I had sailed through my first pregnancy with the serenity of the ignorant. It had not crossed my mind that the process of birth could be anything but textbook or the baby anything but unimpaired in body and mind. I was different the next time. Morbid thoughts overwhelmed me in the small hours, when Jonathan would wake to find me pacing the floor inventing for myself a hierarchy of congenital disasters to see which one I could look squarely in the eye. Once, even, clutching a hot-water bottle in terror, having just dreamed that I had given birth to a dead cat in a pool of gore like Leone’s miscarriage.
‘Oh Jesus!’ Jonathan said impatiently, suffering slightly from interrupted nights. ‘After a nine-week gestation period I hope? Don’t be perverted Kath.’ Jonathan, who had so loyally defended my sanity before the gynaecological consultant, must have had his doubts. Babies had always just happened in his life. They had always come live, with their faculties intact, bringing with them no more than the minor inconvenience of curdled shit and the smell of chlorine bleach. He therefore had no understanding of my intermittent visions of harbouring monsters and dead cats. As far as he was concerned, all this belonged to a genre of mediocre horror. Years of adolescent exposure to low comics had inured him to it.
I was, in addition, a somewhat decrepit case of pregnancy. Not only was I sexually immobilised from the start but I was required, during the first three months, to spend occasional week-long spells in hospital in a special ward for the observation of problem pregnancies. A macabre spirit of female camaraderie prevailed among the victims of fluctuating blood pressure, obesity and diabetes, which caused the sufferers to gather in huddles of quilted nylon dressing-gown and fur-fabric mules, swapping tales of previous disasters. I reverted, as I do in moments of crisis, to rereading Emma, with cotton wool in my ears. Such sleep as one achieved was interrupted by the bedtime trolley peddling laxatives, or by the junior doctors roaring their showy little sports cars into the hospital car park.
It goes without saying that I gave up my job. We lived very largely off Jacob, who came forth with generous and regular hand-outs in the form of the rent he got for his house in Sussex. He would press the money on Jonathan, saying that giving it away saved him from the crime of owning two houses and that he was ‘so bloody rich’ anyway, he had no use for it. He was concerned for my comfort and safety to a ludicrous degree, which caused me on the whole to retire to my couch like Volpone at the sound of his foot upon the stair and to reach for my smelling salts. Once he caught me at the knitting-machine.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ he said, like an old fusspot.
‘Fair Isle,’ I said saucily. ‘Oh come on, Jacob, one of the first things I ever remember hearing you say was that childbirth was natural. Women have been known to squat down in the wilderness and to chew up the umbilical cord.’
‘Don’t talk nonsense to me,’ Jacob said. He brought me books to read. Improving books, and bunches of grapes: I could tell that he was trying not to relish too much the prospect of playing with his grandchild because my condition was slightly dodgy and because we planned, after the fourth month, to go away – to which end my hospital consultant had arranged to hand me on to a colleague in Dublin. Jacob was guilty of nagging Jonathan terrifically on the subject, in an attempt to make him change his mind about going, and blackmailed him shamelessly with the fact of my health. Jonathan, in turn, accused Jacob of relishing the idea of women in delicate conditions, so that he could the more easily manage and manipulate them. After a while Jonathan took to going out when he came, which Jacob found a little rejecting, I think. Jane came to see me in the mornings without him, always talked sense and on one occasion had the excellent idea of bringing Sally with her, in order that her very newly born baby might give me hope. Her only failing was to imply unfairly that Jonathan wasn’t doing enough for me.
I felt so much for Jonathan during those months. He was being driven mad by his father’s alarmism and by his mother’s occasional brisk implications that he was exploiting me; by my repeated midnight anxieties and by his own reluctance to use his typewriter for fear of waking me; not least by sexual frustration. I found him one night standing in his socks at the kitchen sink. He had placed his typewriter on two deal boards across the sink and – since there was no electric power socket in the kitchen – had plugged it in beside the record player with the help of a lengthy extension cord.
‘Come to bed with me,’ I said with feeling. ‘I need you.’ So Jonathan spilled his seed on to my navel and cried some terrible male tears on to my naked shoulder. That same night he stepped out of bed on to his glasses, which he had left on the floor.
‘Oh shit,’ he said, irritably. ‘Too much sex makes you shortsighted.’ He liked to think that only Roger was capable of absent-mindedly destroying his glasses and found it compromising that he had done so too.