I WAS sitting in Frank’s in Fulham, sipping coffee and remembering all this, for two reasons; one I didn’t admit to myself, but it was to do with the actor. The other was because Frank’s reminded me of this other place. I’d stayed on there for two months, till it was time to go back to London. I could have gone three weeks earlier because the company ended its season before it had meant to. But the proprietor offered me £6 10s. a week for as long as I’d stay on. £6 10s. wasn’t bad pay for a waitress in those days; for the first time in my life I was saving money. So I went on for another three weeks, laying tables, cooking the specials, carrying food and cups of tea to the tables; and I went on writing lies to my father.
When I finally left, the proprietor gave me a present of £2 which brought my savings up to £15. I was filled with confidence. I remembered coming home in the train and listening to the wheels saying ‘I can do anything – I can do anything –’ Sitting with Frank’s coffee fighting the cold inner emptiness, I thought of that feeling of triumph and excitement, trying to recreate it, but it was like being stone cold and trying to get warm by remembering what being warm was like. I picked up a teaspoon and let it drum on the table to the rhythm of those six-year-old wheels and whispered to myself, ‘I can do anything … I can do anything …’
‘Do you mind?’
Two girls in overalls at the next table turned round, twisting their mouths and rolling their eyes at each other. I stopped drumming. It wasn’t doing any good anyway. But there was one thing – I could work as a waitress in a place like this, if I had to. And do it well enough so that I needn’t be too ashamed of it. I wondered how much they paid waitresses now. Or perhaps it would be better to be a cook, in the kitchen where nobody would see me. I picked up the menu and saw that Frank only did sandwiches and snacks. It wasn’t important. I didn’t have to start worrying about a job yet. I had one that I wanted to keep for as long as I could.
I left Frank’s and walked back to the house. As I walked, I thought about my job. It was a good one. I’d had it for two years. I was assistant to the public relations officer at Drummonds Hotel, which is not so big as Grosvenor House but more expensive. Because it’s so small it’s considered exclusive and a lot of big wheels who used to go to the Savoy and the Dorchester were now fighting for the privilege of paying a few extra guineas a day for a suite at Drummonds. My job was to arrange Press receptions for the ones who wanted publicity, and fight the Press off for those who didn’t. There were a lot of sidelines to the job too, but that was most of it. It was largely a matter of keeping people happy. I had a small office to myself next to the large plushy one my boss had on the ground floor of the hotel. My salary was twelve hundred a year and expenses. There were a lot of perks, too – quite legitimate ones. And it was great fun and very interesting. Not the way acting had been, of course. But I couldn’t have earned twelve hundred a year on the stage if I’d hung on for the rest of my life.
Sooner or later I’d have to tell my boss. I couldn’t predict how he would feel about it. Perhaps he would make me leave at once. On the other hand, he might let me stay on until the last moment. That seemed more likely, in view of the sort of man he was; but even the most broadminded men are apt to be funny about things like this.
I wondered how long it took to be really obvious. Three months? Four? I could save quite a bit in four months, living as I was going to live. That was the reason I gave myself for choosing such a scruffy place to live in; there was another reason, but I hadn’t explained that to myself yet. On the other hand, some women begin to show almost at once. I was no sylph, but I was flat across the front. As I walked, I put my hand through the slit in my trenchcoat pocket and felt my stomach. It didn’t feel any different. It seemed incredible that there was the beginning of a baby in there.
I wondered, too, when you start being sick in the mornings. That would make it more difficult to keep on working. Perhaps morning sickness was a mental thing, like travel sickness. Some women went through pregnancy without being sick at all. I decided it was necessary for me to be like that. I had to keep on working as long as possible at the job in the hotel. Whatever job I got after that, it couldn’t pay anything like the same money.
But then there was afterwards. I hadn’t let myself think too much about that. It was hard enough to imagine how I was going to get through the next eight months. I’d thought through every minute of it when I first began to worry – before I knew for certain. I didn’t sleep for five nights; just lay awake until four or five o’clock, thinking, imagining. The days weren’t so bad because I had plenty to do, but the nights were very bad. Each one was worse than the one before, because at first I could tell myself it would be all right in the morning. When in the morning nothing had happened I’d tell myself it would come during the day. Then another night would arrive and it would be that much more difficult to sleep than it had been the night before, because my doubts seemed that much nearer to becoming certainties.
