That there might, when the time came, be any difficulty about thus vanishing from their lives had not as yet crossed Miranda’s mind: and why should it? Had not her predecessor, Christine (whoever she was), vanished in just this fashion, without effort and without fuss? The girl had simply failed to return one night, had never been seen since, and no one (so it seemed) was batting an eyelid. Thus, then, would Miranda do likewise, when the time came. She would walk out of the flat one day, without a word, and never return. They wouldn’t try—why should they?—to trace her. For one thing, they couldn’t: she hadn’t even told them her surname, and—Christian names being the rule in this establishment—they hadn’t asked. And for another, it would surely be against their free-and-easy, live-and-let-live principles to mount any kind of a search? Applauding her inalienable right to do her own thing, to run her own life as she pleased, without interference, they’d surely do absolutely nothing? She’d disappear, never be seen again, and their carefree lives would surge onward without her.
Just as had happened with Christine.
Five days, though. Would it be easy to keep up the deception even that long? She yearned, in her heart, to stay, and stay, and stay in this warm, easygoing place, where she felt so comfortable, so admired, and so safe. But in her head, there was an uneasy niggle of doubt. Was she, in fact, not safe at all, but on the contrary in terrible danger; a danger of discovery that increased inexorably with every extra day, every extra hour, that she remained? It was all right so far, no one suspected a thing, she’d got away with it completely: but five whole days?—wasn’t that rather pushing her luck?
Not really. Because luck seemed to be the one thing that was on her side, at the moment. For was it not sheer luck, and nothing else, that had decreed that it should be this Christine, rather than any of the rest of them, who should have chanced to go missing at just this juncture? Because it so happened that Christine’s was the only single room in the establishment—and reliably so, since there was no way a second bed could have been squeezed within these narrow walls—if it could, it would have been. It was a poky little room, narrow and cupboard-like, and rather dark, too, since the only illumination came through a grimy little window high up in the wall—but nevertheless, it suited Miranda down to the ground. Here, in privacy, she could don her false pregnancy in the morning and discard it at night without fear of discovery—without much fear, anyway. Naturally, in so casual and slaphappy a household as this one, there was always the offchance of someone or another barging into the room uninvited—like the rightful owner, for example, but so far it hadn’t happened; and so after a bit there began to seem no point in worrying about it.
Looking back, now, in shame and misery, dragging herself numb with dread through the sullen August heat, Miranda could feel only a sort of dazed incredulity at how little she had worried during those first two or three days; how sure she’d been that the choice was entirely hers, to stay or to go, exactly when she judged fit. She’d felt so happy, somehow, indeed so very nearly pregnant most of the time, that quite often it hardly seemed like a pretence at all. Partly, this was due to the constant reinforcements of the fantasy by her unsuspecting companions. Surrounded by their interest, their concern, and their growing excitement about the coming baby, it was almost impossible not to feel, for quite long stretches of time, that it was all real. When Alison came in one evening with a parcel of pale pink baby wool and a pattern for a matinee jacket, Miranda felt not only touched and grateful, but really excited, and found herself joining eagerly in the ensuing discussion about whether it would be the right size, or should Alison make it a bit bigger by using a larger size of needles than recommended?
“Yes—well—they do seem to think it’s going to be quite a big baby,” Miranda admitted modestly, and without, at that moment, any sensation of telling a lie. “At my last check-up they said it would be well over eight pounds, more like eight and a half, they thought.”
From all of which Alison reasonably inferred that number nine needles would, after all, be the most appropriate, and she settled herself comfortably on the window seat, under the big sash windows wide open to the warm summer air, and set herself to cast on the requisite 72 stitches, counting under her breath as she went.
This was the best part of the day, Miranda felt, this hour between six and seven, when those who had been out at work were beginning to return, flopping down one by one on floor, settee or window seat, in a mood for relaxation and chatter before the question of whose turn it was to cook dinner began to gather momentum, and before a flurry of preparations closed in upon those who had dates—or hoped that they had—for the coming evening. At this halcyon hour, even those who had done nothing all day—like Miranda, and Merve—found themselves partaking with the others in this pleasant (though in their case undeserved) sense of well-earned leisure.
