And now this! Naturally, Merve had accepted the fact that the whole thing was going to end, sooner or later, in a baby. That was inevitable, and in no way Miranda’s fault. You couldn’t blame her for the whole tedious business being the way it was, because that’s how it had been for millions of years, in accordance with evolutionary forces which presumably knew what they were about, or if they didn’t it was no use Merve complaining.
But all the same, why now? And why like this? Such a fuss, such a chattering! Such a banging of doors, such a stampeding of footsteps, such a clamouring of shrill, feminine voices, swooping, rising, falling, like gulls when the catch is in…
Or do all babies arrive like this, roughshod over everyone’s convenience, in this disruptive, time-consuming and nerve-jangling manner, laying waste everyone’s plans and scrunching work routines underfoot like so much spilled sugar…?
Once again, Merve found himself wondering what the hell Evolution thought it was at, launching such a process on the biosphere without a word of consultation with any of the creatures involved? Again, he got no answer. Moodily, he stared some more at his blank sheet of paper, and there was no answer there, either.
Birth, copulation and death: are not these the very stuff of all great writing? So why is it that not one of the three, when they actually occur in real life, is in the least compatible with getting anything written at all, great or otherwise?
God, what a night! Although the flat was quiet enough now, this morning, with all of them off to work at last, Merve still shuddered at the recollection of how it had been. Just after nine in the evening it had started, and at first, he’d paid no attention. He’d heard the outer door slam, and ignored it; he’d heard the uprush of chatter, like a thousand starlings; but no sooner had he succeeded in ignoring this, too, than the door of his room was flung open and they were upon him, cutting a swathe of elephants through every idea he had ever had…
“Swathe” of elephants, indeed! Thus had they succeeded in mucking up and making nonsense of that marvellous metaphor that had been shimmering on the edge of his consciousness just before the moment of impact. Now look at it…!
“A girl!” “A girl, Merve!” “Oh, Merve, listen!—Miranda’s had a girl!” “A girl! Miranda’s had…!”
Miranda, Miranda, Miranda.
A girl, a girl, a girl.
So what? So what? So what?
Gritting his teeth, and lifting his fingers from the typewriter keys, Merve tried to be nice about it.
It had gone on half the night: and then this morning, long before his usual hour, Merve had been wrenched out of deep sleep by a renewed caterwauling over some further message which some telephone-owning neighbour had brought hot-foot to their door before eight in the morning.
“Tomorrow? Oh, how super!” someone bellowed—voices always seem so painfully loud when you’ve only just woken: and then someone else (Alison, by the sound of it) shrieked something about some pink nylon net at Jones’s Sale, and about doing the gathers this evening…
God! What was the point of having no telephone if this sort of thing could still happen?
The outer door slammed; and slammed again. That must be the last of them, for there were no more voices. But the air still rocked with the haste and purposefulness of them all. Further attempt to sleep was futile; there was nothing for it but to get up—actually up—while it was as yet barely nine in the morning.
Even now, it was only ten. Bleary-eyed, and with consciousness returning as painfully as blood into frostbitten fingers, Merve had made himself a mug of coffee, and was now sitting sluggishly in front of his manuscript, adding a comma here, scrubbing an adjective there. But it was no use. It never was at this sort of unearthly hour. His wavering genius needed time to recover from the ravages of a healthy night’s sleep. It had to be humoured like a crotchety invalid, coaxed back to consciousness gently, compassionately, and by gradual stages. It needed time, it needed coffee, it needed solitude.
Sighing, Merve turned back to the bit he’d written yesterday, before all the commotion had begun. He tried to recapture the sense of excitement, the stirring of creative power, with which he had launched into the tense and dramatic scene in which Henry falls into the clutches of the predatory older woman who was to drive him, had he but known it (if he had, of course, many thousands of words would have been saved, but then where would have been the story line?) to the verge of suicide. Black-haired, black-eyed, blasé and sophisticated to the nth degree, and with a creamy olive skin smooth as a something-or-other, not peach, too hackneyed, she’d found herself strangely fascinated by Henry’s unspoiled youth and innocence…
“Strangely” was the word. Would any woman, however predatory, find herself anything other than bored through the floor by unspoiled youth and innocence on this sort of scale? Why couldn’t Henry say something, for God’s sake? Something witty and amusing, preferably, to make this creature’s continued interest at least plausible?
Hell, why should he? Surely a fictional character (unlike his less fortunate counterpart in real life) should be entitled to turn to his author for a helping hand in this sort of all too familiar impasse?
“Fascinated by Henry’s witty and amusing conversation,” Merve wrote, “Myrtle (query Alicia?) allowed a small smile to soften the corners of her thin, harshly-painted lips…” At which crucial moment, her creator became aware of a small sound.
Hell! Had one or other of them not gone to work after all? Just when he thought he really had got the flat to himself at last, with even Miranda out of the way? Which of them was it, and what did she think she was doing, knocking off work before eleven in the morning? What a way to run a country! Bloody bunch of skivers…!