On the fifth night I began to think about afterwards and I panicked. I began to cry aloud and I couldn’t stop myself. My father slept in the next room. Both our doors were open and as my sobs rose I knew he must hear. I knew he would come and ask what was the matter, and I knew I would tell him. It was stupid because, although I felt sure, I couldn’t be completely sure, and what was the point of telling him before it was necessary? I knew how he would feel about it. But in that moment I felt as if I were alone in a trap. Nothing mattered if only I could tell someone. If only I didn’t have to be alone with it.
That was how it seemed before I heard him call from his room, ‘Is that you, Jane? What’s the matter?’ And when I didn’t answer, ‘What are you crying like that for?’ Then I heard him getting out of bed and grunting and fumbling for his slippers and my sobs stopped. I lay without moving and felt the ice of real fear freeze the artificial panic which had made me want to tell him. I lay still, with my face in my pillow. I didn’t move or breathe. I felt him standing over me. He had never hit me in his life. I wasn’t afraid of him that way. I was afraid of his disgust. I would have preferred anything now, anything at all, to telling him what I had so much wanted to tell him two minutes before.
‘What were you crying about?’ His voice was gruff and sleepy, and sounded kind. But I lay, motionless, frozen, willing him to go back to bed.
He put his hand on my shoulder and shook me a little.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘If you didn’t want me to come in, what did you cry so loudly for? What’s the matter, lost your job?’ He squeezed my shoulder with his fingers. ‘Mm? Is that it?’ I was trembling and he could feel it. He sat down beside me on the bed. I thought, Let me just die … I dug my face deeper into the pillow. I felt as if I were suffocating.
‘Come on,’ he said again. ‘That damned shyster sack you? If it’s that, don’t worry. I’ve kept a roof over your head before when you were out of a job.’ Yes, I thought, yes, you’ve done that. For months on end you’ve kept me, and every day of those months I’ve been aware of it. I felt you were wondering if I had no self-respect: not that you grudged the cost exactly, but I knew you were asking yourself what sort of person could live on her father when she was over twenty-one, rather than give up calling herself an actress. Which it seemed nobody else did … When I’d come back from an audition you would say, ‘Don’t contact us, we’ll contact you’– an old theatrical joke I foolishly told you once, which stopped being a joke when you had said it a few dozen times. And when at last I gave in and started going to secretarial school, do you think I wasn’t conscious all the time that this was the second career you’d paid to train me for? The day I took my first secretarial job you told me I’d never stick it, that any girl who could be content to sit behind a typewriter all day must be a cretin … What do you want of me, Father? I thought fiercely. What have you ever wanted?
Not this, anyway. Not a scandal, not a bastard grandchild. This won’t go far to make up for my shortcomings, like not being a son and like killing my mother by getting born.
I turned on my back and looked up at my father through the half-darkness. His big square head with the strong hair sprouting unbrushed above his forehead was outlined against my window. His ears were big and stood out. Mine do that too. I have to wear my hair in a special way to hide them. I thought if my baby had ears like that I would stick them back while it was little and malleable. My father could have saved me a lot of misery if he’d done that with mine, but he hadn’t bothered because he’d lost his chance of having a son. I had a sudden feeling about my baby, not just as something terrible that was going to happen to me, but as a potential person with feelings of its own. It was the ears that made me think of it – lying there looking at the silhouette of my father’s big ugly ears.
‘Well?’
He wasn’t sleepy any more, and his voice was more querulous than kind. I lay on my back and said clearly, ‘No, I haven’t lost my job, Father.’ I know you keep expecting me to lose it because it’s such a much better one than you ever thought I’d get, but the fact is that I’m good at it and I don’t think I’ll ever lose it through inefficiency.
But I only said the first sentence aloud. That was how it always was when I talked to my father.
‘Then what was all the noise about?’
It occurred to me he was disappointed with my answer. It always galled him, I believed, in some subtle way when I actually succeeded in anything. It gave me an odd sense of advantage to be reminded of this.
‘I’m unhappy about something. It’s something private.’