Not that Merve would have agreed that in his case it was undeserved; still less that he had been doing nothing all day, though that was what it looked like to the untutored eye. Merve was writing a novel—a real humdinger of a novel, he assured Miranda—all about a young man of nineteen who had been brought up in Sheffield by blinkered, middle-class parents who had sent him to a school where all the boys who weren’t blinkered and middle-class were noisy and rough. Schooldays (seven chapters in all) were followed by an amorphous period dominated by mounting parental obsessions about what our hero (whose name is Henry) is going to do; until at last he can stand no more. He kicks over the traces, chucks up his membership of the Young Ramblers’ Association, and rushes up to London, where…
This was the point the novel had reached when Miranda came on the scene, and this was where, three days later, it was still stuck. Writers’ Block was the name given by Merve to his unfortunate condition, and it aroused in his flatmates just the same kind of eager solicitude (pink knitting excepted) as did Miranda’s pregnancy. Sympathy, advice, and suggestions for furthering the plot were forthcoming in almost embarrassing profusion, while Merve leaned wearily against the door jamb, limp with the day’s non-achievement, and deeply wary—as of course a writer needs to be—of any idea which he hadn’t already thought of himself.
How about Henry visits a brothel, suggested one?—but Merve didn’t think he knew enough about brothels to make the background convincing. Well, then, have him fall into the clutches of a beautiful spy, someone else proposed: but apparently he hadn’t researched this one in sufficient depth either. Well, drugs, then. Get him caught up with a drug ring. Or introduced into a world famous pop group? … What, apart from lying in bed till midday, does happen to innocent young men on the loose for the first time in the big wicked city?
Here Miranda put forward a suggestion, diffidently, as became a newcomer: How would it be, she ventured, if he didn’t have to be called Henry? I mean, with a name like that…?
But no! On no account! What an idea! Merve was quite vehement about it, and Miranda, suitably chastened, hastily withdrew from the debate and refrained from making any more suggestions.
Though she could have done, of course. Like, in this Squat where Henry hangs out, there’s this bird, see, who’s kidding them all she’s pregnant when she isn’t. Properly pulled the wool over their eyes, she has, thinks she’s got away with it; until one evening, summer time it is, and they’re all gathered together in the big living room, chatting of this and that, and suddenly she becomes aware of Henry’s eyes fixed on her strangely…
Miranda felt the red blood rushing to her face, and she hung her head to hide her blazing cheeks.
It was absurd, though! It was ridiculous! Merve wasn’t even looking at her at all, let alone strangely! He was staring into space, lost in glum contemplation of the uselessness and futility of all human advice: and as to the others, they too had their attention focussed on something other than her, and had noticed neither the rising nor the fading of her telltale blush. Alison was concentrating on those first vital rows of her knitting, making sure that she was getting the tension right; I
ris had already left the room some minutes earlier—it was her turn to cook tonight—and could be heard clattering efficiently in the small kitchen; while Belinda, sitting cross-legged on the floor in her washed-out corduroy slacks, was idly leafing through a magazine.
“I’ll read you Caroline’s horoscope, shall I?” she said to Miranda, without looking up. “She’ll be a Leo, of course—August the eleventh. Which wouldn’t be too good, Miranda, since you’re a Leo too…” (No sooner had Belinda learned the date of Miranda’s recent birthday than she’d squealed out in triumph, “There, I knew you were a Leo as soon as I saw you! I can always tell!”) “… But since you’re almost right on the cusp, whereas Caroline’ll be more towards Virgo, it shouldn’t be all that incompatible. Besides, Mars will still be in the ascendant on August 11th, and—listen!—Venus will be just entering the Third House! That’s very good, especially for a girl, because…”
Miranda wasn’t listening, exactly; more lapping it up, like a contented kitten. With Alison on one side fervently knitting up pink wool on her behalf, and Belinda on the other adapting the very stars in their courses to the best advantage of Miranda’s baby—how could she feel otherwise than cherished, and content, and utterly secure?
