Massimo carried on. ‘I wanted a family with you so much. It frightened me that you were so unhappy. I didn’t know how to handle it. I was too proud to ask for help – I saw Nico and Caitlin with Francesca – the perfect huddle of three – and they made it look so easy.’
I couldn’t help wincing at the mention of Caitlin even though I’d asked about her. Listening to him talk about how lonely and frightened he’d felt after Sandro was born made me realise how we’d created the right circumstances for a chink in our marriage, for someone to slip in and shower him with comfort, attention and care. While I was pushing myself to the point of nervous exhaustion, pressing a glass on Sandro’s limbs, seeing meningitis rashes everywhere, fretting over his refusal to eat anything that didn’t come out of a jar, taking his rejection of my pureed kale and courgette personally, the proof that I was a hopeless mother, devoid of that most basic of skills – the ability to feed my baby – Massimo was helpless and isolated.
Then I thought of Maggie and what she would say if she could hear Massimo. ‘My heart’s not bleeding for him too much! Bless him with his full night’s sleep, secretary bringing him coffee and time to drink it before it’s stone cold. You must be off your rocker, letting him get away with that as an excuse.’
I would definitely have fallen into Maggie’s ‘wet drip’ category, the term she used for women who wouldn’t walk into a pub on their own, who needed their husbands to deal with ‘workmen’ and didn’t have their own bank accounts. I’d never dared admit it was only since we’d got back from holiday that Massimo had given me back my bank cards instead of leaving a ten-pound note on the table for me before he went to work.
I felt a surge of rage, as though I had too much blood in my veins and it was just searching for a weak wall to burst through. Instead of relying on her own husband, Caitlin had stolen mine. Standing there in her yoga Lycra while my stomach frilled onto my knees. Giving me a lecture about the importance of making time to do pelvic floor exercises when it was all I could do to put on clean underwear. And behind my back, she was planning little trips to the opera with Massimo, dinner out, jaunts to the Ritz. The Ritz! When I was lucky to manage a piece of cold toast by two in the afternoon.
I’d looked to her for reassurance. I remembered sitting there, trying to hold in my despair that everyone thought I should be so overjoyed at having a baby. The shame that I sometimes looked into the squalling, angry mass in the Moses basket and thought longingly of Sunday morning lie-ins, dinners in posh restaurants, dinners anywhere when I could pick up a fork without being braced for the wail that would signal another couple of hours of pacing and patting. I’d looked to Caitlin, the only recent mother I knew, in my quest for advice on how to break the pattern of feed, cry, snooze before the whole madness-inducing cycle started again.
Caitlin simply furrowed her brow and said, ‘Francesca slept through the night at eight weeks. I don’t recall it being a problem. Perhaps your milk isn’t satisfying him. Maybe better to get him on a bottle.’
There was no such thing as a difficult baby, just a useless mother. Both Caitlin and Anna wrinkled their noses in disgust when I produced a dummy, scouring off another layer of self-belief, leaving me raw, exposed and vulnerable.
Just the thought of Caitlin’s hypocrisy made me want to slam down my cutlery and stomp out of the restaurant.
‘But why did it carry on for five years? I’d been okay for a while by the time Sandro went to school. I hadn’t been on antidepressants for several years.’
Massimo scraped his fork in the remains of the sauce on his plate.
‘Caitlin was ill. She needed me. It wasn’t really an affair; we just supported each other.’
I wanted to stand on my chair and shout, ‘Anything that took you away from me when I needed you was a bloody affair!’ But I had to hear him out. Whatever he said would be better than the thoughts that kept crowding into my mind.
Massimo pleated and unpleated his napkin. ‘Nico couldn’t cope with her illness. You know what he’s like. He doesn’t communicate well at the best of times. Caitlin was terrified of dying but trying to protect Nico and Francesca. She found it easier to talk to me. I was slightly detached.’
I tried to be generous. She must have looked down the barrel of the future with fear in her heart. God knows what it felt like to look at your child and wonder whether you’d be there, for the big events, yes, school, marriage, babies, but also the little ones – not getting invited to the party, the bouts of tonsillitis, the ‘no one loves me’ days. But she was only ill for one year of a five-year-affair.