Authors: Sarah Bilston
“I’ve brought a list of clubs and boutiques,” I explained, when she finally fell quiet, excitedly producing a well-thumbed page torn from a
Time Out
special on “What’s Still Hot in New York.” I’d saved it especially; every night, the month before leaving, I’d been reading and rereading it, salivating at the thought that soon I-I!-would actually be beating the streets of New York City. “And—” turning over the page, showing her all the sections—“there’s also a section on flea markets. Places where hip young designers flog their stuff. You know, the ones hoping for a lucky break. There’ll be plenty of time, when we get back to the city, for us to work our way through them together, won’t there Q? It’s so nice you’re on maternity leave,” I went on enthusiastically, in answer to her faint nod, “we can really
do
things together this time. Oh Q, it’s going to be lovely!”
She was looking tired, I noticed suddenly—tired, and a bit lumpy.
“You need to get more rest,” I said solicitously, touching her thickly tangled auburn hair then hastily letting it go (what was
in
there?). “It’s good I’m here, Q. I can really take care of you.” Her skin was almost gray; she’s one of those people who’s sort of pretty when she’s plump and sparkly-eyed, but quite plain otherwise. She rested her head on my shoulder. “That would be nice, Jeanie,” she said, heaving a big, exhausted sigh, and then she rubbed her face slowly against my shirt, like a fond but knackered pony. “It turns out it takes a while to get used to—all this. Motherhood. You know.”
“I know, Alison said you’d be exhausted—” I began, but I swallowed the rest of the sentence when I saw her eyelashes flicker. “Really?” my sister retorted, sitting up straight again, one hand resting defensively on her rounded tummy. (She looked suspiciously as if she were still in maternity clothes.) “Says I can’t manage, does she? Typical!”
“I wouldn’t say that—”
“Well, I would,” Q returned crossly. “You should have heard her on the phone the other day. “Motherhood doesn’t come easily to everyone, Q. For some of us it’s second nature, of course. But you mustn’t feel it’s a comment on your femininity if
you
find it hard…’” She mimicked Alison’s voice in a scornful high falsetto. “She’s just longing for me to fail,” she went on. “She wants everyone to think she’s the world’s best mother and I’m just some careerist freak who can’t even change a diaper. Well, I’ll bloody well show her—and you, Jeanie,” she turned to me owlishly, head swaying, “you can help me by staying on message, okay? Whenever you talk to her, I mean. I deal with Alison on a strictly need-to-know basis, which is a simple enough rule because she doesn’t need to know
anything.
But look,” she went on, after a moment, snaking her arm around my waist, “let’s forget Alison. I try to as often as possible. Let’s talk about
you,
dear. Did you manage to finish your course? Your social work degree?”
“Of course I did,” I said, nettled (just how disorganized did she
think I was?). “So was it useful? Worth the money? What did you learn?” she went on, sounding more like my mother than my mother. “How to speak in words of nineteen syllables,” I returned, irritably, draining my cup and setting it down with a bang. That was the one skill I was confident I’d picked up from my master’s course, actually. I used to have my friends in stitches at lunchtime, converting every event of the day into social-work-speak: we didn’t catch the bus, we “engaged with a broad-spectrum transportation network which facilitated the practice of time-keeping skills and coordinated cross-class collaboration.” Instead of cooking dinner we “learned crucial choice-making in a domesticated setting, developing hand-eye coordination and temperature-regulation skills, essential first-order disciplines for all health-care professionals.”
Q was clearly half-asleep. “It was—you know, fine,” I finished blandly, not feeling inspired to expand in the circumstances. “Really fine.” Visibly shaking herself, she opened her mouth to continue the interrogation but fortunately (for my purposes) Samuel began shouting in the other room. I didn’t see the child but could attest to the size of his lungs, although why his scream had to be so freakishly high-pitched I couldn’t say. That child made some noise! Thankfully, I took the opportunity of Q’s absence (she flew off the sofa like a mother duck sighting a fox, wild-eyed and clucking) to slip off for a long, hot shower and some me-time. It had been
such
a long day.
