"Fine," she whispered, still rocking me and the baby in her arms.

I started throwing things into a baby bag. I packed everything I thought I would need. I was all set to bring a pile of disposable diapers the size of a small South American country, but Judy made me leave them behind.

"They do do sell them in Dublin too," she gently reminded me. I flung in baby bottles, sell them in Dublin too," she gently reminded me. I flung in baby bottles, 21.a bottle warmer with a picture of a cow jumping over the moon on the side of it, pacifiers, toys, rattles, little socks the size of postage stamps, everything I could possibly think of for my poor fatherless child.

As I was now a single parent I was obviously overcompensating. "I'm sorry, darling, I've deprived you of your father because I wasn't smart or beautiful enough to hold on to him, but let me make it up to you by showering you with material goods."

Then I asked Judy to give me back a couple of diapers.

"What for?" she demanded, holding them tightly to her.

"In case we have an accident on the plane," I said, trying to grab them from her.

"Didn't they give you any sanitary pads in the hospital?" she asked, sounding shocked.

"Not if I I have an accident, stupid. If the have an accident, stupid. If the baby baby has one. Although strictly speaking, it wouldn't really be an accident, would it?" I said thoughtfully. has one. Although strictly speaking, it wouldn't really be an accident, would it?" I said thoughtfully.

"More like an occupational hazard."

She doled out three diapers. But reluctantly.

"You know, you can't keep calling her 'the baby,'" said Judy. "You're going to have to give her a name."

"I can't think about that just at the moment," I said, starting to feel panicky.

"But what have you been doing for the past nine months?" Judy sounded shocked. "You must have thought of some some names." names."

"I did," I said, my lip starting to tremble. "But I thought of them with James. And it wouldn't feel right to call her one of those names."

Judy looked a bit annoyed with me. But I was on the verge of tears again, so she didn't say anything further.

I hardly brought anything for myself apart from a handful of baby books.

"Why would I bother," I thought, "now that my life is over?"

And besides, nothing fitted me any longer.

I opened my wardrobe and recoiled from the disgusted looks all my little dresses gave me. There was no doubt about it. They were all talking about me.

I could almost see them elbowing each other and saying 22 "Look at her, the size of her. Does she honestly think that dainty little size tens like us would have any dealings with that size-fourteen body she's dragging around? Small wonder that her husband ran off with another woman."

I knew what they were thinking.

"You've let yourself go. And you always said that you wouldn't. You've let us down and you've let yourself down."

"I'm sorry," I explained cringingly. "I'll lose weight. I'll be back for you, I promise. Just as soon as I'm able."

Their skepticism was palpable.

I had a choice of wearing my maternity clothes or a pair of jeans that James had left behind in his haste to get going. I put on the jeans and caught sight of my revolting overweight body in the bedroom mirror. God, I was horrific! I looked as if I was wearing my big sister's Michelin Man suit. Or worse again, I looked like I was still pregnant.

In the few weeks before I gave birth I had been absolutely enormous.

Completely circular. The fact that the only thing that fit me was my green wool jumper, coupled with the fact that due to continuous nausea my face was always green, gave me the appearance of a watermelon who had put on a pair of boots and a bit of lipstick.

Now, although I was no longer green, I still looked like a watermelon in every other respect.

What was happening to me? Where had the real me and my real life gone gone?

With a heart that wasn't the only heavy thing about me, I went to call a taxi to take us to the airport.

When the buzzer rang, I took one last look around my living room, at the gap-toothed shelves, the shiny new unused baby intercom up on the wall (the waste waste!), the hillock of abandoned diapers on the floor.

I closed the door behind me before I could start crying again.

Firmly.

Then I realized that I was missing something. "Oh Jesus," I said, "my rings." I ran back in and got my engagement and wedding rings from my bedroom. They had been on the dressing table for the past two months because my fingers were so 23.fat and swollen that I couldn't wear them. I jammed them onto my hand and they just about fit me.

I caught Judy giving me a funny look.

"He's still my husband, you know," I said defiantly to her. "Which means that I'm still married!"

"I didn't say anything," she said, affecting an innocent expression.

Judy and I struggled down in the elevator, juggling bags, purses, and a two-day-old child in her car seat.

And that's another thing they don't tell you about having a baby! The manuals should say something like "It is imperative that your husband does not leave you in the first few months after your child's birth, as otherwise you will have to carry everything yourself."

Judy was hoisting everything into the taxi when I saw, with horror, Denise's husband coming up the sidewalk. He must have been on his way home from work.

"Oh Christ," I said ominously.

"What?" asked Judy in alarm, her face red and sweaty from her exertions.

"Denise's husband," I muttered.

"So what?" she said loudly.

I was expecting some kind of terrible emotional scene from him. As I said, he was Italian. Or I was afraid that he would suggest some kind of alliance between me and him. Something along the lines of "my enemy's enemy is my friend." I certainly certainly didn't want that. didn't want that.

My eyes locked with his and I felt, in my guilty and fearful state, that I knew exactly what he was thinking. "It's all your fault. If only you had been as attractive as my Denise, your husband might have stayed with you and I would still be happily married. But no, you had to go and ruin everything, you fat ugly cow."

"Fine," I thought, "two can play at that game."

I stared back at him, returning his thought messages. "Well, if you hadn't married a husband-stealing, home-wrecking floozy none of us would be in this mess."

I was probably doing the poor man a terrible injustice. He didn't say anything to me. He just looked at me in a kind of sad and accusatory way.

24.I hugged Judy good-bye. We were both crying. For once my baby wasn't.

"Heathrow, Terminal One," I said tearfully to the taxi driver and we swept away from the curb, leaving Mr. Andrucetti staring bleakly after us.

