She had been waiting to tell them this, and now looked round with shining eyes. It was great fun, being able to tell people something that was going to make them pleased with her. She had never realised. ‘Aren’t you, little Charlie-arlie, little Charlie’s going to sleepy-byes in his cot, going to stay all night and be a good baby, aren’t you, Charlie?’ she crooned at him, drawing out both her pleasure and their surprise. ‘Sally’s got a boyfriend,’ she said. ‘She met him at work, he’s a lawyer as well, in her firm, he joined when she was on maternity leave. She goes on about it all the time. Philip. He’s younger than her. And she doesn’t know if she should tell her husband about him or not, she sort of wants to. I said she should wait a bit.’
She looked up at them importantly. ‘Anyway, the thing is she asked me to baby-sit. Ages ago. She’s asked me loads of times and I kept saying I couldn’t, so she got somebody else from the village, only tonight they’ve cancelled. So this morning she’s all desperate and I said I’d do it but it’d be better if we just kept him here instead of me taking him back for six o’clock and baby-sitting him there, better for her so she’s got lots of time to get ready, and he can sleep over here so she won’t have to worry about getting back afterwards or anything. ‘And,’ she smiled again, ’cause it’s a Friday, I said we might as well have him tomorrow so she can have a Saturday to herself for a change, we’ll keep him till six. So we’ve got him nearly a whole weekend.’
‘Are you sure she doesn’t mind?’ Jean asked. ‘She doesn’t see much of him in the week, are you sure she doesn’t mind us having him on a Saturday?’
‘If you ask me,’ Steph said with a knowing snort, ‘she’s dead pleased. She keeps asking if I think she’s lost the baby weight. And the other day she asked if it was true a man can tell when a woman’s given birth. If he could… you know… feel anything.’
‘Really!’ Jean exclaimed. She wanted to sound as if she were only pretending to be shocked but in fact she was, a little.
‘I said, as if I should know!’
‘What’s that got to do with you baby-sitting?’ Michael asked, wondering about the answer to Sally’s question and promising himself he would think about it properly another time.
Steph looked witheringly at him. ‘S’obvious. She’s obviously planning on bringing the boyfriend back tonight, isn’t she? If Charlie’s away she can shag him all night, can’t she? And probably all day tomorrow as well.’
‘Really!’ Michael cried, mimicking Jean. ‘Really, Stephanie! How can you use that word in front of Charles!’
‘Shagging? But that’s exactly what she’d say!’ Steph told them, laughing again, this time louder.
It was not exactly what Sally said. But she did say that it had been a treat having Charlie out of the house overnight. ‘Because if anything, Steph, since I’ve been back at work he’s been even worse at night. He’s still waking for a feed and he’s gone bloody backwards with the bottle, I’m up for hours with him. Don’t you think he’s gone backwards? Don’t tell me he takes the bottle for you.’
‘Well… you know, he might just be playing you up a bit. You know, just for the attention?’
‘Oh, don’t you start making me feel guilty! Bloody hell, I’ve got to earn a living, haven’t I? Aren’t I entitled to some fun and a bit of time to myself?’
‘Of course you are! I didn’t mean that. We’re happy to have him. I mean, we haven’t got your sort of pressure, have we? It’s easier for us. In fact my aunt says he’s ever so welcome to come again next weekend. Then you could have another peaceful night, couldn’t you?’
Sally accepted the offer. And on the weekend following that, Charlie was allowed to stay away for two nights, and after that it became the norm that on a Thursday morning Sally would kiss him goodbye and not see him again until Saturday evening. She made a point of saying that she was not enjoying herself, not entirely.
‘They’re chucking work at me like it’s going out of fashion,’ she told Steph. ‘If you ask me they’re trying it on- can she or can’t she cope with it now she’s got a baby, oh, they want to think it can’t be done. They’re waiting to see if I’ll go under, well, I’m buggered if I will. I can work all Thursday night if you’ve got Charlie, can’t I? I mean, if I wasn’t a single parent I’d have somebody to help me handle Charlie in the evenings, wouldn’t I? All I’m getting is what millions of people get. And if you’ve got him Friday as well, that gives me a bit of time with Philip, and I don’t see what’s so bloody unreasonable about having a bit of fun, do you?’
‘Of course it’s not unreasonable,’ Steph said, smoothly. ‘Charlie’s perfectly happy and that’s the main thing, isn’t it?’
‘Of course! There’s no reason to feel guilty about it and you know what? I don’t. People don’t understand that. I mean you should hear Charlie’s granddad- he was on the phone again, when am I going out to Nepal, when is Charlie getting christened, et bloody cetera. Christ!’
As Sally grew happier her house became even more untidy and the range of things left lying around widened. It now included many more pieces of makeup, sometimes squashed into lardy pink lumps on the floors or tabletop, wine bottles and theatre programmes, matchbooks from restaurants, a couple of books on hot air ballooning (Philip’s hobby) and, once, an unworn pair of black stockings that had been, as Sally explained to Steph, ‘ripped to buggery’ on their way out of the packet. Steph would clear up these things into prim little heaps that made Sally laugh.
At the end of June there was to be a hot air balloon festival near Deauville. Sally informed Steph, in what sounded like a prepared statement, that Philip had been very generous about Sundays, quite prepared to share them with a six-month-old baby who was not even his. He complained about it really very little, especially when, it should be remembered, Philip was five years younger than Sally and had no ambitions yet to be a father himself. So it seemed to Sally quite reasonable that he should now make it clear, of course in a gentle way, that he wanted to go to France without Charlie, just the two of them, leaving on the Wednesday and returning on Sunday the 29th of June. In fact it was not just reasonable, it was rather sweet and romantic, although it did mean that Sally now had to ask a favour. Not that she did so lightly. She had thought about it and discussed it with Philip. They both felt that it was terribly lucky that Charlie was not the clingy and difficult baby he had been a couple of months ago, and that Sally could contemplate leaving him with Steph for four nights with a completely easy mind.
I suppose I’m of that generation that is meant to believe that everything is worse than it used to be, including mothers. But they could be bad in my day, too. I’ve been painfully aware from an early age of how bad mothers can be. So it’s just in general that I think I don’t understand mothers (with the exception of Steph, of course) and not, as you might expect me to say, ‘modern’ mothers. Nor am I saying that Sally is necessarily a bad mother. She committed no sin; inattention is not in itself a sin, though I am of the no doubt old-fashioned opinion that there is considerable vanity in the belief that one can attend satisfactorily to so many things at once. But no, the puzzle is mothers generally. There’s no explaining them or, to be more accurate, there’s no explaining why the people who make the best ones are not necessarily the ones who have the babies.
Although I’m not referring to Mother, is that clear? I daresay Mother and I each blamed the other for our situation, and I am prepared to admit that I cannot have been without fault. No, I mean my own, actual mother, the one who (I like to think still) was killed in an air raid on Cardiff just before my fifth birthday, in 1940. The one who I am sure must have made the dress I was wearing on the day when Mother collected me from the children’s home and brought me on the train all the way back to Oakfield Avenue. The one of whom I do not have a photograph and cannot recall a thing, not the colour of her hair, the sound of her voice, nor the smell of her skin, nor the feel of my arms round her neck. It may even be a presumption that I ever did put my arms round her neck, but I cannot imagine I did not. Not knowing how that felt is what I most miss- and this is important, the point being that it is perfectly possible to miss something one has never had. It is not the contrast between having and not-having that is at the root of the pain. You simply go without and feel the lack.