So that one evening I say, does she mind then, seeing as she has company, if I go out myself? On the Finchley Road I phone Susan Wyndham, my contact at Brown Boveri, a small girl, almost plain, but with a certain glint in her eye. My wife is away, would she like to go out for a drink? And in a Hungarian restaurant off the Edgware Road we talk very seriously and theoretically about relationships and faithfulness and fun and what life is for. Discrete loudspeakers are playing mazurkas. With make-up and washed hair, she looks better than I’m used to seeing her and has a knowingly wry smile as we wander around for a while under thin rain looking for a decent pub. When I kiss her below her Willesden flat, she comes back so fiercely I’m taken aback. But afterwards she cries and pushes her face into her pillow and says she has a fiancé who had to go to Australia for a year with his company and she’s been faithful to him for nearly ten months. Why, oh why did she let him down now?
When I get home it’s almost one. Charles and Peggy are arguing heatedly about feminism, which Charles is fiercely defending and Peggy fiercely attacking. Shirley has gone to bed with a couple of Mogadon. Hilary has obviously shat and they are ignoring the smell. I change her and re-make her bed. I sit on the loo and stare at the wall for perhaps fifteen minutes, then grit my teeth and go downstairs to propose Glenlivet all round.
Charles says: ‘Of course, it’s not too bad while she’s still a baby like any other. It’s when she grows up that things’ll really get heavy.’
Please
Shirley has always been against an operation, or at least not for it. But the doctors tell us that if the child is ever to walk something must be done. And if nothing else there will be the aesthetic effect.
However, they need both our signatures.
My response, being first and foremost a doer is, okay, try it, go for it, cut. Shirley, who, for all her bubbliness and energy when she’s up, has a fundamentally passive streak to her, is not convinced.
‘What’s the use?’ she says.
‘What do you mean, what’s the use? We’ve got to try everything.’
‘But the girl is like that. I don’t see what’s to gain by chopping and changing her. It won’t work.’
I ask her how can we go on, how can we go on with our lives if we don’t believe the child can be made normal?
‘You always set such store by normality,’ she says.
‘I should hope so.’
‘We’ve lived without it before one way or another.’
I say there’s hardly any point in bringing that up. That was an aberration. We’ve got over it.
‘And this is a tragedy.’
‘Right, so we’ve got to get over this too.’
She finds her wan smile. ‘George, you don’t “get over” tragedies. Haven’t you got it into your head yet that this has really happened?’
I remark that we would serve the little girl better if we argued about the matter logically without attacking each other. Anyway it is she, it seems to me, who is refusing to find out what’s happened or to look into it in any way, while I’ve been all over the place consulting authorities and books and talking to specialists and so on.
‘But it’s not the kind of thing you need books and experts to help you understand. It’s simple, you just sit and look at it.’
We stare at each other. Her face is drained, thin, but with a kind of luminous serenity to it. Which is new.
‘They said if they did the operation she might be able to walk, they might be able to fix everything.’
‘They said not to raise our hopes. You can’t refuse to live with things just because they’re not normal.’
‘We were so together, Shirley,’ I plead, ‘before she was born. We were so happy. Weren’t we? If only they can sort her out, everything will come right between us.’
‘It’s a chimera.’
‘But how can you know?’
‘Because they’d never have offered an operation if you hadn’t bothered them so much.’ And she says: ‘I don’t want her hurt any more than she is now. God knows what they’ll do when they start cutting. She’ll be strapped up for months. Nor do I see why we have to operate on her to improve our relationship. Which is fine as it is.’
My mother comes round and over tea and angel buns, brought in a biscuit tin I remember from earliest childhood, she begins to say what marvellous marvellous things surgeons can do these days. She’s been praying so hard and it’s true that the Lord is capable of revealing himself through science, His healing powers. She is sure it will come good.
Shirley asks how Grandfather is and says I really ought to go and visit him.
I phone Mr and Mrs Harcourt, Charles and Peggy, and get all of them to put pressure on Shirley. Everybody is on my side. Everybody supports the quick fix-it drama of orthopaedic surgery. Intervene, is the general chorus, do something about this wrong child, heal her, quick. And they are right. If the doctors are offering hope, who are we not to grasp at it? What kind of life could I have without it? Every time I come face to face with Shirley’s entrenched fatalism, her ‘accept, learn to live with it’, I find myself feeling quite sick. I know I’ll break down. I know that this is not my life.
The day before the operation Hilary smiles for the first time. She smiles and keeps on smiling. She beams from an apple-red complexion lying in a carrycot on the living room sideboard. The sight of this personality shining out of the so slightly strange face is at once immensely exciting, and distressing.
The same afternoon Mother phones to say that Grandfather is speaking again. They are moving him to a rehabilitation ward. ‘He asked after you.’
‘Oh really. What did he say?’
I notice that I’m not flinching at all.
‘Just your name. He’s not very coherent. Oh, and he asked for his pipe of course.’
‘Are you pleased?’
‘What do you mean? Yes of course I’m pleased. I was thinking perhaps it’s a good omen for Hilary’s op, love.’
Occasionally she does give away that it’s all pure superstition.
Hilary is ten hours in the operating theatre, far longer than they planned. Afterwards the doctors aren’t even encouraging. The assistant surgeon, with a frankness I have come to prefer to the usual flustering for an improbable sensitivity, says he didn’t find a single bloody tendon he honestly recognised. Coming out of anaesthetic in the early hours, the child begins to have very severe fits, contortions, retching. Shirley phones me towards midnight, fearing she is going to die. I drive back to the hospital and we pass the dawn pacing a corridor and occasionally peeping in at a now heavily sedated baby.
In the morning I drive straight from Great Ormond Street to InterAct which has its offices in Hammersmith now. I press for extra sugar and look out through dirty panes at the huge black thrust of the Cunard Hotel, the lively, grey-gloss bustle of a summer morning in London. I realise I have been more than half hoping through the night for the easy drama of a death which would attract sympathy from all and generally make life possible again. Even now I imagine Shirley calling and telling me it is all over; I think how careful I will be to express no sign of relief. On my Filofax, to some unknown deity, I write the word: PLEASE.
How Do You Feel About Your Life?
Grandfather has accused me of trying to kill him. The nurses are assuring Mother this kind of delusion is entirely normal, indeed is one more reason why he really ought to be in a home now. I say perhaps I shouldn’t visit if it is going to disturb him.