The L-Shaped Room

by Lynne Reid Banks

  I wanted to ask, better than what? Instead I said, ‘There’s no question of that.’

  ‘He’s married already?’

  ‘It isn’t that.’ I couldn’t go on talking about it. ‘Please. All I want to know is if I’m going to have a baby.’

  He smiled patiently. ‘I think we can take that as read,’ he said. He looked at me dreamily for a moment, and then abruptly became brisk and businesslike. ‘Now then,’ he said, ‘don’t look so worried. It’s not as bad as all that, you know. When have you got a free afternoon?’

  I frowned, trying to follow. ‘On Wednesday …’

  ‘That might do. You’ll have to see my colleague, and he’s rather busy.’ He picked up his telephone and spoke a number, smiling at me all the time while the light flashed on and off his glasses like a danger signal. He spoke briskly to somebody, making an appointment for me for Wednesday afternoon. He was still smiling as he hung up.

  ‘Why do I have to go to another doctor?’

  ‘Because that’s the only way these things can be arranged. My colleague will countersign a certificate to say you’re psychologically unfit to have the child. After that’s done, I’ll arrange for you to go into my clinic for the operation. You’ll be home again as good as new in a couple of hours, but it’s just as well to stay in bed for a day or so if you can. Most girls choose Saturdays, but if you could make it a week-day I’d be grateful, because the week-ends are such a rush.’

  I sat quite still, looking at the green Florentine leather on the gold-topped inkwell. I’d seen such things for sale in Bond Street. They were very expensive. All the tooling was hand-done, and the gold for it was real.

  The doctor was still talking. ‘I hope you won’t think it indelicate of me to mention the fee at this stage. Whoever told you to come to me probably warned you that the charge is high – in the nature of things, it has to be. You’d be asked the same sort of price by some back-street merchant in Paddington, and he hasn’t any of my overheads. And at least I can promise you the thing will be done conclusively and under conditions of hygiene …’

  I was watching him now, really looking at him carefully. He was so clean and bland and well-fed. Outside, beyond the lace curtains, I could hear the genteel traffic purring along Wimpole Street. It seemed impossible, and yet it was real, it was actually happening.

  ‘How much is the fee?’ I asked. I was suddenly so interested I could hardly wait to know.

  Dr Graham took off his glasses again and looked at me with his small short-sighted eyes.

  ‘A hundred guineas,’ he said.

  Then he took out a cream silk handkerchief to polish the lenses. I could see his monogram on the corner, J.G., the same initials as mine.

  I stood up and the room rocked for a moment. I felt a bubble of nausea come up into my throat. I closed my eyes, and swallowed, and felt better. I picked up my coat which was over the back of the chair.

  ‘Where are you going?’ the doctor asked sharply.

  I held on to the back of the chair and looked at him. There was so much to say that I couldn’t find words for any of it.

  ‘Well now, look here,’ he said in an altered voice. ‘I can quite see it might be difficult for you to get hold of a lump-sum like that, especially if you can’t turn to the man for help. I’m always so afraid of what you silly little girls will rush off and do to yourselves … You must realize I have certain basic costs to meet, but in the special circumstances I can waive my own fee, and my colleague would do the same, I’m sure. Let’s say sixty guineas all-in. There, what could be fairer than that?’

  My mind was suddenly as cold and clear as ice-water. I said, ‘One thing could be.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘You could make some effort to find out whether I’m really pregnant before you charge me sixty guineas for an operation that might not even be necessary.’

  His face didn’t change, but his hands paused about the business of polishing his lenses.

  ‘You might even stop to ask me if I want to get rid of my baby, if there is a baby.’ I clutched the back of the chair with both hands. I could feel a fever of shaking beginning in my wrists and knees.

  ‘But I suppose when all those guineas are at stake, nothing else seems very important.’

  My indignation burned me like a purifying fire. I stared at the doctor with triumph. My accusation, I thought, was magnificent, unanswerable. I forgot my own guilt in the enormity of his.

