Ghosts by Daylight by Janine di Giovanni

I returned to London from my assignments, the only people I wanted to see were people I did not have to explain anything to, people who did not ask questions, people who had seen what I had seen. And Bruno, who knew me, who understood me, and who spoke a language identical to mine.
    I played Russian roulette with my biological clock, and then when the time came and I felt capable of becoming a mother, it was almost too late. I got pregnant very easily. But the weeks would pass, I would buy special oil to rub on my belly for stretch marks, and maternity dresses, and then one night I would wake up in agonizing pain and get rushed to the hospital, and a grim-faced nurse or doctor would tell me the baby was dead.
    No one could work out what was happening, why my body kept failing me, and I spent what seemed like months inside the labs of St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, having blood test after blood test. Finally, someone, a doctor in New York worked it out: my niece and my mother suffered from a rare blood-clotting disorder, and one day, I found out I had the same thing. But it took years to discover, and years for this baby to come down to earth.
    In the Bible, both Sarah and Rachel who had very late and very yearned for babies are told that the child who is much desired, much waited for, is always special. And I had waited so very long for my Luca.
    When I finally held him firmly inside me, I tried to act appropriately: I thumbed through my copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting , but I only got through the first chapter. Nothing in it seemed to relate to me. Someone loaned me a Moses basket with long handles so I could carry the baby everywhere, which was my plan. When people asked what I would do about work, I would shrug and say I would take the baby with me in the basket. In truth, I had no clue what I would do or how I would manage my life.
    When my boss, a man with many children, found out I was pregnant, he brought me into a small office, his face full of anger. ‘I’ve got a war correspondent who can’t go to war,’ he said.
    ‘I’m allowed to get pregnant, aren’t I?’ I responded, but he talked about contracts, and Iraq, and maternity leave and getting back to work, and I knew then that I could never do it again, not the way I had before. I knew that I would miss reporting the war that was breaking out in Baghdad, in Basra, in Mosul, but I realized for the first time I had made a choice, and that I had to stand by it.
    He finally stopped talking, still angry, and I sat in my chair, slightly dazed. I’m not sure I knew then how deeply the addictions of being in those places, those times, watching countries fall apart and being put back together again, had affected me.
     
    In my London flat with the crooked wooden floors and the windows that did not shut firmly, I lay on the bed and talked to the baby, just like every other mother-to-be. I told him everything: about his father, who was far away in Africa, about the mango tree and the green studio where I wrote, about how we met, about our wedding in the Alps during the heatwave, about how the entire wedding party had trooped through the wheat fields, past the barns, to visit the statue of Our Lady and lay flowers at her feet. I asked him to come out healthy and strong and brave.
     
    On several occasions, before she died at the age of ninety, I met Martha Gellhorn, the third wife of Hemingway, and a war correspondent herself.
    The first time I met her, in the early 1990s at the start of the war in the former Yugoslavia, she was remote. Mutual friends had warned me she was difficult: she was tricky, she did not like other women, but somehow I had convinced myself that when we met, it would be different. Above all, her friends whispered, do not mention Ernest Hemingway.
    For our first meeting, I was going to interview Gellhorn for a reissue of a collection of her war reporting, and it took me all day to get from London to her remote cottage in Wales. I