There was no doubt in any of their minds that the baby would be a girl; and it wasn’t just on Miranda’s say-so, either. Belinda had proved it. Only last night she had applied to Miranda’s bulging stomach the String and Ring test, dangling over it someone or other’s wedding ring on a length of black cotton. The others had watched, tense and expectant, until at last, impelled by supernatural forces—well, what else, since Belinda swore she was keeping her poised hand absolutely motionless?—the ring had begun, slowly at first, and then faster, and more decisively, to move round and round, in an ever-widening circle, under their very eyes.
A girl, this meant. Backwards and forwards, like a pendulum, would have indicated a boy. Belinda was exultant.
“It always works!” she declared triumphantly, “for me, anyway! I’ve done it on loads of people, and I’ve never been wrong. Never once! I’m psychic, you see,” she explained complacently; and for just one second, Miranda felt her heart stand still.
But it was all right. Psychic or not, Belinda’s powers were clearly inadequate to penetrate the appalling secret that lay only inches beneath the twinkling little band of gold that revolved so obediently in miniature orbit, like a phoney little planet round a non-existent sun.
A girl! Oh, congratulations, Miranda! That’s what you always wanted, isn’t it! Half-credulous, and more than half committed to the mighty and unexplored efficacy of sheer wishful-thinking, the girls threw themselves wholeheartedly into plans for the little female child who was to come among them. Pink cot-blankets. The dainty, frilled crib that had belonged to someone’s sister. Toys, tiny garments, even a cot mattress fell around Miranda like confetti. No, more like warm, life-giving rain, soaking right down into starved and barren soil.
The five days were nearly up now; but how could she leave them as she had planned, without even a word of farewell? How could she throw all this love and kindness back into their faces, like a wet fish, and walk out without a word of explanation, without any exchange of civilities, or arrangements for future meetings? It hadn’t been like this even with Christine—this had been her miscalculation right from the very beginning.
An understandable miscalculation, admittedly. From their casual and cavalier manner of re-allotting the absent girl’s bed to a total stranger, without so much as a by-your-leave, Miranda had got the impression that this must be the house style: just part of the non-interfering, do-your-own-thing philosophy on which this establishment claimed to be based. Out of sight, out of mind: if someone disappeared, then that was her right and her privilege; you just wrote her off, replaced her with whoever happened to turn up, and carried on without a backward look. And so thus (Miranda reasoned) it would be with her likewise, when her turn came to disappear.
How wrong she’d been in at least some of these assumptions became abundantly clear to her within her first forty-eight hours. Scrupulously though they might concede to the vanished Christine her inalienable right to do her own thing, they clung with equal pertinacity to their own inalienable right to chatter and gossip about this thing to their hearts’ content, analysing and dissecting it down to its last luscious details. They all knew by now exactly where Christine must have gone, and why; and when they weren’t talking about Miranda’s baby during the long summer twilights, sprawling around among the shabby armchairs and frayed cushions of the big, cluttered room, they were talking about Christine’s love life, and where (which would seem to be almost everywhere) she’d gone wrong.
“How she can go crawling back to Keith after all that business with Topsy, I’ll never understand,” Iris remarked, surveying the polished ovals of her nails through narrowed lids. “And as for giving in like that about the bathroom curtains!”—here she shrugged scornfully—“she must be out of her tiny mind!”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Alison’s fingers were flashing through and around the pink wool for Miranda’s non-existent baby, and her face glowed, madonna-like, in the last of the sunset. “After all, Iris, she does really love him. Well, she must, mustn’t she?—look at that time on the Underground…!”
They all laughed uproariously, with delighted reminiscence. Clearly, whatever had happened between this Keith and this Christine on the Underground had been rich enough, and bizarre enough, to have become a household joke, a delightful in-group reference, welding them together in shared merriment.