  He put his glasses back on slowly and tucked his handkerchief away in his breast pocket. Then he leaned on his elbows and looked up at me.

  ‘You want to have your baby?’ he asked curiously.

  ‘I wouldn’t have chosen to have one this way. But if it’s happened, yes, I want it. Anything’s better than your cheating way out.’

  He looked at the snowy blotter between his elbows.

  ‘Don’t, please, misunderstand what I’m going to say. I’m not trying to persuade you to change your mind. In fact, I couldn’t have you in my clinic after what you’ve just said – the risk would be too great. But I wonder how much thought you’ve given to the child. A lot of the women who come to me aren’t just panic-stricken cowards trying to escape their just deserts, you know. They have the sense to realize they’re incapable of being mother and father, breadwinner and nursemaid, all at once. A lot of them have thought what the alternative means, of handing the child over to strangers who may or may not love it. And don’t make the mistake of imagining the word bastard doesn’t carry a sting any more. There aren’t many illegitimate children in this world who haven’t, some time or other, thought unkindly of their mothers.’

  ‘How many of them do you suppose honestly wish they’d never been born?’

  He looked at me for a long time, and then shrugged. He seemed tired, suddenly: ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Life is precious, once you have the realization of it; even the vilest sort of existence can seem better than nothing. But I think a woman, when she finds she’s going to bring a human being into the world, has the right to judge in advance.’

  ‘Well, I don’t. That’s sheer sophistry. Those women are rationalizing their own fear. They’re judging for themselves, not for the child.’

  ‘Possibly, in some cases. It’s not for me to say.’

  ‘Yours not to reason why, yours but to do – and collect a hundred guineas.’

  He smiled wryly. ‘There really are overheads involved in doing the thing properly, you know,’ he said without anger. ‘For me, too, it’s a question of considering the alternatives. If there weren’t men like me to come to, I wonder how many more deaths there would be following abortions …’

  ‘That’s a rationalization, too.’

  ‘Tell me something,’ said the doctor gently. ‘How did you rationalize your acts of fornication?’

  ‘There was only one,’ I said.

  I sat down again on the chair because my knees wouldn’t hold me any longer. My coat slipped off my arm on to the floor. Without warning the tears came, and ran down my face in streams. I couldn’t stop them. There was a great weakness in my whole body; nothing seemed to matter except the enormous sadness of the fact that one raw, mismanaged, unhappy night could result in this, this misery, this huge frightening vista opening in front of me, this mountain of responsibility. That so little – a wrong decision, and two inept, unsatisfactory performances of the sexual act, which gave so little pleasure – could result in a changed world. As I wept I wondered, foolishly and pointlessly, which of the acts had conceived the child – the first with its bungling and pain and apologies, or the second with its cold frantic struggle to achieve or give the pleasure which might have begun to justify either of them …

  I felt the doctor’s banana hands on my shoulders, and the cream silk handkerchief was put into my hand. ‘Don’t get so upset,’ he said. ‘I know it seems bad now, and unfair and all the rest of it, and there’ll be moments when you’ll wish you’d done what I thought you’d come here for, but
there are compensations too. How old are you – twenty-six, twenty-seven? It’s time you had a baby. You’re old enough to appreciate it. If you’ve got the courage to enjoy some of it, it’ll do you good.’

  When I stopped crying he gave me a drink of sherry and some addresses. It was all suddenly matter-of-fact again, as if he were an employment agency giving me addresses of jobs, but actually they were for an ante-natal clinic, the Society for Unmarried Mothers, and a general practitioner in Hammersmith. He told me the names of books to get out of the library. I wrote everything down carefully on a sheet of paper he gave me. It had his name and degrees printed at the top in small, discreet lettering. When I offered to pay him he wouldn’t accept anything. I came away feeling that we had had a battle, and that he’d won.

  That had been four days ago. A lot had happened since. I’d been to the general practitioner, a tall, bluff man called Maxwell, and been given a special test which had cost a surprising amount of money because the doctor said it was unnecessary – I only had to wait a few weeks and he could tell without it. But I had to be sure. And after it, I was.

