In April they settle on a house. As Maud has shown so little enthusiasm for the project the choice is mostly Tim’s—well, Tim’s and his mother’s. It‘s a three-bedroom semi-detached cottage on the Dorset-Wiltshire border, a short drive from the Rathbone family house. There’s a garden, beams, a big wood-burning stove, a Rayburn, a wooden gate with roses growing at the side, no outward chain. The money stream buys the place outright. Tim and Maud will pay the money back at so much a month.
At the beginning of May, Tim hires a van. Friends give up half a day to help them. Maud, heavy now, folds clothes into suitcases, wraps crockery and glasses in newspaper. She drops a glass and Tim’s old flatmate, Ernesto, cries, ‘No le toques, Maud!’ He sweeps up. He embraces her. He puts his hands on her belly, his expression like a priest officiating at the Mystery.
By mid-morning the following day the last oddments—a box of teabags, a pot plant, the corkboard with Lodestar’s bills still pinned to it—are wedged into the back of the van and they set off, south then west. A-roads give way to lanes with lacy hedgerows and unmown verges. Tim’s parents are waiting for them at the cottage. Also the twins and someone called Slad, a middle-aged man, four-square, who, if not entirely a servant, is something similar—a retainer, a housecarl.
All the windows of the cottage are open. There is honeysuckle growing around the door. The path is laid with a blue-grey stone that Tim’s father, dropping stiffly to his knees, identifies as blue lias, ancient seabed of the Jurassic, rich in fossils, ammonites in particular.
Inside, in the cool of the low-ceilinged rooms, there is already some furniture, pieces the Rathbones had in storage. A dresser for the kitchen, dining chairs of dark varnished wood, a leather armchair, its leather mottled and dented as if the chair were made out of old heavy-bags from a boxing gym. There is even a bed—Slad has somehow wrestled it up the stairs—with a headboard of brilliantly polished walnut. Other things arrive in the afternoon: a fridge, a washing machine and dryer, things delivered by the vans of local firms the Rathbones have done business with for thirty years.
Slad lights the Rayburn. At first it stinks of oil but the fumes disperse. By dusk the house is a house to be lived in and they gather in the warmth of the kitchen to eat supper. Tim’s mother has brought a casserole in a red Le Creuset pot. Tim’s father brings in a half-box of Burgundy from the back of the car. Slad goes home. He makes a kind of shallow bow to them all. Everyone tells Maud she must be exhausted. She says she’s not but falls asleep after supper on the leather armchair and only wakes when the others are leaving. She comes outside with Tim to wave them goodbye.
‘They ran out of things to drink,’ says Tim. ‘But they’ll be back in the morning.’
They stand, hand in hand in the doorway for several minutes after the car’s engine note has dwindled to nothing. Over the silhouettes of the trees the sky is crowded with southern stars. An owl calls; an owl calls back. The moment rests against perfection.
‘Let’s leave the door unlocked,’ says Tim, ‘we’re in the country for God’s sake,’ but later, when Maud is in bed, he finds the keys and locks it, puts the bolts over. If nothing else, he has the guitars in the house.
She begins her leave from Fenniman’s. She is given a ‘good luck’ card signed by everyone, including Henderson who just puts his name, Karl Henderson. She will start back in October. After that Tim will stay at home with the child, an arrangement he seemed eager to accept but which his father mutters about, claims not to understand at all. (‘Is this modern? Is it modern to have a child and then simply leave it?’)
A midwife is appointed. There are only two in the local town and Maud is given Julie—ruddy, stout, motherly, though only a year or two older than Maud. ‘Are you planning on a big family?’ she asks, and when Maud says no she laughs as if this is something she has heard before, women who seem not to really want babies but who end up with a houseful.
She examines Maud. ‘You’re very strong,’ she says. ‘It’ll come out like a lemon pip.’
She plays the baby’s heartbeat through a speaker while Maud looks up at the mobile of slowly drifting birds she thinks at first are swans but later, after watching them for half a minute, realizes are intended to be storks.
Julie shows Maud the unit. One mother who looks, at best, fourteen, sitting up in bed nursing her baby. One mother lying on her back as if shot. One walking slowly to and fro in the company of a man with a snake tattoo around his neck.
Back in the office Julie asks for the birth plan but Maud doesn’t have one. Her plan is to do what is necessary when the time comes. That doesn’t seem to need writing down. As for pain control, they agree she will simply ask for it if she needs it. She does not mention to Julie her work in this area, the project in Croydon, the trial packs of Fennidine she has in the glove compartment of the Corsa. So far, the trials have been extremely promising, though there have also been reports of side-effects, some of them worrying. One volunteer suffered extreme nausea and had, briefly, to be hospitalized. Another—who is suspected of having an undisclosed history of recreational drug use—claimed to have had hallucinations, both visual and auditory. This subject, known as Volunteer R, has been excluded from any future participation in the trial.
At the cottage, as advised, she packs a crash bag, something she can pick up in a hurry when the moment comes. Breast pads, nappies. Nightie, underwear, wash bag, torch.
‘What’s the torch for?’ asks Tim.
‘Just in case,’ says Maud.
‘Of a power cut?’
‘Put it back,’ says Maud.
He puts it back, suppresses a smart remark about adding a hand flare.
