Playing Nice

After the NICU, when I got ill, Dad blamed Pete. It was irrational and wrong—Pete couldn’t have been more supportive, and, with the exception of the bike ride, he was there for me and Theo every possible minute. After all, fourteen fathers went on that ride, and only one of them came back to a partner who was having a breakdown. But Dad had gotten it into his head that it was the strain of being a new mother that had pushed me over the edge, and that narrative only worked if Pete was a lazy, unhelpful parent.

Somehow, the narrative managed to survive Pete becoming Theo’s full-time carer as well. Pete and I had been talking about it off and on throughout my maternity—doing the sums, wondering how it might work. It took me a couple of months to fully recover from my psychosis, and even then, I stayed on a maintenance dose of antidepressants. Meanwhile, Pete did the bulk of the caring whenever he could—it seemed to come easily to him, while I had to admit that, much as I now loved Theo, I just wasn’t as naturally maternal or patient as some other women. I’ve always been a bit of an adrenaline junkie. As a teenager, my first love was my horse, Peach: We used to go around Australia together, competing at three-day events. It’s partly why I’m good at a high-pressure job, I think: At some level, I actually enjoy the constant crises, if only because I’ve noticed that I’m usually calmer and more clearheaded in those situations than others are. But the flip side is that I found the quiet, placid rhythms of first-year motherhood mind-numbingly dull, and a part of me couldn’t wait to get back to my desk. Of course, that was very different from thinking Pete would do it—I’d assumed that, like most couples we knew, we’d use a childminder or nanny share until Theo was old enough to go to nursery. If I’m honest, I was sometimes surprised that Pete enjoyed parenting quite as much as he did. He loved nothing better than to get home from work and start looking after Theo, while for my part, I couldn’t wait to hand him over and pour myself a glass of wine.

Perhaps the most serious conversation we had about it was when his newspaper put out a call for voluntary redundancies. He could go freelance, Pete pointed out: With fewer staff, the paper would probably end up using more outside resources anyway, and the kind of stuff he was doing by then—his most recent piece had been “Twelve Traveltastic American Road Trips”—could be done from anywhere. But when we crunched the numbers, there was no getting away from the fact we’d be poor. So, a little reluctantly, we concluded it wasn’t the right time.

And then he lost his job anyway.

Hardly anyone had put themselves forward for redundancy, it turned out—a staff job in journalism was now so rare, people tended to cling to the one they had. And the cuts the paper needed to make were far deeper than they’d been letting on. Some of the other journalists, Pete told me later, had seen the call for redundancies as the writing on the wall it was, and had aggressively lobbied to keep their jobs, writing spurious but eye-catching stories that made them look useful or sucking up to senior management. Pete hadn’t done any of that, and now he seemed almost baffled that those were the journalists management wanted to keep. The fact was—and this, I ruefully admitted to myself, was where my dad’s assessment of him did contain a tiny grain of truth—Pete was simply too nice to succeed in an environment like that, when backs were against the wall and the fighting turned dirty.

For a couple of months after that, both of us were at home with Theo while Pete tried to pitch freelance articles. It was a good time, but scary. The paper wasn’t using more freelancers after all—quite the reverse: The same cost-cutting drive that had led to the redundancies resulted in a tough no-freelance policy; they were working the remaining writers twice as hard instead. With his redundancy payment dwindling fast, I couldn’t afford to take the unpaid part of my maternity leave, so I went back to work after thirty-nine weeks.

For Theo’s first birthday, Pete hatched a plan to go back to the NICU, taking Theo and a birthday cake. It was something many of the ex-NICU families did, he said: It boosted the nurses’ morale to see the babies they’d saved doing well. Unfortunately, it clashed with a commercial I was producing with a famous footballer in Barcelona—the agency wasn’t given any say over the schedule; the footballer’s agent simply told us we had four hours on a certain day and expected us to make it work. Give my love to your Irish groupie, I texted Pete from the shoot, but whereas once I would have felt bitter and angry about the way he and the nurses got on so well, now I just felt amused.

