“I am sure not.”
“I’m sure yes. But Simon, will you be a darling and keep an eye on Mabel? She’s no concern of ours, but I’m concerned just the same. Will you get in touch if we should do anything?”
That was why Darcourt found himself in the comfortless waiting-room of the hospital’s maternity ward at four o’clock in the morning. Al had left at half past ten, promising to phone early next day. Darcourt was not alone. Dr. Dahl-Soot had also turned up, after Al’s departure.
“Nothing could be less in my line than this,” she said. “But that poor wretch is a stranger in a strange land, and so am I, so here I am.”
Darcourt knew better than to say it was very good of her. “Arthur and Maria asked me to keep an eye on things,” he said.
“I like those two,” said the Doctor. “I didn’t greatly like them when we first met, but they grow better on acquaintance. They are a very solid pair. Do you think it’s the baby?”
“Partly the baby. A very fine baby. Maria is suckling it.”
“She is? That’s old style. But I believe very good.”
“I don’t know,” said Darcourt. “As we academics say, it’s not my field. But its a very pretty sight.”
“You are a softy, Simon. And that’s as it should be. I wouldn’t give a damn for a man who was not a softy in some ways.”
“Gunilla, do you think we single people are apt to be sentimental about love and babies and all that?”
“I am not sentimental about anything. But I have sentiment about many things. That’s an English-language difference that is very useful. Not to have sentiment is to be almost dead.”
“But you have taken—pardon me for saying so—a decidedly anti-baby road.”
“Simon, you are too intelligent a man to be as provincial as you sometimes pretend. You know there is room in the world for everything and every kind of life. What do you think marriage is? Just babies and eating off the same fork?”
“God forbid! Because it’s either very early in the morning or very late at night, I’ll tell you what I really think. Marriage isn’t just domesticity, or the continuance of the race, or institutionalized sex, or a form of property right. And it damned well isn’t happiness, as that word is generally used. I think it’s a way of finding your soul.”
“In a man or a woman?”
“With a man or a woman. In company, but still, essentially, alone—as all life is.”
“Then why haven’t you found your own soul?”
“Oh, it isn’t the only way. But it’s one way.”
“So you think I might find my soul, some day?”
“I’d bet very heavily on it, Gunilla. People find their souls in all sorts of ways. I’m writing a book—the life of a very good friend of mine, who certainly found his soul. Found it in painting. He tried to find it in marriage, and it was the most awful mess, because he was a soppy romantic at the time, and she was one of those Sirens who inevitably leave the man with a cup of Siren tears. Rather a crook, judged by the usual standards. But in that mess Francis Cornish found his soul. I know it. I have evidence of it. I’m writing my book about it.”
“Francis Cornish? One of these Cornishes?”
“Arthur’s uncle. And it’s Francis’s money that is supporting this fantastic circus we are engaged in now.”
“But you think this Arthur will find his soul in his marriage?”
“And Maria, too. And if you want to know, I think King Arthur found his soul, or a big piece of it, in his marriage to Guenevere—who was rather a crook, if you read Malory—and that is what a lot of this opera is about. Arthur of Britain, or The Magnanimous Cuckold. He found his soul.”
“But is this Arthur a magnanimous cuckold?”
Darcourt did not need to answer, for at this moment a doctor, in his white garment and cap, came into the room.
“Are you with Mrs. Muller?”
“Yes. What’s the news?”
“I’m very sorry. Are you the father?”
“No. Just a friend.”
“Well—it’s bad. The child is stillborn.”
“What was the trouble?”
“She seems not to have had any pre-natal advice whatever. Otherwise we’d have done a Caesarian. But when we found out the foetus had a disproportionately large head for the birth canal, it was already dead. Death from foetal distress, it’s called. We’re very sorry, but these things do happen. And as I say, she hadn’t had any previous medical attention.”
“May we see her?”
“I wouldn’t advise it.”
“Does she know?”
“She’s very groggy. It was a long labour. Somebody will have to tell her in the morning. Would you do that?”
“I’ll do that,” said Dr. Gunilla, and Darcourt was grateful to her.
2
When Dr. Dahl-Soot visited the hospital the next morning she did not need to give the bad news. Al was with Mabel, who was hysterical.
“There was what the English call A Scene,” she told Darcourt. “You see Al, that odious pedant, had not even troubled to find out whether the child was a boy or a girl, and when Mabel demanded to see the child the head nurse explained that it was impossible. Why? Mabel wanted to know. Because the body was no longer available, said the nurse. Why not? said Mabel, very fierce. Because nobody had asked for the body to be reserved for burial by the parents, said the nurse. Mabel understood that. ‘You mean they’ve put my baby in the garbage?’ she said, and the nurse said that was not the way the hospital thought of what it had done, which was what was most often done with stillborns. But she wouldn’t give details, except that it was a boy and perfect except for an unusually big head. Not abnormal. Apparently it’s Mabel who is slightly abnormal. You know Mabel. A fool, and weak as water, but those people can make an awful hullabaloo when they are outraged, and she was ready to kill Al. And Al—really, Al ought to have been put in the garbage at birth—kept saying, ‘Calm down, Sweetness, you’ll see it all differently tomorrow.’ Not a tender word, not a hug, not a thing to suggest that he was involved in the affair at all. I kicked Al out, and talked to Mabel for a while, but she’s in a very bad way. What are you going to do? You seem to be the one who is expected to do something when real trouble comes up. Are you going to see Mabel?”
“I think I’d better see Al first.”
Al thought Mabel was being utterly unreasonable. She knew what a load of work he had, and how important it was to his career—which meant their joint career, if they stuck together. Hadn’t he gone to the hospital with her? And returned after dinner, as Darcourt well knew? Hadn’t the doctor said the baby might be held up for several hours because first babies were unaccountable? Was he supposed to sit there all night, and then do a day’s work that he had all planned, and that would need every ounce of energy and intellect he could muster? If there hadn’t been this accident—this stillbirth business—everything would have been absolutely okay. As it was, Mabel was raising hell.
The trouble, he assured Darcourt, was that Mabel had never really freed herself from her background. Very conventional, middle-brow people, with whom Al had never hit it off. They kept asking why he and Mabel didn’t get married, as if having somebody mumble a few words, etc. Al thought he had pretty well lifted Mabel above all that crap, but under stress—and Al admitted that the loss of the child amounted to stress—it all came flooding back, and Mabel was once again the insurance salesman’s child from Fresno. Wanted the baby given what she called “decent burial”. As if having somebody mumble a few words, etc., over a thing that had never lived could change anything. Al would be frank. He wondered if the arrangement with Mabel would weather this storm. He guessed he had to face it. People on two such different levels of education—though Mabel was majoring in sociology—would never really see eye to eye.