Enunciating fiercely, I tell him, ‘Now if you don’t agree to go into a home, old man, if you don’t just leave my mother be, then I’m going to come here every week and beat hell out of you, okay. I’m going to beat you to a pulp. Now get upstairs and wash your face and stay out of my sight.’
Muttering under his breath, but definitely defeated now, he struggles to his feet and limps out into the passage and off upstairs.
Left alone, I find myself trembling and truly truly appalled. Resting against the mantelpiece, I pick up a dusty Hummel of a small boy and two yellow birds sitting together on a country fence, their mouths wide open in song. How my mother loves these quaint images of innocence and happiness. An ice-cream van tinkles in some suburban distance, exactly as twenty years ago. And I draw breath. I try to steady myself. I feel deeply justified in going for the old man, yet can’t escape the terrible ugliness of what I’ve done. Have I ever hit anybody before? Never. What am I sinking to? Yet the paradoxical pattern of this experience — justification followed by ugliness — is all too familiar (didn’t I feel much the same after cheating on my wife: justified, ugly).
When Mother comes back I burst into tears in her presence for the first time since childhood.
‘We were so so happy,’ I weep. ‘We’d really got so close together. Why did it have to happen? Why?’
Mother hugs me and repeats over and over: ‘Bless you, my dear heart, bless you, bless you, bless you, my dear heart.’
Later, driving home, I reflect that of course I only let rip with Grandfather so as not to have to do so with Mother. It was an easy way out. For in many ways it is more her fault than his. A generation on, it was she should have known what to do, her I should have been shouting at. Yet I know I never will.
I get home, transfer a Heinz curry and rice from freezer to microwave, and while that’s cooking look up Christensen’s syndrome in the medical book I bought. Of one thousand eight hundred expensive pages, my baby girl’s condition merits only six lines:
Rare syndrome of varying intensity involving multiple disabilities and/or deformities. Cases differ widely and little is know of causes. Affects only females, but may (or may not) be passed on by males. Possible manifestations: spasticity of lower limbs, malformation of major articulations, cerebral palsy (rare). May occur together with, or be mistaken for, Down’s syndrome.
The phone rings. My mother’s voice speaks breathily: ‘Something’s happened to Dad.’
She found the old man upstairs on the floor by his bed unable to speak or move.
‘Dead?’
‘No, he opens his mouth, it’s just he can’t speak.’
‘Stroke,’ I say. ‘You. .’
‘Oh, sorry, that must be the ambulance already, I. .’
I say to phone me just as soon as she’s got any concrete news or needs help. Then I put down the phone and eat. Going about all the routine domestic tasks that evening, washing dishes, wiping surfaces, I numbly wonder whether Grandfather will manage to tell the powers that be that I beat him, or whether they themselves will find signs of violence. I feel nervous, faintly horrified, but there’s a growing sense of grim satisfaction too. Surely now he will be forced into a home at last. I have liberated my mother. It is not a crime. On the contrary I have done something good.
A precedent perhaps.
Four Thousand to One
What happens over the following months is that Shirley gives up entirely while I throw myself heart and soul into saving the situation, into finding, no matter how far I have to go, how much I have to spend, some cure that will reverse our little girl Hilary’s condition. My reasoning is that they can’t know for certain that her brain is in the same condition as Mavis’s. The medical books, when they mention it at all, say the syndrome is entirely unpredictable in terms of severity and areas affected. No one can really know how she will develop. She might have a severe physical handicap and a brilliant mind, for example. So perhaps, I think, there is still a chance for our daughter and for us. And if there is such a chance, however remote, it is my duty to go for it.
Shirley comes home after a month in hospital. She refuses to speak about Hilary’s condition. She avoids wheeling her out where she will be seen by neighbours. She looks after her carefully but clinically, never complaining how difficult it is to dress her with her stiff joints, never making even the most remotely relevant comments. She is efficient, tight-lipped, mechanical, beaten.
‘Please don’t tell me,’ she says quickly, when I begin about something I have read, some information gleaned. ‘Please, I don’t want to know, okay?’
I say how important it is for us to communicate, pull together.
She says: ‘When a tragedy occurs there’s no point in pretending it hasn’t.’ And she says I was right all along, we should never have had children, they’re too risky. Never never never. She could have found a job at another school, or in business, in the end she could have done it. We could have been happy. It is all her fault.
But I say no, she was right. And I tell her how much I want a healthy child now. It was just sheer bad luck.
‘Bit worrying,’ she remarks, ‘when we both start telling each other the other was right.’ She looks up at me from plucking a thread on her blouse and half smiles.
‘Everything will turn out okay,’ I say. ‘I was talking to a specialist who. .’
‘Please, George.’
Weeks pass. We don’t make love for the unspoken fear of somehow generating another Hilary. The geneticist has said a one in four chance. Add that to the, what, thousand to one chance of getting pregnant despite contraceptives and you’re talking about four thousand to one, the kind of odds you might never win at, but could perfectly well lose at. Lying in our bed sometimes, watching the evening shadows that stretch and flit, I will be urgently aware of our extraordinary isolation, from each other, from the rest of the world.
Still, I resist the temptation simply to work late at the office and absent myself from family life. When I am at InterAct I work hard, I plunge into work as into a warm healing bath, I seem to reach intensities of concentration, speed of operation, I never dreamt possible before, but I always make sure I’m home in good time. I think, we will come through even this, I will save little Hilary. I will. And I am terribly tender with the little girl, changing and feeding her myself since Shirley lost her milk almost immediately. Sometimes I’ll be up half the night, heating bottles in the microwave. I look into her small, slightly fish-like blue eyes and wait, hope for the first smile.
Many men, I’ve heard, simply refuse to look at a handicapped child.
Of the relatives, my mother and Shirley’s brother Charles are assiduous to the point of irritation. Mrs Harcourt on the other hand pays ever rarer visits during which she will talk eagerly about proportional representation and the advantages of using faster film, before making for the door with the near panic of someone leaving a sinking ship. Mr Harcourt occasionally phones offering advice about specialists suggested by his professional friends. He will look after the consultancy fees. Peggy brings Frederick over at weekends and offers to babysit Hilary so that we can go out together. Shirley invariably refuses. She doesn’t want to go out. She wouldn’t know what to do.