“Miranda! Miranda Field! This is the second time I’ve had to speak to you this afternoon! Now, will you kindly answer my questions: When the Council of Fourteen finally resolved to put their case before the King, why was it that…”
The Council of Fourteen. Fourteen strong men, fully grown, and every one of them must have started with a missed period! Every one of them must have grown from tiny, tadpole-like beginnings in some long-dead womb, which had thrust them headlong into history, so that now here they were, four hundred years later, on an O-Level syllabus of which they could never have dreamed…
“Really, Miranda! You seem half asleep these days! You’ll have to do better than this next year, you know, if you’re to—Oh, all right, then, Julia, you tell us…”
Two and a half inches long now! Right here, under the waistband of her school skirt, and the fingers beginning to form, with tiny nails… The wonder of it swept over her like a great wind, her consciousness billowing out before it, and filling her with a sense of her own power, her own wisdom, her own unimaginable skills. Not so much as an eyelash would she know consciously how to create, and yet here was this body of hers—her own body, her very self—knowing—easily, effortlessly knowing—exactly how to make a whole new human being, perfect in every detail. No biologist in all the world, with all the techniques of all the research departments on the whole earth at his disposal, could do what she could do. Hers was the secret of life; and here, at an ordinary desk, in a drowsy afternoon classroom with a boring history lesson going on, was its dwelling-place. Here, with Miss Fergusson’s voice droning in her ears, she sat among the immortals, carrying within her the answer to it all.
Tell us! … Tell us …! When the lesson was over, and the books being packed away, the questions once again rose twittering all around her, like flocks of small birds arising from freshly-tilled ploughland; and as always, she tried honestly to answer them.
But it was no use. The harder she tried, the more it sounded like one of those spirit messages that come through at a seance: It’s so beautiful … so wonderful … I can’t explain, but it’s all so beautiful … everyone’s so happy here…
“Sounds plain daft to me,” remarked Doreen Briggs, sturdy and down-to-earth, and not troubling to disguise the scorn in her voice, “I mean, what are you going to do with a baby, Miranda? At your age, I mean, and not married or anything! It’s daft! And what’s your Mum going to say?”
“My mother’s being marvellous about it,” retorted Miranda loftily. “And so is my father,” she added, as a dutiful afterthought, and probably with a substantial element of truth; after all, being marvellous is often a good deal less trouble than arguing. “I’ve told them everything,” she finished smugly, “and they’re going to help me with the baby every way they can.”
Doreen sniffed incredulously.
“Daft,” she repeated unrepentantly. “If they’ve any sense, they’ll make you get rid of it!”
And it was only three days later, over iced tea with slices of lemon in it on the sunny lawn, that she learned that this was exactly what her parents planned to do.
CHAPTER VI
“So you see, darling, all we’re thinking of is what’ll be best for you,” Mrs Field was desperately explaining, stabbing nervously at her words as she always did when limbering up for a major confrontation. “We’ve talked and talked about it, Daddy and I, we’ve gone over every possibility, and we’ve come to the conclusion that the only thing…”
“I won’t! I’m not going to! I’m not interested in your beastly, horrible conclusions, it’s nothing to do with you, or Daddy either! It’s my baby, and it’s my decision; and I’ve told you, I won’t! I just won’t! You can’t make me…”
Or could they? This was the tiny, agonising niggle of doubt gnawing away at the soft, quivering underside of Miranda’s brave words. Was it possible, if you were under-age, for your parents to drag you kicking and screaming to the hospital for what they considered to be a necessary operation? Had they the power, while nurses and orderlies held you down, to sign the necessary forms on your behalf? And would the surgeon, on their signed say-so, be entitled to wreak their parental will on your helpless, adolescent body regardless of your shrieks and pleadings? Would it be his right—his duty even—to commit this outrage at the behest of your legal guardians? But even if this was the case, would any surgeon, in practice, actually do it? Or would he—duty or no—refuse to operate in such circumstances? It wouldn’t be a pretty scene, with the patient fighting him every inch of the way, screaming and pleading for her baby’s life, twisting her head this way and that, holding her breath against the anaesthetic…
Would he? Could he? Were there some surgeons who would go ahead regardless … others who would refuse to do so? Were you thus completely at the mercy of their clinical whims? And if you were, then what would be the best way to win them over to your side? Maybe screaming and fighting would, after all, be counterproductive, serving merely to convince them—exchanging knowing, adult glances above your frantic head—that you were indeed just as childish, hysterical, and unfit for the responsibilities of motherhood as your parents had claimed you were…?
