After the Peace

by Fay Weldon

  The new extension was under a glass roof, and the builders had gone bankrupt before they could come back to make good, so two panes of glass needed to be re-puttied. It was a small job which Clive would get round to in time, but a saucepan in the corner did well enough to collect the drips when it was raining and the wind came from the North. Clive needed to get down to writing his play in such time as he had free. Xandra and I both hated going up ladders and Gwinny drew the line at paying more for the conservatory. It was only a small leak anyway and a householder can get used to anything. The saucepan remained in place for a year. Time does pass even if you’re not having fun, as Xandra wasn’t.

  Christmas pudding. While we were sprinkling the caster sugar, finishing off the brandy sauce (never enough), Xandra stood up to replenish the double cream (these blow-outs only once a year can surely do very little harm), gave a little cry and ran from the room calling ‘Bathroom’ over her shoulder as she left. Clive did not stop in his rendering of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner (interesting, that spelling. Like ‘rime of frost around the rim’: but did Coleridge do it on purpose, an old usage, or just opium sloppiness? One will never know) but I thought there was a slight sense of good cheer, almost relief, in his voice. But one must beware the paranoiac tendency; the schizotypal personality disorder might be breaking through.

  ‘And now the storm-blast came, and he

  Was tyrannous and strong:

  He struck with his o’ertaking wings,

  And chased us south along.

  With sloping masts and dipping prow,

  As who pursued with yell and blow

  Still treads the shadow of his foe,

  And forward bends his head,

  The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast,

  And southward aye we fled.’

  Xandra came back in ten minutes wearing a navy skirt and a white shirt and her warm dark hospital coat (Clive hated it) over both, and that was the end of the biscuits and stilton (and just as well). She smiled bravely but she was trembling.

  ‘Oh poor Xandra,’ I said. ‘Not again!’

  ‘Again,’ she said. ‘Twelve years of bloody agains. Twelve twelves are one hundred and forty-four. That’s more than enough. Clive, we’re giving this up. We’re going to adopt.’ And she burst into great gulping tears. Dinner was forgotten.

  Clive folded Xandra into his arms and said, ‘Darling Xandra, don’t cry!’ and exhorted her not to give up. And she didn’t, whether thanks to Flora, the entities in the Bardo Thodol, or Clive’s frequent cocktail of good cheer and confidence who is to say?

  ‘It’s the speed with which time goes,’ said Xandra. ‘I hadn’t realised. I thought we’d just got married but now it seems to be twelve years ago and I’m nearly forty.’

  ‘It’s that stupid job of yours,’ Clive said. ‘It’s fucking your life up – no time for living.’

  ‘It’s not that,’ said Xandra. ‘It’s the job that keeps me sane.’ Clive’s fingers clenched.

  ‘It might be time for IVF clinic,’ I said. ‘Just to keep Xandra cheerful. The stress is getting her down.’ ‘Stress’ had just been discovered as the source of all mental and physical infirmities: in fashion and out like a yo-yo ever since. ‘Just a little investigation. Lots of women are in the same boat.’

  ‘I suppose there could be something wrong with my internal workings,’ admitted Xandra, ‘but that means going private. You have to be under thirty-five for the NHS to do it.’

  ‘Mean bastards,’ said guess-who, automatically.

  Clive hated all doctors on principle, though what principle was never made clear. They were all stupid, Clive claimed, knew nothing and typically had to sit their exams seven times over until they passed. Xandra told me she knew they had four chances, not seven, but did not like to correct him. It would be seen as disloyalty.

  ‘I was cycling back from the British Museum the other day,’ I said casually, ‘and I passed a new IVF clinic on Harley Street. The Woolland Brilliant Baby Clinic – “Meeting Every Newborn’s Needs”. Ridiculous cutesy slogan.’

  ‘Charge you the earth,’ said Clive, ‘and deliver mud. Private medicine. Shysters and con-men. Ever read Cronin’s The Citadel?’

  ‘Fifty years ago,’ said Xandra. She was weakening.

