Private Papers

by Margaret Forster

  It was when I woke up, at seven, that a whole new perspective presented itself: an abortion? A baby, but an abortion? Why was that the solution? I lay and thought about it. Rosemary did not want a baby. There was no place in her life for one. Becoming pregnant had been an accident, for which I did not blame her. But I could care for her baby. I was only forty-three years old, perfectly fit and healthy. Abortion, if it could be obtained (and I had no idea how it could) was dangerous, especially if, as she said, Rosemary was nearly four months pregnant. She might die. Would it not be better to have the baby? The family, all of us together, could bring it up. Emily adored babies. She was the one who would be most affected by a baby in the house and how lucky that, alone of the three, she had always loved babies. Yet, as I dressed and started the normal morning routine, I could already imagine Rosemary’s fury if I announced it would be better to have the baby, safer . . . It was not what she had come home for. Nothing had yet emerged about who was the father, but I imagined Tony was and certainly he would not want a baby, even if he knew of its coming existence. Perhaps it was what he had run away from. If I even tentatively suggested she should have the baby, Rosemary would hate me. I think she had to hate —

  *

  I hated reading that part. Who wouldn’t. Surprisingly, it’s more or less accurate. In matters of natural and great drama my mother always shows unexpected restraint – she’s nearly always reliable then. If anything, she has underplayed the hell of my return and she hasn’t mentioned at all just what she had to put up with, because I didn’t just weep, I shouted and snarled at her and very nearly became violent. The kinder she was, the more impossible I became, and she never once turned on me.

  I don’t know why I did go home. I could have stayed in Australia and had an abortion, I’m sure. It would probably have been a lot less trouble in the end, because it certainly wasn’t easy in London in 1959. Mother rang up Simon Birch, very embarrassing for both of them, I suppose, as abortion was still against the law. He came round to see me, first time in years, and I thought what a cold fish he was and how I disliked him and how I hated putting my proud mother under his obligation. He arranged for me to see a gynaecologist straight away. God, what a wretched fuss it was in those days, absolutely stupid and humiliating. I felt quite wild, mad, with resentment which was fortunate, because it meant I shouted and ranted at this man in his Harley Street consulting rooms and asked him who the fuck he thought he was to suggest I was healthy enough to bear a child. I told him I’d rather kill myself than have it. And I would have done, too. The mere thought of a baby filled me with loathing. What would I do with one? Managing my own life was hard enough without taking on somebody else’s. And it hadn’t been my fault: I had done everything to prevent having one. Every time somebody goes on about the dangers of the Pill now, I just wish they had had to use the diaphragm, and then they would know they were lucky. I don’t care what the Pill does to you, it’s worth it and that’s after a lifetime’s, well, half a lifetime’s, use. Maybe the damn diaphragm got punctured, a hole so small I never saw it. Maybe I changed shape inside and it no longer fitted properly. I don’t know. All I’m sure of is that I made no mistake, not ever. I was never tempted not to put it in. I always went for check-ups, wherever I was. So I accepted no responsibility for an accident I had done my level best to prevent.

  Tony said ridiculous things. When I suspected I might be pregnant he said, ‘That would be nice, a baby.’ I was livid. Nobody could ever have meant anything less. Tony hadn’t the remotest idea of what having a baby entailed – he couldn’t even begin to envisage it. When I said so, furiously, he just said he liked babies, children, he wouldn’t mind one of his own. He asked what would be so awful, they were lovely and I wasn’t a kid myself or anything. I was speechless. We had a terrible row, worse than any of those we’d been having ever since we left America (that was another mistake, also not my fault) ending with him calling me ‘unnatural’ because I didn’t want to be a mother. He sulked afterwards. He said I had depressed him. I started not to care about anything any more. I lay in bed all day, not speaking, feeling sick, not bothering to dress or eat or go out. We were in Sydney, in a house about two miles from the centre, a ramshackle, suburban-looking place with a large overgrown garden. It belonged to somebody we met in California, a man who had gone round with us for a while, to whom Tony took a great liking. He was just the usual bum going round the world but older than most. Tony thought it was so funny that back home in Sydney he had been a chemist. There is nothing remotely amusing about being a chemist, but to Tony there was. So when we went to Australia, to Sydney, Tony insisted on looking this guy up, descending on him. He wasn’t there. The house was locked up, but we broke in. Some neighbours came to check us out and Tony flourished our friend’s written invitation to stay (which Tony had written himself). We were left alone and stayed there the whole time we were in Australia except for rather unsuccessful trips to beaches and parks and stuff like that. We always planned to go off into the great outback but we never did. Like lots of things we never did.

