Page 13 of Wife After Wife

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At first, Katie enjoyed working at the gallery. Life was good. The staff and clients were lovely, the work was interesting, and she was thrilled to discover she was pregnant again. But after miscarrying at three months, she became increasingly down. In spite of Harry’s encouragement, she abandoned all thought of teacher training. Eventually she was only going through the motions with her job—she just didn’t have the energy.

Sex was loaded with unspoken emotion. They no longer seemed able to talk things through. The connection between Harry and Katie frayed, and neither knew how to weave it back together.

To Harry’s dismay, Katie turned for comfort to her Catholic faith (Harry had lost any belief in God when his mother died). She shifted from lukewarm to ardent as she searched for meaning in what she’d come to regard as her pointless, childless life. After another miscarriage, nothing could shift the hopelessness.

“Why is God doing this to us?” she’d ask. “Why do I keep losing babies? Are we meant never to have a child?”

After Harry’s initial attempts to help her through (and he did try, in spite of his other... commitment), he began spending less time at home and more at work, where his enthusiasm for the job and network of useful contacts saw him achieving success alongside Uncle Richard at the helm of Rose Corp. Work problems were easier to overcome than home ones.

And then there was Bennie, whose laughing eyes were the perfect antidote to Katie’s, which were full of sadness. Katie’s depression was too much for Harry. The ties that bound them were hanging by a thread.

Then, Katie got pregnant again, and this time, everything went perfectly.

Harry was a father.

CHAPTER 6

Katie

March 1988

“The King of Spain’s daughter

Came to visit me,

And all for the sake

Of my little nut tree.”

As Katie ended the nursery rhyme, Maria’s eyes closed. Katie gazed down at her daughter and offered up a silent prayer of thanks. God had blessed them after all, and she was filled with such joy she felt reborn, as new as her four-week-old baby.

The prayer of thanks was also because said child was, at last, asleep. The silence of the darkened bedroom after a day of grizzling was exquisite.

Harry had wanted to name her Elizabeth, after his mother, but when Katie had discovered Maria meant “wished-for child,” as well as being a solid Catholic name, he’d let her have her way. Katie had proposed Elizabeth as a middle name, but Harry suggested they kept it “in reserve” in case they had a second daughter. Katie smiled as she remembered his words, no longer loaded with the angst of childlessness.

Maria was lying on her back, her rosebud lips slightly parted, herhead turned to one side. Katie leaned over and gently stroked her cheek. The skin was so soft it was barely there, and touching it filled her with a deep peace. She gazed at the tiny hands with their micro-nails, resting to either side of her head.

Finally moving away from the bassinet, Katie sank down onto her bed. It was seven o’clock, and she was wrung out. This new kind of exhaustion was so overwhelming it gave the older kinds a glow of nostalgia. After-work tired? Yes, please—fifteen minutes rustling up something to eat, then your time was your own.Your own. After-exercise tired? Delicious. A hot shower and then your feet up, for as long as you needed.

It seemed so long since she’d been able to watch TV or read a book without the menace of a baby monitor, ready to crackle to life and launch her into the next round of feeding, changing, and putting back to sleep. Then there was the emotion of it all, veering between joy and despair. In spite of her euphoria at having a healthy child, Katie was aware of her old enemy, depression, lurking in the wings. Her father had died in January, enabling it to take a few more stealthy steps toward her.

Its cousin, worry, was a constant presence too. Was Maria getting enough milk? How were you meant to know the difference between an “I’m too hot” cry, an “I’m hungry” one, and “I just want a cuddle”?

“Relax!” Harry would say as she fretted over how many layers to wrap Maria in. “Babies have been surviving too-thick cardigans for centuries.”

Germaine, who seemed remarkably unmoved by the loss of her husband (but then she’d rarely seen him—Ferdie loved to travel), had come to stay after Katie’s return from the hospital and had tried to persuade Katie to employ a nanny, having always had a houseful of staff herself. She’d refused. She wasn’t sharing Maria with another woman.

Unfortunately, Cassandra agreed with Germaine, and she suspected Harry did too. It was the norm in their circles, after all. Cass now had two children under the age of two, looked after by a highly competent nanny installed immediately after the birth of Thing One, as Cassandracalled her eldest (real name Milly). She’d advised Katie to do the same “if you ever want a life again.”

But Katie had dug her heels in.Thiswas life. She’d handed in her notice at the gallery; she was going to be a full-time mum.

In spite of the tiredness and the emotional roller coaster, the baby had mended things between Katie and Harry. Their apprehension that something would go wrong again, then their overwhelming joy when their perfect daughter was born—it had brought them back together.

Katie sighed in tired contentment, picturing a future of trips to the zoo and walks in the park, Maria sitting on Harry’s broad shoulders, Katie perhaps pushing another baby in a buggy. Weekends in the country, summers in Tuscany with Cassandra, Charles, Thing One, and Thing Two (real name Arabella).

She ought to start preparing dinner—Harry had said he’d be home “early,” by which he meant before eight—but she was inclined to sit here just a little while longer, staring at her gift from God, breathing in that delicious baby smell.