At Empoli, I was joined at my table by a little boy in a striped vest, three years old, perhaps, travelling with his grandparents who were large and jovial, full of proud smiles as they watched the boy lay out the contents of a small bag of sweets, twelve artificially coloured jellies, four red, eight blue, sprinkled with the tartaric acid that causes them to fizz on the tongue. He counted them, then counted them again. He divided them into rows and columns, three by four, two by six, showing that instinctive pleasure in play that seems to disappear as soon as we call it mathematics. He licked the tip of his finger and dabbed at the sweet-sharp sugar that had become detached, making a great show of choosing which sweet to eat first. I watched him quite openly, perhaps a little too openly for this day and age. He was aware of giving a performance and when he finally settled on a red sweet, popped it into his mouth and puckered his lips at the tartness of it, I laughed and we both laughed together, his grandparents too, nodding, smiling.
He said something to me in burbling Italian. ‘Inglese,’ I replied, ‘no parlo Italiano,’ and he nodded as if this made sense and slid a blue sweet towards me, arm fully extended, and the gesture seemed so generous and so familiar that I thought, Oh God, it’s Albie. It’s exactly how Albie used to be.
Because he really was a charming little boy, like a kid from a comic, full of benign mischief. There were difficult days, of course, particularly in the early months. Croup! He caught croup, a disease designed by nature specifically to terrify parents, and there were further panics to come, over mysterious rashes or inexplicable tears, our nerves perpetually jangled from lack of sleep. But we bore all of this gladly and with only the occasional loss of composure, because hadn’t we yearned for this disruption in our lives? I returned to work, half regretful, half grateful for some respite, then came home and did my bit to bathe and feed him, and the days and weeks and months went by.
At some point around this time, he must have begun acquiring first memories. I hope so, anyway, because it’s hard to imagine a child who was more adored and cared for by parents who, for the most part, got on incredibly well. The inability to control a child’s recollections is a frustrating one. I know my own parents did their best to provide sun-dappled days of picnics and paddling pools, but mainly I remember advertising jingles, wet socks on radiators, inane TV theme tunes, arguments about wasted food. With my own son, there were times when I definitely thought ‘remember this’ — Albie toppling through the high grass of a summer meadow, the three of us lolling in bed on a winter Sunday or dancing around the kitchen to some silly song — wishing there was some way to press ‘record’, because the three of us were, for the most part, pretty good together, a family at last.
We were sharing a bath one night, at a time when we did such things, Albie lying between his mother’s legs, head resting on her belly, and I made an observation that, while all of us might sometimes covet other people’s lives, their careers, their spouses (I coveted no one’s spouse, but knew from experience that others coveted mine), it was extremely rare — unheard of, even, and certainly taboo — to prefer someone else’s children to your own. Everyone thinks their own child is delightful, yet not all children are delightful, so why are parents unaffected by that? What is the reason for this fixed and unshakeable bond: neurological, sociological, genetic? Perhaps, I suggested, we’re hard-wired to love our own children over others as a kind of survival mechanism, for the propagation of the species.
Connie frowned. ‘You mean the love you feel for your child is not real, it’s just science.’
‘Not at all. It’s real because it’s science! The way you feel about friends or lovers or even siblings is dependent and conditional on their behaviour. With your children, that’s irrelevant. It doesn’t matter what they do. People with bratty kids don’t love them less, do they?’
‘No, they teach them not to be bratty.’
‘And that’s the difference — they stick with them and even if they don’t succeed, even if they stay brats, they’d still give their life for them.’
‘Albie’s not bratty.’
‘No, he’s lovely. But everybody thinks their own children are lovely, even when they’re not.’
‘And they shouldn’t?’
‘Of course they should! But that’s what people mean by “unconditional love”.’
‘Which apparently you think is a bad thing?’
‘No—’
‘Or an illusion, a “behavioural instinct”.’
‘No, I’m just … thinking aloud.’
We both went silent for a while. The bath was cooling now but getting out would have felt like conceding a point.
‘What a stupid thing to say in front of Albie!’
I laughed. ‘He’s eighteen months old! He doesn’t understand.’
‘And I suppose you know that, too.’
‘I was thinking aloud, that’s all.’
‘The eminent child psychologist,’ she said, rising suddenly from the bath, Albie in her arms.
‘I was thinking out loud! It was just a theory.’
‘Well I don’t need a theory, Douglas,’ she said, wrapping him in a towel and bundling him away. My wife has always had a gift for effective exit lines. I lay alone in the bath for some time, feeling the water grow more tepid around me. She’s tired, I thought, it’s nothing, and sure enough the debate was forgotten almost instantly by everyone except me.
At least I presume she has forgotten it.
But from the beginning there was never any doubt that she was better at it all, so much more competent, kind and patient, never bored in that dull old playground, never reaching for a newspaper, happy to watch the twentieth, twenty-first, twenty-second trip down the slide. Is there anything duller than pushing a swing? Yet she never seemed resentful — or only occasionally — of the hours and days and weeks that he consumed, the attention he demanded, the irrational tears, the trail of destruction and spilt paint and mashed carrot that he left behind, never repulsed or angered by the vomit that stained our new sofa, the poo that found its way into the cracks between the floorboards and is still there now, I expect, at some molecular level. As Albie got older, his devotion to his mother became more and more blatant and extreme. In early years this circumstance is so commonplace as to be barely worth acknowledging. Strain as he might, even the most fervent father lacks the ability to breast-feed, and the paternal bonding would come later, wouldn’t it, over chemistry sets and model planes, camping trips and driving lessons? He would beat me at badminton and in return I’d show him how to make a battery out of a lemon. In the meantime, there seemed little to do, except wait patiently for the day we became close.
But increasingly I seemed to have a particular gift for upsetting him, standing awkwardly while he wriggled and writhed in my arms, waiting for Connie to relieve me. Without her there, we were both on edge. The journey from baby to toddler will involve a certain number of mishaps, but something about her absence made him tumble and trip so that even now there are scars and dents that Connie can point to and attribute to me. There, that’s the coffee-table incident; that’s the fall from the tree; that’s the ceiling-fan affair. And always, always, his arms would stretch towards his mother on her return because he knew he would be safe.