Q
D
on’t suppose there will be any baby gear at Paul’s house, will there,” Tom said doubtfully, as we gazed around at the contents of the bedroom and the sitting room. My heart almost failed me at the thought of all the accoutrements that somehow accompanied Samuel. Was this a good idea? If Tom hadn’t talked Paul into offering us his house, and if I hadn’t talked it up to Alison on the phone, I think we might have backed out at that point—holidays in your own place can be so relaxing,” I heard Tom muttering disconsolately, eyeing the baby bath, the baby swing, the baby mobile the size of a family car—but who wants to be the kind of parents who get stuck at home, unable to move a step, because of their baby? Tom wrestled three vast suitcases out of the closet.
“I was planning on using the place myself this month,” Paul observed, when Tom phoned, deeply embarrassed, to ask “for a favor…” But after a pause, he agreed. “If you don’t mind sharing with me for a night or two, perhaps a weekend when I come up to work on the boat, I guess it could work.” Tom actually viewed this as a plus (“We can catch a game, go fishing—!”). “But what are you doing about work?” was Paul’s next, inevitable question, at which point my husband coughed uncomfortably. “I’m thinking of taking an—um—vacation,” he said, and you’d have thought he was suggesting crack cocaine. Paul, however, received the information tolerantly. “Great
idea,” he agreed, “you should spend some time with your new son.” Tom relaxed visibly about the whole plan after that; it was as if Paul had given him permission. He marched into Crimpson the very next day and asked for two weeks off. There were some raised eyebrows, but Crimpson still didn’t want to think of itself as one of the firms in distress—and Tom had a reputation with the clients as one of the very best bankruptcy lawyers in the city. So the smiles were, for the most part, bland; “Enjoy your vacation,” the partners murmured, “and give our best to your wife.” Tom’s biggest supporter Luis pulled him into his office just as he was leaving (eyes flicking up and down the corridor) for an intense, excitable conversation about “future options at the firm.”
We packed the rental car, leaving just enough room for Jeanie to actually sit in—quite an achievement. Glancing back at our trunk of neatly stacked monochrome luggage, I felt strangely clean and pure. No junk, just necessities! We should live like this all the time.
After an energizing argument about the route, and after both of us had checked three times on the harness of Samuel’s baby seat (too tight inspires fears of chest constriction, too loose incites images of fearsome automobile accidents), we threw ourselves out into the Manhattan traffic heading out of town for the weekend, lurched over steaming potholes toward the press of the FDR Drive, and dove among the cars heading toward the Triborough Bridge. At the toll, the air shimmered with the heat of a thousand idling engines. Samuel whimpered uncomfortably in his seat; Tom slammed an impatient hand against the wheel, cursed softly, then flicked compulsively through XM radio channels, while Jeanie and I meandered through a desultory conversation about our mother’s yoga business back home in England.
But once the barrier finally rose to let us through, a new world opened up. “I-95 New Haven” announced a large green sign above the sweating, smoking asphalt. Picking up speed at last, we skirted the edges of a dozen small commuter cities, curved around the un
prepossessing hotel fronts of Stamford, flew across Bridgeport’s overpass, and then, as the scattered high-rises and implausible sheer face of New Haven’s East Rock glimmered a tantalizing gold and bronze upon our left, sped beyond, around the underarm of the coast, into the deepest part of the state.
When we finally left the highway and struck out into the winding roads of interior Connecticut, we seemed to be in a different country altogether. The roads were narrow, and the houses modest; a few clapboard farms, slightly dilapidated, sat in the midst of open, undulating fields, where cows half-slept and nosed the grass and flicked flies along the banks of thickly rush-edged ponds. And then, quite suddenly, we entered a dark tunnel of pines and maples whose branches met above us. Down headed the road, further and further, sweeping around sharp corners set with low red Capes; until, at the very bottom, as the road traversed a neat triangle of carefully mown green grass, the sea appeared before us, orange and crimson and palest blue in the lights of the setting sun.
Sussex, the town where Paul’s summer house lay, hugged a cove notched into the Connecticut coast. The house itself was—we knew from Paul’s detailed instructions—located just outside the small center, off a rough, dusty path running perpendicular to the coastal road. Surrounded—almost encased—by trees, the simple white house gleamed in the semidarkness like something out of a fairy tale as we bumped along the drive. “Good size,” said Tom thoughtfully, looking up at it. Jeanie, peering through the windshield, seemed rather more uncertain.