  ‘Almost as old as you, darling,’ said Clive. He was not weakening. Indeed, he was switching from funny Clive, life and soul of the party, to mean-and-nasty, self-righteous, know-it-all Clive. The jaw set, the beautiful eyes glazed. Too much food, I thought, too much drink, too much smoke, and Boreas swirling round the room. The speed of the drips was still increasing. I tactfully went to fetch my coat and when I came back the situation had worsened.

  ‘Please don’t shout, Clive. It’s every woman’s right to have a baby. I need to realise my potential and procreate. I find myself looking into other people’s prams.’ Xandra was snivelling for mercy. How easily strong women are reduced, traduced.

  ‘What feminist tripe are you spouting now?’ He was getting angry, as he did when threatened. Time to intervene.

  I had passed a shop earlier, which had the new BlackBerry 830s before their official release, and bought one. You could talk to the world. I could see it was the future, though not sure even then that the future was all that desirable. It cost £200, a great deal of money. Now I took it out of my pocket.

  ‘Look at this, Clive,’ I said, and spoke to him as if he were a child. And I simply bribed him. I would pay for Xandra’s visit to the Woolland Brilliant Baby Clinic and he would drive her down and I would buy him a BlackBerry. Almost nobody had one. It was one of the very first on the market. It worked a treat. A little more conversation, Xandra had dried her tears, and Clive was saying: ‘When a new life is at stake money is immaterial, darling. Money can always be found.’

  Now it was Xandra’s turn to be difficult.

  ‘But I’m an NHS worker. It would feel like disloyalty.’ And ‘It’s not fair on Gwinny. She’s not made of money,’ and ‘Can we really afford it? We live up to the limit. We’ve only got my wages.’

  Clive said nothing. The question of who supported whom was a sore point. After the first initial promise of fame and fortune when he was seventeen and cast as Joseph in the West End and then on Broadway the young couple’s financial future had seemed assured enough.

  Clive had been snatched out of drama school to become a temporary star, tall and testosterone-charged, gentle-looking and with a voice as powerful as Tom Jones. Sandra, now Xandra, the steady girlfriend, given the small part of Benjamin’s wife as a kindness, lurked in the background, piping away valiantly, trying not to feel envious, but also proud. And then disaster had happened and now Xandra was a nurse and before technology made lip-synching a frowned-upon possibility, Clive was never going to make much money and now they were dependent on his occasional earnings, her salary and the fortune Clive was going to make with Let’s Get Out of Here!, which one day he would finish if only he got enough peace and quiet.

  The drip in the corner is so annoying I know I’ll end up having to fork out for it, and bother Mr Ipswich, whose wife was having another baby, and the law suit over a possible £190, less than she paid for just one BlackBerry. Now it was two. Boreas has let me down.

  Many A Slip

  The appointment at the Woolland Brilliant Baby Clinic was for Friday January 15th 1999. The Sun and Venus both in the first house: an excellent omen! For the wider world 1998 meant the Kosovo war, inflation at 2.72 per cent, Lewinsky and Clinton high jinks: Armageddon at the cinema. Microsoft the biggest company in the world. The Millennium approaching and first alarming news of the dreaded Bug. But forget all that. This was important.

  The appointment had to be made three weeks in advance but they were ‘very busy’, they said – or ‘pretending to be’, as Clive said. I was nervous; Clive might change his mind. Suspicious that he too would end up being tested – and he would not spill his seed Onan-like as easily as young Sebastian had done a full twenty years ago – he
might easily see this as an indignity and find something more important to do.

  Sure enough, on Thursday January 14th Xandra called them in her lunch break (10.30–11.00 a.m., early shift) to check time and date and came back with some alarming news. She broke it to us when we were in No. 24, having fish and chips and onion rings from the chippie in King Edward’s Street. (If Xandra went to the bathroom to get rid of some of it nobody liked to comment. I cycled a lot and Clive never seemed to put on weight no matter what he ate. But Xandra needed to keep trim.)

