Babyville Page 0,112

you, no matter how much we love our grandson.”

“Love him? You barely even know him.” Sam realizes there's no point in saying these things, but she's had enough, and even if her venting doesn't achieve anything, vent she must.

“What are you talking about, Sam? I have to tell you I really don't need this. I had a million things to do this morning and I'm not doing any of them because I'm spending time with George, and all you can do is try to make me feel guilty. I'm sorry that I'm not the kind of person who wants to be with their grandchild twenty-four hours a day, and I'm sorry that I have a life too, but that's just the person I am and you'll have to accept it.”

Chris leaves the room, shaking his head in disgust. He learned long ago not to get involved, but the sheer selfishness of Sam's mother never fails to horrify him. His parents live in Newcastle, in the same house he grew up in, and they try to come down to London a couple of times a month to see him. He knows that were it not for the distance between London and Newcastle, his parents would come around every day. They would offer to baby-sit every night, anything to spend time with their beloved grandson. He always knew Patricia and Henry were selfish, but he never realized quite how selfish. And anyway, everyone they had spoken to BG said that it would be different when the baby was born.

“You should never underestimate how wonderful it is to be a grandparent,” said one grandparent of six years' experience. “It's a different kind of love to when you have your own children. Quite, quite overwhelming. I think perhaps because it is love without responsibility, you are free to just give everything of yourself, to love with total abandon. Wait and see, Sam's parents will fall in love just like the rest of us once the baby's born.”

How wrong she was.

Not that he is particularly surprised, but Sam has been devastated. Devastated because she too believed that Patricia would be different. She had put up with the self-centeredness all her life, had fought for her mother's unconditional love, and had only given it up as a hopeless cause when she met and married Chris. She was starting a family of her own, she decided, and this was the family that mattered.

Sam thought she had dealt with it by slowly removing herself from her mother's life. Where once she telephoned regularly, dropped in to see her parents, sought her mother's advice on daily dilemmas, she had managed to reduce this, before George was born, to perhaps once every couple of weeks.

But George has brought all her own parenting issues to the fore. She had dealt with the pain herself, but now she was dealing with the pain all over again, only this time it was worse because it was her own child. While Sam could live with her mother not wanting to be around her, she couldn't live with her mother not wanting to be around her child.

Chris treads carefully around the subject of her parents, with the eggshells on which he steps seeming ever more fragile. He tries not to say anything, to quietly support, for if he were to say what he truly felt, the floodgates would open and the full force of his own anger and disgust would surely alienate him and Sam still further.

The best thing he can do is leave the room.

“Fine,” Sam says. “I haven't got the energy to argue with you anymore. I'm exhausted, I've been up all night for weeks and weeks, and I thought that today I'd be able to go back to bed and catch up on some sleep, but if you have bridge”—she spits the word out with disgust—“then I'll have to understand. What time will you bring him back?”

Patricia, oblivious of her daughter, looks at her watch. “Eleven? I could maybe manage eleven-thirty if that's better. I thought I could take him for a walk.”

“Fine,” Sam mutters. “I'm going upstairs to have a bath. See you later.” And up she goes, trying to contain the tears that are already welling up, knowing that the one thing she will not do, will never ever do, is cry in front of her mother, show her mother how much she cares.

There is only one plus, as far as Sam is concerned. An hour, hour and a half