‘Not so private you’d be bothered to get up and close your door before you wake me up with your weeping,’ he said. He stood up and pulled his dressing-gown round him. ‘You seem to forget that my job lacks the advantage of frequent mornings in bed.’ He said that because sometimes I work over the week-ends when someone important arrives at the hotel, and I’m given mornings off in lieu. My father has been at work at nine o’clock every week-day morning for thirty-two years. He’s a civil servant. The only time he stayed away from work was when my mother died. Even then he worked on the day of the funeral, in the afternoon; he went straight from the crematorium to his office. He told me that himself; he was very proud of it, for some reason.
So the moment was put off. I fell asleep with a sense of overpowering relief; but it was gone in the morning.
I decided I must go and see a doctor. I was still only five days overdue, but I couldn’t wait any longer. I’d never been ill in my life, so I hadn’t got a regular doctor. There was a man whose name I had heard; I couldn’t remember in what connexion, but it stuck in my mind because it was the same as mine, Graham. I looked him up in the phone book and was relieved to find his surgery was in Wimpole Street. I didn’t know why I should feel relieved about that. Perhaps there was something about the way I’d heard of him in the first place, which I didn’t actually remember, but which made me suspect there was something wrong about him. But if he practised in Wimpole Street, I thought, he must be all right.
I rang him up. His secretary, or perhaps it was his wife, answered the phone and when I said I wanted to come at lunch-time I could hear the superior smile in her voice.
‘The doctor can’t make any new appointments for three weeks,’ she said. I knew it would be better to wait three weeks, then he could tell me at once; but I couldn’t wait three more days. I had to know, so that I could start thinking properly and stop praying for something that wasn’t going to happen. I said, ‘Please, it’s very urgent.’
The woman said, ‘Are you at work?’ and when I said yes, she said, ‘It can’t be as urgent as all that, then, can it?’ I felt myself begin to loathe her unreasonably. I thought, He’s not the only doctor in London, I’ll find one who isn’t so busy, and who hasn’t got a wife like this. I said, ‘All right then, never mind,’ and was surprised that my voice sounded so strange, as if I were crying.
I was just going to hang up when the woman said, in a completely different voice: ‘Just a moment. Are you married?’
‘No.’
There was a pause, and then she said, almost affectionately, ‘Why not pop along at about one-fifteen? I expect the doctor could squeeze you in.’
I got there at one. It was a tall, sober house with black double doors and brass name-plates, the names worn illegible with polishing. A smart white-haired woman let me in, and showed me into the waiting-room. It had a high ceiling and deep leather chairs; there was a big round table in the middle of a red Persian carpet, covered with magazines, the society type, neatly stacked. On the Adam mantelpiece was a single tasteful ornament, reflected austerely in a huge mirror. My eyes kept going back to the mirror. It was wrong in that room with its elaborate gilt frame and fat-bellied cupids. It was more the sort of thing you’d expect to find in a brothel.
I sat on the arm of one of the leather chairs. I almost never smoke, but now suddenly I wished I had a cigarette. I was very nervous, wondering what to say to the doctor. I hadn’t really worked it out, and now it was too late to. I couldn’t even think of a false name. All the names there are in the world, and the only one I could think of was my own. I tried to concentrate, but my mind wouldn’t work properly. I was terribly nervous. I was even sweating a little. That made me think that he would want to examine me. I hadn’t thought of any of that. I stood up suddenly and almost ran to the door; but it opened in my face, and the white-haired woman stood there smiling.
‘What name?’ she asked pleasantly.
‘Jane Graham.’
‘How odd – the doctor’s name is John Graham.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I know.’
She led me up the curved staircase and knocked on a white door. Everything was carpeted into silence. Even her knock hardly made a sound. There was a faint, unpleasant smell of hospitals. I was very frightened.
The doctor was very ordinary-looking, like a stage doctor. Small and comfortable, rather bald, with pudgy hands. He was sitting behind his desk making out a prescription. The woman smilingly showed me into a chair and went out. The doctor said, ‘Won’t – be – a – minute –’ in a slow voice, and went on writing. His fountain pen was gold and he had a big gold signet ring on his little finger with a moonstone set in it. The leather on his desk – the blotter corners, the ink-stand, the appointments book – were all green Florentine leather. There was a gold cigarette box.
I looked at the doctor. His bald patch gleamed domestically. The signet ring gleamed too, on his little fat hand. I hadn’t seen his face, and I couldn’t understand why I didn’t like him.
