“Yes. Well…” She recovered herself. “And that’s another thing dear. This boy. Of course, I know that it was all perfectly innocent and loving, on his side as well as yours, and of course I wouldn’t dream—Daddy and I wouldn’t dream—of doing anything to get him into any trouble—well, the police or anything, we wouldn’t dream of it. But all the same, what he’s done is a criminal offence. In the eyes of the silly old law, I mean. And so I do feel—if you could just bring yourself to tell us his name, in the most absolute and strictest confidence—after all, it is his baby too…
“It’s not! It’s my baby!”
Miranda had leaped to her feet and was confronting her mother red-faced and hands on hips.
“It’s my baby! It’s mine! It’s nothing to do with him, nothing whatever!” she shouted—a pronouncement so patently absurd that even Miranda herself could think of no way of following it up. With a defiant toss of the head, she turned on her heel and flung out of the room. She refrained, just in time, from slamming the door behind her. To bring Daddy in on it at this juncture, blinking worriedly behind his gold-rimmed spectacles and trying feebly to be as progressive as Mummy—this would have been just about the last straw.
Lying on her bed, eyes shaded against the blaze of the summer evening through the open windows, Miranda found her anger cooling. What had possessed her to be so rude and horrid, when Mummy was being as kind and nice about it all as any mother could possibly be? Why couldn’t she respond with gratitude and appreciation instead of with sulks and rudeness—not to mention stupid and irrational back-answering?
Irrational, perhaps. But stupid? Miranda closed her eyes against the glory of the sunset, deeply pondering. Had there not been a kind of truth in her wildly illogical declaration—a truth that lay beyond logic? There was a sense, explicable to no one but herself, in which the baby was nothing to do with Trevor. The encounter had been too brief, too trivial, too disappointing, to have had any part in so mighty a consequence. The whole thing had lasted barely a minute, and seemed, in retrospect, so unimportant, so devoid of meaning. Having once got over the sense of failure, the feelings of shame at her own ineptitude in the sex act, it was the triviality of the whole experience which had amazed her most; its total lack of significance. Here she was, a virgin no longer, the mysterious hurdle surmounted, the legendary Rubicon crossed—and nothing was changed! She felt the same. She looked the same. Back in the cloakroom, she’d run a comb through her hair, straightened her rucked-up skirt, and gone back to the dance as if nothing had happened. By morning, even the slight soreness and the faint achey feeling were gone. No trace of bodily disturbance, no upheaval of the soul, no flicker of unaccustomed sensation of any kind, gave warning of the mighty changes that had been set in motion. And even a fortnight later, her period already six days overdue and her breasts tingling strangely, she still could not take in what was happening.
It was not that she had failed to notice the symptoms, or was unaware of their significance: it was just that the whole thing was impossible to believe in, like a fairy story. That a hurried and graceless entangling of limbs and genitals, lasting a minute or less, should have consequences vast and incalculable, stretching on and on into the unimaginable future—it was beyond all comprehending. As a result of that single inconsequential minute, a new and perfectly-formed living creature was destined to walk the earth, to breathe the air, to feel the heat of the sun, for seventy or eighty years… Easier, far, to believe that the Doctor would bring the baby in his black bag, that a stork would swoop down with it out of the bright air.
Yet truth it was. It was a scientific fact. Those passing moments of embarrassment and disillusion had been sublime moments of creation. The imagination could not register so incongruous a causal sequence, nor belief encompass it.
But as the days went by—seven … eight … nine, and still her period hadn’t come, belief began almost imperceptibly to establish itself in her consciousness. It came not suddenly, in a flash of revelation, but in a slow, unstoppable tide of growing wonder, of half-incredulous joy.
A baby! I’m having a baby! I, Miranda Field, schoolgirl, have been vouchsafed this miracle of new life growing inside me! I’m pregnant! Me! It’s happening to me!
There had been occasions, in the long-ago time before all this had happened, when she and Sharon had indulged in fantasies of Virgin Births, and man-less pregnancies. They had discussed, with much giggling and yet half-credulously, the likelihood or otherwise of being impregnated while they slept by the Holy Ghost: what it would feel like? and whether they’d still remember it in the morning…?
