by Ian Mcewan
It was difficult to talk. Not until they were on a country lane and had dismounted to push their heavy machines over a level crossing and up a steep hill were they able to discuss the matter. It was raining steadily now and they were struggling into a head-wind. It was all so very different from Claire’s imagined scene, and quite unfair, for it had not seemed so improbable that the spirit of their delirious weekend should continue into the summer. Douglas was looking troubled. How long had she known? How did she know? How could she be so sure?
‘But aren’t you excited?’ said Claire, whose tears were lost to the rain. ‘Aren’t you happy?’
‘Of course I am,’ Douglas said quickly. ‘I’m just trying to set things straight. That’s all I’m trying to do.’
At the top of the hill where the rain eased off a little and the wind dropped quite suddenly, Douglas mopped his face with a handkerchief. ‘This is all a bit sudden, you know.’
Claire nodded. She felt she owed an apology, but she was too choked up.
‘And it’ll mean changing all our plans.’
She had taken that for granted. And the minor scandal of a child born, say, six months after they were married would be nothing against their happiness. She nodded grimly.
The road swept down invitingly towards the woods, but it did not seem right to get back on their bikes and coast at such a serious time, so they walked them down the hill in silence with their hands on the brakes. During the descent, Claire began to feel she was about to confront something quite unspeakable, something it had not occurred to her to take into account. ‘It was his silence. It was as if I could taste it, taste the things he was not saying. I began to feel sick. You know how bad smells affect you when you’re pregnant.’
They did in fact stop while Claire retched into the hedgerow. Douglas held her bike. When they continued she felt she had already heard the arguments and had suffered a miserable defeat; Douglas was bored, he regretted the commitment, he had another woman in Germany. Whatever it was, he did not want the child. That was what was on his mind. It was abortion – ‘and the word in those days had a very different, very nasty ring to it’ – it was abortion, the difficulty of raising the subject, which was forcing his reticence.
Anger was clearing her mind. Now she felt lucid. If he did not want it, nor did she. The baby inside her was not yet an entity, not something to be defended at all costs. It was still an abstraction, one aspect of their love; if that was finished, then so was the baby. She would not submit to a lifetime’s ignominy of unmarried motherhood. If Douglas was no more than a passing episode, she did not want to be reminded of him for ever. She must be free, she must be rid of this idiot who had wasted her time. She must start again.
They entered the wood where the light was a watery green and giant beeches dripped calmly on to the unfurled leaves of the abundant ferns. She was furious. She squeezed her brakes in her fury and had to push all the harder. She wanted it ended now, by the roadside, on the ground, in the dirt, under this tree, now and quickly. The pain would mean nothing, it would purify her, justify her. Then she would be on her bike, pedalling swiftly. The wind and rain would cool her face, freshen and heal her. She would not dismount for the uphill stretches. She would push on, leave far behind this weak man whose silence smelled and made her nauseous.
Yes, she had made her decision, it was already a fact. It was almost in the past. But just as at Christmas their intimacy had had to catch up with their letters, so now they still had to break into speech, raise the difficult subject, tortuously reason it through with lies and false emotion and pretensions to logic before they could attain the conclusion she had already accepted. They would have to go through all that before she could be free. Her impatience was so great she wanted to shout, she wanted to pick up her stupid bicycle and dash it against the road. Instead, she raised her hand to her face and bit her knuckle hard.
They walked on. Some intensification in the quality of Claire’s silence made Douglas conscious of his own. He put his arm round her shoulders and asked if she was feeling better. She made no reply. He became solicitous, guiltily so when he noticed she had been crying. He apologised for his diffidence. It was wonderful she was pregnant, a cause for celebration. He remembered there was a pub a little way ahead. A glass of beer was called for, they could escape the fine, drenching rain, and above all they would be able to sit at a table and think things out carefully. Claire knew then that the process had begun, for if the child was to be born, careful thought would have been less appropriate than indulgent feeling. She nodded bravely and got on her bike to lead the way. After turning right on to a slightly wider road they came to the pub. They left their bikes in the porch, out of the rain. It was barely twelve, and they were the first customers of the day. The bar was damp and gloomy, and Claire shivered as she sat waiting for Douglas to bring their beers. She rubbed her legs to make them stop trembling – she felt as if she was waiting in a hospital bed for an operation. She resented the cheerful, vacuous conversation her ex-fiancé was having with the landlord. Was he not remotely troubled? Her anger returned, and with it her resolve. The trembling stopped. She had to do nothing more than sip her beer while Douglas talked them round to the only correct decision. She would make him pay cash for his betrayal, and after that she would never see him again.
