Painting the Nursery

“Yellow,” said Keira. “You can’t go wrong with yellow. Let’s paint this room yellow. It’s a colour that doesn’t look too warm in summer and doesn’t look too cold in winter.”

     “I don’t know,” Rory mused. “It’s hard to get the happy medium with yellow. Sometimes it reminds me too much of school dinner custard.”

     “That’s the most ridiculous reason for ruling out a colour I’ve ever heard,” Keira said, and they laugh, but not for very long. “Okay, then. What’s your idea?”

     “Green. A nice fresh pastel green.”

     “Green’s supposed to be unlucky,” Keira muttered.

     “You have a couple of green tops yourself. And I didn’t think you were superstitious.”

     “I’m not, not really, but – tempting fate and all that.”

     “Sometimes I wonder if we did the right thing, moving.”

     “You said you were all for it!”

     “I know. Anyway, we certainly can’t go back now, so there’s not much point to talking about it.”

     No, there wasn’t much point to talking about it. It was better to talk about painting a room. That was a safe and harmless conversation. Wasn’t it?

Neither of them mentioned any variants of blue or pink. They knew that was a road they shouldn’t go down. They hadn’t found out the gender of the baby Keira was expecting. They preferred not to know unless, as they said, and having to force out even the most euphemistic circumlocution, there was some reason to.

     “A – soft tangerine sort of shade can look very nice,” Rory said. “Let’s get out the paint card they gave us at the DIY shop again. Perhaps we might even ask them to mix one of their special personalised colours.”

     “Perhaps,” Keira said, without committing herself. 

     “Where on earth do they come up with some of the names?”

     “Goodness only knows. No doubt somebody got paid a fortune for coming up with Magnolia Moments or Shimmering Dawn.”

They had moved into the bungalow on Laurel Street two months ago. The respective sets of parents, who normally got on extremely well, had been at odds over that. Keira’s parents thought it was a thoroughly good idea, but Rory’s parents thought they had made the decision too hastily and might regret it. Of course, they made sure there was no unpleasantness about it. They were the first line of defence in their children’s support network. And they had all been wonderful when Keira lost the baby. 

     None of them said the horribly wrong things like “These things happen, and you’re both young and healthy and there will be other children.” Keira and Rory were grateful for that, as much as they could be grateful for anything in the confusing shadowland where nothing made sense any more. But at times they couldn’t help wishing that they didn’t try so desperately hard to say the right things. They had been persuaded to go to a support group, but soon realised it wasn’t really helping them. It seemed as if they were being wrapped in a comfort blanket for something for which there was no comfort one minute, and being made to confront feelings they feared confronting the next. But one of the other group members, a woman called Geraldine, used a rather telling phrase about the tyranny of tact. 

     Their baby had been a girl, and they gave her a name – Antonia Louisa. One thing on which they were now totally agreed was that they would never use either of those names now for a baby girl, nor male variants like Antony or Louis for a boy. But they had avoided talking about names. Neither of them said it was – that phrase again! – tempting fate, but it still seemed far better not to.

     They would have denied, including to themselves, that buying the bungalow was anything to do with being safer. After all, Keira hadn’t lost the baby through a fall downstairs. But people did fall downstairs. Both adults and children, and even with the best safety gate in the world you couldn’t be sure. But it was fairly handy for both the furniture salesroom where Rory worked and the school where Keira worked, though she would soon be going on maternity leave. It needed enough decoration and renovation for them to make it feel like their own, but not too much, and it was also near a lovely little park. The bungalow had its own back garden, too. It seemed that the previous owners had paid more attention to their garden than to their house! They were delighted by the miniature waterfall in the tiny rock garden, but had asked Rory’s dad, who was a gardener, to double check that there was nothing poisonous there. He had kept his own counsel and willingly done as they asked, but they suspected he thought they were being rather over-cautious, especially as it would be a long while before the baby was of an age to play in the garden. 

     “He thinks we’re silly,” Keira had said, “And maybe he’s right. But you can’t be too careful.”

     Perhaps you could, she thought now, as they stood in the room that was going to be the nursery. She had known children, both as a child and an adult, who were wrapped in the famous figurative cotton wool, and certainly hadn’t envied them. But then again, what was the point, anyway, of having plants that were poisonous when there were so many beautiful ones that weren’t? 

     “Some folk reckon,” Rory said, straining to sound studiedly casual, “That babies’ colour vision isn’t developed properly anyway, so you may as well just have a neutral colour in the nursery, and change it a bit later on.”

     “Rory, I’m telling you this right now, no child of ours is going to have a beige nursery!” Again that laughter that came readily enough, now, but still faded out very quickly. “And white – no. Just no.” She had no need to say more. He knew what she meant and agreed. White was a clinical colour. White was a hospital colour. 

     “But some of those soft creams, or just a hint of colour, perhaps.”

     “That has possibilities,” she admitted. “And we can always put stencils or transfers on the walls.”

