Set Me Free Page 2

  Once upstairs in our bedroom, I stood in front of the window and breathed deeply to try to calm my pounding heart.

  There are moments in life when a veil seems to drop from before your eyes and you can see things for what they are, not for what you’d always perceived them to be. A moment of clarity, of deeper understanding. This was one of them.

  As I stood in my bedroom I looked around me. I considered how my husband had shaped everything I saw, from the right postcode to the expensive furniture, the two cars in the garage, the electronic gadgets I didn’t even know how to use. And I realised there was no sign of me, of the real me, in this place I called my home.

  On a warm evening of three years ago, when my son had barely started inside me, I saw how my life had fallen away from me and how it had been moulded around somebody else’s needs and desires; I saw it as clearly as the waning moon that hung in the sky before me, yellow and bright in the twilight sky.

  But the moment ended, and the clarity subsided, and habit took over again.

  I lay sleepless for hours, wondering if when he spoke about choices, he really meant what I’d thought he meant – something I couldn’t even put in words, something I couldn’t even fully think about, only skirt around its terrible, terrible edges.

  I wondered how Ash could think that this baby would make us broke. Or how having another child would suddenly mean him having to be at home more, as if having Lara ever kept him at home anyway. I would look after the baby, just like I looked after Lara, during his absences. It shouldn’t have been this way, of course, but I didn’t have a choice.

  Yes, the discussion was over, and it would never take place again.

  There were no other options for me.

  A hairline crack had started in the love I felt for Ash – one of those fractures that are nearly invisible when they appear but have the potential to shatter and destroy all.

  “Of course he’ll come round,” Anna reassured me as we sat in her conservatory with a cup of tea. Her home was only a few minutes from mine, somewhere so leafy and tranquil you would forget it was London. Relentless, freezing rain was falling from the pewter sky and flogging the glass. There were toys strewn everywhere around us in happy chaos. I loved my sister’s home, messy, cheery, with friends dropping in for a chat and children on play dates with my youngest nephew. Anna had two boys: Pietro was eleven, Lara’s age, and was already taller than me, and little Marco was only two.

  “I hope so,” I said, trying to convince myself. Maybe when he saw the first scan, or maybe when we found out the gender, or maybe when we bought the cot and he saw it up in the spare room that would become the nursery. Of course, sooner or later he’d have to come round. He would not be able to help loving this baby. Then maybe the cruel words he’d said to me two months before would just be a memory.

  But a memory that would never fade.

  “It’s his baby. And he loves you,” Anna said. “He will come round. He has to. I have all faith in him,” she added, sounding somehow less convincing. I looked into Anna’s face and I realised she was feeding me a kind lie. She was aware, just like me, that there was a chance Ash would never come round, never accept this baby. We both knew Ash well. We knew the secret side of him – his potential for coldness, for selfishness. For just not loving enough, or not loving at all. Maybe it was the defence mechanism of a child who hadn’t been much loved himself, but whatever Ash’s childhood traumas at the hands of his mother, this baby needed a father.

  I took a sip of my tea, hoping it would stay down. I was now nearly three months gone. The morning sickness had been terrible, but I was too happy to care. I now had a tiny bump, small and tight. There was no way I could still wear my normal clothes any more, so I was wearing soft trousers with an elastic band at the waist and a white empire-line top. I felt beautiful – I kept looking at my profile in the mirror, marvelling at the changes in my body, marvelling at the roundness, the softness of it. My sister became enormous during her pregnancies – no offence to Anna – and I suspected the same would happen to me. Once I told her that if I ever wanted to jump out of a plane I could use her maternity bra as a parachute – she laughed until she got the hiccups. I was looking forward to my bump growing and I wanted to enjoy every minute of it.

  “The three-month scan is next week. He’s trying to wriggle out of it.”

  Anna’s eyes widened. “What? What on earth is his excuse? OK, I understand he’s not over the moon about all this, but it’s his baby! He has to be there!”

