THE day Addy sent the completed manuscript back to me I telephoned Billy Lee and made an appointment. She was a flashy, hard-bitten little woman with many jangling charm-bracelets and dyed red hair. Why I should immediately have liked her I can’t think, but I did. Perhaps because she didn’t waste time or make any false promises.
‘I’ll read it quickly,’ she said. ‘I can’t say more. Publishing’s costly and first books by old people are very hard to sell.’
When I got home John was waiting for me with a grin across his face which shone like a new moon through the darkness at the top of the stairs.
‘I got something for you,’ he said. ‘Two things.’
One was the cradle. It was a long box with a roof-like hood at one end, on rockers. It had all been carefully sandpapered and painted white, and there was a flower-carving on each side. Hanging from the peak of the hood was a bottle of Guinness.
I let out a hoot. ‘John, it’s perfect, but what on earth’s that for?’
‘That for us – not for the baby,’ he said. ‘You like it? Really?’
I rocked the cradle. It swayed smoothly from side to side without any bumping. ‘It’s a beautiful cradle,’ I said. ‘And a beautiful Guinness. Let’s have it now.’
‘Good.’ He poured it into two glasses and held his up. ‘Now you got to drink me good luck,’ he said.
‘I do – I do!’
‘But special. Something good happen today.’
‘Hooray! What?’
‘Wait there,’ he said.
He went into his own room and shouted, ‘Listen now!’ After a moment I was astonished to hear a trumpet solo with a full orchestral background, playing St Louis Woman. Hurrying after him, Guinness in hand, I found him crouched over a small but brand-new record-player.
‘John! You got one!’
‘Yes. And tonight, I buy the dinner, and cook too, while we listen to all my records I never played.’ He beamed up at me. ‘I got me a new job. Bloody good. Better than old one – I play solo now, good band, no more club, not work all night, Union rates.’
‘Marvellous!’
Suddenly I staggered and dropped the glass. John jumped up and held my shoulders.
‘What’s the matter?’
It was the most extraordinary sensation. It had to happen twice before I realized what it was. Then I wanted to shout with excitement. ‘Feel! Feel!’ I cried, holding his hand over the baby. A second later he snatched it away. He danced about pretending it was hurt.
‘Boy, he kicking like a footballer!’
And he went on kicking.
His hitherto gentle stirrings within me had merely reassured me that he was there; they hadn’t served to remind me, as the recurrent kicks now did throughout the day and most of the night, that he was not only there but alive, growing, fighting towards the fast-approaching day when he would plunge head-first into life.
This tangible life-force drove me, literally, from within. Addy’s letter had its intellectual effect, but the kicks and blows from my inner mentor were probably the deciding factor in my abrupt emergence from lethargy.
I began, belatedly, to go to classes, to take exercises; I was told reprovingly that it was probably too late to save me much ‘discomfort’ at my confinement (the word ‘pain’ is avoided so strenuously at pre-natal clinics that one becomes over-conscious of it by its very absence); but none the less, I was encouraged to persevere – ‘for baby’s sake’. It never failed to grate on my nerves when well-meaning people referred to ‘baby’ instead of ‘the baby’ or ‘your baby’. It seemed, somehow, an unwarranted familiarity if not a downright twee-ism. But the very irritation I felt at small things of this sort encouraged me. It was a sign that I was fully alive and aware again.
I removed the cheap kilt-pins and bits of elastic with which I had been carelessly enlarging the plackets of my ordinary skirts, put them away and bought two inexpensive but quite passable sets of maternity ‘separates’. I dug out the dog-eared list of books that Dr Graham had given me months ago, got them out of the library and read them carefully. One of them thoughtfully supplied a list two and a half pages long, of ‘everything you’ll need for your baby’. Because it said ‘your’ baby I was prepared to give it serious consideration; but if I had bought everything on it, not only would I have had to go deep into debt but I would have been left with no living space. I took it to Dr Maxwell, and he roared with laughter and put a check-mark beside about one-fifth of the items, and query beside another fifth. The checks were musts; the queries were things it would be helpful to have, if I could afford them. The pram, the bath and the crib came into the second category.