  These days the chippie is proud to serve a vegan fish and chips, the fish made with banana blossom, seaweed and samphire, as well as normal breaded sole, mushy peas and low-calorie unsalted chips, and is doing perfectly well – the inhabitants of Standard Road having suffered a sea change too. It’s all progress.

  The Woolland Clinic let it be known that they assumed Xandra was bringing in her partner for testing, and Xandra rashly mentioned this to Clive. Clive stopped shaking the tomato sauce, and misquoted as was his custom, ‘Shake oh shake the ketchup bottle, first none’ll come and then a lot’ll,’ and then said, ‘Sorry darling. Not me, not into a test tube. Sex is all about love not science. Looking at some rude girlie magazine and squirting into a test tube is too hideous a way to start a baby.’

  I marvelled at how innocent Clive seemed to be. Girlie magazines were already a thing of the past. They watched computer porn at the office. These days it took more than some tame girlie magazine to get a man going. But of course he might be pretending innocence. I daresay he watched porn quite a lot when Xandra was on shift. He wouldn’t let on. Xandra would have been horrified. She belonged to the WAP group. Women Against Pornography, still vainly trying for a better world. Young girls feel unshaven pussies are unhygienic. [Writers’ Huddle: ‘Delete the last two sentences. Unhelpful and unnecessary, albeit true.’]

  ‘I’m not being difficult, darling,’ went on Clive, ‘but it is so often the women’s fault. They have such complicated insides. Men are out in the open in their workings; there’s very little to go wrong.’

  Either Clive shut his eyes and ears to everything he didn’t want to see or hear, or actually he just didn’t notice in the first place, so utterly solipsistic was he. Beautiful women can become so self-centred they lose touch with all reality; I have lived amongst them and know how often this can happen, have hysterics if a minion hasn’t taken the brown M&Ms from the box, while taking a botched eye-lift quite calmly. No doubt it could happen to very good-looking, over-adulated men too.

  Marco had accused me once of having a depersonalisation disorder – once during sex I had described myself as floating above myself – perhaps Clive had it too. He was so beautiful he just could not get down to earth.

  If you equated beauty with power you could see the same thing going on in politicians’ heads. Overdose them with power and they’d believe any old thing that suited them. Out of touch, above people’s heads, unable to get down to earth. Mad, mad! [‘Unnecessary,’ says the Writers’ Huddle. ‘What’s got into you? Delete!’]

  Clive finished his chips and went on to the packet of ‘Posh Profiteroles’ which I’d bought back from the Camden Town Sainsbury’s. Xandra shook her head and declined.

  ‘Darling,’ said Clive. ‘Honestly, if there is some kind of delay in conceiving this baby you have no-one to blame but yourself. Nursing is a low-paid, practically manual profession and simple secretarial will earn you twice as much and has social hours. So at least I’ll get to see you sometimes. Go to this clinic of yours tomorrow, but that’s all they’ll tell you. I’m all for it, but don’t ask me to come with you. Gwinny will take you, I’m sure. People make far too much fuss. Childbirth is a natural process. African women go behind a bush, put it in a sling and go straight back to work in the fields.’

  ‘And then they die,’ I said, under my breath, but he wasn’t listening anyway, busy pointing out that in any case he had an important audition in the afternoon and though it was a noon appointment, these places loved to keep you hanging about. Xandra looked tearful and Clive said, ‘Not the tears again!’ Sometimes he was a hard man to love.

  ‘I was in John Lewis’s this morning,’ I said, when I had recovered, ‘and they had such a cute deal on these new iMacs.’

  ‘What sort?’ he asked. ‘I suppose I could change over to the Apple system. Though one’s used to the devil one knows.’

  ‘A 2-for-1 offer,’ I said. ‘How about it?’

  ‘Okay,’ he said, and we got a taxi to Oxford Street. The 2-for-1 offer was no longer available. I bought two.

  Really this baby was causing endless expense. I checked out the I Ching, threw the three coins and got Hexagram No. 3. ‘Difficulty at the beginning works complete success.’ That made me feel better.

