Shirley whispers: ‘At least we’re close to each other, Georgie. At least we’re close.’ I storm out of the room to demand some information from somebody.
The doctors stall me. They say our child is perfectly healthy, eating well and moving her bowels, and there is no hurry. Later I wonder if this isn’t all part of a strategy. By not telling me anything they offer me the role of relief, of he who has to busy himself bothering other people and their secretaries. They slot your shock into their little routines. They have a way of getting you through. Which you hate and cling to.
Peggy comes. She is leaving the hospital as I arrive and we have a coffee together in the cafeteria. She keeps waggling her big knees under the table so that our coffee slops. I ask if she is cold, and I ask: ‘So what does Buddhism have to say about the handicapped? Are they reincarnated dinosaurs?’
She says: ‘You know there’s nothing I can say, George.’
‘Mother’s praying,’ I say, ‘so that’s one angle covered.’
She says: ‘So am I as a matter of fact. Aren’t you?’
I say I thought the Oriental brigade didn’t go in for that direct request kind of prayer. I thought it was all meditation and inward illumination.
She says: ‘I may not do it very often but I’ve always prayed just how I like, thank you very much.’
She is wearing a loose lilac jump suit, an old fashioned blue spotted foulard tied under her plump square chin. She has let her hair grow a bit and it’s chunky and messy. She looks slightly overweight, jolly, attractive, a very normal London mother. I think: her career has always been just being herself, rather than doing anything, achieving anything. She has no direction, no thrust. Warming her hands round her coffee cup, she tries to look into my eyes and smiles. I look at my Jaffa Cake. I say: ‘I always knew you were the lucky one, Peg. Fancy being able to pray.’
‘You couldn’t lend me fifty quid?’ she asks.
Driving home that afternoon I stop at a Tempo discount warehouse and picked up the best videorecorder they have, plus half a dozen films to watch. I dream that I have lost my leg. It has been torn from my thigh. And I look in the fridge, in the airing cupboard, under the bed.
What is Life Expectancy?
Finally there is the interview with the geneticist. He is portly, dark-suited. He hums and ha’s and smiles. He has the manner of someone who has accepted that sensitivity is a necessary accessory to his profession but has never been able to master it. He describes the baby’s condition as defined in the reports of the various paediatric specialists: the physical deformities, notably of the legs and the major joints, an unusual brain scan.
Which adds up to what, I ask. What is it? And what are they going to do about it? Shirley in blue dressing gown with tiny pink flowers is silent with the sleeping child in her arms. Snuffling in its sleep it might be any child.
‘Slowly does it, chaps. One thing at a time.’ He has the consultant’s avuncular smile, calmly twiddling with a propelling pencil behind an unnecessarily large leather-topped desk. He draws a breath, knits his brow: ‘Now what I want to put to you is this: can either of you recall any similar problem in your family histories? Anything at all. Think carefully now. Some aunt, uncle, great grandparents, anything.’
Perhaps it is his curious manner of addressing us as if we were five-year-olds that makes me fail to see the obvious. Behind him, across the courtyard, I watch a tiny oriental girl wiping condensation from a window with the sleeve of her green pyjamas. Shirley shakes her head. A cousin of her mother’s had a child with problems, but that was due to a trauma at birth.
The consultant nods with pantomime gravity. I jingle change in my pocket.
‘Well, have we got any brothers and sisters?’ He raises white eyebrows. ‘And have they got children, yes? No problems with miscarriages, for example? That’s often an indication that. .’
‘Mavis!’
Yes, Mavis. In one split second, one click of the interminable and generally uneventful ratchet of time, my whole life, childhood and youth, career and marriage, apparently so varied, changing, picaresque, so much my own to do what I want with, succeed or fail, all collapses, concertinas, flattens, into my aunt’s flat and mooning face. And is no longer mine.
Aunt Mavis. Hilary. Past. Future.
Perhaps fifteen minutes later, leaving his office with its big desk, its framed photos of smiling but obviously wrong children (in bad taste surely), Shirley says: ‘I think that’s the first nice bloke we’ve spoken to. At least he told us something.’
But I’m moving in a trance. Like some insect who discovers colour and flight is just a dream. He is still a cocoon-trapped grub. How can I live with a repeat of Mavis? Plus physical deformities into the bargain. Worse than Mavis!
‘Well?’ When we get back to the ward Mrs Harcourt has arrived. Despite the powerful central heating she hasn’t taken off an elegant cashmere coat.
Charles is with her and comes out with me, asking for a lift to Shepherd’s Bush. A caucus meeting. What is a caucus meeting exactly? Taking him gives me an excuse for going straight on to Park Royal to tell Mother. Tell Mother it is her fault.
Tall, lean, glassy-eyed, unshaven, old leather jacket, narrow blue jeans, Charles begins talking about the ins and outs of some Labour Council committee he is involved in. I’m not paying attention and anyway he must surely have appreciated by now what I think of his politics. Eventually I cut in to say, ‘But what on earth do I care about rights for black unmarried mothers? Don’t they have the same rights everybody else does?’
His tic is to rub thumb and forefinger along either side of his off-white teeth, an intellectual, concentrated look on his face. He says he’s been trying to distract me. And begins to roll a cigarette. It must be a difficult moment for me.
I tell him not to bother. I don’t want to be distracted. On the contrary. My particular style is to look at problems and deal with them.
Pushing in the lighter, trying to be clever, he says okay then I can try some lateral thinking, I can look at black unmarried mothers as a category similar to my own, another minority who need defending.
‘I beg your pardon?’
I am a member of a minority now, he says, with a handicapped child. The only way to progress is through solidarity with other minorities.
I’m quite harsh. I tell him not to talk like an arsehole, it isn’t as though the black unmarried mothers are spending their days worrying themselves sick about my plight, is it? Nor can they possibly help me. Or I them. Each to his own. Anyway, it’s their own fault if they have kids, with the State positively hurling contraceptives at them. Whereas what’s happened to us was pure bad luck.
He seems to relish my rudeness: ‘How you get into the hole you’re in is irrelevant. It’s how you get out that needs attention. You have to pull together.’
He has a bony, slightly freckled, very intense face, Charles. When he speaks, it is always with the assumption that he has thought more, and more deeply, about the subject than you have. I suck my teeth and decide to let the matter drop.