‘He can sleep in a nice clean drawer and be bathed in a nice clean sink,’ he said briskly. ‘Only don’t close the drawer by mistake, and mind the taps.’ I was rather shocked and asked him if he were joking, but he looked put out and said certainly not. ‘Of course, if he turns out to be delicate, that’s different. But normal babies are tough as old boots. Give ’em plenty of love and they don’t give a damn if you put ’em to bed in a window box and bath ’em in the rain-barrel.’
‘Won’t I need a pram to exercise him?’
Maxwell snorted. ‘Ever stop to figure out how much exercise a baby gets, lying in a pram? It’ll be high summer when he comes – take all his clothes off and lie him in the sun on a groundsheet.’
‘But when I go shopping?’
‘Carry him on your back like the Indians.’
I laughed. ‘I can’t do that!’
‘Why not? Well, get a pram then, an old one. Now I come to think of it, we’ve got one at home somewhere, probably up in the attic if my wife hasn’t chucked it out. May be a bit cobwebby, after all we haven’t had a baby for ten years – and it’s done for three of mine – perhaps it’s a bit battered, too. Still, if you don’t mind a few snooty looks from the nannies in Kensington Gardens …’
It was a perfectly wonderful pram. Nor was it either cobwebby or shabby, by the time the doctor’s wife and eldest son got through cleaning and painting it. They even offered to keep it for me until I was ready for it.
I bought the rest of the things the doctor had checked, plus some of the ‘queried’ items. I regarded these as semi-luxuries, and made amends by cutting down on essentials – a nightie here, a dozen nappies there. (Why should any baby need four dozen nappies, for heaven’s sake?) I enjoyed the shopping very much. Everything I bought added to my growing sense of the reality, the exciting imminence of the baby’s arrival. When he kicked me now, I would say, ‘All right, all right – what the hell more do you want?’ and feel a surge of physical joy go over me that was like being bowled over by a warm wave on a summer beach.
Perhaps I would have enjoyed the shopping even more if I had bought a ring to wear. But I didn’t; somehow it seemed too big a lie. I let people give me looks, and returned them with interest.
The woman at the clinic was surprised and rather annoyed by the progress I made in learning to relax. I did work hard at it, but I think my success was partly due to having learned to breathe properly for the stage. My diaphragm and various other muscles seemed to be well under my control, whereas a lot of the other girls couldn’t seem to locate theirs mentally – it was like trying to wiggle their ears. I felt so bursting with confidence from this small triumph that I asked Mavis to teach me smocking, and I learned it in a week.
I felt transformed. It was like having lain frowsting in bed, unable to summon the energy or enthusiasm to get up, and then at last rousing oneself, having a refreshing bath, making up one’s face and getting cracking. One invariably wonders why the sleazy, rumpled bed seemed too attractive to leave.
I put an advertisement in the newsagent’s frame to say that I would type manuscripts, letters or anything else anyone wanted typed. The old man I had talked to on my first day in the house shook his head when he read it. ‘No one round here writes,’ he said. ‘They can’t, poor ignorant bleeders.’ Still, he put it up, and about two days later telephoned me. ‘Well – shows how wrong you can be,’ he said. ‘I got something for you. I’ll bring it round on me way home.’ I knew he lived behind the shop, and felt grateful as well as excited about having some work to do.
It turned out to be a television play. It was pretty appalling, but who was I to worry? Before I’d finished with that one, there came another. The little newsagent waxed cynical as usual. ‘You make what you can out of ’em,’ he advised me, sucking his teeth. ‘They watch the thing a few weeks, think they know all about it. Television plays! Most of ’em couldn’t write a laundry list.’ But I’d have typed even laundry lists for money, and my new customers didn’t seem to be short of that. The newsagent fought my corner and insisted on cash in advance.
