Ghosts by Daylight by Janine di Giovanni Page B

Somewhere that photograph still exists. She greeted me warmly and kissed me on both cheeks. The meeting in Wales a decade earlier seemed to have been forgotten. Martha was very old but still very beautiful. She was draped in scarves, tall, slender, with snowy hair and exquisite bone structure.
    She called me ‘dear girl’ again.
    Martha died when she was ninety. It was whispered, but never confirmed, that she killed herself. She was found alone in her flat with a letter. Her close friends were distraught, but I remember thinking: How much more could she have gotten from life? The beautiful books, the beautiful words, the many men, the love affairs, the disappointments, the pain, the war, and all the things she saw.
    When I met Emerson in Princeton – she killed herself, alone in her apartment in Manhattan – she reminded me of a more raw Gellhorn. She did not have Gellhorn’s beauty, but she was clever and smart and lived by herself in a lovely house, surrounded by male friends and admirers. I loved the fact that a male reporter I knew who had reported with her in Vietnam called her a ‘pain in the ass’. I loved any woman who irritated the male press corps, who was strong enough to be described like that.
    I loved these women, and what they stood for. They lived alone and played alone and worked alone in a world that did not like women to do that. I wanted to learn from them how to do it. I wanted to be like them, and not – as much as I loved and admired my mother – like the women in my family.
    But the thing about these amazing women was that they did not hand out their secrets, or directions of how to live one’s life because, I suppose, they did not know. I learned no secrets of how to live my own life without a map from either Emerson, or Gellhorn (or even Gloria Steinem, who I met one winter morning in Manhattan, beautiful in silk pyjamas and bare feet, a few days after her sixtieth birthday) except something I had once read that Gellhorn had written: ‘I always leaped before I looked.’
    And this was how I was having my baby. There was no birth plan, no name choice, no knowledge of how to change a nappy, breastfeed, prepare a bottle or even live with the father of my baby. Gellhorn would have coped, I thought. And I could cope.
     
    My shell-shocked husband arrived back in London from Africa the day before Christmas Eve. I was now more than six months pregnant, and he was joining me before we moved together to Paris.
    He was gutted, exhausted. And while he seemed joyful and exuberant at seeing me and touching my stomach, he seemed grief-stricken about leaving Africa. He was cutting short his three-year contract. He had closed up the lovely mango-strewn house in Cocody, the place he had loved and decorated with so much pride with teak tables, ivory inlaid mirrors and bright fabrics, and packed his things. He was happy to be home – but he looked so incredibly tired.
    Looking back, I wish I had seen how thin he had become, how much he was trying to hide all the turmoil that he had left behind. I did not see it. I only saw someone who was in love, who took care of all the details. But do we ever see things that we really don’t want to see?
    He stopped in Paris first, dropped his bags, and went to Hermès to buy me leather gloves lined in cashmere for Christmas. He called me from the Gare du Nord. ‘In three hours, I am going to see my baby!’
    On Christmas Eve, we went to midnight mass. We ate caviar with a friend and went to bed, and on Christmas Day went to two separate turkey dinners. I began to pack, quietly folding the gifts friends had given me from the shower, unable to imagine a baby fitting into the blue-striped summer outfits, or the white Petit Bateau snowsuit.
    After New Year’s Eve we bought our train tickets to France. By now, my own flat was empty except for the bed, and we closed the door and locked it, turning the heat low. We took an afternoon train, and arrived late, in the freezing