I didn’t realise they were lovers at first. Why? Because Peggy has always enthused over her lovers, always pronounced herself everlastingly in love with them. Because, being our brother and sister, they have a good excuse for arriving together. Because Charles never shows a shred of fatherliness toward the exhaustingly exuberant Freddie. And because I always suspected he was queer.
‘Peggy mentioned it,’ Shirley tells me one day.
‘Mentioned it!’
‘She was very offhand.’
‘Wonders will never cease.’
‘I was thinking, probably that’s why he became so assiduous about visiting us in the first place. To see her.’
I reflect on this.
‘They don’t show any affection together. Why don’t they act like a couple?’
‘The amazing thing about you,’ Shirley says, ‘is that for all your super logic and supposed modernity, you’re so incredibly traditional.’
‘Sorry, I just thought it was common sense. You’re lovers, you live together, you may as well act like a couple.’
‘Why don’t you just accept that people are different. You got angry with her when she was naïve, now maybe she’s being less so.’
But although in some obscure way I disapprove of Charles and Peggy, I do enjoy their visits. Discussing things between four people they seem manageable, whereas on one’s own, or alone with Shirley, hysteria is always just around the corner.
‘Now the girl’s five,’ Charles tells us this evening, ‘you’re due for nappy relief, since a normal child would now be out of nappies.’
‘Oh yes?’ Shirley asks chattily. ‘What do we have to do?’
Charles begins to describe the bureaucratic procedure. He obviously enjoys this. His voice is quick, incisive, very faintly patronising in a teacherly sort of way. As he speaks, lean and sinewy, I watch how his thin fingers twine and untwine around a tumbler. His Adam’s apple is also jerkily mobile.
‘A wonder they haven’t cut it,’ Peggy remarks. She is helping Frederick with a jigsaw puzzle of the Changing of the Guard.
‘No, there’s no actual means test per se,’ Charles reassures. ‘More to the point they need a letter from your GP to the effect that the child really is incontinent.’
‘Fair enough. After all, they’re eight quid a box,’ Shirley says, ‘and it’s only paper and a bit of plastic in the end.’
‘You know you can’t use them at all in Washington State,’ Peggy informs. ‘Anti-ecological.’
‘Then you present proof of purchase and you get the cash.’
I remark that eight quid, what, a week, isn’t going to change our lives in any major way, is it? It hardly seems worth the time in the queue. In fact — and I make the mistake of getting drawn into an old argument — the whole point about state help, or any such sops of this kind, is that they merely draw your attention away from the real issue while you waste your time picking up crumbs.
‘And what is the real issue?’ Charles asks sharply.
‘That this is our problem. Our huge problem, and we’re stuck with it. There is no imaginable help that could really amount to anything or significantly change our lives.’
‘Well, obviously it’s useful for the less well-off,’ Charles says, faintly offended by my lack of interest, ‘which is why the government’s no doubt trying to cut it.’
‘But we’re not less well off, we’re rich. I’m on forty-plus grand. If I don’t pick it up there’ll be more for someone else.’
‘No, if people don’t pick it up, the government’ll say they don’t need it and remove it all together.’
Looking away from me to inspect a ladder on dark tights, Shirley says: ‘George is just lamenting the absence of state assisted abortion post birth.’ She looks up with her little smile. ‘N’est-ce-pas?’
I shrug my shoulders. We’re old campaigners now. I don’t think either of us is capable of shocking the other any more. ‘Abortion certainly solves a problem in a way a few quid for nappies doesn’t.’
Then before Charles can stop her, Peggy says simply: ‘I’m going to have to have an abortion. Next week.’ And very matter of fact, she explains that she is pregnant by Charles (he fidgets fiercely, pushes thumb and forefinger around his teeth), but that he doesn’t want the child. Anyway, she already has Freddy and that’s quite enough for anyone the way men come and go. She doesn’t seem to be saying this as an attack on Charles, or even as an expression of reproach.
Why am I so stunned? It is the ease with which my sister handles these decisions, the lack of any hint of guilt.
‘She insisted,’ Charles says, ‘on using the Okino Knauss method.’
Peggy laughs: ‘Rhythm and blues! In that order. Still, I just can’t afford another.’
Later, when they have gone, I watch Shirley liquidising meat to store away in little tubs in the freezer for all Hilary’s meals for the week to come. She follows an intense routine now of keeping house and feeding Hilary. She is always doing something, locked into some procedure.
‘What do you make of that?’
She shrugs her shoulders. ‘Probably they’re afraid it’ll be like Hilary.’
‘But we asked, on her behalf, don’t you remember. It was one of the first things I did. And the specialist said how unlikely it was and that anyway they can test for it now they know it’s a possibility.’
Shirley doesn’t seem interested.
‘The child is probably perfectly healthy,’ I insist.
‘So maybe it is.’
Obliquely I say: ‘Soon they’ll be able to keep foetuses alive as soon as the cells meet. Will they still let people abort them?’
As if she were another part of my own mind, she says: ‘No, at that point, they’ll tell you you can kill anybody who’s helpless and inconvenient.’
‘But why didn’t she use contraceptives, for heaven’s sake?’
Shirley’s working fast, slicing some stewing meat into manageable chunks. Her once finely tapered pale fingers are growing rough and red, like Mother’s.
‘We all have our fixations. She’s into Buddhism, natural foods, natural body functions, no contraceptives. Charles is into politics, his career, he doesn’t want a kid he would have to feel responsible for. Probably he’s quite right.’
‘And you?’ I ask with the husky tenderness that will sometimes spring up unexpected as a wild flower on the roughest terrain. ‘Don’t you think life should have a certain grace, Shirley?’
‘Leave be, George,’ she says. ‘Please, please, please leave be.’
Foul Medicine
I’m not a pig. In an attempt to recapture something of my relationship with Shirley I decide on a vasectomy, let’s see if we can’t get back to lovemaking. She says: ‘I’ll have forgotten how to do it. I can’t quite see why we ever bothered, it’s so much more hygienic without it.’ Though a week or so before the op she hugs me from behind, squeezes my crotch, and murmurs: ‘I can’t wait, if you knew how much I want you and want you.’
Since I’m determined no one at the office should know about the whole thing, I take a fortnight’s holiday during which time I arrange for the operation to be done privately in the London Clinic in Harley Street. Typically, Shirley informs my mother without first conferring with me, hence the day after the op, there she is at my bedside in her ancient black coat with the fake once-white fur inside the collar. The strap of her blue handbag, doubtless full of used paper handkerchiefs, is held on by a heavy duty safety pin.