As I struggled down the aisle on the Aer Lingus plane, I bumped against several irate passengers with my bag of baby supplies. When I finally located my seat a man got up to help me stow my bags. As I smiled my thanks at him, I automatically wondered if he thought I was pretty.

It was so awful. That was one of the things I'd really liked about being married. For a couple of years I'd been off that horrible merry-go-round of trying to meet the right man, finding out that he was already married, or living with another man, or pathologically stingy, or read Jeffrey Archer, or could only have an orgasm if he could call you "Mother," or any one of the thousands of character flaws that weren't immediately obvious the first time you shook his hand and smiled into his eyes and got a warm buzzy feeling in the pit of your stomach, and thought to yourself, "Hey, this could be the one."

Now I was back in the situation where every man is a potential boyfriend.

I was back in a world where there are eight hundred exquisitely beautiful women to every one straight single man. And that is even before we start weeding out the truly hideous ones.

I looked at the helpful man carefully. He wasn't even that attractive. He was probably gay. Or, more likely, this being an Aer Lingus flight, he was probably a priest.

And as for me, a deserted wife with a two-day-old baby, the self-esteem of an amoeba (that much?), forty pounds overweight, incipient postpartum depression, and a vagina stretched out to ten times its normal size, I was hardly a prize catch myself.

The plane took off and the houses and buildings and streets of London circled away below me. I looked down as the roads got smaller and smaller.

I was leaving behind six years of my life.

Is this how a refugee feels? I wondered.

My husband was down there somewhere. My apartment 25 was down there somewhere. My friends were down there somewhere. My life was down there somewhere.

I had been happy there.

And then the view was obscured by cloud.

I sat back in my seat, my baby on my lap. I suppose I must have looked just like a normal mother to all the other passengers. But-and the thought struck me quite forcibly-I wasn't. I was now a deserted wife. I was a statistic.

I had been lots of things in my life. I had been Claire the dutiful daughter.

I had been Claire the scourge of a daughter. I had been Claire the student.

I had been Claire the harlot (briefly-as I said, if we get the time, I'll fill you in). I had been Claire the administrator. I had been Claire the wife.

And now here I was being Claire the deserted wife. And the idea did not sit comfortably with me at all, I can tell you.

I had always thought (in spite of my professed liberalism) that deserted wives were women whose husbands, pausing only to blacken their eyes, left with a bottle of vodka, the Christmas Club money and the children's allowance book, leaving them behind weeping with a huge mound of un-paid utilities bills, a spurious story about walking into a door and four dysfunctional children, all under the age of six.

It was a humbling and enlightening experience to find out how wrong I had been. I I was a deserted wife. Me, middle-class Claire. was a deserted wife. Me, middle-class Claire.

Well, it would have been a humbling and enlightening experience if I hadn't been feeling so bitter and angry and betrayed. What was I? Some kind of Tibetan monk?

But I did realize, in some funny way, through the self-pity and the self-righteousness, that someday, when all this was over, I might be a nicer person as a result of it, that I would be stronger and wiser and more compassionate.

But maybe not just yet.

"Your father is a bastard," I whispered to my child.

The helpful gay priest jumped.

He must have heard me.

Within an hour we began the descent to Dublin Airport. We circled the green fields of north Dublin and, even though I knew that she couldn't really see anything yet, I held my baby up to the window to give her her first view of Ireland.

26.It looked so different from the view of London we had just left behind. As I looked at the blue of the Irish sea and the gray mist over the green fields, I had never felt worse. I felt like such a failure.

I had left Ireland six years before, full of excitement about the future. I was going to get a great job in London, meet a wonderful man and live happily ever after. And I had had gotten a great job, I gotten a great job, I had had met a wonderful man and I met a wonderful man and I had had lived happily ever after-well, at least for a while-but somehow it had all gone wrong and here I was back in Dublin with a humiliating sense of deja vu. lived happily ever after-well, at least for a while-but somehow it had all gone wrong and here I was back in Dublin with a humiliating sense of deja vu.

But one major thing had changed.

Now I had a child. A perfect, beautiful, wonderful child. I wouldn't have changed that for anything.

The helpful gay priest beside me looked very embarrassed as I cried helplessly. "Tough," I thought. "Be embarrassed. You're a man. You've probably made countless women cry like this too."

I'd had more rational days.

He made a fairly lively exit once we landed. In fact, he couldn't get off the plane fast enough. No offers to help me unstow my bags. I couldn't blame him.

27.

three.

And so to the baggage pickup area!

I always find it such an ordeal.

Do you know what I mean?

The anxiety starts the minute I get to the carousel, when I suddenly become convinced that all the nice, mild-mannered people I shared a plane journey with have turned into nasty luggage thieves. That every single one of them is watching the carousel with the express purpose of stealing my bags.

I stand there with narrowed eyes and a suspicious face. One eye on the hatch where the bags come out and the other eye darting from person to person, trying to convey to them that I'm wise to their intentions. That they've picked the wrong person to mess with.

I suppose it would help matters slightly if I was one of those well-organ-ized people who somehow manage to stand near the start of the carousel.

But instead I'm always down at the far end, squinting and standing on tiptoe, trying to see what's coming out of the hatch, and when I finally see my bag emerging I'm so afraid that someone will steal it that I can't stand patiently and wait for the carousel to deliver it to me in due course. Instead I run to catch it before someone else does. Except that I usually find it impossible to breach the tightly knit cordon of other people's baggage carts.

So my bag sails serenely past me and circumnavigates the carousel several times before I'm able to grab it.

It's a nightmare!

28.This time, to my surprise, I managed to secure myself a place quite near the hatch.