’

‘Excuse me.’ I went up. She wanted to go to the loo.

‘Have the persons gone yet?’

‘No, love.’

‘Can they go soon?’

‘I hope so.’

‘I hope so back,’ she said. I smiled. ‘I love you,’ I said. ‘I love you back,’ she said. I wiped her bum and said, ‘Do you want to come down?’

‘You’re not my mummy but you are my mummy,’ she said.