‘Just that now she seems a great deal worse than before the operation. And her legs won’t bend.’
This middle-aged man smiles. He is long-jawed, schoolmasterly. ‘Actually, that remains to be seen.’ He focuses deep-set eyes on me. ‘I’m sorry, but this was not by any stretch of the imagination routine surgery, hence there were risks which we did warn you of. Certainly we don’t take these decisions lightly. However, and be that as it may, we shall have to wait a good, what, at least six months more to know the real results of the operation one way or another.’ He stops. ‘Nor do I see any need to be too pessimistic. The child has survived after all, which shows remarkable resilience.’
Shirley says: ‘She doesn’t seem to be able to hold her head up straight, doctor. I mean, she should be able to do that at four months, shouldn’t she?’
I haven’t actually registered this myself before, but realise now that this is what makes the girl so odd. Even when you hold her up, her head will loll slackly to one side. And I have one of my sudden piercing revelations, visions, of what our life will be like from now on with this handicapped child. I see her at five years old, ten, her head lolling.
Shirley is nodding gravely as the consultant describes the special kind of chair we will have to buy in about six months’ time to keep the spine and neck straight. Some kind of allowance, he is saying, is available to cover at least part of the cost.
Which is? Shirley is being very practical.
He doesn’t know. About £400 perhaps.
We stand up to leave. Then no sooner have we got in the car than Shirley flips. She straps Hilary into her seat and bursts into tears. She howls: ‘All those nights, all those nights of pain, and now she can’t even see!’
I drive brilliantly fast. I’m getting to know the lights and lanes round behind the hospital. That splendid feeling of challenging the great city machine: filters, left-only lanes, bus lanes, bollards, no right turns, sequence-timed lights, brake and accelerate, brake and accelerate. I stay silent a long while.
‘I can’t stand it, I can’t, I won’t stand it.’ She doesn’t even fiddle with handkerchiefs, just weeps, shoulders shuddering.
Finally, caught on a long red, I say: ‘Shirley, Shirley!’
‘I wish I was dead,’ she shrieks.
I drum my fingers on the wheeclass="underline" ‘We should have been angrier. We should have told him we’d sue.’
‘God, do I wish I was dead!’
I storm up the Caledonian Road, jerking from pedal to pedal. The motley buildings race toward us, the wheeling sky, the low neon, tall blocks of flats, the afternoon sun occasionally spangling on blank glass, the rubbish outside cheap restaurants, the usual motley on the pavements.
Our child is blind.
Shirley is moaning now. I can think of no other word for it, a low animal cry, her face in her hands.
Overtaking on the inside lane, squeezing back into the flow before a parked car, it occurs to me that driving is not unlike a computer game. Some program that would project your score onto a corner of the windscreen perhaps?
I say maybe it really is only post-operative trauma. How can we know? In any event we must find some other consultant to contact who will tell us more. ‘These guys never tell us anything.’ Maybe we can find out if there’s some big specialist in America or Switzerland or something. ‘You can bet they’ll be light years ahead of the NHS for this kind of thing.’
‘I wish we’d never met,’ she says.
‘Come on, Shirley.’
‘Sometimes I hate you for all this.’
I don’t object. I often feel the same.
We drive on with an urgency that scatters other traffic like confetti. She doesn’t comment on it as she usually does. One secretly hopes for an apocalyptic accident of course. She leans over her seat and caresses the child’s thin hair. She is murmuring now. I stare at the road.
Has my mother been working on Shirley these weeks she’s been staying with us? I haven’t actually noticed anything, but I often think Mother manages to exude influence even without speaking. Her eyes, her posture, her tone. She will persuade you to see the world as she sees it. In any event, when we get back home, Shirley carries the baby with her into the house while I stick the car in the garage, taking my time over everything now, relaxing, calming down, turning keys and handles with the slow, almost voluptuous pleasure I have recently begun to find in doing all those little activities that keep you just outside the family sphere: taking a pee, a bath, a shave, carrying the rubbish out to the bin, changing a lightbulb in an empty bedroom. I move with meticulous painstaking slowness, the exact opposite of my driving, though the escapist intent is no doubt the same. When finally I walk into the living room, Shirley is in my mother’s arms weeping.
She is making some kind of confession. It is all her fault she is saying in a low voice broken by sobs. All her fault. She’s been a terrible wife, she forced me to go and have other women, had an affair herself for ages and ages.
‘Shirley!’
Instinctively I try to wade in and stop this, but she clings tightly to my mother whose large face watches me over her shoulders.
‘It must be a punishment. It must. It’s too awful.’
‘Shirley, shut up!’
I start to shout, to try to pull them apart. Hilary wakes, as she always does, screaming. Through the bedlam, my mother says quietly: ‘George, why don’t you just go out for a while and let her get this off her chest.’
I hate, no really hate the attempt, inherent in that everyday expression (’get this off her chest’) and again in her tone of voice, her willed serenity and motherliness, to reduce the whole thing to a kind of understandable outburst which will soon be over.
‘No. It’s ridiculous. Shirley. Don’t be crazy! Let’s talk this over on our own.’
My mother, her face half in Shirley’s mussed hair, mouthes the word: ‘Please.’ Her old eyes, tremulous in their papery net of wrinkles, glow and plead, insisting I am her son. And I go. As much simply to be out of it as anything else. I go to Child’s Hill Park and smoke about a hundred cigarettes.
When I get back, they are in the baby’s room, kneeling and praying by Hilary’s cot. They don’t see me at first and I spy on them a moment from the landing. They are knelt in a clutter of toys and baby clothes on the carpet. The curtains must be drawn, because the light is pinkish grey filtered through red. My mother, on her swollen knee, has both raw hands hooked over the top rail of the cot, her face pressed against her knuckles, shoulders hunched, back bowed. Shirley on the other hand is kneeling straight up in perfect finishing school posture, girlish, virginal, the smart dove-grey wool dress she put on for the consultant falling prettily over her curved back, her slim calves; the fine ankles still in their white summer sandals. Then Mother launches into another prayer: Oh dear Lord who so often in the past. .’
In bed I ask: ‘You really had an affair?’
‘Yes.’
‘Who with?’
‘A teacher at school.’
‘When you were so depressed?’
She laughs softly: ‘No, before that. I was depressed when I lost him.’ She adds: ‘I’m sorry, George.’
I take this in. After a moment I tell her: ‘I don’t blame you for that. But this with my mother is the worst betrayal of all.’
And next morning when I get Mother alone for a second I ask her please to go. I don’t care how much help she is being, she’ll have to go.
It is a Saturday and I spend the whole day cracking a computer game called Helicopter Attack. The sneaky thing is the way they keep altering the wind speed so that you drift off course into the flak. In the evening Peggy comes over with Charles and mentions almost in passing that Buddhist Barry, her lover of two years standing, has left her. The marvellous thing, it occurs to me, about Peggy is how she never needs comforting.