by Weldon, Fay
‘What shall I do?’ she asked her mother.
‘Trust to luck,’ said Mum. Luck! Good God! What good had luck ever done her?
‘You must do what you want,’ said Bobby. ‘Though, of course I want us to have a baby. Very much.’ And of course now the baby could be tested at ten weeks, through the cervix, so that took at least some of the anxiety out of it, not to mention risk to the baby, should the pregnancy proceed and they decide to go ahead. No termination, not yet. They postponed rejoicing until after the test. It could be done. Just. You went on pretending morning sickness was food poisoning and not referring to it. The baby was not a baby, just a growth, until declared valid by medical decree. But it was okay. They loved each other. That much was now certain. Only at eight weeks a scan showed twins. Two sacs. ‘What will I do?’ pleaded Alison. ‘I can’t go through with it. Not twins!’
‘I might as well tell you,’ said Mum, ‘since you’re already in such a state, you were twins, Alison. You had a sister. She died at birth. Of course these days they’d have saved her, but goodness knows how I’d have coped. Your father was better with a TV set than with a baby.’
‘But why didn’t you tell me?’ Alison was astounded. ‘You knew it would alter the odds. You must have known it would.’
‘But knowing the odds made no difference,’ observed Mum, ‘since you got pregnant by accident, anyway. All knowing ever did was worry you more. Now you know you’re terminating two, if that’s what you’re going to do, all that’s happened is the decision’s twice as hard. No one likes doing away with a perfect baby. Better to wait till they’re born, if you ask me, then do away with the one that isn’t right, if it isn’t, and keep the one that is.’
‘You go to prison, and I couldn’t possibly do any such thing. Kill a baby, once it’s born! Allow it to die – that’s different. That’s natural.’
‘Might as well tell you,’ said Mum, ‘your twin wasn’t right, mongol as we called them then, and the midwife did away with her. That’s what midwives were for. That’s why we had our babies at home. More danger but less interference.’
‘She couldn’t have been identical,’ said Alison, too obsessed by these genetic matters to worry about Mum’s deceit, let alone the real function of midwives, ‘or I’d have been Down’s too.’
‘Would you?’ asked Mum. ‘Down’s schmown’s, a baby’s a baby.’
‘Bet you were glad yours didn’t live, all the same.’ My sister, she felt. The sister I never had, always thought I ought to have, killed by my own mother.
‘I was,’ said Mum. ‘Your father would never have stood for it.’
‘You may be right there,’ said Alison. Statistics certainly showed babies that weren’t right broke up families quicker than anything. The handicapped end up with mothers, seldom fathers, hardly ever both. And she thought sadly of William, whose good opinion she still somehow couldn’t quite seem to do without, and grieved for her poor baby, with his extra chromosome and dicey lungs, who had clung so studiously to life, and for so long – long after others would have given up and allowed themselves to be sluiced away in a flood of pre-natal blood. But the conversation, though it shortened, or was it lengthened, the odds, strengthened her mind. Termination. To go ahead with twins was absurd. She didn’t have the physical strength, either before or after the birth. She just didn’t.
‘Oh!’ said the specialist, ‘if it’s twins that worry you, these days we can terminate one and let the other go to term.’
‘Which one?’ Alison asked.
‘The first one we come to,’ said the specialist, a little stiffly.
‘You mean you can’t test both and remove the one with Down’s?’
‘Not yet. Though no doubt soon we’ll be able to. And of course we must look on the bright side. Neither might be Down’s.’
‘I don’t think that’s the bright side,’ said Alison. ‘I don’t think terminating a perfect baby can ever be called the bright side.’ Difficult, wasn’t she. Well, wouldn’t you be?
‘We would recommend a selective termination in any case: you might have trouble carrying two babies to term. We do it often, nowadays. The procedure’s been developed to cope with the number of multiple pregnancies we get nowadays – the result of fertility drugs.’
‘That’s different,’ said Alison. ‘This baby of mine – these babies – were created naturally. Conceived in love and passion, if by accident. How can I possibly terminate one? It might be the wrong one. And if it was okay, how could I tell the one that lived, when it came to their turn for genetic counselling, that I’d got rid of the other? What would it think of me?’