What were your legal rights when you were only fifteen? You must have some—but how to discover them? And, above all, to discover them in time…
*
To do Mummy justice, she hadn’t for one moment threatened Miranda with her and Daddy’s legal powers—not so far, anyway. For the time being, sweet reason was Mrs Field’s preferred suit, and she was playing it for all it was worth.
A baby? At fifteen? Surely Miranda could see for herself what a catastrophe it would be? How it would wreck her whole life at the very outset, all hopes of a proper education, a proper career, and a happy successful future at the end? There would be no hope any more of Miranda’s getting into University, which was what they’d always planned for her, bright, clever girl that she was; or of qualifying for an interesting, creative job commensurate with her talents. It would be wicked, it would be an outrage, to allow her to throw away all these chances right at the start, before she was old enough to know what she was doing! And her chances of a happy marriage one of these days—those, too, would go by the board: who did she suppose would want to marry a girl burdened with another man’s child before she’d even reached the age of consent?
And think, too (Norah Field’s voice began to take on an almost wheedling note)—think, too, of all the fun she’d be missing, the lovely carefree years of the late teens and early twenties which are every girl’s birthright! How did she think she’d feel in two or three years’ time, when all her friends were going out into the world, travelling, meeting new people, having adventures, falling in love—while she, Miranda was stuck at home night after night, year after year, serving her life sentence of baby-sitting?
It just didn’t bear thinking of! And all the time, the solution was staring them in the face—just a quick and very nearly painless visit to the hospital—hardly anything more than a visit to the dentist—and back home in a day or so, right as rain.
“You don’t know how lucky you are, in your generation!” Mrs Field admonished, “having it all so easy and above board, and with no stigma attached! When I was your age, a nasty, dangerous back-street abortion would have been the only option … some awful old woman with a knitting-needle, most likely … and all the time terrified of being found out because you knew that what you were doing was illegal…”
“I’d love to have lived in those days!” burst out Miranda furiously. “If it was an awful old woman with a knitting-needle, then you couldn’t make me go to her, you’d be breaking the law, I could demand police protection, I could get you put in prison!”
The quarrel was beginning to escalate beyond either of their control; it was frightening, and yet there seemed nowhere to go but on.
“Miranda! What a terrible thing to say! And anyway, no one’s talking about making you do anything! I’m not for one moment trying to impose my will
on you—it’s just that you surely must see for yourself…”
But Miranda didn’t see. Wouldn’t see. Couldn’t see. She was fighting for her baby’s life, and could see nothing beyond.
“I won’t,” she kept repeating doggedly. “I just won’t. I’m not going to. I’ve told you, I’m not going to.”
So far Mrs Field had been trying, with ever-increasing desperation, to keep the argument on an enlightened, rational plane, and encourage her daughter to come to her own decisions in a mature and rational way. But what can you do with a person who, instead of coming to mature and rational decisions, just keeps saying “I won’t!”? How can you maintain a permissive, non-judgemental, open-minded attitude towards people who just won’t see sense? After all, the Permissive Society can hardly be expected to cater for the sort of people who flatly refuse to do the things it permits.
“Really, Miranda! Do we have to go on and on like this, the same arguments over and over again, and never getting anywhere! It’s so boring, as well as stupid! And such a waste of time! And time, you know, dear, is something we just can’t afford to waste, not any longer. You see, it’s so very important—and if you don’t believe me, ask any doctor—so very important not to let it go beyond three months because by then it’ll be too big. You see, after that.
