Playing Nice Page 8

  And I didn’t say anything, because part of the unspoken contract between us is that I don’t criticize her father, even though she does and he usually deserves it.

  “He wants to send us money for a lawyer,” she added. “And a psychologist, if we want one.”

  “I don’t want a psychologist. I know what’s best for my son.”

  The word slipped out without my even being aware of it. It was only when Maddie didn’t reply that I realized what I’d said. “He is our son,” I said patiently. “We can’t spend the rest of our lives avoiding that word.”

  She nodded.

  “The most I’m prepared to do is consider suing that private hospital,” I said. “Assuming it is their fault, of course. I’ll talk to Miles about it when I see him on Wednesday.”

  19

  MADDIE

  MY DAD’S ANTIPATHY TOWARD Pete started after I got pregnant. Back in Australia, they’d actually gotten on quite well—mainly because Pete, being British, was naturally polite and deferential, which Dad always liked. Even when I followed Pete to London it was simply, in Dad’s words, “Madelyn traveling”—like a slightly delayed version of the gap years many Australians still take, working their way around Europe.

  When he found out we were buying a house together—something I realized afterward I hadn’t told him about until it was actually happening—and that this was it, we were making a life in a distant country, he was baffled as much as hurt. Who was this quiet, reserved pom I’d chosen to spend my life with? What made him so different from all the other young men who’d drifted in and out of my life?

  If I’m honest, the fact Pete and I haven’t gotten married is a kind of sop to my dad, a balancing of the books. While we’re just living together, he can choose to believe there’s a chance I’ll change my mind. Besides, he’s the kind of man who’d like his future son-in-law to ask his permission, and Pete would think that was a ridiculously old-fashioned thing to do.

  And perhaps, deep down, it’s even more complicated than that. Jack Wilson is also the kind of man who’d love to throw the biggest wedding Adelaide has ever seen, to make the most memorable speech, to walk his daughter down the aisle with a ramrod-straight back and a tear glistening in his eye. So by not getting married, I know I’m telling him that I don’t care about any of that, and, by extension, that I’m not his adoring little daddy’s girl anymore.

  When I phoned home to tell him I was pregnant, he said jokingly, “Better come back and tie the knot quick, girl, before they won’t let you on the bloody plane.” That was when I told him we wouldn’t be doing that, not ever. Pete, overhearing, looked a bit surprised. But neither has he ever gotten down on one knee and proposed.

  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, j
ust 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.”

  Miles shrugged. “Our lawyer thinks it’s better to sue both, from a tactical point of view. After all, we can’t prove exactly where the mix-up happened. Better to let them fight it out between themselves. And at the end of the day, the NHS has deeper pockets.”

  “I’m not sure I’d be happy about suing the NHS. As a taxpayer-funded service, I mean,” I said uneasily.

  Miles looked at me fondly over the top of his pint. “You know what, Pete? I’m coming to realize something about you, which is that you are a really decent bloke. I admire that. But I also know you’d do anything for Theo, am I right? And the way I look at it is, if I can make you and Maddie just a little bit wealthier, or at least more comfortably off, I’ll be doing something for Theo, too. As well as removing one of the biggest difficulties about this whole situation.”

  “Which is?”

  “Well.” Miles had the grace to look awkward. “That it’s currently somewhat…asymmetric.”

  “Asymmetric?” I echoed.

  “Yes. To put it bluntly, we’ve got more money than you have. And obviously, I’d hate to see Theo being held back because of lack of funds. With the payout in your bank account, conversations like the one we had the other day about schools are going to be a whole lot easier, am I right?”

  “Not wanting Theo to go to boarding school isn’t about money.”

  “Maybe not at the moment. But when you can afford the best education money can buy, perhaps you’ll view things differently. All I’m saying is, it’ll give you options, and that can’t be a bad thing, can it?”

  I felt we were getting into dangerous territory. “Look, I’ll talk to Maddie about litigation. But not schools. A boarding school is completely out of the question.”

  Miles held up his hand, the one that wasn’t wrapped around his glass, in a gesture of surrender. “Of course. Your call entirely, Pete. So it’s a yes to suing, but a no to Hogwarts. Another pint?”

  “Yes. But this time it’s my round,” I said firmly.

  * * *

  —

  THAT ONE DISAGREEMENT ASIDE, we got on surprisingly well, given the difference in our backgrounds. Three pints in I realized we’d better steer clear of politics, after I mentioned Vladimir Putin and Miles frowned. “Say what you like about the oligarchs, Pete, but at least they’ve put that country back together.” Mostly, though, we talked about our children. Miles never tired of quizzing me about Theo’s achievements—“Can he jump with both feet yet? Stand on one foot? What’s he like on monkey bars?”—although I noticed he was far more interested in physical milestones than social ones. It would have been awkward not to reciprocate about David, so rather than ask about his progress, which would inevitably have led to negative comparisons with Theo, I asked what he was interested in.

  “Oh, you know,” Miles said. “Movement. Tops and spinners and things like that. Poor little chap.”

  “Right,” I said. There didn’t seem to be anywhere to go with that.

  “You know, the worst thing about it is what it’s done to Lucy.” Miles’s tone was suddenly serious. “She’s not like your Maddie. She’s…fragile. And having a child like David brings out her anxious side. It’s made her overprotective, I suppose.”

  To break the silence, I said, “Actually, Maddie isn’t as tough as she looks. She really suffered after the NICU. I won’t go into details but…it wasn’t easy for her. And all parents are overprotective, I think. I once lost Theo for twenty minutes in Sainsbury’s, and it was one of the most terrifying things that’s ever happened to me. It turned out he’d only wandered off to look for cartoons on the back of cereal packets, but…” I shook my head. I was a little drunk now, unable to articulate the full horror of that time, the sudden irrational fear that Theo might have been abducted or hit by a car in the car park. “It was visceral. That was one of the things that made me realize…It’s not about genetics, is it? It’s about who you love.”

  “I’ll drink to that.” Miles clinked his glass against mine.
“ ‘To love.’ ”

  We both drank. “Though a social scientist would probably say this is quite an interesting experiment,” he added.

  “How so?”

  “You know—nature versus nurture, all that stuff. Will our children take after their biological parents, or will they be shaped by their environments? Or, to put it another way, will Theo turn out to be a driven, competitive little bugger like me, or an all-around decent bloke like you?” He nodded. “You should write about that. It’d make an interesting article.”

  “Maybe they’ll get the best of both worlds,” I said. “Drive and decency.”

  Miles laughed. “Exactly the answer I would have expected an all-around decent bloke to give. Come on, let’s get another.”

  * * *

  —

  AND THEN THERE WAS a moment, halfway through the fourth and last pint of the evening, when—our tongues loosened by drink—we were reliving the drama of our first meeting. It seemed almost funny now, looking back.

  “You know what I thought, when you first told me Theo was your son?” I demanded.

  Miles shook his head. “Elucidate me, Pete. Whadidya think, when I first told you Theo was my son?”

  “Just for a moment, I thought you meant you’d shagged Maddie. That you and she…” I shook my head in disbelief at how stupid I’d been. “So that’s a silver lining, anyway.”

  “True,” Miles said sagely. “Silver lining for you, anyway. But I tell you what, Pete old son.” He swayed in close and whispered in my ear. “I. Totally. Would. She’s gorgeous. And ballsy with it. You are a lucky bastard, Pete. A very lucky bastard.” He stuck out his hand for me to shake. “Congratulations. You got the girl. You got the kid. Well done.”

  21

  Case no. 12675/PU78B65, Exhibit 15: Extracts from the internet history of Peter Riley.