And that’s when I had my first slipup.

After filming we all went out for beers and tapas, then back to the hotel bar. At some point the attractive-but-wicked camera assistant started flirting with me, which felt exhilarating and fun after so long being a milk machine and a launderer of babygrows. One nightcap led to another, and then he leaned in close and whispered his room number in my ear. “If you dare, that is,” he added, sitting back again.

And somehow, stupidly, I did.

Afterward, I felt wretched. But strangely, not guilty. It was more as if I was…detached, the way I’d been in the NICU.

The brutal truth was, the spark just hadn’t been there with Pete since Theo’s birth. Nice Pete, Saint Pete, the Pete who changed nappies and warmed baby food and raised funds for charity, just wasn’t a turn-on. I loved him, I loved my family, but it wasn’t that sort of love anymore. Walking down the silent, dim-lit hotel corridor toward the camera assistant’s door had felt like I was seventeen again, galloping Peach at full speed toward a fence I wasn’t sure we could clear.

But it was a one-off, I told myself. A stupid mistake. A reaction to everything that had happened, from the shock of getting pregnant to the NICU and then my illness. It was over and in the past and there was absolutely no reason to confess it to Pete because it would only hurt him.

So I didn’t.

20

PETE

I MET UP WITH Miles in a sports bar close to Marylebone Station. It was next to the headquarters of a French merchant bank, and the place was full of loud young men in well-cut suits, talking in French as they watched football on the big screens. Miles paid them no attention, but he was clearly at ease in their company.

“Here,” he said, handing me a pint and raising his own. “To parenthood and friendship.”

I chinked my glass against his. “Parenthood and friendship.”

“And I got you this.” He handed me a shopping bag. “Well, not strictly you, I suppose.”

Inside was a miniature rugby ball—not a toy, a real one. I took it out. The maker’s name was Gilbert, which even I knew was the official supplier to the England team, and it was covered with signatures.

“The 2003 England squad,” Miles explained. “Best side we ever had.”

“That’s really kind of you,” I said, touched.

Miles waved away my gratitude. “You can’t start too early. And maybe…”

“What?”

“Maybe I could teach him how to throw it sometime? If that would be all right with you and Maddie, I mean.”

“Of course. I spend most of the day with Theo. It’ll do him good to see someone else once in a while.”

“What about Saturday? We could take him to Gladstone Park.”

“Sounds good, but I’d better check with Maddie.”

“She handles your diary, does she?” Miles’s grin robbed the words of any offense.

“It’s just that she doesn’t get to spend much time with Theo during the week,” I explained.

Miles patted my shoulder. “Don’t worry—I know what it’s like. Lucy and I are the same. I just turn up where and when I’m told. Speaking of which…” He pulled out his phone. “You know we talked about spending Easter together? I thought maybe we could go to Cornwall. There are these fantastic houses right by the beach on Trevose Head—you literally step out onto the dunes and the sea’s just there in front of you.” He was flicking through photos with his thumb as he spoke. “Sand, rock pools—it’ll be cold, but you can get little wet suits, and something tells me Theo’s the kind of kid who’d love to build a sandcastle and watch the waves come and knock it down. Here, take a look.”

The house he showed me was massive, with vast windows framing a view of picture-perfect Cornish beach. “It looks amazing,” I said enviously.

“Great. I’ll book it.” He scrolled down to a BOOK NOW button.

“But again, I should talk to Maddie,” I said quickly. “We may not be able to afford it.”

Miles shook his head. “You don’t have to, Pete. My shout. And we can always cancel.” He tapped the button.

“I can’t let you pay for everything.”

“Well, you won’t need to after the hospitals pay up.” He put the phone back into his pocket.

“You really think they will?”

“Of course. The last thing the NHS wants is anxious mothers starting to panic about whether their baby really is their baby. They’ll make us sign an NDA to protect their reputation, and then they’ll write us a whopping great check.”

“The NHS?” I said, frowning. “I thought it was the other hospital you were suing.”