  A Pact With The Knowledgeable

  Xandra was on early shift on the 15th. [Writers’ Huddle says it’s okay to shift to her voice. You know her well enough.] She was on Ward 8 up at Hampstead Hospital, where she was the very competent Intensive Care ward sister – annual salary £21,750 – it ended at 11 a.m. and the appointment with Dr Vellum at the Brilliant Baby Clinic was at noon. That gave Xandra just time enough to pick up Clive at No. 24 and Gwinny as witness to the life at No. 23. She drove in her darling little 2CV (£3,000 almost new) and could be in Harley Street by ten to twelve. She almost didn’t go. She got cold feet.

  Wanting a baby had become a way of life, a habit, tearing her apart. Had it been so long she no longer knew who she was? What about her job? Supposing she had a baby and then couldn’t bear to leave it? How would they live? Clive was more ornamental than useful when it came to earning money.

  She’d seen women when they came back to work after having a baby, and a weeping, sleepless, exhausted lot they were, unable even to read vitals properly, a danger to the ward: whining, too, always asking for time off for no real reason, and a nuisance to everyone else. But how could she change her mind now?

  And supposing it hurt? She’d got away with never working in Maternity, but she’d been in a ward down the corridor once and had heard terrible screams. Most likely hysteria, she supposed, pain relief being so much improved these days, but even so.

  But she would not think like this. She was a strong, independent, powerful, self-reliant person. She was an intelligent woman. A feminist. It was every woman’s right to choose to have a baby, just as it was her right to choose not to. Whatever happened, she would cope. She could have it all. She would.

  But today could be hard. Going out with Clive, especially if it was somewhere he didn’t want to go, was often extremely hard. If there was a No Smoking sign he would smoke under it. If he was treated with less respect than he believed he warranted, faced with what he perceived as passive aggression, he would take loud and expletive-filled offence.

  He hated everything to do with doctors and now she had dragged him off to sit in a waiting room to discuss a particularly sensitive medical topic. She could cope, but could he?

  Poor Clive: he had had such a dreadful beginning. The bullying car salesman father, the over-passive mother, the initial too-early sexual experience – introduced to sex by a prostitute –underage too, and that can wreak such emotional damage, according to all the books. That woman should go to prison. Then the car crash, leaving him an orphan. The sudden rise to fame hadn’t helped

  ‘Whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first call promising’, as Cyril Connolly had observed. Clive was always quoting him, and Gwinny next door was a real fan. But it was true. When she met him at drama school he’d won the ‘most promising’ annual award; they were already a couple – Clive and Sandra turning into Clive and Xandra, and they’d been like that all their lives. Clive had been picked up at once and snatched away to play the lead in Dreamcoat. He’d insisted on taking her with him and she’d been given a small part, to keep her quiet, she supposed.

  There’d been rave notices, management was delighted, offers were pouring in, agents were on the phone (well, at
least one or two). Girls were all over him, but then they always had been. She’d had to draw him out of the embraces of her best friend in a dressing-room where some actor had a high pile of cocaine on a marble table and a glass full of straws. Clive had just grabbed one and sniffed quickly and deeply – and there and then damaged his nasal septum so that it later perforated. Perhaps it had been cut with bi-carb, which can be very corrosive. I don’t know, she thought. Nobody knew much, back in the seventies, but it was all her fault for being jealous and mean minded. She tried not to be.

  We loved each other then, we love each other now, she thought: it was love at first sight and would be at last sight. Love is all, as they say. That, and nursing. Helping other people. Making a difference.

  She can have it all: the baby, the career, the family. She will. Too late now anyway. She couldn’t just call it off, as if it was a wedding. She would look too silly. It was only a visit to an IVF clinic. Clive would rejoice but Gwinny would never forgive her if she backed out. She would stop brooding and making herself late and go and fetch the others.

  If only it didn’t all end in some dreadful scene where Clive loudly cursed all doctors as fools and shysters and in public too. She must love him, otherwise why was she still with him?

  Trio Con Brio

  Me again, Gwinny. [Shut up, Writers’ Huddle. Readers can stand sudden switches in voice, so long as you tell them what’s going on. They are not fools.]