At last he finished writing and put the cap on his pen. He looked up, already smiling. He was pink and jolly-looking, with small eyes behind glasses.
‘You haven’t been to see me before, have you, Miss – er –’
‘Graham. No.’
‘Graham? Really? Fancy that – no relation, I suppose?’ His smile spread into a laugh, but my face felt frozen. ‘Well, now. You look healthy enough. What seems to be the trouble?’
‘My period’s late.’
‘How late?’
‘Five days.’
He smiled again. ‘Well, you know, that’s nothing. Nothing at all. Are you usually regular?’
‘Five days, you know – it doesn’t have to mean anything’s wrong with you. Could be caused by anything – change of air – change of diet – emotional upset – cold in the head …’ He was watching me closely; at least I felt he was. With the light on his glasses I couldn’t really tell. But I felt he was trying to drive me out into the open.
I said nothing. His smile was as steady as ever.
‘Unless, of course,’ he said, in the same cosy voice, ‘you’ve got any reason to worry … ?’
I wanted to shout at him that of course I had reason to worry, or what would I be doing here? Instead I said awkwardly, ‘Yes,’ praying he would understand, or rather stop pretending not to understand.
He took off his glasses and wiped them, exactly like an actor playing a doctor, and said, ‘Oh dear oh dear oh dear.’ Then he looked up at me reproachfully. I stared back at him, feeling suddenly angry. I hadn’t come to him to be looked at like that. He wasn’t my father, it was nothing to him. But I couldn’t think of any stinging words to say; I just sat there, feeling angry and humiliated. I thought he was trying to make me drop my eyes, and I wouldn’t. I was ashamed to my very soul, but I was damned if I was going to let him see it. I stared back at him and finally he sighed heavily and put his glasses on again.
‘When did it happen?’
‘On the twenty-third of last month.’
‘And you were due five days ago? My dear child –!’ He leaned forward, wearing a tolerant smile now. ‘Don’t you know anything about your own body? Don’t you know you could not have picked a worse day – or rather, night?’
I felt a wave of disgust, as if he’d made a dirty joke about it.
‘Took no precautions at all, I suppose?’
‘No.’
‘Oh dear me no. “It couldn’t happen to me” – that’s what they all think. “Don’t let’s bother with all that nasty nonsense – it would spoil the wonder of it all.” ’ He twitched one eyebrow and slumped back disdainfully.
‘I didn’t think anything of the sort!’
‘I’m not deaf, Miss Graham, so please don’t shout.’ He ran his fingers along the shaft of his fountain pen, watching me. I looked at his banana fingers and dreaded the moment when he would tell me to undress.
‘Well now,’ he said, his voice abruptly cheerful and cosy again. ‘What’s the young man – the proud father-to-be – going to do about this, eh?’
It was like watching a film in which there is suddenly a large, clumsy cut, and you’re left not knowing what has been missed out, not quite understanding what’s happening now. I said bewilderedly, ‘What’s that got to do with it?’
The doctor said blandly, ‘Well, it’s a not unimportant aspect of the situation, is it?’
I said, ‘I don’t see that it’s an aspect which concerns you.’
He swayed forward sharply and landed with his elbows halfway across the desk. There was no smile now, and he held the gold pen pointed at me like a pistol.
‘Now let’s just get ourselves tidied up about this,’ he said hardly. ‘You’ve come to me for help. There’s no need to be on the defensive. You’re not the first, and you won’t be the last. But you must clearly understand that it’s not as simple as buying a pound of sugar. I have my own position to protect.’
I couldn’t understand what he was talking about. I shook my head, and then, when he stiffened angrily, I quickly nodded instead, hoping vaguely that that would please him. It seemed to, because he lowered the pen and sank back again, his face softening. ‘You really must trust me,’ he said. ‘I’m not just a nosy old man, you know. If the young man could be persuaded to marry you, obviously that would be a better solution, wouldn’t it?’
I wanted to ask, better than what? Instead I said, ‘There’s no question of that.’
‘He’s married already?’
‘It isn’t that.’ I couldn’t go on talking about it. ‘Please. All I want to know is if I’m going to have a baby.’
He smiled patiently. ‘I think we can take that as read,’ he said. He looked at me dreamily for a moment, and then abruptly became brisk and businesslike. ‘Now then,’ he said, ‘don’t look so worried. It’s not as bad as all that, you know. When have you got a free afternoon?’