I still had spare time on my hands. I spent a lot of it walking. The doctor had told me this would be good for me, providing I got on a bus the minute I felt tired. I could usually walk several miles before this happened.
One day I walked to Drummonds; or rather, most of the way. I took a bus the last few miles. I stood looking up at the corner window of what had been my office. A rather smart young man in a bow-tie kept peering impatiently out into the street as if expecting someone. He had dark hair and a thin black moustache and small, discontented eyes. He looked Jewish. He was the first Jewish person I’d ever disliked on sight.
Several times I found myself walking towards home – my father’s house. I always turned back before reaching the river. I had a superstition that the magnetic field would be too strong for me once I set foot on the bridge.
Days began to pass more slowly, to lose their individuality. Events like the arrival of James with the promised armful of nappies and some flowers – plus the welcome gift of a year with a nappy-washing service – stood out like bas-relief on the uniform flatness of the days. Also, we were having a spring heatwave. I moved slowly through long soporific days of sweet drenching sunshine, filled with an unreasoning contentment. Sometimes it seemed too hot to move. But I did my exercises every day. If I tried to skip them, the baby’s kicks seemed to accuse me.
One evening when I was idling slowly along the eight-o’clock-quiet street, my back began to ache a little and I turned into a small public garden where there were some benches and a show of tulips and wallflowers in the litter-patterned flower-beds. I eased myself down on a bench and closed my eyes. The litter, the dusty flowers, the ugly rearing walls surrounding the tiny ineffectual oasis in the concrete, vanished. The sounds and scents remained. The wallflowers’ perfume was untarnished by their coating of soot. There were birds somewhere, closer to my ear than the traffic. My tired muscles relaxed; the baby was asleep inside me, and peace wrapped me round, as uncomplicated as it must be for animals, resting their tired bodies and conscious only of the elementary pleasures of warm air and safety and no loud, sudden sounds. I drifted off to sleep.
I barely seemed to touch the bottom before starting to rise towards wakefulness again; but it must have been longer than it seemed, because when I opened my eyes it was almost dark. My earlier light sweat made me damp and chilly now. The walls of surrounding buildings climbed unlit into the gloom; there was a feeling of being down a well. I shivered a little and stood up stiffly.
As I left the garden to get back on to the road, I thought I saw a figure detach itself from the shadow on one of the other benches. A little way along the street, I turned to look back. A man had come out of the garden and was walking along after me. He was tall and lanky and wore a pulled-down hat. He had his hands in his pockets, and looked so much like a traditional film stalker that I felt no more than a trivial, fictional alarm. But just to amuse myself I pretended that he was following me. Every now and then I looked back and when he was still there, I felt almost pleased. I began to plan how I would snub him if he spoke to me. But of course he wouldn’t; I was so very obviously ‘married’. I nearly giggled at the idea of anyone trying to pick up a girl as pregnant as I was.
However, when I’d been walking slowly for ten minutes and he was still behind me, I began to get rather tired of it. I turned into a crowded coffee-house seeking warmth and the security of numbers. Not that the numbers were very comforting except in their quantity … they were nearly all Teddy-boys. One of them looked me up and down and remarked with a snigger, ‘You can see she’s got the right stuff in her,’ and another one called to me, ‘Carry yer luggage, lady?’ at which they all tittered idiotically. One of them stood up and said, ‘’Ere, ma, ’ave my seat, you got more to carry round than wot I got.’ His girl-friend kicked him and went off into shrieks.
It was like a nightmare in which one gets lost in a zoo. I wanted to get out again, but that would have called forth more inane jeers. I put my head down and walked to the far corner of the café, where there was an empty table. I sat down and stared at its coffee-smudged red top. I wished I smoked, it would have given me something to do with my hands. I felt spotlit; there was a sort of horror about the faces I had seen as I came in – thin, meaningless, unreachably stupid. I felt the baby kick protestingly against the sudden tension within me, and it hurt for the first time.