  Then there was no point in putting off telling my father.

  When I know something terrible is inevitable, I don’t want to go on putting it off, I want to precipitate it, because thinking about it and dreading it seems so much worse than the thing itself could possibly be. So it wasn’t courage that made me go straight to my father’s office from the doctor’s without even waiting for him to come home. I wanted to get it over, to get started on the changed world. As I sat waiting for the woman to tell him I was there, I felt a bit the way I felt before I went to my first bull-fight. I didn’t want to see the bull killed; I just wanted to know what it would do to me to see it.

  I hated going to my father’s office at any time. I didn’t go often, although he was always suggesting I drop in. Often I felt dislike for my father, but never more than in his office. It was a very ordinary, dull one in a block in Shepherd’s Bush, something to do with death duties; the usual thing, long lino’d corridors with thick ageless girls in grey flannel skirts and cardigans walking along them, and doors leading into outer offices with names scratchily painted in black on their pimply glass panels. The outer offices were too small to turn round in and littered with very tattered copies of government handouts. And the inner offices, which led in and out of one another like a rabbit warren, weren’t much better.

  My father often said he didn’t know where all my ‘acting nonsense’ came from. If he could have seen himself putting on his head-of-an-industrial-empire act in that shabby, poky office, he’d have known it came straight from him. The way he glanced up from his work, looked at me for a second as if trying to place me, then slowly let a tired smile play round his lips – it was a perfect performance of the weary tycoon smiling tolerantly at the carefree daughter who knows no better than to interrupt his Atlasian labours.

  ‘Well dear, what is it? I’m very, very busy, as you can see.’ He spread his hands to indicate his desk, cluttered with unimportant-looking papers. ‘The new Bill means a complete reshuffle … I sometimes wonder if H.M.G. dreams them up specially so none of its servants can ever be accused of wasting public money by having a minute to themselves …’ He droned on like that for a few moments. I sat quite still with my hands folded. In some strange way I was almost looking forward to telling him now. I was glad I’d decided to do it at his office. I wasn’t afraid of him here. I saw him here, not as my father, perpetually demanding strengths and achievements of me, but as a supremely unimportant cog trying to pretend it was the whole dull wheel.

  At last he stopped talking about his problems and turned to me again. ‘Would you like a cup of something?’

  ‘No, Father, thank you. I’ve got something to tell you.’

  ‘Yes, well, so I imagined. It’s not your habit to pop in and visit me, exactly, is it? Still, you’re always welcome, you know that, I hope.’ He spread his hands out, palms down, and shifted the papers on his desk with swimming motions. He couldn’t relax. I never could either, until I had to learn to for the stage. It struck me now as ironic that he, with nothing to worry about, yet, was twitching and fidgeting nervously while I was able to sit perfectly still, waiting, like a schoolteacher, for undivided attention.

  At last he gave it to me, by taking off his glasses – an infallible sign that he was going to listen because he couldn’t see to work without them.

  ‘Well, come on,’ he said jovially, ‘out with it.’ From the joviality I could tell he knew it was something fairly serious.

  I had meant to tell him straight out, but when it came to the point I found I had to hedge a little. And the way I hedged surprised me. It may have had something to do with the blind way he turned his eyes to me when he’d taken off his glasses. He had a sudden look of helplessness which defeated my intention not to spare him.

  ‘What’s the worst thing I could do to you, Father?’

  For a long moment he sat absolutely still, with those naked-looking eyes fixed on me frowningly as if peering through a mist. I didn’t expect a direct answer; I expected some jocular evasion. But suddenly he said decisively:

  ‘Take to drink.’

  I almost laughed. I don’t know why; perhaps it was partly relief.

  ‘Well, it isn’t that.’

  ‘No? Oh, good!’ He smiled indulgently.

  ‘Don’t smile, Father. I think you’ll think what I’ve got to tell you is just as bad, or worse.’ He kept on smiling, though, almost patronizingly, as if to say he was sure it couldn’t be as bad as all that. I didn’t regard this as a compliment to me. It was just that he thought me as incapable of excesses, admirable or otherwise, as himself.