I frowned, trying to follow. ‘On Wednesday …’
‘That might do. You’ll have to see my colleague, and he’s rather busy.’ He picked up his telephone and spoke a number, smiling at me all the time while the light flashed on and off his glasses like a danger signal. He spoke briskly to somebody, making an appointment for me for Wednesday afternoon. He was still smiling as he hung up.
‘Why do I have to go to another doctor?’
‘Because that’s the only way these things can be arranged. My colleague will countersign a certificate to say you’re psychologically unfit to have the child. After that’s done, I’ll arrange for you to go into my clinic for the operation. You’ll be home again as good as new in a couple of hours, but it’s just as well to stay in bed for a day or so if you can. Most girls choose Saturdays, but if you could make it a week-day I’d be grateful, because the week-ends are such a rush.’
I sat quite still, looking at the green Florentine leather on the gold-topped inkwell. I’d seen such things for sale in Bond Street. They were very expensive. All the tooling was hand-done, and the gold for it was real.
The doctor was still talking. ‘I hope you won’t think it indelicate of me to mention the fee at this stage. Whoever told you to come to me probably warned you that the charge is high – in the nature of things, it has to be. You’d be asked the same sort of price by some back-street merchant in Paddington, and he hasn’t any of my overheads. And at least I can promise you the thing will be done conclusively and under conditions of hygiene …’
I was watching him now, really looking at him carefully. He was so clean and bland and well-fed. Outside, beyond the lace curtains, I could hear the genteel traffic purring along Wimpole Street. It seemed impossible, and yet it was real, it was actually happening.
‘How much is the fee?’ I asked. I was suddenly so interested I could hardly wait to know.
Dr Graham took off his glasses again and looked at me with his small short-sighted eyes.
‘A hundred guineas,’ he said.
Then he took out a cream silk handkerchief to polish the lenses. I could see his monogram on the corner, J.G., the same initials as mine.
I stood up and the room rocked for a moment. I felt a bubble of nausea come up into my throat. I closed my eyes, and swallowed, and felt better. I picked up my coat which was over the back of the chair.
‘Where are you going?’ the doctor asked sharply.
I held on to the back of the chair and looked at him. There was so much to say that I couldn’t find words for any of it.
‘Well now, look here,’ he said in an altered voice. ‘I can quite see it might be difficult for you to get hold of a lump-sum like that, especially if you can’t turn to the man for help. I’m always so afraid of what you silly little girls will rush off and do to yourselves … You must realize I have certain basic costs to meet, but in the special circumstances I can waive my own fee, and my colleague would do the same, I’m sure. Let’s say sixty guineas all-in. There, what could be fairer than that?’
My mind was suddenly as cold and clear as ice-water. I said, ‘One thing could be.’
‘What’s that?’
‘You could make some effort to find out whether I’m really pregnant before you charge me sixty guineas for an operation that might not even be necessary.’
His face didn’t change, but his hands paused about the business of polishing his lenses.
‘You might even stop to ask me if I want to get rid of my baby, if there is a baby.’ I clutched the back of the chair with both hands. I could feel a fever of shaking beginning in my wrists and knees.
‘But I suppose when all those guineas are at stake, nothing else seems very important.’
My indignation burned me like a purifying fire. I stared at the doctor with triumph. My accusation, I thought, was magnificent, unanswerable. I forgot my own guilt in the enormity of his.
He put his glasses back on slowly and tucked his handkerchief away in his breast pocket. Then he leaned on his elbows and looked up at me.
‘You want to have your baby?’ he asked curiously.
‘I wouldn’t have chosen to have one this way. But if it’s happened, yes, I want it. Anything’s better than your cheating way out.’
He looked at the snowy blotter between his elbows.
‘Don’t, please, misunderstand what I’m going to say. I’m not trying to persuade you to change your mind. In fact, I couldn’t have you in my clinic after what you’ve just said – the risk would be too great. But I wonder how much thought you’ve given to the child. A lot of the women who come to me aren’t just panic-stricken cowards trying to escape their just deserts, you know. They have the sense to realize they’re incapable of being mother and father, breadwinner and nursemaid, all at once. A lot of them have thought what the alternative means, of handing the child over to strangers who may or may not love it. And don’t make the mistake of imagining the word bastard doesn’t carry a sting any more. There aren’t many illegitimate children in this world who haven’t, some time or other, thought unkindly of their mothers.’