“She’s not ‘it’!” Miranda choked out, tears of fury once again filling eyes worn red with the long afternoon’s weeping. “She’s Caroline! She—”
“Oh, but darling, that’s where you’re so silly, talking like that!” cried Mrs Field. “It’s ridiculous! ‘Caroline’ indeed—and you don’t even know yet if it’s a boy or a girl! And actually it isn’t either, not yet: it’s just a nothing … a blob of jelly…”
“She’s not!” “I’m sorry, darling, but it is, and that’s a fact! Don’t you realise it’s still only…”
It isn’t! It is! It isn’t! Don’t shout at me like that! I’m not shouting! You are shouting! I’m not…! you are …! I’m not! Darling—please—the neighbours! The neighbours, the neighbours, that’s all you care about, you and Daddy, what the neighbours will think! And you supposed to be so Left-Wing, both of you … so modern and progressive … and now, when it comes to the crunch! … Hush, dear, oh please hush! Everyone all down the street…
The mother pleaded: the daughter grew ever more defiant. I won’t, she continued to assert, obstinately, sullenly, and doggedly. I won’t. I’m not going to. I don’t care what you do, you can tear me with wild horses, I’ll never give in!
In the event, wild horses proved to be unnecessary. The power of emotional blackmail should not, after all, be underestimated, nor the slow wearing down of the spirit over many days. On Tuesday, August 3rd, at 10.30 a.m., white and silent, eyes swollen with crying, but without protest, Miranda climbed obediently onto the surgeon’s couch and submitted herself to the operation.
Baby Caroline would never know, now, what it was like to be more than three inches long, this was as big as she would ever be. Those half-formed, bulbous eyes would never see, nor the ears hear. The sprouting fingers, with their tiny finger nails already forming, would never now play the piano, whip up an omelette, or hold a pen. Like buds shrivelled by the frosts of a late, cold spring, their tiny day was over.
CHAPTER VII
PERHAPS IT WOULD have been better if they had threatened her with wild horses, or some similarly heroic ordeal. To be forced by sheer physical violence into submission may leave scars on the body, but the soul, with any luck, can soar above it unscathed. If Miranda had fought, as she had planned to fight, with teeth and nails against a steely-eyed robot of a surgeon, whose response to her screams and pleadings was merely to summon four muscular orderlies to hold her down—had this been the scene, then she might have emerged from it with her spirit unbroken; vanquished indeed, but with some shreds of self respect to sustain her through the ensuing days of grief and loss.
But that’s not the way it was at all. They couldn’t have been nicer, all of them, from the young, smiling surgeon who talked to her so soothingly and reassuringly while he examined her before the operation, to the pretty, kind-hearted nurses who greeted her return to consciousness in a bright, sunny room full of flowers. A private room, apparently. “Real V.I.P. treatment!” as one of the young nurses laughingly put it, remarking on what a lucky girl Miranda was to have parents who cared so much about her welfare as to pay for private treatment. “Nothing but the best good enough for their daughter!” the girl summed it up, half admiring and half critical. “And getting you to the top of the list, too!—there’s girls nearly four months gone and still waiting, to my certain knowledge … Somebody’s Dad knows how to pull the strings, that’s for sure…”
It would have been Mummy, of course, not Daddy, who would have pulled the strings—or, rather, would have guided his hand while he did it, making sure that he deployed to best advantage his contacts both at work and in politics. Mummy was marvellous at this sort of thing. She must be loving it.
And as a result of all this, the whole affair had gone off splendidly; everything turned out exactly as Miranda had been promised it would. As far as physical pain was concerned, it really had been “no more than a visit to the dentist”—less, if anything; and by the end of the day she really was feeling “as right as rain”. The young surgeon, visiting in the late afternoon, was delighted with her—regular pulse, no disquieting fluctuations of temperature or blood pressure, no complications of any kind. Like most doctors, he found it quite a treat to be dealing, now and again, with a perfectly healthy body in peak condition and with absolutely nothing wrong with it. Among all the fibroids, prolapses and hysterectomies of his gynaecological practice, this sort of thing was quite a little oasis in his day.