But if the home was Quakerish on the outside, the inside had, as we quickly discovered, recently received the loving attention of an expensive interior designer. The wooden floorboards had been evened out and stripped to a gleaming sand color, and ocean-hued silk curtains tickled the floor in the breeze. Nautical-themed carpets and pillows were thrown next to pure white armchairs and sofas. A large modern canvas splattered with lines in declining shades
of ochre stared down from the gloss-painted mantelpiece. The table and dining chairs were polished teak slabs, as were the kitchen cupboards. The oven alone was the size of a New York City apartment.
Upstairs were two enormous bedrooms with en suite dressing rooms and vast, echoing bathrooms, equipped with claw-footed iron tubs and rain showers. Fawn-colored glass tiles turned rich gold with a flick of the light switch; amber-colored towels as thick as a woman’s arm lay neatly folded on silver rails (Paul employs a housekeeper to come in and clean once a week, and to set up the house for him and his guests). It was—we realized, as we ran from room to room, exclaiming at the size, the space, the coolness—like something out of a tourist magazine,
Martha Stewart Living
at the very least; a fantasy come to life, a dream of secluded quiet, a cloistered retreat equipped with swansdown and a dizzyingly expensive entertainment system.
Jeanie was, in spite of herself, deeply impressed. “Blimey,” she said, staring wide-eyed at the expanse of opulent minimalism. “How much d’you think all this stuff cost? How can he afford it?” After dinner (pasta thrown together from packets), she curled up on the sofa, tapping out e-mails to her friends in which she described the place in precise, intimate detail. Dave, she said, would be particularly intrigued. “He just wouldn’t believe it,” she said, looking up for a moment with a grin between gulps of iced Chardonnay. “All these rooms! The space! The huge bathrooms! The weirdo art! Although—” her excited smile slipped down her face a bit—he might not approve…” She took another sip of wine, looking thoughtful. “He’s very into the environment these days, he might sniff about the ‘carbon footprint’ of the house.” She shook her head a little, then started tapping again. “But I’ve got to tell him about the kitchen and the bathrooms, he’ll be simply amazed…”
Tom and I left her to it, and took ourselves upstairs to our room. A vast downy quilt and floaty white pillows were piled on top of an iron four-poster in the middle of the room. At the bottom of the bed,
on a painted ship’s chest, stood an enormous display of lilies and ferns with a card from Paul that said, simply, “Enjoy.”
We’d put Samuel to bed in his bassinet before dinner; I picked him up now with cautious, gentle hands, nursed him while he slept, and levered myself into the cool sheets without making a sound. Tom, who had been anxiously watching the whole careful dance, produced a big thumbs-up gesture in the darkness and we settled down with matching sighs of relief. For ten minutes, Samuel slept the heavy, dreamless sleep of the innocent. I drifted off listening to his thin, even moth-breaths. Then, a few moments after I’d lost consciousness, just as I was walking into a dreamland of warm black velvet and soft white down, I was woken by an ear-splitting shriek, a sound to tear body from soul.
“What the—”
Maybe it was because of the trip, maybe the change of surroundings, but the night that unfolded was nightmarish. Samuel was up at midnight, then again at two a.m., three thirty a.m., four a.m., five fifteen a.m., and finally for good, chirruping hopefully, at six a.m. “Can’t you
do
anything?” Tom said raggedly, somewhere about four a.m., but by this point our son was acting as if nursing, cuddling, and singing were all activities approximately akin to torture. “Oh, right, I’ll just switch the ‘off’ button, silly me, why didn’t I think of that before,” I told my husband, and I think I even hit him at one point.
We fell down the stairs together just as the first rays of sunshine were filtering through the window blinds in the kitchen, cheeks flushed, eyes hollowed. I had the oddest sensation of having lost the fluid in my brain. “Obviously, it was just a one-off,” Tom remarked in a ghastly voice, turning pancakes on the stove with shaking white fingers, as the room brightened quickly to day. I nodded. (I think I actually heard my brain rattle.) “Once he gets used to the place, it’ll be different,” he went on, slapping a syrupy mess of half-cooked pancakes in front of me. “We can work on getting him into a
routine
while we’re here, Q,” he added, sitting down on the stool opposite me with the stiff, jerky gait of a very aged man. “Then when we go back to work, at the end of our holiday, he’ll be sleeping reliably throughout the night. We’ll be
totally
in control by then.”