  “Well, he hasn’t plainly said he doesn’t want to go, not as such . . . but he’s sort of saying he has a lot on, that the next few weeks are going to be very busy, that he’ll try and be there but he’s not sure he’ll manage and blah blah blah . . . which could be true, I suppose.”

  “Right.” Anna slammed the cup down on the coffee table so hard that some tea spilled out of it. She wasn’t looking at me. She was trying to hide her anger, but I knew. “So he can’t spare two hours for his pregnant wife. He must be really very busy.” She spat the word.

  “He is very busy. I know that. But I want him there. I need him there.”

  “He must be there!” Anna snapped.

  When she’s angry, my sister sounds like my mum; the hint of an Italian accent comes out and she starts gesturing wildly. The women in my family are very hot-tempered – I seemed to have skipped the temper gene, being quite easy-going most of the time. But when I get angry, I get really angry.

  “When I see him I’ll give him a piece of mind, I can tell you.”

  “Please don’t. Honestly. Things are complicated enough at the moment.”

  “Someone has to give him a reality check, Margherita! He can’t possibly think that his behaviour is normal! Or justifiable! How long have you been married? Ten years now? This is how he treats his wife of ten years, pregnant with her first baby? The guy needs to take a long, hard look at himself!”

  Ash had clearly gone down in my sister’s estimation. He didn’t even have a name now. He was the guy. Short for the guy who is rejecting his own baby.

  “I know. But please don’t go in all guns blazing now. Don’t go in at all, actually. I’ll deal with it myself.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t recognise you, Margherita. Why aren’t you reading him the riot act? What’s all this . . . submissiveness?”

  “It’s not submissiveness. You don’t understand.”

  “What do you mean? I don’t understand what?”

  “I want him to decide for himself, Anna!” I snapped. “I need him to see for himself that he should come to the scan. Not because I shout at him, or you do, or because it’s the decent thing to do. I need him to want to be there.”

  Anna sighed. “I see what you mean.” A pause. “But he still needs a kick up his backside.”

  “I know.” I looked out to the rain soaking my sister’s garden, bouncing on Marco’s slide and drenching abandoned toys.

  It was all so different from the way I’d imagined my first pregnancy would be. In my mind, I’d have had two perfect children before I was thirty and Ash would adore them both. We’d have the ideal family. Back then, twenty-five and newly married, I was still to learn that you didn’t order a family from a catalogue, picture-perfect and ready-made. The reality was something else entirely.

  My reality has been years of infertility, a million tests, a difficult journey to become adoptive parents. And then Lara arrived, and that was when, all of a sudden, reality was better than my dream, better than any ad-worthy family and perfect babies. Because after the years I’d spent trying to create a child that would not materialise, we’d found Lara, and Lara had found us. A child who needed a family and a family who needed a child. She came to us like a blessing. How could I ever wish for anything to be different? We’d chosen each other, and having Lara was, with all its difficulties and challenges, perfect.

  I would have loved to adopt again, but Ash didn’t wan
t any more children. He simply said he was happy with his little family, that he didn’t need anything else. And I went along with it without regrets or recriminations, because Lara filled me up. There would be no more trying to get pregnant, and no more long and convoluted adoption journeys. Just us: Lara, Ash and me.

  And then, the two pink lines. Followed by another six tests, each with two perfect lines shining nearly fuchsia in their little windows.

  My sister squeezed my hand. “Listen. If Ash doesn’t come to the scan, I’ll be there. You know that, don’t you?”

  I forced a smile. “Yes. Thank you.”

  “I don’t know how long I can keep my mouth shut, though.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  Ash had to cancel some all-important meeting, but he came.

  I was strangely calm as they spread a blob of slimy jelly on me and put the cold hand of the ultrasound arm on my stomach. And there it was, tiny and alien-like, with a huge head and minuscule arms and legs. A little fish swimming inside me. A human being growing inside me.

  It was hard to believe, and still it was true.