‘It would at least be alive to do the thinking. I could terminate one now,’ said the specialist kindly, ‘and test the other at sixteen weeks, though there would still be an increased risk of miscarriage, and dispose of it for you if it were Down’s.’
Sixteen weeks! ‘No, no,’ said Alison. ‘Never. No counselling, no testing, I’ll have them both and trust to luck.’ She could already feel the pain of the sciatic nerve but she didn’t care. She’d never said or felt such a thing before. It quite shocked her to hear herself speaking so loud and clear. And as it happened, the gods of chance must have heard, and looked down on her, or somebody or something; at any rate as she left the clinic she felt the first sticky flow of blood, and presently more and more, so much blood there seemed no end to it, so many regrets, so much relief, and within twenty-four messy, painful hours the putative twins were gone, male or female, good or bad, identical or fraternal, no one was ever to know, in such a flow of welter and crimson even the hospital was surprised.
‘So much blood!’ exclaimed the au pair, in the ambulance.
‘Don’t look,’ cried Alison, ‘it might put you off.’
Later on, when she was feeling steadier, she’d try again, and trust to luck it wasn’t twins. Caroline, Wendy and Wyndham were all just fine – weren’t they?
‘Just as well,’ said Mum, ‘though I don’t suppose you want to hear that. You have quite enough to think about as it is. How is the inside of your head?’
‘Clearer,’ said Alison. ‘It’s the sudden drop of oestrogen.’
‘Reminds me of the time I miscarried the first lot of twins,’ said Mum, who was, as ever, full of surprises.
‘Just as well. They weren’t your father’s. Now drink a lot of water, and replace the lost blood, and here’s to better luck next time. It’ll happen. Blood’s the libation the God of Chance requires. Lots and lots of blood. Always has, always will. Afterwards things go better. Didn’t I have you?’
II
Jennifer’s Story
Come On, Everyone!
All kinds of things puzzled Maureen Timson when she was eighteen, and nothing puzzled her more than her friend Audrey Thomas. If she was a friend. They were both at college, doing languages. They shared a room, being next to one another in the alphabet; a kind of fated closeness. Maureen had all the advantages, Audrey (in Maureen’s eyes) very few. Yet Audrey led and Maureen followed, and Maureen could not understand it, and chafed, and was riled. Maureen liked to get to the bottom of things: to work away at them like a knotted shoe-lace, yet here there was something bottomless, un-unknottable. And it was not fair.
She, Maureen, was pretty: she only had to look in the shared bedroom mirror to know. (Maureen’s mother had discouraged mirrors, being the kind who said it was your character that counted, not your looks, but mirrors are everywhere, aren’t they? Puddles or shop windows will do, or the interested eyes of others reflect back at least some kind of image.)
Audrey was not at all pretty. She had a face like – as Maureen’s Great-Aunt Edith would say – the back of a bus. (Maureen’s mother had eight aunts and Edith was the one she most disliked – but then Maureen’s mother disliked almost everyone, scorning the weak, the frivolous, the idle, the soft, which meant almost all the human race, excepting only sometimes Family.) Maureen was an only child, Maureen’s mother having scorned her father right
out of the house, shortly after Maureen’s birth. (Maureen had a vision of him, stumbling with thick boots and beery breath, up the damp path between the sad rhododendron leaves and away for ever, her own infant crying echoing from the right hand upstairs window.) Maureen had a tidy little waist, and Audrey had rolls of flesh above and below hers: that is the kind of thing you get to know if you share a room. Maureen had never shared a room before. It puzzled her that for all her bodily imperfections Audrey could wander around it naked and easy. And she didn’t like it. Maureen was clever: from the age of thirteen she’d never let a past participle not agree with a verb, not once. Audrey could hardly tell a grave from an acute. Heaven knew how she’d wangled her way into college. Maureen read Machiavelli and Audrey read women’s magazines. But still there was something Audrey had, that Maureen didn’t. Audrey led, Maureen followed, half grateful, half resentful. Maureen was solitary, Audrey was not. Maureen hated to be solitary.
