Читать книгу The Three of U.S.: A New Life in New York - Peter Godwin - Страница 23

Joanna tells me that The Expectant Father will make me more understanding of what she is going through. I flip through the book and it falls open at an early page which advises me that the correct way to announce to my friends that Joanna is expecting a child is to say, ‘We are pregnant.’ I try saying it aloud. ‘We are pregnant’ ‘We are pregnant.’ It sounds absurd. I cannot bring myself to do this in public.

It is true however that I have been putting on some weight since the conception. John, also pregnant, has alerted me to Couvade’s Syndrome, a condition suffered by fathers-to-be. Couvade comes from the French word, to hatch, and victims of the syndrome experience phantom pregnancies. I try out the idea on Joanna and she suggests that I might go to the gym more often.

I fall back on the thought that, rather like a beautiful Italian peasant girl who, having snared a husband, rapidly inflates into a moustachioed pasta pudding, I am perhaps relaxing into middle age, propelled by fatherhood.

Later I am consoled somewhat by a news item on the Rolling Stone, Keith Richards, the bad boy of rock ‘n’ roll. It is reported that he has broken several ribs. This injury has not been inflicted in some night club brawl, however, or while trashing a hotel room. He has, in fact, sustained it in a nasty fall from the ladder in his library while trying to retrieve a volume from the top shelf. I wonder what the book was: Proust? Dickens? Or perhaps a leather-bound edition of the New Musical Express?

Eventually, it seems, a Rolling Stone does gather moss.