And of course, from his point of view, it was an open-and-shut case—the perfect, archetypal situation for which the more liberal abortion laws of the past decade had been expressly designed: a young teenager, still at school, getting herself pregnant after a few drinks, by a boy she scarcely knew and with whom she’d had no contact since—this was just the sort of case to which abortion was the humane and obvious answer. Fortunately the parents weren’t Catholic or anything, there were no complicated religious scruples to be got round, nor were they the guilt-ridden old-fashioned types who were against the easy way out on principle. In fact, they seemed to be a singularly enlightened couple, remarkably free of the sort of hang-ups typical of their generation, and thus able to come to a balanced, sensible decision, their daughter’s welfare the only consideration. If only all parents were like these!
The girl herself had seemed a bit quiet and tearful; but then this was by no means uncommon, and when you considered what these girls had usually been through in the preceding weeks—family rows, perhaps, and anxieties and humiliations of all kinds—you couldn’t wonder. To see the way they perked up when the op. was safely over, to witness the relief and gratitude on the young faces when they woke to their new freedom, their new lease of carefree living—this was what made the job so worthwhile.
Not that “perked up” was quite the phrase that best described this latest patient of his when he paused, smiling, at her bedside. She was still subdued and monosyllabic, though physically (as he quickly and expertly ascertained) in tip-top condition: good colour, regular pulse, everything exactly as it should be.
“My prize patient!” he tried to jolly her up, “I wish they all looked like you three hours after leaving the theatre! Any pain anywhere? Any headache? Any problems with passing water?”
He knew there wouldn’t be; he was far too good a surgeon for bungled side effects of this nature to be a feature of his postoperative rounds; and so, “Good girl, you’ll be fighting fit by the week-end!” he encouraged her, smiling down into the wide, unblinking eyes fixed on his own, “and this time watch your step a bit, eh, young lady?”—and with a friendly pat on her shoulder, he was gone.
*
To have let off her rage, her grief and her despair into that kin
dly, unsuspecting face would have been unthinkable. Besides, the thing was done now, and couldn’t be undone. And even this morning, when the options, in theory, were still open, the practical impossibility of making any sort of last ditch stand against the calm and ordered structure of events in a well-run hospital, was something that had caught her completely by surprise. To have turned upon all these kind, committed people, who had gone to such trouble to fit her into their busy schedule, to repay their concern and sympathy with shrieks of rage and ingratitude: to have fought off with kicks and blows those gentle, ministering hands: to have clawed with her sharp nails at that pleasant, boyish face as it leaned over her so eager to comfort and reassure—it would have been impossible. How could she have known that these would be the enemies, and that the weapons she’d been secretly, silently sharpening against them through the long nights of sleepless fury, would suddenly be limp in her hands, like toy daggers, cut out of cardboard, and left all night in the rain?
Rather than make an undignified and shocking scene, rather than affront and appal all these pleasant, well-behaved, well-intentioned experts, rather than disgrace herself in public, she had allowed Baby Caroline to die.
It was no good hating them. They had only been doing their job. For her remaining hours in hospital, Miranda’s behaviour was quiet and unremarkable. She ate little, but answered politely when they spoke to her, said Yes, thank you, she was feeling fine.
Hating was for when she got home.
*
Mummy couldn’t possibly have been kinder, or more loving. During the two days after Miranda left hospital, Mrs Field devoted herself totally to her daughter’s comfort and wellbeing, cosseting and fussing over her as if she was a little girl again suffering from some minor childhood illness, bringing her cool drinks, and trays of delicious food—even offering to read aloud to her, and to play card games, as in days gone by. If Mrs Field was aware of the waves of silent hostility and rejection that met her every overture, she gave no sign of it: Miranda’s monosyllabic rudeness was put down to “the strain of it all, poor child!” and her sullen silences to “Hormonal readjustment—only to be expected!”
With No Crying Page 4
