Not far away, in another road in Headington, another mother was preparing to take her baby out for a walk in the pleasant June sunshine. Little Esme was fractious and would not settle in her cot after her midday feed. Victoria Norris decided to take her out in the pram, in the hope that the motion would send her off to sleep. It sometimes worked – and then again, sometimes she would continue to cry as they walked and walked. Victoria hopefully placed an apple and a banana into the pram, next to Esme’s feet. She had been too distracted to eat lunch; with luck there would be a few minutes of peace, while they were out, during which she could sit down and eat these.
The doctor in the hospital had warned Victoria that this sort of behaviour might be one of the consequences of the brain damage that had occurred during the difficult birth. The midwife and health visitor had both been solicitous in the first weeks after they came home – visiting frequently and offering advice – but it was more than a fortnight now since she had seen either of them. They must assume that she could cope on her own now – or else they were busy with other new mothers and did not have time for her anymore.
Victoria felt very alone as she pushed the pram along the pavement, choosing her route at random, concerned only to keep moving. She wished that she was back in her old home in Sunderland, where she had friends whom she had known since childhood and colleagues at the hospital where she worked, from whom she could have sought advice. Six months after the move, Oxford still seemed like an alien place where she knew no-one.
She sighed as she remembered John explaining why they needed to move. It had all seemed so reasonable at the time.
‘You do understand,’ he kept saying anxiously. ‘I daren’t let Debra know about the baby. She’d be so upset. Living here, you could bump into her at any time. And the house in Oxford is just the thing for raising a family.’
And so, she had allowed him to persuade her to resign from her job as a speech and language therapist on the stroke unit, and to move down to Oxford – 250 miles from her home and family and friends – to the house that John had inherited when his mother died, the house where he had grown up. All because he did not want his ex-wife to know that his new girlfriend was pregnant.
Poor Debra! She and John had been happily married – and happily child-free – for fifteen years before Debra developed symptoms of an early menopause. It was only then that they both realised how much they wanted to have a family of their own. Years of tests and treatments and hopes and despair followed, before finally they had tried to accept that they would never be parents. But it had changed Debra forever and had created a barrier between them that John could not penetrate. Unsurprisingly, he had found intimacy elsewhere and, thirty years after their marriage, he had divorced Debra – generously handing over to her possession of the house that they had shared – and moved in with Victoria.
The prospect of becoming a father at last had been an unexpected bonus for John Middleton, but it had brought with it the prospect of further de-stabilising his first wife’s mental condition. He remained very fond of Debra, even though living with her had become impossible. He could not bear the thought of ‘rubbing her nose in it’ as he described the situation were she to find out about Victoria’s pregnancy. His business – something to do with engineering projects all over the world, as far as Victoria could make out – could be run as easily from Oxford as anywhere else, and his mother’s house had been lying empty since her death several months earlier. The move to Headington was an obvious solution to his problem; and he sought to sweeten the pill for Victoria by promising that, after one final three-month trip to China to which he was already committed, he would pack in the globe-trotting and stay at home with his new family. His business partner could take charge of the international side of things from then on.
Esme’s crying gradually subsided as she drifted into a restless sleep. Victoria risked pausing for a few moments to draw back the blanket, which her daughter had managed to pull up over her face in her agitation, and tuck it in safely beneath her chin. Then she started walking again, fearful that the pause in the motion of the pram would cause Esme to wake again.
Poor John! As his phone calls and emails made clear, he was so looking forward to returning home and seeing his daughter for the first time! What would he say when he discovered that she was not the perfect baby that he had been expecting? Victoria had not yet dared to tell him about the awful moment during labour, when the heart monitor had stopped, or her first sight of Esme, looking limp and lifeless and a strange blueish colour, or the soft-spoken doctor telling her gently that the brain damage due to oxygen starvation might be permanent. She had put it off time and again, and now he was due home tomorrow and he would see Esme and realise that something was wrong and Victoria would have to tell him – and would have to explain why she had kept it from him for so long.
And then what? Would he still want to give up the travelling and stay with her? Would he want to share the implacable crying and the difficulties over feeding, with the prospect that their daughter would never achieve the milestones that other people’s children did?