Someone came to stand by my table. I said, ‘Coffee please,’ without looking up, but the figure didn’t move. I felt an unthinking panic, as if those simian creatures were closing round me; it rose to my throat and I thought wildly, ‘It’s bad for the baby for me to feel so afraid,’ I stood up sharply, meaning to push through at any cost and get out. Face to face with me was Terry.
He took off the pulled-down hat and his fair hair dropped on to his forehead, giving his sharply-angled face a look of ineffectual youngness. His eyes wavered, met mine, as if accidentally, and then swivelled off again. He looked like a child who expects a beating.
I stared at him with unbelief. I had hardly thought of him for months. At one time I used to feed myself perpetually with fantasies of this meeting. Lately, I had always imagined meeting Toby. By now I was thinking, even in dreams, of Toby as the father of the baby. The truth of the matter swept in on me shatteringly now. This thin, intelligent face – that rather small mouth, those blue eyes, that nicely cleft chin and narrow, angular jaw – all these my baby might have. It was incredible. I couldn’t relate the seed of that body to the body within me, any more easily than with any other man I knew, or didn’t know. I felt no pull, no pang of affinity. I scarcely felt recognition. Only a remote mental astonishment.
‘Hallo, Terry,’ I said. The astonishment echoed in my voice.
‘Hallo,’ he muttered.
I became aware that the Teddies were murmuring and guffawing.
‘What a place to meet!’ I said. ‘I ducked in here because I thought there was a stranger following me.’ It shocked me anew to realize how right, in one sense, I’d been.
‘I saw you asleep in that garden,’ he said. ‘I’ve been sitting there for an hour, looking at you.’
Our eyes met. ‘Just please don’t ask if it’s yours,’ I said.
His fair skin flushed darkly. ‘I wasn’t going to,’ he muttered.
He reached out hesitantly and took my arm. ‘Let’s go somewhere civilized where we can talk,’ he said indistinctly. Stares and whispers followed us as we went out. I wondered if something intuitive deep in those untouched shaggy brains told them, as intelligent observation could not have done, that we were not an ordinary married couple.
Out in the lamp-lit street we walked along aimlessly. Terry had dropped my arm uncertainly as soon as we were outside. I was aware as I hadn’t been before of the weight of the child, and my own waddling, head-back gait. I tried to think of something to say, but the situation was so unexpected I couldn’t.
‘Let’s get a taxi,’ said Terry.
‘That’d be lovely,’ I said politely.
In the taxi I made myself relax. My legs and back ached painfully. I closed my eyes and enjoyed the padded movement and the pattern of passing lights on my eyelids.
‘Are you all right?’
I reluctantly forced my mind to function. ‘Yes, just tired.’
He was sitting in the far corner of the taxi, looking at me with the same helpless, expectant expression.
‘Where are you living?’ he asked.
‘In a room in Fulham.’
‘What’s it like?’
‘Quite all right.’
‘What’s the address?’
I told him. I felt as if I were floating on a tide of events it was pointless for me even to try to control or fight. My back was still aching; I shifted about trying to ease it.
Nothing more was said till we reached the house. Terry paid the taxi while I stood on the pavement. Then he turned, almost apprehensively, and looked up at the house.
‘It looks pretty shabby,’ he said.
I laughed. ‘You should see it by daylight,’ I said.
He hung back. ‘Couldn’t we go somewhere else?’
I understood his guilty reluctance to see the details of the situation he had placed me in. ‘It’s not all that bad,’ I said, thinking with unexpected hardness, Let him see it. Why should I let him off? ‘Come on.’
He followed me silently up the long flights of stairs. ‘Isn’t it very bad for you to climb all these stairs?’ he asked. He seemed unable to help rubbing his own nose in it. My hardness disappeared. I felt sorry for him. After all, what a shock it must have been for him to see me sitting in that depressing, grimy little garden, my hair lank with heat, my smock unmistakably bulging, probably asleep with my mouth open … He must have recognized me, started towards me perhaps, and suddenly – seen; stopped short; calculated with numb horror – and then, how much easier to run like hell than to stay! I stopped at the top of the fourth flight and tried to get my breath without panting.