‘How many of them do you suppose honestly wish they’d never been born?’
He looked at me for a long time, and then shrugged. He seemed tired, suddenly: ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Life is precious, once you have the realization of it; even the vilest sort of existence can seem better than nothing. But I think a woman, when she finds she’s going to bring a human being into the world, has the right to judge in advance.’
‘Well, I don’t. That’s sheer sophistry. Those women are rationalizing their own fear. They’re judging for themselves, not for the child.’
‘Possibly, in some cases. It’s not for me to say.’
‘Yours not to reason why, yours but to do – and collect a hundred guineas.’
He smiled wryly. ‘There really are overheads involved in doing the thing properly, you know,’ he said without anger. ‘For me, too, it’s a question of considering the alternatives. If there weren’t men like me to come to, I wonder how many more deaths there would be following abortions …’
‘That’s a rationalization, too.’
‘Tell me something,’ said the doctor gently. ‘How did you rationalize your acts of fornication?’
‘There was only one,’ I said.
I sat down again on the chair because my knees wouldn’t hold me any longer. My coat slipped off my arm on to the floor. Without warning the tears came, and ran down my face in streams. I couldn’t stop them. There was a great weakness in my whole body; nothing seemed to matter except the enormous sadness of the fact that one raw, mismanaged, unhappy night could result in this, this misery, this huge frightening vista opening in front of me, this mountain of responsibility. That so little – a wrong decision, and two inept, unsatisfactory performances of the sexual act, which gave so little pleasure – could result in a changed world. As I wept I wondered, foolishly and pointlessly, which of the acts had conceived the child – the first with its bungling and pain and apologies, or the second with its cold frantic struggle to achieve or give the pleasure which might have begun to justify either of them …
I felt the doctor’s banana hands on my shoulders, and the cream silk handkerchief was put into my hand. ‘Don’t get so upset,’ he said. ‘I know it seems bad now, and unfair and all the rest of it, and there’ll be moments when you’ll wish you’d done what I thought you’d come here for, but there are compensations too. How old are you – twenty-six, twenty-seven? It’s time you had a baby. You’re old enough to appreciate it. If you’ve got the courage to enjoy some of it, it’ll do you good.’
When I stopped crying he gave me a drink of sherry and some addresses. It was all suddenly matter-of-fact again, as if he were an employment agency giving me addresses of jobs, but actually they were for an ante-natal clinic, the Society for Unmarried Mothers, and a general practitioner in Hammersmith. He told me the names of books to get out of the library. I wrote everything down carefully on a sheet of paper he gave me. It had his name and degrees printed at the top in small, discreet lettering. When I offered to pay him he wouldn’t accept anything. I came away feeling that we had had a battle, and that he’d won.
That had been four days ago. A lot had happened since. I’d been to the general practitioner, a tall, bluff man called Maxwell, and been given a special test which had cost a surprising amount of money because the doctor said it was unnecessary – I only had to wait a few weeks and he could tell without it. But I had to be sure. And after it, I was.
Then there was no point in putting off telling my father.
When I know something terrible is inevitable, I don’t want to go on putting it off, I want to precipitate it, because thinking about it and dreading it seems so much worse than the thing itself could possibly be. So it wasn’t courage that made me go straight to my father’s office from the doctor’s without even waiting for him to come home. I wanted to get it over, to get started on the changed world. As I sat waiting for the woman to tell him I was there, I felt a bit the way I felt before I went to my first bull-fight. I didn’t want to see the bull killed; I just wanted to know what it would do to me to see it.
I hated going to my father’s office at any time. I didn’t go often, although he was always suggesting I drop in. Often I felt dislike for my father, but never more than in his office. It was a very ordinary, dull one in a block in Shepherd’s Bush, something to do with death duties; the usual thing, long lino’d corridors with thick ageless girls in grey flannel skirts and cardigans walking along them, and doors leading into outer offices with names scratchily painted in black on their pimply glass panels. The outer offices were too small to turn round in and littered with very tattered copies of government handouts. And the inner offices, which led in and out of one another like a rabbit warren, weren’t much better.
