14 March

Feeling blue today. No one major reason, more a million tiny things, pressing together to make a bruise. So I took refuge this morning in my daughter’s room, while she pottered about, disciplining her dolls and admonishing her teddies. I’m not quite sure where the scary shouty tactics come from; certainly not from me, I’m a pushover. Just occasionally, she will change to mock concern when tending a ‘poorly child’, and then her voice sounds like an anxious bird beating the air. I love to just sit, sometimes, in a child’s room, even when chaos is crashing around me and I’m knee deep in mess. There’s something so soothing in the atmosphere, the light softer. When I’m in a fanciful mood, I like to imagine other children’s voices, like a jumble of chords from the past, just discernible behind the more strident tones of my daughter. In her room, scratched on a beam above her bed, just low enough for a child to reach, is marked the name ‘Bess’. It looks as if it has been scratched by a penknife, etched firm, the letters big and well spaced. The ‘B’ in particular is a proud capital; a confident hand scratched this. It was one of the first things I noticed when we first came to look around the house, my own girl but a heavy promise inside me. The room was empty, and I’d stood where I imagined a cot might go, and seen the name immediately. I hadn’t known we were having a girl; this baby had been a long time coming, and I didn’t really want anything to break the spell of hope. A baby was enough, at last; the gender a sort of optional add-on. Still, I knew immediately that this would be the baby’s room, just as I could picture my boy in the little room that gets the morning sun. I suppose it was auspicious, looking back, that K turned out to be a girl, this space, even empty, feeling so much like a girl’s room. Or perhaps I knew, really, deep in my subconscious. I thought about Bess, sometimes, as we prepared the room and made the million and one adjustments involved in changing from three to four. I have no idea, of course, if she was a real live girl who scratched her name there. The house dates from about 1770, and the timbers could be older. Maybe it was a boy who wrote it, dreaming of his sweetheart one hot summer night. In my mind’s eye, though, I always see a dark curly-haired girl, leaning out of the window and counting the stars which crowd together so densely in the huge Suffolk sky.

My fair-haired girl looks out of that window now, and used to hold her tiny hands up to reach the stars. Her cupped palms seemed to catch the light. In the blink of an eye she has gone from a curled question mark to a bold exclamation. The house was waiting for her, I felt, a hum of expectation in the room. My son slept through for the first time without a night light when he came to this house; his room faces out over the village green, and a tawny owl keeps a watchful eye on him from the tree outside his window. K’s room looks out over the fruit trees and the garden. She was born in the late summer, at the tail end of a heatwave; a heavy, torpid time of year which burst into fecundity when she arrived. The trees seemed to bring their fruit just for her; my apple girl, I called her privately.

We walked up to Playgroup together, and saw a hare on the verge of the lane. The three of us gazed at each other for some time. He lifted my spirits, as always. Then at playgroup something else happened. A friend of mine is expecting her third daughter this summer. She has a penchant for old and ‘unfashionable’ names, and tells me that one of the names they are considering for their new daughter is Bess. She will no doubt have dark curly hair, like her sisters. So maybe she will lean out of the window in my house and gaze at the stars, after all.