He lowered himself into the alcove seat beside her with a little well-here-we-are sigh. They raised their glasses and said ‘Cheers’. There was a silence during which Claire tapped her foot rhythmically and Douglas ran his fingers through his wet, Brylcreemed hair. He cleared his throat and recalled for her the time he had last been in this pub, less than a week before war was declared. Another tense interlude, and then at last he began. It was wonderful she was pregnant, not least because they knew for sure now that they could start a family at any time. We have started a family, Claire thought, but she did not speak. She sat rigid, trying not to listen too closely. If she could just hold on, it would be over as soon as she had extracted his guilty commitment to pay and make the arrangements. Other couples, Douglas was saying, tried for months, years, sometimes without success. It was evidence of their love, of how right it all was, that they could have a baby with such ease. It made him love her all the more, he felt boundless confidence in her and in their future together. She had never heard him say so much in one go. He took her hand and squeezed it, and she returned the squeeze encouragingly. ‘I thought to myself, Get on with it you oaf. I want to go home.’ Then he spoke about the difficulty of their position. He had heard nothing so far about his posting home, and in Germany they had only just started building the married quarters. His awkwardness was less noticeable when he left the more personal matters to deal with wider issues. He talked about the housing shortage in England, the international situation, the Berlin Airlift, the new Cold War, the nuclear bomb.
He had long finished his beer, hers was barely touched. She was growing impatient, she felt she should move things along. She interrupted. ‘If you’re trying to say you think I shouldn’t have it, let’s start …’
Horrified, Douglas raised two hands to forestall her. ‘I wasn’t saying that, sweetheart. I wasn’t saying that at all. All I am saying is that we ought to take everything into account, look at all sides, and ask ourselves if this is really the best time, and if it is …’
She regretted her intervention. Douglas had been scared off his subject and was telling her all over again how lovely she was, how deep his feelings ran. If they could talk everything over now, then whatever they decided would strengthen them for the future. He went on in this way, timidly enlarging on his ‘whatever’, edging his way back to his previous position.
It was during this speech that Claire, still just holding on, still distracted, glanced across the saloon bar towards the window by the door. ‘I can see it now as clearly as I can see you. There was a face at the window, the face of a child, sort of floating there. It was staring into the pub. It had a kind of pleading look, and it was so white,
white as an aspirin. It was staring right at me. Thinking about it over the years, I realise it was probably the landlord’s boy, or some kid off one of the local farms. But as far as I was concerned then, I was convinced, I just knew that I was looking at my own child. If you like, I was looking at you.’
As Douglas talked on and the child at the window continued to look in, a transformation was taking place in Claire. How extraordinary that she could think of destroying this child simply because she felt piqued by her fiancé. The baby, her baby, was suddenly flesh. It was holding her in its gaze, claiming her. It had acquired an independence of anything that might pass between this man and herself. For the first time she contemplated the idea of a separate individual, of a life which she must defend with her own. It was not an abstraction, it was not a bargaining point. It was at the window now, a complete self, begging her for its existence, and it was inside her, unfolding intricately, living off the pulse of her own blood. It wasn’t a pregnancy they should be discussing; it was a person. She felt herself to be in love with it, whoever it was. A love affair had begun.
Then the child was gone. She did not see it move away. It simply faded into nothing. Now she turned again to Douglas who was pressing on with his devious speech, and she felt protective of him. Benignly, she remembered her love and the adventure they were beginning together. It was not duplicity or cowardice she was witnessing here. This was a man summoning all his manly powers of reason and logic, all his considerable knowledge of current affairs because he was in a deep panic. How was he to know what it was to have a baby? It was not inside him, it was not part of him in any way, and yet he sensed correctly it could change his life for ever. Of course he must panic. How was he to know that he would not love the child until he saw it, until he could see who it was? Douglas was enumerating instances of something or other on the fingers of his left hand, unaware that his fate was being fixed. She recalled how magnificent he had been in the department store, how strong. It was her mistake to believe that he or any man could be strong in all circumstances. She had broken her news in a passive spirit, expecting him to react just as she had, to take the matter in hand for her. And then she had been sulky, masochistic, selfpitying. Where Douglas had been weak, she had made herself weaker. And yet the truth was she was one step ahead, for she already loved the child, she knew something Douglas could not. So this was her responsibility and this was her time. This was the moment for her to be decisive. She was having the baby, that was beyond question now, and she was having this husband. She placed her hand on his forearm and interrupted a second time.
Mrs Lewis closed her eyes and tilted her head back against a cushion. They sat in silence in the darkening room. Her steady breathing suggested sleep, but finally she spoke in a murmur without opening her eyes or moving her head. ‘Now you tell me.’ Without hesitation he began his own story, omitting all references to Julie. He was walking in the country, he said; and at the end, after the experience of falling through the undergrowth, he had himself coming to by the roadside, a hundred yards from the pub. When he described the bicycles, which he did with great care, he watched his mother closely. She showed no response, nor did she when he recalled the gestures, the clothes, the hairclasp. She spoke only when he had finished, and then it was a brief sigh. ‘Ah well …’ There was no need for discussion. After a minute’s reflection, she said she was tired. Stephen helped her from her chair and up the stairs, and they said goodnight on the landing. ‘It almost connects up,’ she said. ‘Almost.’ She turned her back on him and went into the bedroom, her hand trailing the wall for support.
An hour later his father returned so exhausted that he could barely sustain the weight of his own overcoat, or bend his arms to unbutton it. Stephen helped him and guided him into the chair in which his mother had been sitting. Not until a beer had been brought and he had sipped quietly for a quarter of an hour was Mr Lewis able to recount his ordeal. A day of anxious waiting, failed bus connections, jostle and dependence on strangers had demanded all his reserves. The unaccustomed squalor of public places, the aggressiveness of the beggars, had shocked him.
