7

Even at thirty, I was much better at managing strong emotion than experiencing it. I suppose that in my boyhood I must have learned to work hard at suppressing the anxiety caused by my mother’s illness. And then at just carrying on, despite my grief at her loss. Our home, with its silences and spaces, became a sort of desert where, to my relief, strong emotion did not flourish. Although from time to time it would appear so suddenly through my brother’s challenges or my father’s vaporizing tempers that it seemed to be something very scary, dropped suddenly from another planet. It was certainly very hard to believe it had been there, beneath the surface, all along.

I would have liked life to be emotionally uneventful but by the time I performed my first post-mortem that was certainly not the case. I returned home from the mortuary and opened the front door to hear the wails of my new baby son. He was oblivious to the extraordinarily powerful love and bewilderment he stirred in his parents. And as for my wife, she showed no sign of satisfaction with the flat emotional landscape I preferred.

Jen and I had met at the hospital when I was a student. She was the beautiful, dark-haired nurse who mopped my brow during finals, who entered my life with a great vitality and whose cleverness I admired. Each day she finished most of the Times crossword at ridiculous speed – although not quite as quickly as her father, Austin, could finish the Telegraph’s. He had retired from a distinguished career in the Colonial Police in Uganda after seeing service in the Indian Mounted Police and was now living on the Isle of Man.

Jen’s parents were the beating heart of Manx society. When she took me home for the first time I was overwhelmed by her dizzy, busy and, it seemed to me, luxurious world. Austin presided with great charm over a living room full of visitors. Whisky and sodas, noise and laughter, the great old house’s lack of physical warmth was unnoticeable for the warmth of the welcome there. The furniture and curtains were all swathes and swags. The immense, if slightly dilapidated, kitchen smelled good. And there were always two dogs asleep in front of the oven.

It didn’t matter if we arrived late at night; Jen’s mother, Maggie, gin-and-tonic at a precarious angle in one hand, wooden spoon waving in the other, would greet us extravagantly and ply us with fine food. She was the sort of woman whose presence defined any party. The sort of parent my siblings assured me my own mother had once been, although I could hardly imagine such a thing. Viewed from the noisy whirl of Austin and Maggie’s home on the Isle of Man, the house of my upbringing seemed a sparse, silent place. Empty, even. I tried to remember with affection the radiogram, the antimacassars, the swirly carpet in my childhood home. And couldn’t.

On our marriage, Jen’s kind parents helped us buy our new home in Surrey. I had qualified as a doctor, finished my ‘house’ jobs and was just about to start training as a pathologist. Jen was now working as a health visitor. We couldn’t, for a while, afford a proper bed or any furniture at all, but we were happy. Then, after a few years, we knew that the time was right to start a family.

We were unaccustomed to adversity but here it came, making up for lost time. Jen had a miscarriage. We were both devastated. I had no idea how to deal with my overwhelming feelings of loss, my sense of the child that could have been, the life that might have been lived, nor what to do with the love that should have belonged to that baby. My pain was an enormous, invisible thing I carried awkwardly around. Where on earth was I to put it? This was so preoccupying that I was entirely incapable of offering Jen enough support in her own great sadness. Was I supposed to say something? Do something? If so, what?

I failed to say it, whatever it was, I failed to do it, whatever it was, and I also failed to admit that I was completely out of my emotional depth. So, when we lost the next baby, then the next, I became more and more distressed by Jen’s apparently unassuageable grief. It was a true reflection of my own unexpressed devastation but, rather than look at it, I confess, with many regrets, that I turned my back. I became increasingly isolated. So did she.

I did manage to tell her how much I loved her and how sad and confused I was that our babies could not seem to grow larger than a cluster of cells. Would that do?

No. She seemed to expect more from me. And she was right. Although I still couldn’t imagine what I was supposed to offer. Just as, when a young boy, I didn’t really know what people had wanted me to do after my mother’s death.

Finally, when she found she was carrying yet another baby, Jen was confined for almost the entire pregnancy to bed rest in hospital. It was not a happy time, separating and isolating us from each other still further. Until, at full-term, a beautiful boy, whom we named Christopher, was born one winter’s day.

