I first read this story, about a couple trying to manage their daughter’s jealous rages after the birth of their second baby, before I had children and it seemed like a window into a particularly extreme experience that affected only these particular characters – a world I could sympathise with, but knew I’d never live in.
When I read it again, after having children myself, it felt completely different – it had more resonance and power now; it was suddenly an accurate depiction of a widely shared and highly relatable experience. The description of the couple attempting to visit Hardy’s house while dealing with their daughter’s almost constant interruptions (“Don’t talk!”) and the resentment of the house’s custodian, who assumes their daughter will behave badly and tries to ban the mother from breastfeeding her new baby on the bench outside in case it offends other tourists (“they don’t come all this way to see THAT sort of thing”) is hilarious because it’s so recognisable, but the extent to which the mother is isolated and frantically over-extended, just managing to cope with the demands of the children, but utterly exhausted and drained to the extent of having to suppress her own sense of self becomes more apparent as the story progresses and the description of her as a “Woman Overboard”, almost sunk by the births of the two children, is haunting:
“He’d watched, ineffectual but sympathetic, trying to keep her cheerful as she clung to the edge of the raft, holding out weevil-free biscuits for her to nibble, and all the time she gazed at him with appalled eyes. Just as they had grown used to this state, difficult but tenable, and were even managing to start hauling her on board again an inch at a time … along came the second baby in a great slap of a wave that drove her off the raft altogether. Now she was out there in the sea while he bobbed up and down, forlorn, but more or less dry, and watched her face, between its two satellites dwindling to the size of a fist, then to a plum, and at last to a mere speck of plankton.”
First published in Granta 43: Best of Young British Novelists 2, 1993. Also available in the collection Dear George, Minerva, 1995,and in Simpson’s selected stories, A Bunch of Fives, Vintage, 2012. Available to Granta subscribers here