     She was also thinking, I can do that, I can do that without risking any harm to the baby when I’m quite late on. It’s not tiring or over-exerting or anything like that. But it will be good to have something to do. Keira had never been much good at drawing or painting and had completely failed to see the appeal of those “grown-up colouring books” – not least because she knew her own failings and simply didn’t have the patience. But stencils and transfers were another matter.

     “I have a picture of my own nursery – well, Mum and Dad, do,” Rory said, “And there is a big frieze with lions and tigers and bears – not the most suitable thing for a baby, you might think, but I’m pretty sure they didn’t give me nightmares.”

     “I think my parents were a bit more conventional and went in for fairies and elves, though I’m not sure. I must ask them.”

     “Babies can be remarkably resilient ….” But even as Rory spoke the word “resilient” it tailed off as he thought of Antonia Louisa and muttered, “I’m sorry.”

     “Hush,” Keira said, putting her finger on his lips as if he were a small child himself. “I thought we agreed that we weren’t going to watch every word. We can’t live like that. And babies generally are resilient – it’s adults who aren’t. We know too much. We’ve learnt to be scared.”

     “About the frieze, or the transfers, or whatever,” Rory went on, after they were silent for a couple of minutes. “I’ve seen some with pictures of marine life on – seahorses, starfish, things like that.”

     “Sounds cute,” Keira said. “When I was little I had a comb shaped like a seahorse – just a cheap plastic one, free with a comic, and the curl in its tail went the wrong way. But I loved it.”

     “That’s odd,” Rory said, wrinkling his brow thoughtfully. “I was probably a bit older than that, but I had an eraser shaped like a starfish – I bought it, or more likely my parents did, at a marine life exhibition we went to.”

     “Posh boy,” Keira teased affectionately.

     “Come to think of it, it was pretty useless as an eraser – not exactly a sensible shape!”

     “What happened to it?”

     “Not sure. Got lost in a move probably, long after I decided I’d grown out of it.”

     “Same with my comb. But it’s a fact, little silly things often wedge in the mind more than the expensive presents. Though I can’t recall ever preferring a box to what was in it.”

     They both knew, of course, that in speaking of their own silly, briefly-cherished little childhood possessions, they were also thinking of such things in the future, in their child’s future, but they could not bring themselves to talk about it. Not to talk about this child who would sleep in the nursery, whatever shade it was painted, and whatever was on the frieze or the transfers or the stencils.

     The staff in the shop that sold the frieze with the starfishes and seahorses knew Keira and Rory, and knew what had happened, and they didn’t mention it, and were paragons of being practical and upbeat. They also bought some stencils of dolphins (not necessarily biologically accurate, but recognisable) and a little lamp like a miniature aquarium. “I can see the ongoing theme here,” the assistant smiled. Had they been talking to other customers, to customers who hadn’t gone through what Keira and Rory had, they might well have half-joked about having a water birth.

     In fact, in what sometimes seemed like a past life, Keira had been drawn to the idea. She had a friend who’d had a water birth and described it as an awesome experience. Keira didn’t doubt her, but was not interested in an awesome experience. This conversation, by the way, had taken place before. There was a nuance and a meaning to before, that meant they did not have to specify before what. It was simply before. She wanted something safe now. That was all that mattered. They had decided to have an elective C-section. 

     They painted the nursery a shade of rich cream that seemed to have the tiniest hint of soft orange lurking in it somewhere. The shade was called Mandarin Mist, but that wasn’t the shade’s fault. They put up the frieze with the sea-horses and starfish, and Keira carefully put the dolphin stencils onto the wall. It was just the right kind of task, absorbing and yet non-demanding, and she thought with affection of one of her old art teachers, Mr Dawson, who had a knack for finding activities that ungifted pupils could still enjoy, and that enabled them to produce something that looked good. 

     They only showed the nursery to the parents on both sides, Rory’s older brother (Keira was an only child) and a couple of very close friends. It wasn’t as if it was one of those TV makeover shows! Everyone agreed it was lovely, but everyone still seemed to talk about the room, and how attractive it was, and not of the child who would sleep in it. Of course nobody used that phrase tempting fate in front of Rory and Keira, and tried not to use it anyway, almost as if, in some kind of perverse perpetual motion, saying it was invoking it. It was safer to talk about a lovely shade of paint, and a cute frieze, and transfers of dolphins, and a table lamp like a miniature aquarium.

     But you can’t plan everything, no matter how carefully you plan, and Keira knew, one frosty, bright October morning, that – a phrase her late grandmother had used sprung to mind – her time had come. 

     Neither she nor Rory said anything about it being only two weeks early and two weeks not mattering in the least. That would have been admitting to a problem, even as they denied it. That would be admitting to the fact something could go wrong, even as they insisted nothing had. 

     Rory delivered his own daughter in the nursery they had planned for her, when all they seemed to talk about was the nursery. She came into the world with a lusty yell and, for all everyone said newborn babies couldn’t focus seeming to weigh up her environment with her great blue eyes, and deciding that it was to her liking. 

     And though they had not had one single conversation about names, without needing to say a word they knew what hers would be.

     Marina Hope.