Born of Woman

by Wendy Perriam

  ‘Wh … What did you say?’ Jennifer’s voice was flaking and unravelling.

  ‘I’m not much good at maths, Jen, but between January and May, I only slept with three blokes. One didn’t come at all, OK, and I had my period, anyway. Sparrow’s just been ruled out as father. Which leaves the third.’

  ‘You don’t m … mean …?’ Jennifer sank down in the chair.

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid I do. Your precious Matthew screwed me. I suppose you thought he hadn’t got a cock?’

  ‘Susie, I … I don’t believe it. It can’t be true, it can’t be. Not Matthew, not … Anyway, didn’t you say the third bloke lived abroad? I remember distinctly. You told me he was foreign and only in London for a month or two. Well, that’s not Matthew. Matthew isn’t …’

  ‘I’m sorry, Jen, I lied to you. I had to. Matthew was the third.’

  ‘He … he c … couldn’t be. He’s not like that. He’s always been so strict and …’ Jennifer was almost crying with horror and incredulity. ‘Anyway he’s old enough to be your f … father. He wouldn’t take advantage of you. I mean, he was your employer, almost your guardian, and …’

  ‘Not then, he wasn’t. I only pressured him into giving me a job when I knew I’d fallen pregnant. I still thought it was Sparrow’s kid. But Sparrow wasn’t helping—didn’t have a bean, whereas I was well aware that Matthew was loaded, and looking for a girl to help Anne out in the house. It seemed the perfect job to me. No tax, no ties, and an employer in my power.’

  Jennifer’s tears had turned to steel now—cutting and unshed. How could Susie be so devious? It had always seemed extraordinary that Matthew should have employed a girl like Susie, but she would never have guessed his reason in a hundred thousand years. She snatched up a magazine with a simpering girl on the cover, flung her face downward on the bed. ‘H … how did you meet Matthew in the first place?’

  Susie was dismembering a second cigarette. ‘It was at a party—one of those swanky publishing things with pink champagne. I went with another guy I hardly knew. He drank too much of the bubbly and spent most of the evening puking in the toilet. Matthew took me over—you know—filled my glass, fetched me some food, made sure I was OK.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’ Jennifer almost spat. She might have guessed the story would be squalid—vomiting in lavatories, Matthew pouncing on other people’s girlfriends when he told them all how late he worked at nights. Wonderful work that was—impregnating a teenager, cheating on his wife. She could still hardly believe it. Stern and virtuous Matthew, who wrote letters to the papers about the moral dangers of television, who wouldn’t allow so much as a comic in his house, in case it corrupted the boys. She felt corrupted herself, as if all the times she had sat in his study, fed at his table, had left some grimy residue on her skin and hair and hands. And yet it still seemed so improbable. Matthew was a cautious, prudent man. Even if he succumbed to the charms of seventeen-year-olds, surely he wouldn’t have risked a pregnancy.

  ‘Didn’t Matthew … use something? Or … or … check to see if you were on the Pill or …?’ She couldn’t go on. It seemed both sordid and impertinent to be enquiring into Matthew’s private life.

  ‘Yeah, he did check, and I told him I had this cap thing, but they’re a devil to put in, you know. You have to squeeze jelly stuff all over them, and they slip and slide about, and if anyone tries to kiss you down below, all they get is a mouthful of spermicide. I decided not to use it till … well … later on. I didn’t want to spoil things. I mean, I had every reason to believe Matthew was a stayer. He’d been giving me all this spiel about what an ace lover he was, and how sex wasn’t something casual or impulsive, but a sacred act which needed time and preparation. Well, naturally, I reckoned it would be hours before we reached the … crunch and I could always excuse myself before that, and put the cap in then, when he’d worked through his hundred and fifty spiritual exercises and was still going strong. Actually, it wasn’t like that. He came in two seconds flat—just climbed on top of me, shoved his … thing in, and … that was that.’