Hearing his father’s familiar expostulations running through his own head like this was unnerving, and only went to show what a state he was in, with all these disruptions and upheavals. Really, it was too much! He found himself literally trembling at the enormity of the decision that now confronted him. Should he go and say “hullo” straight away to whoever it was, and get it over with, or should he stay doggo in here, in the hopes of missing the salutation altogether? The trouble with this last tactic was that though it might easily work—people often popped in and out without exchanging a word if they happened to be busy—it also easily mightn’t. If the intruder (for thus he viewed the fellow lodger who had invaded his part of the day) felt like exchanging a word with him, then exchange it she would; he was a sitting duck, in here with his typewriter, with no locks on the doors, and all this bloody togetherness thing, which worked out so well financially, but so badly on the spiritual level, or when you wanted to fry kippers in the pan they kept for bacon…
Waiting on tenterhooks lest someone come and say “Hullo” to you is every bit as disturbing as having them actually come and say it. Flinging caution to the winds, Merve took two strides towards the door—and then once more came to a halt. An awful thought had struck him.
Suppose it was Miranda out there, complete with baby! What should he say? What should he do? Merve had never spoken to a baby in his life, let alone one only a day old; and as to Miranda, he envisaged her as mysteriously and absolutely changed. A mother, now, just as his own mother was; a totally different category of being, and wholly outside his ken. For a full minute he stood there, in a state of pitiable and abject terror: though what, exactly, he thought Miranda might do to him, or the baby either, he could not have explained.
Gradually, though, common sense began to seep in round the edges of his panic, and a certain cautious optimism. “Forty-eight hours!” someone had shouted during this morning’s bedlam, and the cry had been taken up: “Forty-eight hours…!” “Only forty-eight hours, isn’t that super…?” At the time, more than half asleep, Merve hadn’t bothered to make sense of the joyous, reiterated cry: but it was clear enough now. Miranda and the baby were to stay in hospital for forty-eight hours, of which—yippee!—not much more than twelve had as yet elapsed! It couldn’t be Miranda.
Emboldened by this thought, but still wary, Merve put his head round the door and listened. From the kitchen, he could hear the faint but unmistakable clink of crockery. The dresser drawer was opened, and then closed. The delicious aroma of fresh coffee, made from freshly ground beans, began to fill the air.
It was Iris. This much he might have guessed, actually, she being the only one who ever took the trouble to make coffee in the proper way. Wearing a sleeveless dress of brown and white striped cotton, very crisp and trim, she was sitting at the kitchen table sipping black coffee from one of the Wedgwood mugs, and studying with quiet intensity the newspaper outspread in front of her.
She looked up as Merve came in.
“Hullo: coffee?” she offered pleasantly, gesturing towards the percolator still bubbling softly: and then, as he clattered around finding himself mug, spoon, sugar, evaporated milk, she continued smoothly: “I suppose you’ve heard that the proud Mum will be back in residence tomorrow? Complete with offspring?”
Merve nodded dumbly. How could he not have heard? And heard, too, until his ears rattled with it, how the child had blue eyes, fair hair, and weighed nine and a half pounds—an exceptional weight, apparently, judging by the chirrups of awe and admiration that had accompanied the statistic, though in fact it wasn’t much heavier than an average sort of cat.
Was Iris really planning to tell him all this again…! Oh, God…!
But Iris, when she spoke, seemed to be talking more to herself than to him.
“The silly girl! There was no need for it to have weighed that much!” she remarked softly, with a sort of dry amusement; and Merve, momentarily startled out of his boredom, very nearly asked her what on earth she meant.
But he stopped himself just in time. She would only have answered, and then there he’d have been, with a conversation on his hands, the very thing he’d been trying so earnestly to avoid. Conversation was endemic in this place and, if you let it, would gobble up every moment of your free time, every ounce of your emotional energy. It would somehow lap up and trivialise the best and brightest of your creative ideas, nourishing itself on them like some gigantic spiritual tapeworm.
So Merve said nothing; just got himself out of the kitchen as rapidly as possible, slopping coffee over the edge of the mug as he went. And Iris, after giving him a swift, pitying glance, said nothing either.
For she, too, was preoccupied this morning. Carefully, she selected from the morning’s newspapers such pages as she was going to need, and tucked them into the back of the dresser drawer. She was neat and precise in all her movements, for she was an orderly person by nature—as indeed she needed to be, for these chaotic, free and easy households can only survive if somewhere in the background there is a clear and disciplined intelligence in charge. Without this, they will disintegrate within a week.
But Iris had not taken the whole day off from her fairly demanding job just to read the papers. There was a lot that she had to get through yet, one of the items involving a journey of a good many miles, right across London, and she was particularly anxious to be back in plenty of time to listen to the News.