  This house was in a rundown district (rundown then, anyway) called Randwick, near Coogee Beach. It was actually at the top of Coogee Bay Road. I thought, as soon as we arrived there, how much Mother would have liked that house. It looked like a large English country vicarage (except for the palm tree at the front and the frangipani trees to the side and the lantana growing wild all round). It had two sorts of gables at the front, edged with white scalloped boarding, and a porch running between them. It was solid-looking, with long, narrow windows, a family-looking house, as Mother would surely have said. The roof wasn’t the garish red of most roofs around there, but a kind of greyish colour that toned in well with the yellow sandstone from which the house was built. Geraniurns flourished in the matted undergrowth all round the garden, mixing in with the red flowers of the lantana. It looked pretty in a decadent sort of way. What it really needed was a dull English sky behind it to complete the vicarage impression, but instead there was the relentless blue of the Australian summer. There were none of those misty, soft English colours – everything was brilliant and hard, even brighter than California had been.

  Inside, the house was dusty rather than dirty, and full of creepy crawlies. Tony said he would get some stuff to kill them, but he never did. We stuck to two rooms, both with verandas. When we flew in over Australia, we noticed what everyone notices: how much space there was, each house with so much land to itself. Nothing cramped or mean. It really appealed to us. But the odd thing was that, as soon as we were on the ground and in that house, we felt the opposite – shut in, claustrophobic – and yet we knew all around was land, land, no endless high buildings, everything brilliantly light and bright. But we lolled in our dark rooms, finding it hard to leave. Every time we tried camping on the beach, we got driven off and ended up back in the only place we knew, that house. It was one of the few times I ever had Tony to myself, and it was fatal. All the memories I describe of Tony seem to be bad ones, and that is so unfair. Mother and everyone else never knew what he could be like, and I couldn’t tell them. Tony was original. He had spirit, a spirit I tuned in to. We would do quite terrible things together and they didn’t feel bad. I could steal, cheat, lie, destroy and run away with Tony, and none of those things would feel bad. He made every other man seem feeble. And yet I didn’t hero-worship him. I knew he was no hero. I knew his faults, his lack of centre. But Tony loved life, he had a joyousness and acceptance that permanently excited me. I had a great yearning to make things go right for him and, if that is not love, I don’t know what is.

  But I couldn’t make things go right, not for either of us. Tony grew bored. We knew nobody before we took off for America, but never lacked for company of every sort once we got there. Every day we met new people, people just like us. We drove hectically all over America, without rhyme or reason, and always found friends. When we went to Australia, on Tony’s whim, mysteriously we found none. I can’t explain it, it just ha
ppened. It meant we were together alone, for weeks on end, and it was boring for Tony. I discovered I was more of a contemplative than I had guessed. I can take great slabs of peace and quiet if I have the right person with me. Tony had nothing of the contemplative in him. Peace and quiet were anathema to him. Once he’d tinkered with whatever car he had and played his guitar for several hours (badly), he had nothing to do. He didn’t daydream. He didn’t read or draw or even talk – he hated talk for talk’s sake. Within a month he was saying Australia was a disaster, let’s go back to America. That was when I said the money wouldn’t run to it.

