It is a cliché to say that having a baby changes a person, but the day Sadie was born, Gabriela and Tom became different people.
‘You should rest,’ the midwife said, once the baby had taken her first feed. Gabriela was weak and grateful for the nurse’s capable hands as they stretched towards her, taking Sadie and placing her tiny body in the tiny plastic cot next to the bed, then pushing it towards the pillow end, within easy reach.
‘Are you sure you don’t want to sleep with her next to you?’ Tom asked, and Gabriela was grateful when the midwife interfered.
‘We prefer if the baby stays in the cot. It’s safer that way.’
Gabriela could see that he wanted to argue with her on that point, according to the parenting books on attachment he’d started to read and to cite in the weeks before their daughter arrived, as if it was his body, not hers, she would be attached to.
When Tom disappeared behind the curtain in search of a cup of tea, leaving Gabriela alone with her daughter, she felt like she’d been placed in the middle of the ocean and her life-raft was drifting away from her, the force of the love for her baby and the helplessness she felt in this moment threatening to drown them both, to dice her into pieces of herself that could never be put back together. She felt the severing as a series of sharp stabbing pains in the taxi home from the hospital the day they were discharged, Sadie asleep in the car-seat behind her, the pain slicing at her insides every time they went over a speed bump, serving as a reminder that her body – and her life – were no longer her own.
Whatever scene she had painted in her head of what maternity leave would look like, the image was obscured by Tom’s constant shadow. He didn’t hover over Sadie the way she did, anxiously checking her daughter’s breath on a hand mirror in the middle of the night to make sure she was still alive, but rather he simply couldn’t leave Sadie – or her – alone.
‘Where are you going?’ he asked for the tenth time, the day they were discharged.
‘Just to the loo, going to try doing a piss without pulling out a stitch, if that’s all right with you?’ she snapped and he winced.
‘Sorry,’ he said, looking hurt.
‘It’s fine. I know you’re just trying to help.’ She brushed his head with her fingertips as she passed. And he was, but the more he tried to do for her the more she wished he would back the hell off.
It wasn’t fair, to find herself aggrieved by his constant offers of help, to feel a swell of resentment for the disproportionate impact of their daughter’s birth on her life compared to his, for how liberated he was to enjoy their new circumstances free from the physical and hormonal shifts of becoming a mother. Yet some days the rage she felt towards him was so great she would fathom excuses to leave the house: an imagined errand she’d announce before heading out to sit on a bench on the Heath, smoking a cigarette. And then she’d come home and find Tom and Sadie asleep on the sofa, his body curled protectively around hers, and she would find herself suddenly overwhelmed by a surge of love. Hating herself, she would sit and watch her daughter’s tiny fingers clutching Tom’s thumb as if she sensed that something was coming for them in this world she had suddenly been propelled into, and she had to hold on for dear life. The urge Gabriela felt to protect her child, to protect all of them, in those moments, was so strong, so all-consuming, that she couldn’t imagine that anything would ever tear them apart. She couldn’t have foreseen the force of the wave that would sweep them all up, and then spit them out again so far from home.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘I can’t get the breast pump to work,’ she said, pushing at the valve that was failing to connect to the tube, the evening before she was due to go back to work.
‘What’s wrong with it?’ Tom asked, taking it from her gently.
‘I don’t know what’s wrong with it, that’s the problem,’ she snapped, and Tom held up his hands.
‘Just trying to help.’
‘Massive help,’ she muttered under her breath as he moved out of the line of fire, putting on the kettle, because all any of them ever needed was a cup of fucking tea.
‘I just don’t know how I’m supposed to work properly when I can’t think straight, when my tits explode every time she makes a bloody noise,’ she cried later, once Sadie was down for the night and it was just him and her on the sofa making their way through the remains of the previous night’s takeaway.
‘Are you sure you want to go back so soon?’
‘Seriously, Tom, is that supposed to be helpful?’
He lifted up his hands in an act of surrender. ‘I’m just responding to what you’re saying. There is no pressure from me for you to go back to work so soon. That’s all.’
‘Right, and you’ll pay the mortgage?’
‘I can get a job, Gabriela, you’re not the only person in this house with a brain. Jesus, you’re the one who said you wanted me to stay home with the baby and for you to w—’
She exhaled loudly. ‘Please, can we not argue? I’m just worried. I’m allowed to be worried, aren’t I?
There was someone else at her desk when she arrived at the office the following morning, dressed in the newly expansive suit trousers and blouse she’d bought to mark her return to work.
‘Hi,’ she said to the girl in her seat, who was wearing trainers and jeans and made Gabriela feel about 300 years old.
‘Hi,’ the young woman said, looking up as she continued to type, as if waiting for Gabriela to ask her a question. Her hair was pulled into a long dark ponytail and her fine fingers danced over the keyboard even as she maintained eye contact.
‘I’m Serena.’
‘Gabriela.’
Again there was an uncomfortable silence, so Gabriela said, ‘I’ve just come back from maternity leave, this is – this was – my desk …’
Blushing, Serena stood. ‘Oh God, sorry. I started a couple of months ago and this has been my desk ever since. Nobody mentioned …’ Her voice petered out and she waited there awkwardly, as if unsure whether to clear a space on the desk beside her.
Gabriela held out a hand, trying to keep the unreasonable level of contempt she felt off her face. ‘It’s fine, I’ll wait until Lauren gets here. I’ll just pop to the café …’
‘I’m really sorry,’ Serena called after her and Gabriela shook her head, reassuring her not to worry, telling herself it was just a misunderstanding.
‘You’ll be sitting here now,’ Lauren explained an hour later, pointing to a smaller desk at the far end of the office, not mentioning that this put her as far away from Emsworth as was conceivable without hanging her from the window by a noose.
‘Sure,’ Gabriela said, trying to smile.
If she had been under any illusion as to whether or not Emsworth still intended to put her forward for the promotion once she’d had the baby, that illusion was instantly shattered, scattering shards as sharp as glass which lodged themselves in her skin.
‘Welcome back, Gabriela,’ he managed a few days later, sweeping past her desk and patting her shoulder briskly as he continued moving through the office towards Serena.
‘You should go home,’ Madeleine insisted on her way out, later that day. Glancing at the desks which were largely empty aside from Johnny who was still beavering away, she placed a hand on Gabriela’s shoulder.
‘Come on. Presenteeism is horribly passé, Gabs. Besides, none of these guys will give you any credit for being the last person here – I don’t think your daughter will thank you for it either …’
‘All right,’ she snapped. It was easy for Madeleine to say, having made a niche for herself working government-to-government under the Multilateral Policy Directorate, between London and Krakow, while Gabriela was at home grappling with the benefits of reusable vs disposable nappies.
Madeleine might have been able to bypass Emsworth and his whims and grab the role that she was due with both arms, but Gabriela was stuck, and the only way to prove she was equally serious about her job, now that she had the baby, was to push herself into the sightline of superiors from other departments.
‘I’m just saying, there are more important things in life. Go home to your family,’ Madeleine said, leaning down to kiss her friend on the cheek as she made to leave, her skin electrifying as their cheeks touched.