  Susie flung the bedspread back. Her casual almost jaunty choice of words belied her real emotion. Her cheeks were flaming now, fingers twitching nervously at the sheets. ‘That’s how I … got pregnant. At the time, I refused to believe it possible. I mean, we’d only done it the once and only for halfa minute, where as me and Sparrow had gone on hours and days and … Mind you it was my dangerous time, and Matthew did stay in. We both sort of lay there. I think we were both shocked he’d come at all. After that night, I just blocked the whole thing out. Pretended it never happened. Even when I realised I was pregnant, I still refused to tie it up with Matthew. Making babies with a guy that old and so uptight really turned me off. I’m sorry love. I know he’s your relation, but …’

  ‘Hardly a relation.’ Jennifer could barely speak for shock. This was the Matthew who fined his sons if they said so much as ‘bum’, deplored the modern world for its permissiveness, boycotted his local newsagent because it stocked Penthouse and Men Only. She no longer wanted any tie or bond with him. ‘Matthew’s simply a half brother-in-law. No more. Almost an ex-half brother-in-law, now.’

  ‘Oh, Jenny, don’t be bitter.’

  ‘I am bitter. And this time I’m shocked as well. Oh, not with you, with Matthew. It’s shameful—when he’s married and got four lovely boys already … Look d’ you swear that this is true? I mean if you lied to me before, how do I know you’re not lying to me still?’

  ‘But that’s the point, Jen—I only lied because I knew the thing would shock you.’

  Jennifer fumbled for her jacket. Her coat was still in Matthew’s office—had been there a whole week now. She remembered sitting there in front of him, feeling sorry for him, grateful for his hand-outs. Were they simple bribery? A means of buying her silence in case Susie had confided in her, told her the whole story?

  ‘You should have told me before, Susie—way back in the summer—even if I was shocked. It’s far worse for me to stumble on it now when …’

  ‘I was scared you’d throw me out, Jen, or refuse to help me at all. I hadn’t a penny in the world …’

  Jennifer snatched up her gloves and bag. Susie had used her all along, taken advantage of her naiveté, her foolish gullibility.

  ‘So your’re w … walking out, are you?’ Susie was almost crying now herself. ‘I was right, you see. You d … don’t want Matthew’s kid.’

  Jennifer didn’t answer, just stood trembling by the curtains. Wouldn’t it be better to turn her back on Matthew, pack Susie off to Sparrow, and hand the baby over to some quiet, conventional couple not tied to it by guilt, or marriage bonds?

  ‘I … I don’t know what I want, I’m totally confused … I’m going out for a minute—to clear my head. I’ll get your matches on the way. All right?’

  Susie nodded silently. Her small, scared face looked wrong above the bulge, as if someone had joined a child’s head to an older woman’s body. Matthew had made that bulge, tried to bridge the thirty years between them by booting Susie from the playroom to the labour ward.

  Jennifer stumbled to the door, trailed along the corridor, up some stairs, down some more. She was walking blindly, bumping into people. Matthew had always been the strict and righteous Elder in the family, building up his empire, laying down his laws, leading them all like blind and obedient satellites. Yet, how many lives had he warped and overturned? Susie sick and pregnant, her own precious, precarious marriage blown to pieces by the impact of the book, the book itself impounded by solicitors, Edward shamed and shocked. Yet, without Matthew, she would never have met Susie, never married Lyn. Matthew sowed love and then uprooted it—like the baby she had almost taken over until she knew that it was his. How could she keep a child which he had fathered, a lifelong reminder of his guilt and shame?

  She stopped a moment, tried to find her bearings. She had been looking for the exit, but had somehow gone too far and landed in the basement, by the vistors’ canteen. At least i
t was somewhere to sit and rest her brain. She chose a corner table, out of the way. They were almost closing, two girls in orange nylon overalls slooshing disinfectant on the floor. She hardly saw them. The figure looming up in front of her was Thomas Winterton’s, stalking huge inside her head. He had died before Lyn was born, left him nothing but his genes. But those genes were Matthew’s, too. Both sons had inherited that unique exclusive patterning which made them Wintertons. And since the baby Susie carried was also half a Winterton, then surely there must be some of Lyn in it.

  Jennifer picked up a sugar lump from the plastic dish on the table, held it in her mouth. She could feel tiny grains of sweetness seeping into her body, singing through her veins. She knew nothing of genetics, but surely it was possible that this child could duplicate some vital part of Lyn in its blood-stream or its cells, repeat some features of his character or constitution. Because it was Matthew’s kid, Susie had concluded that she couldn’t or wouldn’t want it. But Matthew’s kid must be made, at least in part, from the same building bricks as Lyn’s would be—the nearest she might ever get to her own husband’s child and lineage—a child who belonged to Hernhope, who was half a Winterton, who might even be born with Lyn’s eyes or soul or hands. She stared down at the mottled table top. She could see cells in it, branching into lilies, breaking into flowers. This child could well redeem them all, let in some light and sweetness to the frowning Winterton genes. Susie might be slapdash and rebellious, but she was also cheerful and warm-hearted. Even Matthew had his strengths. A child could fuse the best of them, thaw Matthew’s frosty gloom with Susie’s radiance; temper Susie’s sluttishness with Matthew’s skill and steel.