An immaculate conception! Strange how childish fantasies can so truly foreshadow the realities to come! For this was exactly what it felt like—as if the glory that had come upon her had its origin in some sacred source beyond human understanding, far, far removed from Trevor with his heavy gasping and his offhand, uneasy haste…
It was real! It was happening! To her! Lying here on her rumpled bed, in her familiar childhood bedroom, the miracle was already beginning. Inside her, right now, as she lay here, a little creature no bigger than a frog was forming limbs for itself, and eyes, and the beginnings of a brain; a brain which would one day contain a vocabulary of forty or fifty thousand words, as well as geometry, and algebra, and the names and addresses of countless friends and acquaintances yet unborn. At this very moment, only an inch or two below her knicker elastic, those first clusters of cells were gathering in readiness to read Shakespeare, to listen to Beethoven and Elvis Presley, to learn “On Westminster Bridge” by heart; to gaze through a telescope at the moons of Jupiter, to read about Black Holes, and wonder about the infinite spaces beyond the furthest galaxies…
*
“Darling…! I’m so sorry I upset you, I didn’t mean…”
But it was she, Miranda, who should be apologising, not Mummy! It wasn’t fair! Mummy always managed to get the better of you, somehow! Swivelling round onto her stomach, Miranda buried her face in the pillow, and lay there, mute and ashamed, waiting for it all to be over.
And yet still Mummy kept hovering there between the bed and the door, baffled and uncondemning, poised as on a tightrope between staying and going, and babbling uneasily on and on about misunderstandings, and about it being nearly dinner-time, and about not worrying Daddy just now, with the by-election coming on, and about nobody blaming anybody for anything, and was Miranda not feeling well, would she like some nice hot soup on a tray, in bed…?
If Mrs Field had been one of those straight-laced, censorious parents she so despised, actually trying to make her daughter feel guilty and awful, she couldn’t have made a better job of it. Miranda pulled the eiderdown over her head and buried her face deeper in the pillow; and when, a few minutes later, she ventured warily to peep out, her mother was gone.
Presently, a delicious smell of oxtail, cooked with thyme and bayleaves, began to float upstairs.
Her favourite meal! Had Mummy done it on purpose, to make her feel even more churlish and ungrateful? Or (let’s be fair) had she done it lovingly, to cheer her up, and make her feel cherished?
Either way, there was the same decision to be made: sulks or supper? No one can reasonably expect both, and so after a brief struggle between the flesh and the spirit, Miranda rolled off the bed, combed her hair, slid her feet into her slip-slop sandals, and went downstairs to the dining-room.
Daddy had already been told, obviously. He was wearing his see-no-evil, hear-no-evil look which he never ceased to hope would somehow make things not have happened. And indeed, it worked well enough at Ward Labour Party meetings quite often, but less well at home.
On this occasion, the better not to see what was going on, he had taken his glasses off as well (he was short-sighted) and laid them by his plate, so that the bluish fuzz now materialising in the doorway bore but a minimal resemblance to anyone’s daughter, let alone his own, in blue-and-white checked shirt and faded jeans, carrying Trouble towards his dinner table like a
loaded tray…
“Hello, Daddy,” Miranda greeted him, brightly and deliberately—the transparency of his evasion tactics always irritated her, wasn’t he supposed to have an I.Q. of 140, or something?—“I’m having a baby, did Mummy tell you?” she continued chattily, pulling out her chair and sitting down at the table, “around the beginning of March—”
“Hush, dear! Not just now!” her mother admonished in an urgent undertone, while her father made a brave effort to choke on a forkful of mashed potato, and then to hear the telephone ringing out in the silent hall. Twice he rushed headlong to answer this phantom summons; and by the time he’d returned the second time, the conversation had sure enough moved into safer channels, and he was able to finish his meal in peace.
The ostrich, burying his head in the sand, has long been a laughing stock; but all the same, it really can work. After all, if it couldn’t, ostriches would have been out of the evolutionary stream long ago, and so, presumably, would people like Edwin Field. The Survival of the Fittest manifests itself in diverse and sometimes surprising ways—look at the Toucan, for example, or the Duck-Billed Platypus.
