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‘I can.’
She hesitates. ‘But … she’s crying. She’s crying, Peter.’
‘I tried everything. I tried the milk; she wouldn’t take it. I tried changing her, I tried burping her.’ He takes his hand from his eyes and peers at her. His hair is too brown, she thinks; it looks like a wig.
She stomps up the stairs without taking off her shoes. Sod him. Emily is wailing like a professional mourner: deep sorrow, oceans of pain. From the wall of the staircase, Peter’s parents stare out from a photo taken here, in this house; her own parents squint against the sun, stiff as convicts outside the farm, a picture taken before the divorce. There is one of her, aged ten, with a home-cut fringe, a real knife and fork job; and herself and Peter with Emily when she was first born, the one she posted on Facebook to announce her baby’s arrival into the world. It is Samantha who has framed and hung these pictures, to give the house a bit of soul.
Emily is crying hard now: great howls, trembling aftermaths, shocked silences as she sucks in another lungful of air. She is in her cot, her face crimson, almost purple. Samantha picks her up, holds her fraught and furious body close. Almost instantly, she calms. Sh-sh-shushing, Samantha sits on the armchair in the corner of the nursery and unbuttons her blouse. Her left breast is the fullest, firm as a rubber ball, and when Emily closes her mouth around it, she almost yelps with that still strange yet familiar blend of pain and near ecstasy as the baby draws the milk down.
Hush descends. The soft smacking sound, Emily’s eyelashes, her tiny soft head. Samantha tries to contain her fury at Peter. Illogically, she fears it might transfer, might sour the milk.
Peter appears at the nursery door.
‘That’s what she needed,’ he says, smiling.
She glances at him, but only briefly, before looking away. She cannot look at him, not right now.
‘I left a bottle,’ she says.
‘I tried, but she wasn’t interested.’
She glances at him. He is not upset. He is not mortified. He is not ashamed to have been caught lying on the sofa while their baby—
‘I’ve been out of the house for a few hours,’ she says. ‘A few hours. This is the first time I’ve been out on my own. You could have comforted her, Peter. She’s a baby. They need comfort. And instead you comforted yourself with a little lie-down and some nice music.’
‘I couldn’t do anything for her, Sam. I thought the best thing to do was leave her to cry it out. There’s no point me draining my battery, is there? I have a lecture at five.’
She closes her eyes to the rage that boils within her. ‘I won’t leave her with you if you’re not going to look after her. I’m not going to go and teach if you can’t even—’
‘She was perfectly safe. She hadn’t been crying that long. I just needed a break.’
‘You just needed?’ She has raised her voice, damn him. He doesn’t like it when she raises her voice. Well, tough. ‘What aboutherneeds, Peter? You’re missing something, some vital piece. It’s about her needs now, not yours. Don’t you see that?’
‘I’m not going to talk to you if you’re going to shout.’
‘I’m not shouting. But you can’t have tried very hard. I would have tried for the whole time. I would have sat there for hours and got her to take her bottle if it killed me. It’s bound to be difficult, but you have to persevere, otherwise, I can’t go out to work.’ She looks up. The doorway is empty. From downstairs music amplifies, dies away.
‘Twat,’ she mutters, relishing the illicit swear word. ‘Bastard. Stupid wiggy twat bastard fuckface.’
She has made herself laugh at least. But it is not the first time he’s left her muttering and swearing like a madwoman. And as often happens since she had Emily, in these moments, when she finds herself so utterly alone, the memory of giving birth comes to her, followed always by the first time she pulled a calf with her father, over and over, like a dream: the hay and the heat, the smell of iron and dung, the mother licking the calf with her pink speckled tongue. Herself, no more than ten, crouched by her father’s side, listening to his soft whispered words …She’ll take it from here.Theday she gave birth to Emily, Samantha put her trust in the midwives as the cows put their trust in her father. Maybe that’s why the memory comes to her when she’s cross and confused. Maybe it’s to do with her father, her father who, in the end, couldn’t be trusted.
‘Hey, my little baby calf,’ she whispers, lips pressed to her daughter’s soft head.
But now she’s made herself cry when what she wants is to be furious. As furious as her beloved baby girl when she came slithering out, livid as a bruise, outraged. This part of her own body, this hot blood shared. How could Peter leave their child to cry when she is part of his flesh too? His emotionless response is so at odds with the way he can be at other times: so affectionate, so understanding, so beautifully civilised. Day and night. It is as if he is two people.
She hears the oiled click of the latch, the profound roar of the Porsche pulling out onto the street. She carries Emily to the front window and watches Peter drive away. Her anger is already beginning to confuse her now, after the event, as it so often does. Peter has a way of making her out to be the unreasonable one. He does it so eloquently, so rationally, that she is left no longer sure if she is entitled to feel what she undeniably does feel, whether she is being too demanding, too sensitive, too … whatever. And she always ends up being the one to say sorry. Peter doesn’t say sorry. Ever.
‘Never argue with a professor,’ she said to Marcia last time they met for coffee, before Emily was born. ‘Even when they’re wrong, they’re right.’
Seven o’clock. Emily is in bed and Samantha is starving. Peter should be home by eight, but she is too hungry and, frankly, not in the mood to wait for him. In the living room, she finds a low bank of glowing coals in the grate and tops them up from the bucket. The house is cosy, at least.
In the larder there’s some dried pasta and half a carton of fresh pesto in the fridge. While the pasta boils, she calls her mother, whose village gossip always straightens her out.
Sure enough, her mother regales her with the story of the stranger who, on Tuesday evening, sat in Charlie West’s chair in the Dancing Drake, the pub where her mother works, the silent scandal that followed; Fiona Kelly, who organised the maypole dance for the last spring fete, is in hospital again with her nerves; Tara Munday’s lad broke his wrist coming off his quad bike and had to be taken to York to have it reset.
Last of the stoics, her mother never once mentions the farm, the life that was sold from under her.
Samantha eats two rounds of toast while she listens, several slices of Cheshire cheese, a lone leftover falafel and a handful of walnut halves. Peter has never, in all the time she’s lived with him, stocked crappy foods. Which is a shame. Right now, as she tells her mother about her first ever class, she longs for a treat from the packed lunches Mum used to make: prawn cocktail crisps or cheese strings or a greasy, salt-saturated Peperami.