My father often said he didn’t know where all my ‘acting nonsense’ came from. If he could have seen himself putting on his head-of-an-industrial-empire act in that shabby, poky office, he’d have known it came straight from him. The way he glanced up from his work, looked at me for a second as if trying to place me, then slowly let a tired smile play round his lips – it was a perfect performance of the weary tycoon smiling tolerantly at the carefree daughter who knows no better than to interrupt his Atlasian labours.
‘Well dear, what is it? I’m very, very busy, as you can see.’ He spread his hands to indicate his desk, cluttered with unimportant-looking papers. ‘The new Bill means a complete reshuffle … I sometimes wonder if H.M.G. dreams them up specially so none of its servants can ever be accused of wasting public money by having a minute to themselves …’ He droned on like that for a few moments. I sat quite still with my hands folded. In some strange way I was almost looking forward to telling him now. I was glad I’d decided to do it at his office. I wasn’t afraid of him here. I saw him here, not as my father, perpetually demanding strengths and achievements of me, but as a supremely unimportant cog trying to pretend it was the whole dull wheel.
At last he stopped talking about his problems and turned to me again. ‘Would you like a cup of something?’
‘No, Father, thank you. I’ve got something to tell you.’
‘Yes, well, so I imagined. It’s not your habit to pop in and visit me, exactly, is it? Still, you’re always welcome, you know that, I hope.’ He spread his hands out, palms down, and shifted the papers on his desk with swimming motions. He couldn’t relax. I never could either, until I had to learn to for the stage. It struck me now as ironic that he, with nothing to worry about, yet, was twitching and fidgeting nervously while I was able to sit perfectly still, waiting, like a schoolteacher, for undivided attention.
At last he gave it to me, by taking off his glasses – an infallible sign that he was going to listen because he couldn’t see to work without them.
‘Well, come on,’ he said jovially, ‘out with it.’ From the joviality I could tell he knew it was something fairly serious.
I had meant to tell him straight out, but when it came to the point I found I had to hedge a little. And the way I hedged surprised me. It may have had something to do with the blind way he turned his eyes to me when he’d taken off his glasses. He had a sudden look of helplessness which defeated my intention not to spare him.
‘What’s the worst thing I could do to you, Father?’
For a long moment he sat absolutely still, with those naked-looking eyes fixed on me frowningly as if peering through a mist. I didn’t expect a direct answer; I expected some jocular evasion. But suddenly he said decisively:
‘Take to drink.’
I almost laughed. I don’t know why; perhaps it was partly relief.
‘Well, it isn’t that.’
‘No? Oh, good!’ He smiled indulgently.
‘Don’t smile, Father. I think you’ll think what I’ve got to tell you is just as bad, or worse.’ He kept on smiling, though, almost patronizingly, as if to say he was sure it couldn’t be as bad as all that. I didn’t regard this as a compliment to me. It was just that he thought me as incapable of excesses, admirable or otherwise, as himself.
‘I’m pregnant,’ I said.
Those two words shocked even me with their crudeness. I instantly wished I’d said the softer ‘I’m going to have a baby’, or even something fatuous and euphemistic. The blunt statement of the biological fact had the same after-echoes as a slap across his face, a thing I’d abruptly lost all desire to give him, even figuratively.
Numbly I watched the tolerant smile slip off his face as his cheek-muscles sagged. I waited almost impatiently for them to stiffen again in anger and outrage. They didn’t, and the tableau seemed to be held and held until I could feel my eyelids beginning to smart from being held rigidly open. At last, with a huge effort, I made myself move, and choked out, ‘Do say something, for God’s sake!’ My voice held all the anger I’d expected in his face.
But he still didn’t speak. He just kept numbly staring. It was as if he’d just had a bullet in the stomach and knew it was going to start hurting like hell at any minute. Finally he blinked rather stupidly and rubbed his eyes as if he’d been asleep. ‘I can’t seem to take it in,’ he mumbled. Then he put his elbows on the desk and covered his face with his hands like a tired old man.
Suddenly I was appalled. At one stroke I had punished him for all the nameless agonies he had put me through, and I regretted it. I regretted it so deeply that in that moment I felt this was the worst part of the whole thing. Looking at the dark, disordered top of his head, with the sturdy blunt fingers pressed into the hair, I thought that all the rest of my life would be easy, compared to seeing this.