  Now Tony did not leave me either because my money was coming to an end or because I was pregnant. He was never greedy, never exploited me. Mother thinks he did, but then she would. I don’t wish to read what she has to say on that subject. It doesn’t actually matter because I know he didn’t and he knows he didn’t and that’s all that matters. Tony didn’t value money. When we had it, he spent it, but when we didn’t, he turned his hand to something and got some. He didn’t dislike that kind of hand-to-mouth living either: in fact, it suited him. In a curious way he hated waste as much as my mother. People who paid too much for things disgusted him. He despised flashness, wouldn’t have had a new Jaguar if I’d bought him one. He most definitely was not at all materialistic. People saw him as a parasite on me, but nothing could be farther from the truth. But, when he was told I had perhaps a thousand pounds left out of ten, he was horrified. He kept on and on about where the hell had it gone, and I quite enjoyed reminding him that one of the points of our odyssey had been to do just that, to let it go and not even have to notice. I didn’t know where it had gone. I had no accounts. I had bought and given for a year and a half, and that was that. I said, if he wanted he could perhaps tot up a few sums but I couldn’t and wouldn’t and I didn’t care. Tony did. He went very serious and started lecturing me about being more careful. He seemed to feel that the money being nearly spent was a sign that we should go home, if not back to America. Maybe we had had enough. Maybe we should stop pissing about. I asked what would we do if we returned to London? And then he surprised me: he said I had a career to think about. That made me laugh. I’d never mentioned any career, what career, what was he talking about. He said it was obvious, I was clever and educated, I wasn’t going to sit around all my life doing nothing. Some day, he had always known, I would turn my attention to what I could do. We had another row. I said I saw no reason why we shouldn’t move on somewhere else, even go back to America, but our life style would change, that was all. We would have to work our way round the world instead of travel freely. Tony said if he was going to do that he’d rather be back in London. Might as well be, he said.

  He said, I said. How trivial and squalid it all sounds, but it wasn’t. It was grand and tragic, two people who loved each other tearing themselves apart wilfully. If I hadn’t been pregnant, I might have managed my life better. But, instead, I turned myself to the wall and wept and slept and snivelled and Tony left. I gave him the money for his ticket home of course. He said he’d pay that back. I said I didn’t fucking want it back. He tried to get me to go back with him but I refused. I wanted to see how completely he would abandon me, what circumstances he would leave me in. It was all a game. Tony knew I was strong really – he was fond of saying my mother had programmed me too well. He knew I wouldn’t lie there and let myself starve, he knew that, however I appeared, I was always able to take care of myself. He knew that what stopped me from being practical during those last weeks was his presence. My apathy was a kind of threat. And he was right. As soon as he had gone, I got up, showered, dressed and went trudging out for food, even though I didn’t feel like eating. But I didn’t go and buy myself a ticket home for another month. Instead, I lay on my bed and looked out at the frangipani trees. They had been in flower when we arrived but now their leaves were gone and they looked distinctly phallic. I stared at them for hours and wondered if I had any feelings left any more. I thought about Mother after Father was killed. Perhaps all feeling left her then, except for us children, perhaps that other sort of feeling died, as it seemed to have done in me. Maybe I should have the baby and get some feeling back. To escape such thoughts I went out in the evenings. I walked on the beach, Coogee Beach, hating it. The main road ran right next to the sand. There was nothing lonely or lovely about it. I suddenly longed for the windswept, isolated beaches Mother used to drag us to. All the time I stared out at the silly rock they called Wedding Cake Island, I was thinking of Devon and Suffolk and mourning the lack of wildness. The colours everywhere began to offend me. I loathed the bright red flowers of the coral trees and even the hibiscus seemed ugly. Only the dark, shiny, menacing leaves of the Moreton Bay fig pleased me. It wasn’t like European fig trees. It grew to a vast size, twisted and gnarled and in some ways like a really old English oak, and its fruit was inedible. Sometimes I would pass cars parked under such a tree and the sight of them covered with revolting bird droppings (from the birds who alone could eat the figs) pleased me.

  I cried a lot in my room. All the time I knew I was being stupid not going at once to a doctor, but I hadn’t the energy to do it. I couldn’t stand the thought of explanations and examinations. There really wasn’t any point to anything, nothing mattered, day slid by into night and I was paralysed with fright. Yet inside my head there was a small, vivid image of my mother, shrunk a million times but distinct and dominating. I hated to see it, but it would not go away. She didn’t talk to me or do anything, she was just there, like a very strongly lit still photograph. I didn’t have visions, there were no voices. I just saw her.