  But supposing Susie’s baby combined the worst of her and Matthew, grew up reckless, hypocritical, promiscuous, neurotic? Environment played a part, of course, but what could she offer to cancel all those threatening genes? She herself was leading a feckless fractured life with no permanency or centre. And as Matthew’s sister-in-law(even ‘half’ or ‘ex’, the relationship still existed, however she denied it), she was the very worst person to have possession of his child. She was deluding herself if she imagined she could hide from him for ever, especially with a baby he might even suspect was his.

  Perhaps she could escape with it abroad, as Alice and Edward Fraser had—but then she would lose touch with Lyn completely. So long as she stayed in London, there was always the chance that he might contact her, even turn up at the bedsit. And yet how could Lyn accept the baby, worst of all one fathered by his half-brother?

  She licked the last sweet grains of sugar from her lips.

  Lyn might be intrigued, despite himself. The child not only had part of him in it, but also part of Susannah. He had known only Susannah’s name and memory, but it was those he cherished, somehow—as an ideal and a romance. Susie was the new Susannah—fair, young and beautiful, and now with child. That child fused them all together—Thomas and his sons, Susannah and her namesake, her and Susie, even her and Lyn. The baby’s genes and heritage must always remain a secret, even from her husband, but would carry a hidden charge which Lyn might sense somewhere deep within his soul.

  ‘Mind the floor! It’s wet.’

  She zig-zagged towards the door across the dry spots. She had to return to Susie before visiting was over. She strode down the corridor, which looked more like a Victorian urinal, with its huge old-fashioned water pipes lumbering across chipped and shiny tiles. It was a relief to enter Maternity and see flowers and windows again.

  Susie was lying with her eyes closed, looking peaky and exhausted. Jennifer cut the greetings short. ‘Does Matthew know?’ she asked.

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘That the baby’s his.’

  ‘Well, I’ve only known myself an hour or two. I could have hardly told him yet. I’m not really allowed to use the phone at all. They caught me ringing Sparrow and went mad because …’

  ‘What I meant was did he know before—that there was even a chance he could have made you pregnant?’

  ‘I told you, we didn’t dicuss it. Couldn’t bear to, really. Now the boys have seen me so enormous, it might have … entered his head, I s’pose. Mind you, he knew I was having it off with Sparrow, and he was even suspicious of that feller at the party—the one I arrived with.’

  ‘Susie, you didn’t sleep with him, did you?’

  ‘No, I bloody didn’t! I admit I’ve told a few fibs, but I swear to you on oath—and God strike me dead if I’m lying to you now—that there was only those three blokes and no one else. Don’t you see, Jen, it’s just as important to me as it is to you? OK, so I’m giving the kid away, but it still makes a hell of a difference who the father is.’

  Jennifer turned away. ‘Yes,’ she murmured. ‘It does.’

  ‘Apart from anything else, now we know it’s Matthew’s, I think we ought to screw him for some cash—maintenance or something.’

  ‘No.’ Jennifer rapped the word out. Money made for power and owner-ship, control and interference.

  ‘Why not? You were hard enough on Sparrow.’

  Jennifer hesitated. ‘Matthew’s in enough trouble. There’s Edward demanding half of all the profits and …’

  ‘So you’re his champion now, are you? Half an hour ago, you were saying what a brute he was. Anyway, how about the kid? Matthew could give her every last thing she wanted, and yet you’re willing to cut her off without a penny.’

  ‘Don’t you see, Susie, it’s the child I’m concerned about? I want her to be a love-child—in the proper sense of the word—grow up in love and peace and harmony, not swamped in sordid money hassles or used to pay off scores or stifle guilt or …’ Jennifer stopped. It sounded fine, but how could she ensure it?

  Susie was kicking at her blankets. ‘What’s it to you, in any case? You don’t even want the baby now. That’s what you came to tell me, wasn’t it? I don’t know why we’re wasting our bloody breath.’

