Such is my average nightmare, the kind of neurosis-generated angst fantasy that merely confirms one’s contemporaryness, I suppose — busy man, under pressure — the kind of thing you can even learn to look on with a certain affection after the nth recurrence.
But the night Shirley threw me out was the first time. And the interpretation seemed obvious. I was mutilated by this break-up. Indeed in my sleep I started calling out for her, needing to show her the disaster, the bloody stump, and so finally, shouting my wife’s name, I woke myself up. I was in a sweat, shocked and full of adrenalin. Immediately, in just pyjamas, relieved as I moved that I hadn’t stopped to agonise over this one, I ran down two flights of gritty, lino-covered stairs to a pay phone on the first landing. Then back to my room for a coin, then back to the phone.
I wept as I spoke. She wept on hearing me weeping. We told each other we couldn’t bear the thought of separation. We had invested so much in our marriage, our identities were so wrapped up in it, in each other, we just couldn’t bear for it to end. Who were we if not our marriage? In half an hour I was home and enjoying precisely the sentimental reconciliation I had hoped for and been denied just days before.
So that only a few weeks later, shortly after our return from Turkey, it would be the rings in her urine in the middle of the night, followed by the serious talk with Mr Harcourt, the mortgage, the payrise, the house in Hendon with permission for an extension, nausea, pregnancy books, pre-natal classes and a host of purchases to be made. .
Such was the power of love. And now it actually came to it, I didn’t mind. I thought, you can handle this, George. You can be happy with this. This is the way life goes. It’s manageable. For Shirley was in such delightful mood now. She was so bright and pleasant, so much my old Shirley. And I thought, you should have caved in on this one ages back, George. This isn’t going to do you any harm. When we lay in bed one night going through the Penguin book of names, I said: ‘If it’s a girl let’s call her Hilary.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it means cheerful, apparently. Like us.’
Part Two. HILARY
How Things Happen.
There is a taboo about handicapped children of course. I’ve had time and occasion to think about this. Either they are wept over by social-consciousness mongers who want to show the government’s not spending enough, or they are simply not mentioned at all. Except perhaps in jokes of the worst taste. Their parents are generally perceived as angels who love them against all the odds, or devils who abuse and abandon them. Martyrdom and brutality make good copy. Another focus of occasional interest are the ones who overcome horrendous difficulties to paint Christmas cards with a brush gripped between the second and third toes. Maybe the TV’ll show you about thirty seconds of their sad and twisted bodies (not that I’m saying they should show more). Then there are the tabloid fables of what genetic engineering may be able to do in the future, and of course the emotive question of whether the severely mentally handicapped girl should be sterilised regardless of consent, that’s an interesting old chestnut. But the day to day business of working, nursing and cleaning, while all the time facing that enormous sense of loss, of no hope, of no way out. . forget it. I certainly would if I could.
I was kissing Shirley’s wet cheeks, she was squeezing my hand hard, sobbing for joy. The child was born. Our child. It was a girl. And so Hilary. We felt extraordinarily whole, fulfilled as a couple, we really did. I was truly happy. When the young doctor, examining the child on a white cloth, says in the kind of regional accent one has come to associate with sit-com and soap opera: ‘It’s a right mess this one I’m afraid. Never seen anything like it.’ Doctors, I’ve discovered, have quite a way with the handicapped.
How things happen and one is tricked into getting used to them! My mother, bringing flowers and baby clothes, says she’s sure it’s nothing they can’t put right. They can do such amazing things these days and we must all pray. Deliberately, I sense, she keeps calling the child by her name, as if she were already a person, picking her up, kissing her, celebrating, as if everything were perfectly normal. Immediately I’m aware of an undercurrent of pious persuasion, to accept this child on any terms as one of the flock, which immediately, instinctively I resist. Then resist the resistance. She is my child. So that I too say, ‘Darling little Hilary,’ while my mother kisses and fondles her.
But Shirley is listless. She keeps her baby completely swaddled and leaves it to the nurses to change her. She doesn’t seem to want to touch or look at her. She doesn’t want to talk about the problem, nor to hear all the rumours of syndromes, cures and prospects that I am rapidly gleaning. I sense that in her silence she is simply willing for it not to be true. She is waiting to wake up into a different reality. Breastfeeding, she weeps quietly, smoothing the child’s thin damp hair. The little face is strange, and strangely endearing.
Mrs Harcourt arrives at last. She bustles brightly but keeps her camera in her case. She doesn’t ask to see the girl’s body. Mr Harcourt comes, phoning first to make sure he won’t find Mrs Harcourt. He is grave and distant. There have been, he says, no cases, to his knowledge, of handicap in the Harcourt family. In the corridor he tells me confidentially that any way he can help financially not to hesitate to ask, and he claps me on a shoulder and says if anybody is equipped to deal with a problem like this it is me. I am so straightforward and sensible. I have my head so firmly on my shoulders.
Shirley’s brother Charles surprises us with a first visit in ages and says he’ll check up what benefits the government has left intact and we’d better grab them before they disappear. Shirley flares up and tells him to get lost. I feel this is a positive development, though when she goes to the bathroom I tell him by all means to do all the checking up he likes. We’d be grateful. ‘The whole game,’ he says, ‘with the Welfare State, or what’s left of it, is knowing what’s due to you.’ I remember the waiting room of the clinic where we attended our pre-natal course and above plastic pigeon holes, the sign: KNOW YOUR BENEFITS. These brief imperatives. Somehow it reminds me of my mother saying: ‘Couunt your blessings.’
They are doing tests, so Shirley has to stay in hospital. They have moved her and the child to Great Ormond Street. They take X-rays and do scans. They are trying to decide, they say, whether maybe an operation wouldn’t put it right. But they have never seen a child with its feet the wrong way round before. Also the thighs are disjointed.
I tell Shirley I suspect we are being drip-fed the bad news at the speed they imagine we can handle it. Whereas I want to know everything now. She shrugs her shoulders. She says she has enough to cope with without my paranoia.
I take a few days off work to think. Already I am aware that I must decide on some strategy, some plan, not just let events take over, especially with Shirley withdrawing into herself. But to make plans I need information. I get on the phone and bother the specialists, the doctors, the ward sister. For God’s sake, it’s been ten days and still no sign of a diagnosis! Coming back from visiting, I stop at Dillons and spend half an hour picking up two hundred quid’s worth of medical books. When I come out into heavy rain they have put the old yellow boot on the car. One thing you soon discover about personal catastrophes is that they don’t excuse you from any of the other rules.