  I couldn’t speak. I just stared at the screen and I couldn’t stop smiling. I had to stop myself from reaching out and laying my fingers on the screen, in a strange impulse to feel those little hands. I turned towards Ash, and what I saw astonished me. He was smiling too. He was entranced, gazing at the screen.

  He had sort of . . . thawed. I couldn’t believe it as he began bantering with the sonographer, asking for three copies of the scan, to give his parents and my mum. He kept smiling as we walked out, clutching our baby’s very first photograph.

  “So. What do you think? Boy or girl?” he asked, squeezing my hand.

  “I don’t know. I don’t even have a hunch. Really, I have no idea.”

  “I think it’s another girl. A sister for Lara.”

  “Maybe. Who knows.”

  “Are you okay?” he asked as we were about to get into the car.

  I slipped into the passenger’s seat. “I think so.”

  Was I okay? I felt a bit wobbly. All of a sudden, before I realised what was happening, I burst into tears.

  “Margherita, what’s wrong?” Ash said, taking hold of my hand again.

  “It’s the hormones, I’m a bit emotional.” Which was true. Honestly, pregnancy books could not warn you enough about how weepy you could get. I was moved to tears by just about everything.

  But what was making me cry then wasn’t the turbulent hormones, it was relief. Relief and joy, because for the first time my husband had shown something that wasn’t regret and annoyance towards our baby. And he knew that. He knew why I was in tears.

  “Margherita . . .” he began.

  For a moment, I was afraid. Was he going to say something terrible again? Had I misunderstood his joy at seeing the baby on the scan? I held my breath.

  “I just wanted to say . . . I’m sorry. For the way I reacted when you told me about this baby. To see her on the screen . . .” Her? I thought. What if it was a he? “I don’t know. It just felt . . . right. I’ve been an idiot. I’m sorry.”

  For a while Ash was more attentive, and miraculously less busy, which was a first since I’d known him. He was home more, and he began to actually talk about the baby, to acknowledge its presence. We discussed little things, like what colour we’d paint the nursery, or if we should buy a cot or a Moses basket, what would be more comfortable for her. I noticed that he was always calling the baby she, and although there was a little pinprick of fear there – would he be disappointed if it was a boy? – I thought it was sweet. I didn’t mind the gender and, unlike Ash, I didn’t even have hunches. I just wanted the baby to be here, healthy and happy.

  By the end of the third month, the sickness hadn’t gone away at all and I was constantly exhausted. It was wonderful to be able to lean on Ash and not experience it by myself. I think it was the first time since we got together that I had been so dependent on him – me, usually so self-sufficient. Too independent at times, I suppose.

  Meanwhile, Lara was going through a difficult time. Being eleven is hard enough – on the brink of a new era, and a tumultuous one – but with Lara’s background, it was even harder. As my bump grew, she grew quiet, anxious. She followed me around everywhere like a puppy scared of being abandoned. On top of all her fears and worries, now she was afraid I’d love this baby more because it was ‘mine’. She never said as much, but I knew. I could feel it in the words unspoken between us, in the way she looked at me when she thought I couldn’t see her. That could never happen, of course – I would love the new baby just as much as I did her, but to love anyone more than I loved my Lara? That was impossible.

  When she came into our world, Lara was withdrawn, full of grief for her earlier experiences. But she was brimming with strength and courage as well, a little fighter and a lover of life. I fell under her spell, this little creature who had changed many homes already, who was desperately looking for something to hang on to, something safe that would not change and sift through her fingers. I, for my part, was looking for someone to shower with all the love I had inside me and had nowhere to go.

  Her real name was Laura, like my baby sister, but she asked to be called Lara, and she was so convinced, so forceful about it – as if she were renaming herself – that we went with it. Our social worker, Kirsty, wasn’t keen on the name change and I could see why: so much of our sense of self is woven into the name we are given at birth.

  “Unless there are safety issues, we prefer it if the adopted parents don’t change the child’s name. It can cause further trauma and loss of identity,” she said. Kirsty had been a real ally in our quest for a child, at our side every step of the way, even if her workload was impossible and her job highly stressful. She’d trusted us all along, and we trusted her.