Sooner or later, of course, Mrs Field would pin him down and force him to face the facts, but by that time the worst would be over, and she would be in a position to tell him what he should think and, if there was anything he ought to do, to make him do it. Such had been her benign practice over all these years, and there seemed no good reason why any drastically different system should suddenly be put into operation now.
By the time the meal was over, and she’d gone back upstairs, Miranda’s room was bathed in pinkish light, and the bright cotton curtains that Mummy had made her for her thirteenth birthday were stirring gently in the cool of the evening. In the far corner of the room, dusty, unloved and neglected these five or six years, Miranda’s old dolls’ house was flashing with sparks of rosy light from its tiny lattice windows, long unopened.
How she had loved that dolls’ house once! And what a nuisance it had been ever since, remorselessly continuing to exist, gathering dust, blocking up that useful alcove, and yet somehow quietly and inexplicably resisting every decision to give it away to this or that deserving child, or on behalf of this, that or the other worthy cause.
Miranda hadn’t looked at the thing except with mild and helpless irritation for years, but suddenly this evening she found herself noticing all over again how pretty it was—how enchanting, really, all aglow in the last rays of the sunset, and the little windows shining just as they used to shine when she polished them with that inch-square of wash-leather that Mummy had snipped off for her that rainy afternoon six—seven?—years ago. There’d been a tiny bucket, too, and a ladder made from match sticks glued to cardboard struts, for Grandfather to climb up on his stiff, unyielding plastic legs.
What fun it had been! Crouching down in front of her old treasure, Miranda manoeuvred open the absurd little front door (it had always been inclined to stick, and now it was worse than ever from disuse), and peered into the dark little hallway, still carpeted with those scraps of maroon corduroy left over from the pinafore dress Mummy had made her one winter holidays, when she was about eight. The little stairs were carpeted likewise, boasting even stair rods made from wooden tooth picks, laboriously halved with blunt (and subsequently quite useless) scissors.
On to the ornate, ridiculous dining room, crammed with match-box furniture, and lumpy, impossible sets of dining-chairs (even a doll couldn’t balance on them) made from conkers stuck with pins. How well she recalled Mummy showing her how to make them … and the wonderful, golden October afternoon when they’d collected the conkers, gleaming like polished mahogany through the cracks in the green, spikey rind…
And in the midst of it all, decrepit and unloved, there lay in a dusty little heap the whole Mactaggerty family—Grandfather Mactaggerty, with his white beard come unglued and dangling round his left ear and his stick all out sideways … Grandmother Mactaggerty eternally smiling down—even now, with her legs in the air—at the knitting stitched permanently to her lap, Mummy Mactaggerty, Daddy Mactaggerty and the three naughty little Mactaggerty children, Rosalinda, Rosamunda and (for some reason she could not recall) French, his perky, bell-bottomed trousers tattered and dusty now beyond all recognition.
How the baby was going to love them! Little though they knew it, their days of loveless retirement were coming to an end, and life would begin for them again. Soon, there would be new little fingers to set Grandfather’s beard straight for him again, and to send him—hobbledy-hop, hobbledy-hop—out shopping. Or to the office. Or up in an aeroplane. In a year—well, no, two years—the Mactaggerty’s would be on their feet again, having fun again, adventures again, and raisins, and crumbs of chocolate biscuit on the tiny plates….
That her baby would be a girl, Miranda had never doubted. Already she had decided to call her Caroline. Like “Caroline and her Seaside Friends”—and after Granny, too, of course. Granny would have been awfully pleased…
Would she, in view of all the circumstances? The wishes of the dead are, of course, difficult to ascertain, but it is surprising, in practice, how often their opinions turn out to be just what is maximally convenient for their survivors; and why should Miranda’s Granny be an exception to this rule?
Dusk was falling, the inside of the dolls’ house was thick with shadows. Reaching with her giant, overgrown fist into the dining room, Miranda gathered up the Mactaggertys in a single handful and carried them over to the desk to look at them properly under the reading lamp. To look at them, that is, through Caroline’s fresh, wondering eyes, already in the process of coming into being.
