God knows, I wanted wanted to bawl and tell her about James's allegedly leaving me, but there was a line of women in pink terry cloth robes behind me waiting to use the phone (no doubt to bawl and tell her about James's allegedly leaving me, but there was a line of women in pink terry cloth robes behind me waiting to use the phone (no doubt 15.to call their devoted husbands) and, against all the odds, I had some some pride left. pride left.

"Smug bitches," I thought sourly (and irrationally, I must admit) as I limped back to bed.

As soon as Judy came I knew that she knew about James. I knew because she said, "Claire, I know about James." Also because she didn't arrive with a huge bunch of flowers, a bigger smile and a card the size of a kitchen table with storks all over it. She looked anxious and nervous.

My heart sank to my boots. If James was telling other people, then it must must be true. be true.

"He's left me," I said dramatically.

"I know," she said.

"How could he?" I asked her.

"I don't know," she said.

"He's fallen in love with someone else," I said.

"I know," she said.

"How do you know?" I demanded, pouncing on her for the information.

"Michael told me. Aisling told him. George told her."

(Michael was Judy's boyfriend. Aisling was a girl who worked with him.

George was Aisling's husband. George worked with James.) "So everyone knows," I said quietly.

There was a pause. Judy looked as if she would like to die.

"Then it must be true," I said.

"I think it is," she said, obviously embarrassed.

"Do you know who this other woman is?" I couldn't believe my best friend knew that my husband was cheating on me and hadn't told me. I was pissed off at her, but the highest priority was extracting information, at this point.

"Er, yes," she said, even more embarrassed. "It's that Denise."

"What!" I shrieked. "Not nice Denise from downstairs?"

A miserable nod from Judy.

It was just as well that I was already lying down.

"That bitch! bitch! " I exclaimed. " I exclaimed.

"And there's more," she mumbled. "He's talking about marrying her."

"What the hell do you mean?" I shouted. "He's already already 16 16 married. To me. I hadn't heard that they had made polygamy legal in the last day or so."

"They haven't," she said.

"But then..." I trailed off, bewildered.

"Claire," she sighed despondently, "he says he's going to divorce you."

As I said, it was just as well I was already lying down.

The afternoon ebbed away, along with Judy's patience and any hope that I might still harbor.

I looked at her in despair.

"Judy, what am I going to do?"

"Look," she said matter-of-factly, "in two days you'll be getting out of here. You still have somewhere to live, you have enough money to feed yourself and the baby, you'll be going back to work in six months, you've got a newborn child to look after and give James some time and eventually the two of you will work something out."

"But Judy," I wailed. "He wants a divorce divorce."

Although James seemed to have forgotten one big fact. There is no divorce in Ireland. James and I had been married in Ireland. Our marriage had been blessed by the fathers of the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour.

Although a fat lot of good it had obviously done us. So long, Succour.

I was at a total loss. I felt alone and afraid. I wanted to pull the blankets over my head and die. But I couldn't because I had a poor defenseless child to look after.

What a start in life she was getting. Less than two days old and already she'd been deserted by her father, and her mother was on the verge of cracking up.

For the millionth time I wondered how James could do this to me.

"How could James do this to me?" I asked Judy.

"You've asked me that about a million times," she said.

So I had.

I didn't know how James could do this to me. I just knew that he had.

Up to now I suppose that I'd thought that life doled out the unpleasant things to me in evenly spaced bite-size pieces. That it never gave me more than I could cope with at one time.

When I used to hear about people who had serial disasters, 17 like having a car accident, losing a job and catching their boyfriend in bed with their sister all in one week, I used to kind of think it was their fault.

Well, not exactly their fault fault. But I thought that if people behaved like victims they would become victims, if people expected the worst to happen then it invariably did.

I could see now how wrong I was. Sometimes people don't volunteer to be victims and they become victims anyway. It's not their fault. It certainly wasn't my fault that my husband thought that he'd fallen in love with someone else. I didn't expect it to happen and I certainly didn't want want it to happen. But it had happened. it to happen. But it had happened.

I knew then that life was no respecter of circumstance. The force that flings disasters at us doesn't say "Well, I won't give her that lump in her breast for another year. Best to let her recover from the death of her mother first." It just goes right on ahead and does whatever it feels like, whenever it feels like it.

Now I realized that no one is immune from the serial disaster syndrome.

Not that I thought that having a baby was a disaster, but it could certainly come under the heading of upheaval.

Judy and I sat on the bed in silence, both trying to think of something constructive to say. Suddenly I had the answer. Well, maybe not the the answer, but answer, but an an answer. Something to do for the time being. answer. Something to do for the time being.

"I know what I'll do," I said to Judy.

"Oh thank God," I could feel her thinking fervently. "Thank God."

And like Scarlett O'Hara in the last few lines of Gone With the Wind Gone With the Wind, I said plaintively, "I'll go home. I'll go home to Dublin."