  Coming home to her was the greatest possible relief. I wouldn’t want to deny that. All the same, I wish I hadn’t done it. I never did it again, because afterwards I remembered the price I paid and she paid and it was much, much too high. The lure of Family was something I learned the hard way to deny.

  *

  — to hate me anyway. Perhaps I would have lost nothing by daring to suggest she went ahead and had the baby and I would care for it. But I did not. My head knew it would be foolish, even when my heart cried out to do it. My responsibility, as I judged it, was not just to Rosemary but to the unborn child. I was not brave enough to think I could take on a baby, to insist on it being born, and be sure I was right. And, of course, inevitably, those old, weary thoughts about my own origins and Jess’s reasserted themselves. I was glad I had been born. But I looked at Rosemary, a comparatively fortunate young woman with every kind of support, and I saw her fear and anger and distress, and I thought of my own mother as I had not done since Jess’s birth. It is so tempting to minimize the anguish of any woman bearing an unwanted child. In comparison with all the millions born, what does it matter if one woman fights against adding another? But it does matter. To me, life itself was, and is, not sacrosanct. I cannot go along with the Right to Life campaigners of our day. And yet I, of all people, revere the family. It seems a contradiction that I should appear to sanction the killing of unwanted babies. I would not hide behind disputes as to the point at which life begins. I want all babies to start off life in a family and that is why I helped Rosemary. She did not have her own family and mine would have been no substitute. It was no fault of mine that my own children were deprived of a father. Nothing makes me quite so angry as young women wilfully deciding to impregnate themselves artificially, or knowing they are never going to see the father of their child again. It is an attack on all I hold most precious, and I condemn their arrogance.

  Well that is high-minded, I suppose. There were no discussions with Rosemary, no ifs and buts or worrying about rights and wrongs. It would have been a waste of breath. Emily was terribly upset – it was one of the hardest things to tell her – but Rosemary was adamant that she would not hide behind secret operations. Emily and Celia had to know the truth. She told them herself and, to their credit, neither of them criticized her —

  *

  What an outrageous lie, neither of them c
riticized her, indeed. Dear Celia was all criticism and, Christ, how I hated her for it. She said she felt it her duty to tell me I was making Mother terribly unhappy. She asked me if I realized that. I said I realized she was a shit, and told her to fuck off, but she wouldn’t go away. I remember her standing in the doorway of the room where I lay, feeling like death, and lecturing me on my sins. She ticked them off on her fat fingers. She summed up with this appalling sentence about my having made nonsense of all Mother believed in, and then said I hadn’t even the decency to be grateful and at least behave nicely. I stared at her and thought murder was certainly a possibility. What the hell did Celia know about gratitude? She thought it meant saying thank you every other minute. Like when she was young, she’d bleat ‘Thank you for having me’ all the time to anyone who’d let her cross their threshold for a second. It was ‘thank you, Mummy’, like one of those talking dolls. Where she got that kind of unctuousness from, I can’t imagine. Not from Mother, that’s for sure. Her parting shot was that I could at least get up and not lie in bed all day worrying Mother. She, Celia, would rather die than be a worry to Mother. Dear Jesus, to think she hadn’t a clue that she was one of the biggest all-time worries Mother has ever had.

  *

  — to me, Emily said she did not know why Rosemary had let it happen, if she didn’t want a baby, but she didn’t go on to say she was against the abortion. She did not think Rosemary ought to have a baby and neither did Celia. Neither of them were comfortable with her in the house, until after the abortion was over, but then neither was I. I loved her and felt for her but the very sight of her trailing from one room to another, alternately yawning and sighing, and looking all the time so derelict, was unbearable. We all wanted her out of our sight and felt guilty about it. What we really wanted most of all was the abortion over and the chance to start again. That foetus haunted us all each time we looked at Rosemary.