And in plenty of time she was: though, as it turned out, there were no fresh revelations so far about the stolen baby. At the end of the news, a psychiatrist was brought on to pontificate (Iris’s word, when she was discussing the programme afterwards with Tim) about these “Crimes of Love” as he dubbed them, giving it as his professional (and not very startling) opinion that girls who steal babies are themselves the victims of a desperate need for love. They see the baby, with its unquestioning, passionate dependence on whoever cares for it, as a love object par excellence with which to fill the aching void, and they deserve pity rather than blame, support and sympathy rather than punishment. Very often (he pointed out) they have suffered some recent trauma of loss or desertion, and have received neither sympathy nor understanding from their families, from whom indeed they may be quite alienated. Compassion, not severity, must be the keynote in dealing with such a victim of her own desperate compulsions, and he appealed to Miss X., whoever she might be, to come forward and give herself up. If she brought the baby back safe and sound, he assured her, she would have nothing to fear; sympathy, understanding, and practical help with her problems would be forthcoming in full measure. And he finished by declaring that it was Society that was to blame, not the unhappy baby-snatcher herself. We are all guilty, because if someone needs love that desperately, then clearly it is someone’s duty to love them…
Iris’s lip curled, and she reached towards the knob. Love as a matter of duty was something that she’d seen in action, and she was all too familiar with the place to which it led.
CHAPTER XV
MISS X. WAS listening to the talk, too, her radio turned down very low. Unlike Iris, she found nothing to mock at in the psychiatrist’s benign if slightly platitudinous utterances. Almost every word of it struck home to her with poignant accuracy: the desperate hunger for love—the alienation from an uncomprehending family—the recent shattering trauma—why, the man was describing her, and so exactly that for a few mad seconds she imagined that he must somehow have tracked her down, and at any moment was going to reveal her identity to all the world.
But he didn’t; and hearing herself described, instead, as “Miss X.”, she felt a rush of absurd relief—even, indeed, a mischievous little flutter of excitement!
“Miss X.!”—What fun! What a wonderful anonymous feeling it gave her! Irresponsible, too! She felt her past self slipping away, and this Miss X. emerging like a snake from its skin into a new and shining world.
“How wonderful it is to be
Just Miss X. instead of me!”
she crooned softly to the little creature in her arms, sleeping so peacefully, so trustfully, and with no notion of not belonging there. She looked down at the small, unconscious face, and felt herself drowning in protective love. What should she teach the child to call her, as the months rolled forward bringing it to the verge of speech, to the brink of understanding?
Not “Mummy”, that was for sure. The associations were far too painful.
The baby stirred in her arms, screwing up its face into a thousand wrinkles, and Miss X. looked around for somewhere to lay it down while she prepared the bottle. She should have improvised a crib of some kind, not to mention a proper stock of essentials, such as disposable nappies and tins of Cow and Gate, before ever embarking on this wild venture—but then, how could she have known?
It had all happened so suddenly: or so it had seemed at the time. It was only now, twenty-four hours later, that she realised that it hadn’t actually been sudden at all, but had been growing, invisibly and imperceptibly, in her empty, broken heart, ever since the blow had first fallen.
The pram had been parked so carelessly, so hurriedly on the hot pavement outside the supermarket, without even the brakes on properly, and in the full glare of the August sun. Miss X. had watched the mother, a blowsy, angry-looking woman of forty or more, yanking her grizzling three-year-old away from the pram, and dragging him, whiny and miserable, into the crowded store. She did not give so much as a backward glance at the pram, though by now its occupant, roused by the sudden cessation of movement, had begun to whimper.
Miss X. waited while the whimpering sharpened, gathered power, and finally escalated to full-blown yelling. Then, after a quick, nervous glance at the store’s entrance to see if the mother was returning, she stepped nearer: one more cautious glance around, and she was leaning down over the pram and peering in under the hood.
A very young baby, still pink with newness, like an opening rose, flailed its tiny arms into the vastness of the universe, and howled its needs into the unknown.
Miss X. straightened up and stepped backwards with guilty haste, though as yet her intention was barely lapping the fringes of her conscious mind. She stood, uneasily, a yard or so away, quite expecting the mother to return at any moment. Surely these passionate yells of rage and despair would ha
ve reached any mother’s ears, no matter how great the press of crowds and noise in there?
A minute passed … and another. It was all nonsense what that mother had said, later, to the police, about having left the baby for only a couple of minutes. It was five at least, if not more; she’d almost screamed this fact right into the television screen when she heard the woman lying like that, but had stopped herself just in time.
It was impossible just to stand by, listening to those screams, and doing absolutely nothing. Miss X. could hold back no longer. With a sense of coming home at last, she leaned down, down, into the warm recesses under the hood, and gathered into her arms the quivering, furious little creature.
Instantly, as if she had turned some magic switch, the cries ceased, and were replaced by contented little sucking sounds. The warm, lovely little weight slumped in utter trust against her unfamiliar shoulder as if that was where it had always belonged, and she felt herself drowning in total, unquestioning love, though whether it was hers or the baby’s she could not possibly have told. She was filled, overwhelmed, by a sense of the golden, absolute rightness of what she was doing, and clutching the child close against her chilled, awakening bosom, she whipped round the corner and away.
*
She could not believe it, at first, that no one was running after her; that no angry shouts, no startled eyes, bulging with accusation, were following her: You’re not a real mother, you’re just a thief and an imposter, a withered branch, a dried-up water-hole! That’s not your baby, anyone can see it isn’t! That’s a real baby, and you are but barren stock…
With No Crying Page 10