‘It’s good exercise if you go slowly,’ I said casually.
‘God, not more!’ he exclaimed anxiously as we started to climb again.
‘Only one flight.’
The L-shaped room welcomed me as usual, its flashing whiteness leaping outwards from the lamp as I switched it on, its patches of bright colour pleasing my eyes. James’s flowers were still not finished; they fanned gaily from one of the bakelite mugs, flinging exotic shadows. I moved a plastic bath-bowl filled with a jumble of baby-clothes and talc so that Terry could sit in the arm-chair.
He sat, as if dazed, but jumped up again guiltily as I began to light the fire. ‘Here, I’ll do that –’ I handed the matches to him silently, watching his hands tremble over the business of striking them. He took longer over it than necessary, putting off the inevitable moment when we would have to talk. I felt sorrier and sorrier for him. I wished now I could have spared him. After all, what possible good would it do?
‘Would you like anything – coffee?’
‘No, heavens, no, please!’
I sat on the bed resting my back. He sat again in the arm-chair. After a while he met my eyes.
I found it easy to smile at him. ‘Don’t look so anguished, darling – it’s serious, but it’s not a Greek tragedy.’
It seemed natural to call him darling. It was more a theatrical than an emotional term of endearment. But it seemed to stick a further barbed dart of guilt into him. His hang-dog expression was almost comic on his long, thin face. I hadn’t realized how well it lent itself to lugubriousness.
‘I can’t seem to get it into my head,’ he mumbled. ‘I sat there in that garden, trying to get it into my head,’ He licked his lips. ‘Why didn’t you get in touch with me?’
I forbore to mention that he hadn’t left me his address. ‘Because it seemed such a cheek – presenting you with a bill like that for something you hadn’t even enjoyed.’
There was a silence and then he said with an effort, ‘You didn’t enjoy it either, so why should you pay the bill all by yourself?’
‘There was no alternative for me.’
‘Wasn’t there?’
‘No, there wasn’t.’ I winced from my own dishonesty, remembering the night I had panicked and made that unkept appointment with Dr Graham. But there was no need to mention that now, I felt.
‘Did you never even think of telling me?’
‘No.’
‘You could have found me if you’d wanted to.’
So he remembered about the address. ‘Yes, but I didn’t want to, Terry.’
He stared at his knees. ‘Was I so – did I behave so badly?’
‘I understood how you felt.’
‘It was just that it was all so –’
‘I said I understood. I felt the same way.’
‘Everything was spoiled. It was so much my fault that I couldn’t face you, remembering how I’d felt before, and how I felt afterwards –’
‘Terry, do shut up about it,’ I said quite gently.
We sat silently. At last he roused himself.
‘Jane, I can’t tell you what I felt when I saw you asleep there, and realized … You looked so tired and alone. What you must have been through all these months – I don’t want you to tell me about it, although I know I deserve to have to hear it all – I just can’t bear to think of it.’ I said nothing, and he said with difficulty, ‘Did your father –’
‘Terry, don’t do this to yourself. What on earth good will it do? It hasn’t been so bad. I haven’t been alone all the time. I met a boy – in this house – in fact, I made quite a lot of new friends. It’s been interesting and good for me in lots of ways.’
He was staring at me. ‘God, how you’ve changed!’
‘How?’ I asked, interested.
‘Don’t you want to – to hurt me in some way – punish me for all you’ve gone through?’
‘No. Well, only a little. If you’d come back a few months ago – but I feel different now. More peaceful about it.’
‘Jane –’ he leaned forward. ‘Tell me how you feel now. Bitter? As if you were caught in a trap?’
I shook my head. ‘Not a bit like that any more.’
‘How, then?’
‘I’m quite excited about it. I can’t wait to see what he’ll be like.’
A look of gratitude and relief flattened out his face for a moment. His mouth relaxed open and he stared into my eyes.
‘You mean it,’ he said at last. ‘Thank God, you really mean it.’
‘Of course I mean it,’ I said lightly.