‘The filth on the streets, the dirty messages on the walls, the poverty, son, it’s all changed in ten years. That’s the last time I visited Pauline, ten years ago. It’s a new country. More like the Far East at its worst. I haven’t got the strength for it, or the stomach.’ He drank his beer. Stephen saw the glass tremble. Thinking it might rally his father, he told him how he had been right all along, the childcare book had been written months before the Commission had even gathered all its evidence. But Mr Lewis merely shrugged. Why should he be pleased? He stood up creakily, refusing Stephen’s help, and announced that he was going to bed. Mr Lewis had never before missed out on an evening of beer and talk with his son, but now he clapped Stephen weakly on the shoulder and set off up the stairs, making impatient little gasps as he went. It was barely nine-thirty when Stephen, having cleared away the tea things and the beer glasses, turned off the lights and slipped quietly out of the house in which his parents were sleeping.
Eight
On these occasions the hard-pressed parent may find some solace in the time-honoured analogy between childhood and disease – a physically and mentally incapacitating condition, distorting emotions, perceptions and reason, from which growing up is the slow and difficult recovery.
The Authorised Childcare Handbook, HMSO
News of a childcare handbook secretly commissioned by the Prime Minister’s office broke in a single column on the second page of the only newspaper which did not actively support the Government. The story was sly in its reticence, referring to nothing more than rumours and usually reliable sources, encouraging perhaps the Prime Minister’s brisk denial in Parliamentary Question Time two days later that such a book existed. Then the story moved to the bottom of the front page and offered up tantalising quotations, but still made no claim to physical possession of the book. Over the weekend a copy of a photocopy made its way to the Leader of the Opposition, and on Monday the paper ran a headline which foretold the storm to come and, underneath, generously cited charges from the Opposition headquarters of ‘gross and indecent cynicism’ and ‘a disgusting charade’ and ‘this vile betrayal of parents, Parliament and principles’. By mid-week other papers were running the story. The Government’s backbenches were ‘troubled’ or ‘outraged’. An emergency debate was demanded and granted, but delayed for a week.
Since Charles Darke’s time in office, Stephen liked to think he had an insider’s knowledge of how these things worked out, and so far it seemed to be going well. An enfeebled Opposition was making an effort, there were no other stories likely to eclipse this one, and after all these years there still appeared to be a general requirement for a measure of probity in high office.
A week’s delay was important. On the Wednesday, in the interests of open government and informed discussion, the Prime Minister ordered two thousand copies of the offending book to be printed and distributed to newspapers and other involved parties. The Government presses ran all night, and the dispatch riders were out at dawn. Journalists read all day and wrote through the evening to meet their late-night deadlines. The reviews the following morning were at least favourable, and otherwise ecstatic. One tabloid gave a front page to: Sit down, shut up and listen! Another said: Kids, get in line! In the quality press it was ‘masterful and authoritative’. It marked ‘the demise of confusion and moral turpitude in childcare writing’, and, in the paper which had first carried the story, ‘with its honest quest for certainties it encapsulates the spirit of the age’. However it had come about, ‘The Book’ was exemplary and should be made widely available. A handful of obscure civil servants working at high speed had set standards of which the Official Commission should take note. In its wisdom or carelessness, the Government had come up with the kind of lead parents would respect.
Once the issue of The Book itself was set aside, the remaining question was a simple one. Had the Prime Min
ister lied to Parliament at Question Time? This simplicity was immediately muddied by rumours, whose source was difficult to locate, that the book had originated not in Downing Street at all but at an intermediate level within the Home Office. Two days before the emergency debate both The Book and the lie faded from discussion. The issue now was presentation, whether the Prime Minister could rise to the moment and achieve the kind of performance in the House of Commons which would enthuse the back benches and restore confidence in the leadership. While truthful explanations were desirable in some degree, convincing, heart-felt ones were vital.
Hunched by the radio with a can of beer, Stephen listened to the matter resolving itself over an unbroken background of cheers and groans. The familiar voice, pitched somewhere between a tenor’s and an alto’s, did not falter over a syllable as it set out to convince. Downing Street had known nothing of the existence of the book until the week before. The Prime Minister would not condemn the commissioning of the book, despite the existence of the Official Commission. It was an internal document, intended to focus the issues for the department concerned. Apparently there were only three copies in existence and they were not in circulation. Strictly speaking, the Home Secretary had acted improperly in not informing the Cabinet Office, and that was regrettable, but no important principle had been violated. It was childish nonsense to suggest that the Government had intended to publish the book in place of the Official Commission’s report. What was to be gained from that? It was deeply regrettable if the Commission’s work had been made redundant by the necessity of publishing the book, but the blame for that lay with the irresponsible civil servant who leaked the document to the press. This criminal would be pursued and punished. There would be no official enquiry, for the matter was too trivial. The names of the authors of the book would not be made public, nor would these civil servants be available to answer questions before any interested Select Committee.