Yes, I agree with you. "Dublin" doesn't have quite the same ring to it as "Tara," but what would be the point in my going home to Tara? I knew no one there.

18.

two.

Judy picked me up from the hospital a couple of days later. She had booked me and my baby on a one-way flight to Dublin. She took me home to pack some things.

I had heard nothing from James in the meantime. I was stumbling around in a grief-sodden daze.

Sometimes I simply couldn't believe it. Everything he'd said to me seemed like a dream. I couldn't really remember the details, but I could remember the feeling. That sick feeling that something was very wrong.

But sometimes the loss would make a guest appearance.

It would invade me. It would take me over. It was like a physical force.

It knocked the life out of me. It took my breath away. It was savage.

It hated me.

It had to, to hurt me so much.

I can't really remember how I spent those couple of days in hospital.

I can vaguely remember being bewildered when all the other new mothers talked about how their lives had now altered forever, how it would never be just oneself ever again, the problems of having to adjust their lives to fit in with their new baby and all that.

But I couldn't see what the problem was. Already I couldn't imagine life without my baby. "It's you and me, sweetheart," I whispered to her.

The fact that we had both been abandoned by the man in 19 our lives probably sped up the bonding process. Nothing like a crisis to bring people together, as they say.

I spent a lot of time sitting very still, holding her.

Touching her tiny, tiny tiny little doll's feet, her perfect pink miniature toes, her tightly curled up little fists, her velvety ears, gently stroking the delicate skin of her incredibly small little face, wondering what color her eyes were going to be. little doll's feet, her perfect pink miniature toes, her tightly curled up little fists, her velvety ears, gently stroking the delicate skin of her incredibly small little face, wondering what color her eyes were going to be.

She was so beautiful, so perfect, such a miracle.

I had been told to expect to feel overwhelming love for my child, God knows, no one could say that I hadn't been warned. But nothing could have prepared me for this intensity. This feeling that I would kill anyone who so much as touched one of the blond wispy hairs on her soft little head.

I could understand James leaving me-well, actually, I couldn't-but I really really couldn't understand how he could leave this beautiful, perfect little child. couldn't understand how he could leave this beautiful, perfect little child.

She cried a lot.

But I can't really complain because so did I.

I tried and tried to comfort her, but she rarely stopped.

After she cried for about eight hours solid on the first day and I had changed her diaper a hundred and twenty times and fed her forty-nine thousand times I became slightly hysterical and demanded that a doctor look at her.

"There must must be something terribly wrong with her," I declared to the exhausted-looking youth who was the doctor. "She can't be something terribly wrong with her," I declared to the exhausted-looking youth who was the doctor. "She can't possibly possibly be hungry, but she won't stop crying." be hungry, but she won't stop crying."

"Well, I've examined her and there's absolutely nothing wrong with her, so far as I can see," he patiently explained.

"But why is she crying?"

"Because she's a baby," he said. "It's what they do."

He'd studied medicine for seven years and that was the best he could come up with?

I wasn't convinced.

Maybe she was crying because she somehow sensed that her dad had abandoned her.

Or maybe-major pang of guilt-she was crying because I wasn't breast-feeding her. Maybe she deeply resented being fed from a bottle. Yes, I know, you're probably outraged that I didn't breast-feed her. You probably think that I wasn't a proper mother. But, long ago, before before I had my baby, I had I had my baby, I had 20.thought it would be permissible to have my body returned to me after I had loaned it out for nine months. I knew that I wouldn't be able to call my soul my own now that I was a mother. But I had kind of hoped that I might be able to call my nipples my own. And I'm ashamed to say that I was afraid that, if I breast-fed, I would be a victim of "shrunken, flat, droopy tit" syndrome.

Now that I was with my gorgeous, perfect child my breast-feeding worries seemed petty and selfish. Everything really does does change when you give birth. I never thought I'd see the day when I'd put anyone else's needs before the attractiveness of my tits. change when you give birth. I never thought I'd see the day when I'd put anyone else's needs before the attractiveness of my tits.

So if my little sweetheart didn't stop crying soon, I was going to consider breast-feeding her. If it made her happy, I'd put up with cracked nipples, leaky tits and sniggering thirteen-year-old boys trying to get a look at my jugs on the bus.

Judy, baby and I arrived home. I let us into our apartment and, even though James had told me he was moving out, I still wasn't prepared for the bare spaces in the bathroom, the empty wardrobe, the gaps in the bookshelf.

It was so awful.

I sat down slowly on our bed. The pillow still smelled like him. And I missed him so much.

"I can't believe it," I sobbed to Judy. "He's really gone."

My baby started to cry also, as if she felt the emptiness too.

And it was only about five minutes since she'd last stopped.

Poor Judy looked helpless. She didn't know which one of us to comfort.

After a while I stopped crying and slowly turned my tear-streaked face to Judy. I felt exhausted with grief.

"Come on," I said. "I'd better pack."