  “I can imagine,” I explained. “I would hate to have my name changed like that, all of a sudden. But it came from her; we didn’t have a say in it. She didn’t ask us to call her Lara. She told us to.”

  When she was interviewed by Kirsty, Lara made her point. “I am Lara Ward,” she said, tapping a little foot on the floor in the perpetual motion of a six-year-old child.

  “Is that a nickname you like, Lara?”

  “It’s not a nickname. It’s my name. And this is my mum and dad. Their names are Margherita and Ashley Ward. And my gran makes cakes. She is from Italy, where there’s a lot of sun. I’m going to learn to make cakes and open a shop and call it Lara’s Bakery and Sweets.” I was so touched; my mum and dad had a bakery in Hertfordshire called Scotti’s (my family name) Bakery and Sweets. Lara had given herself a history; she had rewritten herself as part of our family already.

  The next day Ash ordered a little wooden kitchen from a catalogue, and he painted Lara’s Bakery and Sweets on it in big blue clumsy letters. Lara loved it and played with it for hours. He’d do little things like this, in the past. Not any more.

  Reassuring Lara and nurturing her during my pregnancy took a lot of work, a lot of energy, a lot of time. I wanted to speak to her openly about her fears, but I didn’t know how to broach the subject. Words seemed so clumsy in the delicate universe that was Lara, and words could be comets, bringers of doom.

  I decided that there was no need to put her worries – and my reassurances – into words. I decided that the only way was to show her how strong my love for her was and always would be, and how she was my daughter through and through, whether I’d carried her or not.

  Just before my four-month scan I took her for a day out, just the two of us. We went shopping, and then to the Tate gallery, a place she’d been enchanted with since the first time we’d taken her there. We stopped in front of one of her favourite paintings, Mother and Child by Sir William Rothenstein. She always stopped in front of it, contemplating the domestic scene full of quiet happiness. It portrays a mother sitting by a sunny window and holding her small son up in the air, a smile of contentment on both their faces. In the
background there is a stone fireplace, a hearth – a safe, warm place that mother and child call home. The scene speaks of quiet domesticity and love.

  “That’s you and the baby,” Lara said thoughtfully, without looking at me.

  A heartbeat.

  “That’s me and you,” I said.

  “I didn’t know you when I was that small.” She was matter-of-fact about it, like it was an undeniable, if painful, reality.

  My mind wrestled for a moment with the best words I could use to reassure her. I felt that it was a pivotal moment, one where the words said would be remembered and stored away. The truth came out in all its simplicity.

  “But I’ve known you all my life. You were always in my dreams.”

  She slipped her hand in mine and stepped a little closer to me.

  2

  Leo

  Margherita

  At the four-month scan we found out I was carrying a boy. I was overjoyed, not because it was a boy as such – I would have loved a girl too – but because now I knew him. I felt like finally this little dream I was carrying inside me was real, a small human being in the making. We chose his name: Leo, after my father. I was in love already.

  But for some reason only he knew, Ash started drifting away from us again. The babymoon was over. It happened slowly, over a few weeks. More meetings, more trips away, silence creeping between us like ivy up a wall. I had no energy to challenge him, to question him. I needed him as my belly grew bigger and I stepped into uncharted land – but he just wasn’t there any more. The last five months were so hard, but something in me was resolute and focused. This baby was all that mattered, and my little Lara. I would be strong for them, no matter what.

  “I don’t know what’s happening to him. I don’t know why he’s changed,” I said to Anna. We were sitting at her kitchen table, Marco playing at our feet. “He seemed to have accepted it, he even seemed happy about it . . . oh, who is that? Is it for me?” Marco was handing me his toy phone.

  “Yes! For Ziarita!” That was his nickname for me. Zia meant ‘auntie’ in Italian, so Zia Margherita had become Ziarita, which never failed to make me melt inside. He was the only person in the world allowed to shorten my name.