  The bell was pealing at the far end of the ward, nurses bustling in to disperse the visitors. Jennifer leant over, laid her hand a moment on Susie’s bulge. ‘I do want the baby,’ she whispered.

  Susie frowned. ‘Even though it’s …’

  ‘Yes.’ Somehow she would manage, fob off Matthew, talk Lyn round, scrape a living together.

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Yes. But are you sure? I mean, you wouldn’t prefer adoption with a stranger? Someone less … involved?’

  Susie grinned. ‘Miss Cow-Face would.’

  ‘But would you?’

  ‘Out!’ said a nurse, sweeping towards them with a thermometer in her hand.

  ‘Would you?’ repeated Jennifer, almost desperate now that the nurse’s bulk divided them.

  Susie pushed up on her elbows, ducked her head round the solid blue-striped hips. ‘I never agree with social workers on principle. OK, Jen, you’re on! And by the way …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Where the hell are my bloody matches?’

  Chapter Twenty Five

  ‘No! Matthew shouted. ‘Get away. Get off!’

  Edward Ainsley was catching up on him, heavy footsteps hammering through the street, breath hot and clammy on his neck. Matthew tried to put a spurt on, but his legs had turned to cobweb. Edward grabbed him, swung him round, held his face so close to his that the pores of Edward’s skin swelled into gaping craters, and his strange Hester-coloured eyes blurred and overflowed.

  ‘You’re wrong!’ Matthew gasped. ‘I didn’t do it. I never knew that …’

  He heard his neck snap off like a flower head, felt his body flop and crumple—a puppet with no strings. He still had arms. He used them—flailing and struggling up between the blankets, fighting off Edward who had now squeezed inside the eiderdown.

  He sat up in bed, sweating and shivering at the same time, opened his eyes to darkness. He made a grab at the eiderdown which was entangled round his neck. It felt limp and chilly in his grasp. Edward had escaped. He glanced around the room. Only shadows—the s
ingle point of light the red and bloodshot eye of his alarm clock. He couldn’t see the hands, but he knew it was three o’clock. It was always three o’clock—that endless nightmare hour when you had neither friend nor hope.

  Anne …?’ he murmured.

  She was often sleepless, too, these days, lying there beside him in the second bed, trying to share his troubles when she knew only a fraction of them. At least it was a comfort to have another human being mopping up the silence and the hours. He groped a hand towards her, touched the cold rumpled sheet, the empty pillow.

  ‘Anne?’ he said again, fumbling for the light-switch.

  She wasn’t there. Panic switched on inside him, harsher than a light. Supposing she had left him, somehow found out about his dealings, stormed off in disgust? Everyone was leaving him, rats scuttling from a leaky ship. Lyn was still in hiding, and even Jennifer had given him the slip again, penned him a note with no address on it and packed with new-coined lies. Jim Allenby was suspicious and offhand, his other colleagues openly contemptuous. Had Anne decided to turn her back as well? She had been quiet and brooding recently, probably a cover for suspicion and resentment. Matthew sprang out of bed, darted towards the door. She could have packed her bags and gone while he was off his guard and sleeping. He ran downstairs, bare feet slipping on the stair carpet. He might find her yet, collecting up her things or dashing him off a note—a lying note like Jennifer’s, giving no address. He charged into the kitchen—empty—checked the chilly rooms around it. All dark and silent. The light startled him when he swtiched it on in the hall and saw someone staring from the mirror—a haggard man with thinning hair, wearing limp and creased pyjamas. No wonder Anne had left him.

  He dragged himself back upstairs. Of course she hadn’t left him. She was probably with one of the boys, soothing over a nightmare, fetching a glass of … He stopped, steadied himself against the bannister. The boys could be gone, as well. She might have taken all four children with her, arranged a total walk-out. The red whorls on the carpet seemed to be writhing up towards him. He couldn’t lose his family. They were part of him, his heritage, his hostage to the future, his bulwark against death or isolation, his ensurance of the Winterton name and line. He had only ever arranged the trust for their sake. He longed for his sons to see him as a generous, princely father, a universal provider who never had to skimp or grudge. He had slaved to give them a decent education, shelter them from over-crowded classrooms or under-trained teachers, or duller, rougher children who might hold them back or teach them farmyard manners. Other men might hoard their money selfishly or squander it on themselves, but all he had ever wanted was a solid standard of living, a decent start in life for those dependent on him.