At about this time, in the morning post (the nice post lady who already seems to know them well), Maud receives an unsigned letter, or not a letter at all but a sheet of paper bearing a quote from someone called Marguerite Duras, and copied out in black ink, in careful handwriting. It reads:
Being a mother isn’t the same as being a father. Motherhood means that a woman gives her body over to her child, her children; they’re on her as they might be on a hill, in a garden. They devour her, hit her, sleep on her; and she lets herself be devoured, and sometimes she sleeps because they are on her body. Nothing like that happens with fathers.
She has no idea who has sent it to her, cannot tell if the writing belongs to a man or a woman. The postmark on the envelope is illegible. Nor can she tell if the words are intended to encourage her or warn her or simply inform her. She folds the paper and puts it between the leaves of a book (one that Tim’s mother has given her, What to Expect When You’re Expecting). A short while later she takes it out of the book and carefully slides it between two oak boards on the bedroom floor. Posts it into darkness.
She does small jobs in the garden, plants French beans and lettuces while Tim plays slow scales on the guitars (the Lacôte copy, the Andres Dominguez, the Taylor with the ebony fretboard, the cocobolo backstrap). The people next door, a childless couple who seem to live a highly organized and orderly life, who dress each Sunday in black lycra and ride their expensive bikes for miles, have already said they have no objection to the sound of a guitar, though they hoped he did not have an electric guitar, did not belong to a rock band. Their names are Sarah and Michael. It is already perfectly clear there will be no intimacy between Sarah and Michael, Tim and Maud.
The due date comes, passes. Another week goes by. Maud sweats in the July sun. Her ankles swell; whole days pass when she hardly speaks. She is awake when Tim goes to sleep, awake when he wakes up. Julie comes out to the cottage. There is no sign of distress from the child. Maud’s blood pressure is a little elevated but not a cause for concern. They will wait a few more days then consider their options.
Tim’s mother visits. She offers to massage Maud’s belly, looks relieved when Maud rums the offer down. The twins, broad-hipped virgins, can barely look at her without squirming—the horrid, comical outcome of the secret act!—but it is the twins who are with her, sitting in the little front garden braiding each other’s hair, when Maud’s waters break. They gape at her as she lifts her dress to watch the fluid run down the inside of her legs, can do or say nothing as she trudges towards the cottage.
Inside, Tim’s mother is sitting on the leather armchair, head back, eyes half shut. It’s her second month on Seroxat and she has, after some adjustment of the dose, achieved a passage of glassy calm. ‘I’ll take you,’ she says. ‘Tim will only drive into a wall. He can come along later.’
She spreads newspaper on the passenger seat. Maud sits on it with the crash bag on her lap. A dog in the well of the seat licks her legs, timidly. They speed away, the car’s dust falling on campion, moon daisies, creeping buttercup.
‘Try and stay awake,’ says Tim’s mother.
‘I haven’t taken an overdose,’ says Maud, who may as may not have intended this to be a sharp remark. The dog is still licking her, its tongue flickering around her knees.
‘When I had Magnus,’ says Tim’s mother, her bone-thin fingers wrapped tightly around the wheel, ‘when I was in labour, I had a sort of huge spontaneous orgasm. Very unexpected. Rather embarrassing if anyone noticed. But at that age I could lean against the rumble dryer and be in heaven in about a minute. I’ve never understood those things you read in the magazines about women who can’t. Makes you wonder if something’s missing. You know, anatomically. I’m not going to ask about you and Tim. It’s obviously very healthy. I remember Magnus having an enormous collection of pornography that he used to rent out to other boys in his house at school. He always had a good business head. Very good. But babies are what matter, Maud. You’ll know that soon. Babies and children. Especially babies but children too . . . Well, this is odd . . .’ She brakes, hard. They are at the edge of a village of low, thatched houses. A man in white is riding on a beautifully decorated horse. Around the horse women in gold and green and red are tapping sticks together and singing.
‘Looks like a Hindu wedding. There are only about two Indians in Dorset.’ She slides the window down, edges the big car forwards, and to every surprised or frowning face says, ‘This girl is about to be delivered of a child. Thank you! No time to wait, I’m afraid!’
When they’ve reached the front of the procession she puts up the window, accelerates. ‘You can call it Shiva,’ she says. ‘Or what’s the other one? Kali?’
In the unit two other women are giving birth, each with her attendant team. The noises are what you would expect—life rugged around its spindle. Maud is doing well, people tell her so repeatedly. It’s lunchtime, it’s three o’clock. She has an hour in the birthing pool (it’s new and they seem keen to use it). She has, in her seventh hour, lungfuls of gas and air (this, too, they seem keen to use).
The midwife wears a plastic apron like a dinner lady. ‘Good girl,’ she says, ‘almost there.’ The feel of the midwife’s hand, the sight of her own knees, her stirruped feet. And visions—caused no doubt by the gas—a woman, for example, walking naked through some barren place, a desert, a shiny grey desert like the moon, just the view of her back, her hunched shoulders, the relentless rhythm of her walking and no end in view. Her back, her hips like an anvil, her shadow rippling in the grey dust of the place . . .
Then the promised burn, Tim weeping at something she cannot see, and in two drenching pushes it’s out and lifted, still roped to her, and settled on her pounding heart. She touches its seamed back, rests her fingers there. The clock over the door says ten past ten at night. A bus passes on its way to the station; a moth dances under the ceiling. She has given birth. She has given birth and she is a mother. A mother, come what may.