‘You make friends so easily,’ said Maureen to Audrey, making it sound like a reproach, some inbuilt lack of discrimination. ‘How do you do it?’
And that seemed to puzzle Audrey, who was so seldom puzzled.
‘You just talk to people,’ she said.
‘Anybody?’ asked Maureen, with distaste.
‘Well, yes,’ said Audrey. Sometimes it was more than talk, it was into bed with just anyone, and then into someone else’s, so the first anyone would go off in a huff, and Audrey would weep and weep but as Maureen said, keeping her virginity to the last possible moment, and then surrendering it to the Secretary of the Debating Society, a steady and reliable boy with a car, what did Audrey think would happen?
Audrey was popular with boys but Maureen could take her pick of them, so that wasn’t the matter. But she felt when she looked in the mirror of their eyes she saw less than Audrey did. Now why should she think that? She tried to talk about it to Audrey.
‘What do you see?’ asked Audrey. ‘I mean, apart from general lust?’
‘Self-interest,’ said Maureen, before she had time to think. They were sitting together in a Chinese restaurant after a film. Audrey was eating crispy banana in batter, which Maureen of course had declined.
‘Oh,’ said Audrey. ‘I see them liking me.’
Maureen felt such a spasm of rage she swallowed too great a mouthful of too-hot calorie-free China tea and burned her mouth, and it was dry for days. But she didn’t say anything. What was there to say? She forgot it.
What she didn’t forget was Audrey standing on top of a sandhill one day in spring, in a one-piece swimsuit, hair flying in the wind, turning back to the group that followed her, that would follow her anywhere, calling out ‘Come on, everyone!’ and everyone followed. Friends. Company. Party times, good times, crowded times, peopled times; the whole human race whizzing round the benign fulcrum that was Audrey. ‘Come on, everyone!’ and everyone came, and so did Maureen, against her will yet by her will. She thought of the quiet, damp regularity of her childhood home, the single cat shut out at night, breakfast for two, mother and daughter, laid before they went to bed, and part longed to escape and part didn’t want to: some blight had entered her soul too deeply. Up the sandhill she ran with the others, and Audrey was in the sea first. ‘Come on in, everyone! The water’s lovely!’ But of course it wasn’t, she was joking, it was icy, everyone screamed and Audrey splashed. How dare she! Maureen was furious. But everyone had a good time, and so did she. Orchestrating Audrey, weaving everyone into patterns of pleasure! How was it done?
Then of course their paths parted. Audrey with her II2 went off to muddle through some Social Science course; Maureen, with her II1, went off to Brussels to work for the EEC, always her ambition. There was something so clear and wholesome and ordered, not to mention well-paid, about the notion of a job in such a city; a little car, a little flat. And so there was. She had to chuck the Secretary of the Debating Society, because he went to work for Marks & Spencer in Newcastle, but these things often happen to student relationships. Maureen was put out when she found he’d married within the year, a colleague ten years older than himself, and that summer she went home to her mother in Paignton for her annual holiday, but it was miserable and boring, and she resolved never to do it again. Twelve years in Brussels, and now creeping up in the Agricultural Division, and lonely, and getting herself involved with a married man (but they were all married: what was she to do?) which kept her lonelier because of all the waiting about for the telephone and the secrecy and the unkept promises and the no social life, all of which she could see, but it took her forever to break it off (what had happened to her?) and finally she did and then she got a letter from Audrey. What had become of her? Could they meet? Just like Audrey, Maureen thought, why should anyone want to keep in touch with anyone just because they’d been to the same college, been close together in the alphabet. But she wrote back, Audrey invited her to stay for Christmas. Yes, she was married (of course, the unchoosy bitch) with three children: in the country, with lots of animals. Just like Audrey, thought Maureen, come-on-everyoneing into something no doubt damp, muddy, messy, noisy, with cat crap in corners. But Maureen went; she had come to dislike Christmas, after seven seasons with a married man.