  ‘I’m pregnant,’ I said.

  Those two words shocked even me with their crudeness. I instantly wished I’d said the softer ‘I’m going to have a baby’, or even something fatuous and euphemistic. The blunt statement of the biological fact had the same after-echoes as a slap across his face, a thing I’d abruptly lost all desire to give him, even figuratively.

  Numbly I watched the tolerant smile slip off his face as his cheek-muscles sagged. I waited almost impatiently for them to stiffen again in anger and outrage. They didn’t, and the tableau seemed to be held and held until I could feel my eyelids beginning to smart from being held rigidly open. At last, with a huge effort, I made myself move, and choked out, ‘Do say something, for God’s sake!’ My voice held all the anger I’d expected in his face.

  But he still didn’t speak. He just kept numbly staring. It was as if he’d just had a bullet in the stomach and knew it was going to start hurting like hell at any minute. Finally he blinked rather stupidly and rubbed his eyes as if he’d been asleep. ‘I can’t seem to take it in,’ he mumbled. Then he put his elbows on the desk and covered his face with his hands like a tired old man.

  Suddenly I was appalled. At one stroke I had punished him for all the nameless agonies he had put me through, and I regretted it. I regretted it so deeply that in that moment I felt this was the worst part of the whole thing. Looking at the dark, disordered top of his head, with the sturdy blunt fingers pressed into the hair, I thought that all the rest of my life would be easy, compared to seeing this.

  Chapter 3

  WELL, that had been at noon. When he’d recovered a little, he’d turned to me with a sort of shaky, fumbling anger and told me to clear out of his house, that I was no better than a street-woman; and I’d been glad, because I couldn’t have stood it if he’d turned round and been sympathetic and helpful.

  Walking back now to the house in Fulham, I let myself wonder why I’d instinctively chosen an ugly, degraded district in which to find myself a room. There was the practical aspect of cheapness; I’d never been any good at saving money and the need to do so now was acute. But there was something more to it than that. In some obscure way I wanted to punish myself, I wanted to put myself in the setting that seemed proper to my situation. It was odd that I wouldn’t have fe
lt the backstreets of Fulham to be the most fitting place for me before what had happened in Father’s office.

  It was raining properly now, with a spiteful drubbing persistence. My hair clung to my head and the water ran down my sleeves and hands and made little puddles in the pockets of my trenchcoat, transforming the dust there to a consistency like the sediment at the bottom of a bottle of cheap wine. A bottle of cheap wine suddenly seemed like a good idea. Half-way back along the sloppy grey streets I turned into an off-licence and bought some port-type, that sickly, syrupy muck that you can get three bottles of and have change from a pound. I’m no connoisseur of wines, but I know what’s bad. I chose this not only because it was cheap but because I could get an effect from it without enjoying it. The way I was feeling, it would be quite dangerous to buy liquor I might enjoy drinking.

  It was nearly dark when I reached the house. I let myself in and felt my way along the passage, bumping my hip against the hall table as I groped for the banister. I swore viciously at the table; I swore again as I tripped over the bottom step of the staircase.

  ‘Why not switch on the light, instead of using words which have no possible application to a static object?’

  ‘I didn’t know there was a light,’ I said sullenly.

  It came on. It wasn’t much of a light, a 40-watt bulb dangling nakedly from the hall ceiling, but it was enough to show me the table, the stairs and the man who’d spoken to me.

  He was small and dark and thin like a fledgling blackbird. He had maroon-coloured shadows round his eyes and didn’t look very clean.

  ‘The switch is just here, inside the door,’ he said. ‘You have to run like hell to the next landing before it goes out.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, turning to go.

  He followed me up and showed me where the next switch was.

  I thanked him again, rather shortly. I wasn’t sure whether the faint sour smell was the house or him.

  ‘Where’s your billet?’

  ‘Right at the top.’