For the newcomer, though, these sort of exchanges were most tantalising. You couldn’t keep on saying, who’s Topsy, and which time on the Underground, and where do the bathroom curtains come in?—it would be just too tedious for the rest of them. Oh, well; that’s the way it was, being a new girl. Miranda would just have to sit quietly, listening, picking up what she could, and piecing it together, until gradually, as the days went by, it would all become clear to her, and she, too, would be sharing in the gossip and the laughter…
As the days went by… But for her, Miranda, the days weren’t going to go by, not more than one or two of them, anyway. By tomorrow, or the day after at latest, she must be gone.
And when it was all over, when Alison’s knitting needles clicked no longer; when Belinda’s fairy-godmother predictions ceased, and the girls chattered about her no more, then Baby Caroline would be gone, too. Gone in some final, irrevocable way which despite the abortion, despite everything, had somehow, as yet, not quite happened.
*
“Coffee, anyone?” Belinda was on her feet, numbering off the assembled company without reference to the replies—it wasn’t as if anyone ever did say “no” to this sort of offer.
“Black for you, Iris?” she opined; “and you too, Merve, if you’re really going to be rewriting that chapter all night. Milk-and-a-dash for you, Miranda, it’s better for the baby; remember what Tim said about too much caffeine… No, no love, you stay where you are, I’ll do it. Why don’t you put your feet up?—move over, Merve, and let Miranda have the whole of the settee. She’s the one who’s pregnant, not you… Yes, I know that writing a novel is as painful as giving birth, you’ve told us about ten million times, but all the same, it can’t give you varicose veins, now can it!
“I haven’t got varicose veins, either,” Miranda was beginning, with a little laugh; but Iris interrupted her:
“Funny you’re having so little trouble with your legs, isn’t it?” she remarked pleasantly. “No cramps. No swollen ankles. Nothing. My sister had all sorts of aches and discomforts in the last month—although she never got to half your size! You’ve been awfully lucky, haven’t you?”
Was Miranda imagining it, or was there in the older girl’s pleasant, conversational tone a hint of something other than ordinary, kindly interest? This was not the first time that Iris had called attention in a perfectly bland and casual sort of way to some feature of Miranda’s
condition which struck her—so she claimed—as being just slightly different from the norm. She couldn’t, like Tim, lay claim to any specialised medical training in the field, but she did seem to possess an unconscionable number of sisters, cousins and girlfriends, whose pregnancies had every one of them differed in some small but disconcerting way from Miranda’s.
“You’re carrying very high, aren’t you, Miranda?” she’d remarked only yesterday, eyeing Miranda up and down as she stood at the cooker, stirring the big pan of soup thereon. “Usually, it tends to drop during the last month, and you go quite a noticeably different shape. The head is engaged, isn’t it? It should be, by now.”
Up to a point, Miranda was well able to counter expertise with expertise, so thoroughly had she read up the subject during recent weeks. But this was a new one to her.
“Oh yes. Oh, I think it is,” she answered hastily; and at that very moment Tim walked into the kitchen. By some unfortunate chance it always seemed to happen that, despite his long hours at the hospital, Tim invariably chanced to be around, and within hearing, just when Iris was making her casual but disconcerting observations.
“What’s this about the head not being properly engaged?” he asked sharply, looking from Miranda to Iris, and then back to Miranda again. “Was that what they said, at your last check-up?”—and then, with a sudden sharpening of anxiety: “You are going to your check-ups still, aren’t you Miranda? I know you told us the hospital you’re booked into is miles away, but all the same—listen, I’ll tell you what! I’ll drive you there. Just let me know when your next appointment is, and I’ll get the time off somehow … you shouldn’t be travelling that sort of distance on public transport at this stage. Besides, I’d like to have a word with your doctor … there’s just one or two things I’m not quite happy about … Oh, now, sweetie, there’s no need to look so horrified! I don’t mean there’s anything wrong with the baby, I’m sure it’s fine, absolutely fine! It’s just—well—with your parents out of the picture like this, and you so determined to keep it that way—well, someone’s got to see that you’re being properly looked after. Surely you can see that?
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