The house was a mess. Of course it was. Maureen put on rubber gloves and helped clear up; helped get the over-decorated Christmas tree steady on its pins, the stockings done, endeared herself to the children by handing out Mars Bars in a sugar-free household, and keeping Audrey’s husband Alan entertained while Audrey muddled through the children’s bedtimes and prepared four kinds of stuffing for two small turkeys because that was more fun than one stuffing and an apple in a large turkey.
‘But it’s more work, Audrey.’
‘I know it is, Maureen, but we’ve all got used to it. Family life is all ritual.’
Maureen doubted that ritual was enough. Alan was a political journalist with modern left-leanings; he had to reinspect his own political stance at least three times a year and it didn’t seem to Maureen that Audrey was taking much notice of what was going on in her husband’s head: rather she favoured a kind of ongoing warm emotional demonstration to keep him happy.
‘Darling, what’s the matter, what’s the matter?’ she would cry, flinging her arms round him and embracing him as he stared at the electricity bill (two turkeys cost a third more to cook than one, as Maureen pointed out) until he unwillingly smiled. Maureen understood the unwillingness very well. In fact she thought she understood Alan very well. She looked round the ingredients of the household: the children, the warmth, the animals, the mud tramped in and out, the friends coming and going – they came for miles – and thought, with a little reorganisation this would do me very well. She thought she would have it for herself.
She had to wait four years. In that time she was a frequent visitor to the household. Then Audrey had, as Maureen knew she would, her affair with a married man, and Maureen knew the anatomy of that very well.
‘I feel so bad about it,’ mourned Audrey, chopping nuts for one of the turkey’s stuffings. ‘I love Alan, but I just can’t stop myself.’
‘I expect you just want attention and flattery and to feel loved,’ said Maureen, carefully. She’d read enough women’s magazines in her time, oh yes, since her college days. ‘The things Alan isn’t good at. Such a pity he isn’t more demonstrative. Then you wouldn’t have to look for love outside your marriage.’
Audrey’s tears fell into the cous-cous and lemon peel, and made it a fraction soggier than it should have been.
‘If only I could tell Alan, if only I could talk to him about it, I’d feel so much better in my mind.’
‘Perhaps you should,’ said Maureen, not believing her luck. ‘You have such a strong marriage. If Alan knew the lengths you’d been driven to he’d be horrified. He’d really work at saving the marriage. So this kind of thing never happened again.’
‘Confess?’ asked Audrey, her swift hands pausing, some glimmer of common sense illuminating the dark rec
esses of her lovesick mind, but only for a moment. Her lover was married too, of course, glooming over his Christmas Eve whisky in some other household, lost to her for the season.
‘It’s hardly confessing,’ said Maureen. ‘It’s just being honest. How can a marriage as close as yours and Alan’s work if you’re not honest with one another? I think you owe it to your marriage, and to Alan, to tell him.’ Then Maureen went out for a walk with the children, in the woods, where the leaves were wet with mist, and tried out ‘come on, everyone’ as she produced Mars Bars from her bag. How they rushed!
As the two of them filled Christmas stockings, Audrey told Alan about the affair, about her secret love, about trystings in the backs of cars and offices, and behind hedges – it had been going on since the summer – and how she really loved Alan, if only he was a bit kinder and nicer to her it need never have happened, but he’d let things get stale and how much she valued her marriage.
‘Don’t talk like the back of a woman’s magazine,’ was all Alan said, before hitting her from one side of the room to another, and by Boxing Day she had packed her bags and gone; she’d had to, screaming and hysterical, leaving the children, matrimonial home and all, which didn’t help her a bit in the divorce. (Her lover decided to stay loyal to his wife.) Just as well there was Maureen to help the family through the rituals of that dreadful Christmas Day – she knew the domestic ropes so well, as Alan’s mother said. And by the next Christmas Maureen was not just installed in the house but pregnant as well, with her first child, and calling out ‘Come on, everyone!’ at mealtimes, along with the best, though she didn’t often cook herself, having help in the house, and a very good job (considering the local wage structure) running the local branch of the Farmers’ Union.