They were awful! Well, not them, not the Mactaggertys themselves, for they were indestructible—but their clothes!
Dirty, tattered, cobbled together with huge, uneven stitches, and not even hemmed, half of them—had she really been such a rotten needlewoman at the ripe age of nine? Or even ten, was it? She couldn’t possibly pass them on to Baby Caroline in such a state. It might well put her right off them, and would certainly spoil the magic moment of the presentation. Something would have to be done.
And this was why, an hour or two later, under the soft drawing room lights, “What are you making, dear?” Mummy had asked, peering, puzzled, at the tiny scrap of red-and-white check gingham at which Miranda was busily stitching.
“It’s Rosalinda’s new frock, Mummy,” Miranda explained, proudly and a little shyly, “You remember Rosalinda, don’t you—one of my dolls? I’m refurbishing the dolls’ house, you see, ready for Caroline—for the baby—that is…”
Her voice faltered into silence, for a most extraordinary thing was happening. So sympathetic, so almost preternaturally understanding Mummy had been until this moment—and now, suddenly her eyes were hard and angry, her voice shrill:
“Ridiculous! Throw it away at once! Really, I don’t know how you can be so childish! As if there were nothing more to worry about than… Miranda! Did you hear me? I said, Throw it away! At once!” And Miranda, utterly taken aback, too startled to protest, obediently tossed the absurd little object into the waste-paper basket, and sat staring up at her mother, uncomprehending and speechless.
Later, Mummy was sorry. Really sorry.
“I didn’t mean to upset you, darling,” she pleaded, for the second time that day, “but you see”—here her voice quivered, almost as if she was on the verge of tears—“Oh, darling, I’m only trying to do my best for you! You know that, don’t you? I want to help you, sweetheart, in every way I possibly can. I’ll do anything… anything! Surely you know that…?”
And Miranda did know it. Of course she did. They hugged one another, even wept a little, in sheer relief.
CHAPTER V
BY MID-JULY, Miranda was the heroine of the Fourth Year. Awed whispers, and envious or incredulous glances followed her wherever she went: her peregrinations between playground and classroom, between chemistry lab and music rooms, took on the nature of a royal progress,
heads popping from windows all along the route, and furtive little crowds gathering to watch and whisper as she passed by.
Pregnant? Miranda Field? You’ve got to be joking! No, but really, no kidding! She told Sharon herself, and Sharon told me! Or Angela told me … or Vanessa told me … or Judith … or Doreen … the qualified informants by now were legion.
It must be like this to be an astronaut, or a pop star. During those last days of the summer term, Miranda basked in such glory as she had never known, eclipsing effortlessly and completely the erstwhile radiance of those once-envied girls who had merely had “It”.
A baby! Miranda Field going to have a baby …! The nine-days wonder of it seemed as if it would never end. In the slow, windless heat of late July, with exams over and with the school year grinding gently to its close, the Miranda Field drama expanded to fill the minds available for its contemplation.
“Tell us what it’s like!” her wide-eyed audience would plead, in hushed tones, awed in the presence of such immensity of experience. Can you feel it moving yet? Is it like—well, like a sort of lump inside you? Well, what is it like, then? Do you feel sick at all? Not morning sickness or anything? Do you have weird cravings, like for raw parsnips and things? Or coal? Someone’s sister—or was it—someone’s sister’s friend?—had had this awful craving for coal, great shiny lumps of it, she’d be scrunching them up all evening, her saliva all black all the time, so that in the end her husband… Does it show at all, when you’ve got nothing on? Do you have to wear anything special—you know—underneath? Are you beginning to have peculiar dreams…?
Tell us! Tell us! The eternal cry of Life’s stay-at-homes to the voyager from far places—but how to answer it? How to convey to them—to anyone—the sense of holiness that enfolded her; the feeling of having been chosen, of moving like a priestess, robed in splendour, towards some shining altar on which the whole of the future lay curled and waiting? She, Miranda Field, was part of evolution now, a member of the evolutionary elite who have been selected-in, and whose genes are to pass into immortality…
With No Crying Page 3
