Motherhood by Helen Simpson

Author:Helen Simpson [Simpson, Helen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2017-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

Heavy Weather

‘YOU SHOULD NEVER have married me.’

‘I haven’t regretted it for an instant.’

‘Not you, you fool! Me! You shouldn’t have got me to marry you if you loved me. Why did you, when you knew it would let me in for all this. It’s not fair!’

‘I didn’t know. I know it’s not. But what can I do about it?’

‘I’m being mashed up and eaten alive.’

‘I know. I’m sorry.’

‘It’s not your fault. But what can I do?’

‘I don’t know.’

So the conversation had gone last night in bed, followed by platonic embraces. They were on ice at the moment, so far as anything further was concerned. The smoothness and sweet smell of their children, the baby’s densely packed pearly limbs, the freshness of the little girl’s breath when she yawned, these combined to accentuate the grossness of their own bodies. They eyed each other’s mooching adult bulk with mutual lack of enthusiasm, and fell asleep.

At four in the morning, the baby was punching and shouting in his Moses basket. Frances forced herself awake, lying for the first moments like a flattened boxer in the ring trying to rise while the count was made. She got up and fell over, got up again and scooped Matthew from the basket. He was huffing with eagerness, and scrabbled crazily at her breasts like a drowning man until she lay down with him. A few seconds more and he had abandoned himself to rhythmic gulping. She stroked his soft head and drifted off. When she woke again, it was six o’clock and he was sleeping between her and Jonathan.

For once, nobody was touching her. Like Holland she lay, aware of a heavy ocean at her seawall, its weight poised to race across the low country.

The baby was now three months old, and she had not had more than half an hour alone in the twenty-four since his birth in February. He was big and hungry and needed her there constantly on tap. Also, his two-year-old sister Lorna was, unwillingly, murderously jealous, which made everything much more difficult. This time round was harder, too, because when one was asleep the other would be awake and vice versa. If only she could get them to nap at the same time, Frances started fretting, then she might be able to sleep for some minutes during the day and that would get her through. But they wouldn’t, and she couldn’t. She had taken to muttering I can’t bear it, I can’t bear it, without realising she was doing so until she heard Lorna chanting I can’t bear it! I can’t bear it! as she skipped along beside the pram, and this made her blush with shame at her own weediness.

Now they were all four in Dorset for a week’s holiday. The thought of having to organise all the food, sheets, milk, baths and nappies made her want to vomit.

In her next chunk of sleep came that recent nightmare, where men with knives and scissors advanced on the felled trunk which was her body.

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