Alphabet Weekends - Elizabeth Noble [41]
There’d been a woman, Sally something, three doors down, when Natalie was a newborn, who’d had what was clearly post-natal depression. That had been more than thirty years ago, of course, and they didn’t call it that. At least, not as far as she knew. And not out loud. ‘Baby blues’ came on the fourth day with your milk.
Anna remembered helping her. She’d had to, really. Sally had looked so awful all the time. She didn’t wash her hair, and she had grey skin beneath her eyes, which were red from crying. She had put Sally’s baby, Amanda, beside Natalie in the big Silver Cross pram and taken her for walks, or let them lie side by side on a blanket in the summer sunshine while Susannah watched them. Bridget was no trouble – she always sat still.
Anna had helped in practical ways, but she hadn’t understood. She remembered thinking that Sally should pull herself together and be grateful she had a healthy baby to care for. She wondered now whether Sally had known. She’d got better eventually. She and her husband had moved away, and for a few years the two families had exchanged Christmas cards. Sally never had another baby: she had said in one card that she was afraid of what would happen. Now, Anna understood. If you could ever manage to pull yourself out of this terrifying dark place, you’d do anything – anything – to stop yourself falling in there again.
Did Nicholas think she should pull herself together? Did the girls?
She smiled broadly at him. ‘Come and help me eat this toast.’
She opened her cards. One from Nicholas, from Susannah and Casper, Bridget and Karl, a homemade one from Christina, on computer paper stiff with too much paint, and one from Natalie. To my wife, to my mum, to my lovely granny. A woman’s whole life encapsulated in three relationships.
Anna hadn’t needed friends particularly. Friends had always been ephemeral. Before she’d married Nicholas, there’d been girls in the bakery where she worked. To giggle and talk about boys with. To dress up and go out with, then forget about. After the babies, there had been other mothers. She supposed she’d always felt a little superior to them. Her children were cleaner, cleverer and prettier. She’d never wanted those co-dependent relationships other women craved. She hadn’t wanted to spend whole mornings drinking tea in someone else’s kitchen, revealing details about her sex life. That was private, and she was self-sufficient. Anyway, the intensity of those friendships didn’t last. The kids grew up, too.
They had friends, of course. The people who came for New Year. The women whose husbands had worked at the bank with Nicholas, who played golf with him at the club. He had a friend he’d done National Service with, for God’s sake. But not people who knew secrets about her, because pride had never let her tell one.
It didn’t make sense, really, any of it. So Anna stood the cards up – the one from her husband, the three from her children, the one from her granddaughter, and smiled benevolently at them on the mantelpiece, and she didn’t talk to Nicholas about it, because, after all, what would she be saying?
‘I’ve got a surprise,’ he was saying. ‘Instead of the same old birthday treat, I’m taking you away for the night. Here.’ He handed her, with a flourish, the brochure of a country-house hotel. ‘I thought it would make a nice change. Just the two of us.’
His lovely familiar face, so desperate to please. She put her hand to his cheek and caressed it. ‘Thank you, darling.’
Nicholas pulled her into an embrace, and held her tight.
F for Family Get-together
‘I know about your cousin’s wedding because your mum told me at New Year, and I know it’s coming up soon, and I’m sure you can wangle me an invite. Anyway, I know for a fact that your invitation is for