Most parents will remember the chaos of their first, longed-for arrival. I’d been overwhelmed because there was no baby. Now I was overwhelmed because there was a baby. And so was Jen, even though she was by now an experienced health visitor. As for me, I was a doctor with a stint in paediatrics behind me. But we were both taken aback by the weeping, the sheer dissatisfaction with which our little prince responded to our efforts to please him. And all the time we were awash with a love for him which was so deep and passionate it shook me to the core. And his apparent lack of appreciation of our efforts perhaps shocked us both.

When I returned home after completing my first post-mortem and opened the door to Chris’s familiar, high-pitched wail and the sweet smell of baby oil, I found Jen upstairs. The busy mother of our tiny son was elbow-deep in baths and nappies, gently shushing the eternally protesting Chris. Downstairs, her books were propped open in the living room: she’d just started studying for an Open University degree but Chris and his yells had seen off that plan this evening.

Every moment of Jen’s time was filled: no wonder she had forgotten it was such a big day for me. And now that the hurdle of my first post-mortem was receding into the distance, this racehorse began to wonder if the hurdle had really been so high anyway.

I went upstairs to see them both. Chris looked at me and wrinkled his face into a ball from which a smile might have emerged. Or a roar of disapproval. Predictably, it was a roar. I took him from Jen and he wailed some more. I rocked him, swung him, gazed at him, pulled faces at him. His tiny features twisted themselves again into a comical but unbecoming ball. A smile? Of course not. Out came another huge wail. How, how to stop him?

Jen put the baby to bed while I made the evening meal. Miraculously, Chris’s roars upstairs subsided just as the meal was ready downstairs. We ate it, relishing the silence as much as the food. After supper, we both studied. I was in a world of exams without end, a world Jen, on her degree course, was just entering.

And now it’s late. I am exhausted, having spent much of last night worrying about and preparing for today’s post-mortem. The day is over and when my head hits the pillow I know all I want is sleep, sweet sleep. I can feel it engulfing me. My body relaxes happily, I am slipping downstream when suddenly … Waaaaah!

Chris. Again. God, again. He cries so much that we’re starting to suspect that, despite being breast-fed, he might have a lactose intolerance. But what good are all the theories in the world going to do me now? Because Chris may be allergic to milk but he has excellent lungs and he is crying and one of us will have to do something.

‘Your turn,’ mumbles Jen.

I get up. The house is still and cold.

I reach into the cot and scoop up Chris’s hot, stiff, angry little body. I love him but I want to go back to sleep. I walk around the house, cradling him in my arms. Lack of sleep is depriving me of my humanity, I am a robot doomed to walk until the end of time with my kicking little bundle. I know the bundle is a baby, a vulnerable baby. But I am beginning to wonder. Is he, in fact, a tyrant? A tyrant whose sole and monstrous aim it is to deprive me of what I crave most, sweet sleep?

Gradually, after a long, long time, gentle rocking persuades him to cry less, to yawn more, to close his eyes. I listen to his breathing. Even. Deep. Yes, he is asleep.

Very, very gently, stealthily, like an art thief, I traipse to the nursery and place my tiny masterpiece oh so gently into his cot. I pull the blankets over his sweet-smelling body. He is pliable now with drowsiness. I watch him for a moment. He pulls a face and that may mean … I hold my breath but all remains silent. He is dreaming. I feel something similar to joy as I creep towards our bed. The duvet closes over me like an embrace, I shut my eyes. And then … Waaaaaah!

What desperate parent hasn’t feared that he might shake the baby or lose his temper and chuck the baby into the cot, or give the baby a short, sharp slap to stop the noise? What desperate parent hasn’t been terrified by his own pressing need for respite from the constant demands, the wearing, piercing Waaaaah?

I knew that, although Chris was distressed, he was safe enough. I knew I needed a few quiet moments. I shut the bedroom door on my crying son and went downstairs into the kitchen. I shut this door behind me too. He was still crying but the crying was distant. I covered my ears. I could no longer hear him. I continued to cover my ears for five minutes. Breathing deeply. Regaining my equilibrium. Then I returned to his cot. Maybe not full to the brim with love, but certainly lovingly, and with my compassion rekindled. I rocked him gently back to sleep.

After that, we researched neo-natal milk allergy and Jen stopped eating and drinking dairy products. Chris became almost immediately a different child. He slept. He even smiled. But I am grateful for all I learned from that wailing baby. Thank you, Chris, for giving me this understanding of the great pressure some parents face.