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But Samantha knows it’s only love that makes her like this. Quite simply, her mother cannot bear for Samantha to suffer as she has. It would kill her.
‘It’s all right, Mum,’ she says before she rings off. ‘Everything will work out, I promise.’
Everything does work out. With military precision. Peter makes sure she finishes her degree, gives her regular lifts into town and to her medical appointments. And on a hot day in June, when she logs on to her student portal to find out her results and discovers she has gained a 2:1, she shrieks and runs into Peter’s study to tell him the amazing news.
‘Er, knock?’
‘Sorry!’ She waits for him to turn. He swivels around on his chair and pulls his black glasses from his nose. He is smiling at her before she even has time to say it.
‘You’ve heard?’ he says.
‘I got a 2:1!’
His smile realigns itself; his eyebrows lower a fraction, then worse, shoot further up than they were at the start.
‘Well, I think that’s brilliant,’ he says. ‘Under the circumstances.’
Her delight shifts shape as an animal cowers under a whip, still recognisable but so much smaller.
‘Under the circumstances?’ she asks.
His eyebrows are still high, his hands clasped in his lap. He is nodding encouragement, but encouraged is not what she feels.
‘It’s really great.’ He reaches then for her hands and holds them in his as he often does when explaining a point. ‘I just meant with the pregnancy and everything. I meant that it’s a marvellous achievement and I have no doubt whatsoever that you would have gained a first if you hadn’t had all that to deal with. You clever, clever thing.’ He pulls her towards him to kiss her. It is awkward, with the bump.
‘Thanks,’ she says quietly. ‘I’m actually really pleased.’
She leaves him, telling him she’ll let him work, and, without a clue as to why, goes and stands by the front door and cries. It is cool here, cooler than anywhere else in the house. She pushes her face into the coats and breathes in and out. He meant it kindly. His faith in her is rock solid and she is grateful for it. But he has no idea how he has crushed her. He didn’t mean it like that. He doesn’t, cannot possibly know or understand that for her, getting into UCL was a pipe dream, to have come out with a 2:1 beyond anything she imagined. For a few moments, her delight was tall and whole. Until he brought down the whip.
After a brief holiday in Dorset – he doesn’t want to risk flying – Peter books her on to a twelve-week adult education course. A teaching qualification will be a string to her bow, he tells her. It’s good to have a flexible profession to fall back on. By the time she finishes the course, it is late summer and she is as round as a hot-air balloon, breathless, astonished at how her ankles have swollen. This is a sick joke, she thinks. Nature is a mad sadist. How does any woman have more than one child? She doesn’t care how much childbirth hurts, she just wants the babyout.
Peter pays for a private clinic in Cobham, a private room, a private delivery.
And it is perhaps only at that point, when they enter the delivery room, that Peter’s confident order is obliterated by a force stronger than both of them: nature, in all its bloody and painful reality. Samantha lows like a cow, panting, sweating, swearing, pushing out with all her animal might this purple, sticky and raging baby girl, who for now at least is not taking any shit from anybody. Right now, this child will not be told what to do or how to do it or how to be. No, she comes out fast, fists tight, yelling like a barbarian.
‘Is she all right?’ Samantha asks, her own pain forgotten instantly.
‘Oh yes,’ the midwife says, placing the tiny naked warmth on Samantha’s chest as Samantha bursts into tears of relief and joy. ‘Don’t you worry about her. She’s a feisty one.’
‘Special delivery,’ Samantha quips later, when her baby girl is returned to her, clean and wrapped in a soft cotton blanket. She holds her swaddled daughter in her arms, nuzzles her nose against the soft, warm, angry little mite, kisses the world’s tiniest fists. The love is instant, like a light beam or an injection or something, designed to obliterate the hell of the last weeks and hours.
‘We should call her Emily.’ Peter stands over them, his face lit with pride. ‘It’s a good writer’s name.’
It’s also his mother’s name. Samantha thought maybe Laura, after her own mother, but she hasn’t voiced it, and now Peter is looking at her all joyful and sure. Unable to be marked by childbirth, he’s going to stamp his family name on the baby like the farmer brands the cow. Samantha says nothing. Peter’s health insurance has earned him the right to pick whatever name he wants, she supposes. She doesn’t want to seem ungrateful.
Her mother can’t believe what she’s seeing when she comes to visit.
‘Looks like you’ve landed on your feet,’ she says, with almost no trace of bitterness in her voice.
Samantha shows her up the wide staircase with its dark brass runners and white eggshelled edges. The spare room and the third bathroom, which her mother will have sole use of while she stays, have been freshly painted by a guy who Peter saidtakes care of things around the place for me. Her mother sits on the soft double bed, runs her hands over the crisp new White Company bed linen; the gesture is not casual, it is appreciative. She gathers the new snowy bath towel in her arms and presses it to her face.
‘Money isn’t everything,’ Samantha says, with no idea why, or what she means by this. Sorry, perhaps. She wants to say more, but at that moment Peter appears on the landing.
‘Ah, there you are,’ he says. ‘Who’d like to join me in the sitting room for a glass of wine before dinner?’
It is a Sunday evening in October, almost a year to the day since they met.
‘So I’ve hopefully lined up a job for you at Richmond College,’ Peter announces over dinner, an organic rabbit casserole he has prepared with the rest of the second bottle of Barolo he opened last night. ‘It’s only two hours a week, but it’ll be good for you to get out of the house and exercise the old grey matter.’
