All best, GEORGE.
She wrote back from an address in Holloway beside which she had scribbled the words: ‘Temporary. Communicate via Mum.’
Georgie bruv — she wrote in blue wax crayon on a large sheet of graph paper — ‘ might just as well ask, 1. What if a brick were to fall from a great height on your big head leaving you totally mentally handicapped? 2. What if Shirley’s dad lost all his jolly lolly and you couldn’t go horseriding at the weekends? 3. What if you were paralysed from the waist down in a hit-and-run accident and Shirley not only refused to push your wheelchair but ran off with a well-hung Rastafarian. .? See what I mean?
George, when you love a man as I love Dave, I mean love deeply, then you want to have a baby with him and he with you. It’s something you both feel in your souls. It’s the ultimate human experience. And once it’s started, the baby I mean, you can’t say, no, no, we’ll have it in three years’ time, for the simple reason, brother mine, that ‘it’ would be a different baby, wouldn’t it, not the baby of our love now, but the baby of our love then. I shall have that baby too when the time comes, okay? No need to worry about Mum either as she has Big G on her side.
By the way, is it okay if I crash a night at your place on the way back from the Loughborough festival?
Lots of love and thanks, no really, for your concern.
PEG.
Fair enough, I thought, if she insisted on being romantic about it (’baby of our love now’, indeed, as if it wasn’t just any sperm meeting any egg). Time would tell how right I was.
In the event, however, this was not to be the case. For coming back from her roadying at the Loughborough Festival, Peggy crashed not at our place but about fifteen miles away shortly after leaving the M6. It happened around midnight on the pillion of a 500cc Honda behind a bloke called Marcus Robbins, a folk singer apparently. They hit a broken-down, unlit Mini-van stationary in an underpass. Marcus was killed instantly. Peggy suffered only mild concussion, but miscarried.
She was heartbroken. I sat by her hospital bed for hours upon hours while she did nothing but cry and squeeze my hands. Her chubby face was pale. Carelessly she let her big breasts show through her nightdress, the kind of thing you just can’t help noticing even when you don’t want to. She cried and I felt very close to her and gave up my last week of revision to be with her, shuttling back and forth on trains and buses. We talked about this and that, and for the first time we talked about our childhood at home — Mother, Grandfather, Mavis — as something definitely past and gone. We were adults. I remember her surprising me by saying she often thought of Mother as the Virgin Mary and Grandad as the Devil. I never think in these terms. People are who they are. Anyway, who did that make Mavis? Some possession case JC ought to hurry up and heal? And where was the man himself? Certainly not me.
At one point, laughing through her tears, Peggy said: ‘You want to bet Mum will find some way of saying it was her fault.’ I smiled. ‘Poor baby,’ she whispered. ‘Poor little baby.’ Her plump cheeks ran with tears. In a kind of daze she said, ‘You know there’ll never never be another baby the same. In all eternity. I was going to call her Elsa. Don’t you think it’s a nice name?’
Deep true lover Dave didn’t show up once the whole week they kept her in, but I didn’t mention this. Sensibility so often seems to entail not mentioning the most painfully pertinent. Peggy should have been counting her lucky stars.
I Do the Right Thing
Shirley and I on the other hand were truly in love. We were quite sure of it. We had been together four years now, formative years. We had grown into each other, made sacrifices for each other. For the last two years we had had our bank accounts in common, at my insistence, since I felt that as soon as you knew something was the right thing, the best course of action was to commit yourself at once. Some people fret and fritter their whole lives away, wondering whether to take this plunge or that. It inhibits them in every area, love, work, play. They sit for years caught uncomfortably on the prongs of their fences. But I was eager to get a move on.
I was ambitious. I wasn’t sure in what direction, but I was eager to prove myself. Half I would have liked to travel, see places, have adventures, half I wanted to get right down to it and make money now in the city I’d grown up in, buy a car, buy a house, then a better car, a better house, eventually go into business, politics, who knows. Over those last four years, since adolescence, the world had gradually been transformed from my prison to my oyster. I felt ready to dive in, rather than merely desperate to get out. And understandably I associated this change and the euphoria that went with it with Shirley.
In any event, it seemed important to get marriage out of the way. Shirley was fun to be with. She was attractive. She had hazel eyes and a straight nose with a tiny sprinkling of freckles (like a bouquet I told her) around the bridge. And we got on together. She was intelligent herself and she believed in me. She said I had a good mind, a good body, a good face, a good voice and rotten taste, but the latter, fortunately, she felt she could rectify. She smiled wrily. She had large, well-spaced, fine white teeth with just one small endearing chip on the left upper incisor — skiing accident, the Dolomites (whereas my own chip I owe to a scuffle in a playground on the Tubbs Road Estate). Her lips were wide, her manner, at least in social conversation, exquisitely sardonic and ‘collected’ I think must be the right word. She would never embarrass you. She was always cool, polished. And talented too. She could dance, play the piano, play tennis (all the upper middle-class accomplishments denied to Peggy and I). She could sing counterpoint alto to my solid harmony church tenor. We often, hamming it up, sang hymns and even anthems together about the house. Plus she was an eager lover and she swore blind she didn’t want kids. Who wouldn’t have married her?
Her parents lashed out on the clothes and rings. My mother, delighted, spent more than she need have done buying a Moulinex she would never have dreamt of getting for herself. The venue was Christ Church, Turnham Green. Peggy, Grandfather and Mavis were all there, Grandfather with his navy medals, Peggy in a whorish pink jumpsuit, but I shut my mind to any embarrassment, they couldn’t harm me now. I had escaped.
In a lemon dress, hair permed for the first time in lovely copper ringlets, opals in her ears, wide eyes truly glowing as it seemed to me only hers could, Shirley whispered at the chancel steps: ‘If only I had a pair of tits, I’d make quite a picture, n’est-ce-pas?’
For my own part, acknowledging stout Mr Harcourt’s complacent approving, just very slightly boss-eyed smile, bespeaking wealth, respectability, unassailable common sense, I knew I had done the right thing. I was set. Why shouldn’t we be happy?
We rented a flat in North Finchley and got down to business with the rat race. House prices were spiralling and we would have to spiral after them. Shirley quickly found a place teaching infants at a private school for girls, St Elizabeth’s, a temporary arrangement as what she was really suited for was something in publishing or advertising maybe. But we both felt that this was a moment to swallow pride and get some experience behind us. We didn’t want to live off her parents. Meanwhile I got a foothold on the bottom rung at InterAct Management Systems and proceeded to become an expert (perhaps I should say one of ‘the’ experts) in network planning. Within a couple of years I was turning out software they’d never dreamt of till I arrived.
There was Johnson, an electronics man retired young from the airforce having lost an arm; pompous, mannered, always a fresh handkerchief in his pocket and so on, but very sharp. He’d had the idea. Then there was a dithery, worried type, Will Peacock, a great adjuster of trouser belts and twister of ties. He was putting up the money he’d inherited, and at the time I arrived still losing it. To look at him, death pale, stooped and fiftyish at thirty-five, you’d have thought he’d been bleeding for weeks on end. He needed a transfusion. But these were the halcyon days of software design and really you couldn’t go wrong (to my credit actually that I sensed this at once).