by Fay Weldon
Marriage can be very difficult, as I daresay it is for many wives, nervous in case their husbands behave badly in public, understanding only too well, as strangers don’t, the tensions and troubles that drive them to behave as they do. Loveable little boys, if never quite grown up, to their wives. To strangers, outrageous. I knew what Dr Vellum had said to me because I was there. I knew only what Clive thought – that Dr Vellum’s colleague was (squeak) a ‘cunt of a quack’, or was it ‘a quack of a cunt’? – and could only hope that he had not said as much to the good doctor and so had compromised any further dealings I would have with the Brilliant Baby Clinic. I decided I would not ask Clive for too much detail when I got home that night, and would take good care not to look too cheerful through supper. Simple tact demanded it. Compared to home, work is a piece of cake.
Time For Reflection
‘So what are you going to do?’ asked Gwinny. ‘At least you know there’s no point in trying.’ They were walking down Harley Street towards Kentish Town. Clive had taken the car. Taxis whizzed by with their lights off. Shops and businesses were closing: it was the rush hour. Rain was beginning to fall. ‘Go down the nearest pub and pick up someone who looks like Clive? That’s what I would do.’
Xandra looked quite shocked.
‘I could never do that,’ she said. ‘I’m surprised at you. We might adopt, I suppose. A baby from Africa or Thailand perhaps. The world is over-populated as it is. But I don’t think Clive would allow that.’ She was shivering from emotion, shock, damp and cold. The streets seemed hostile and merciless. ‘Poor Clive. Such a shock to him. I love him. I would rather die than be unfaithful.’
If only the same could be said of Clive, thought Gwinny. Forget herself, what went on at all these auditions. No wonder actresses insisted they all be called actors. But actors weren’t all that different. [Writers’ Huddle: ‘Very unwise to insult a whole profession. They’ll take offence, never see the joke.’] But she held her tongue. They had reached the Mason’s Arms, and still no taxi: inside the pub all seemed cosy and warm.
‘We need a drink and a warm fire,’ said Gwinny. ‘We can wait here until the traffic dies down.’
‘Certainly not,’ said Xandra loftily. ‘I don’t drink. Or only in exceptional circumstances.’
‘These may well be them,’ suggested Gwinny. ‘Clive need never know. Just make sure the lucky guy doesn’t have red hair, or paternity might be suspect.’
‘This is no joking matter,’ said Xandra. ‘Whatever we do will be with Clive’s knowledge, consent and understanding. I’m really rather shocked at you, Gwinny.’
Gwinny had to remind herself how much of a younger generation Xandra was. Now almost sixty, Gwinny was a survivalist, a wartime baby reared on black market meat and fancies fallen off the back of a lorry and no questions asked. Clive was a moralist (failed). Xandra was a real moralist and foolishly assumed Clive was the same. Gwinny thought at the time that this propriety augured no good for the future of her country, which would sink under a population of Mrs Grundys, male and female, so cautious and approval seeking were they. She had yet, of course, to encounter a new race of female Millennials, who see love and sex as a reactionary folly.
‘Clive does take a little time to adjust to new circumstances,’ said Xandra, ever conciliatory. (You can say that again, thought Gwinny.)
‘I just hope he gets to be James Bond. With his lovely new voice he could reapply. It would make all the difference.’
But of course Clive didn’t. Karma had caught up with him, carried along in the vitriol flow. ‘Many are called but few chosen’: motto of Equity, the actors’ union – it isn’t but it should be. Especially if the manly lips open and a little tinny squeak emerges.
After a drink in the pub Xandra and Gwinny took the bus home and arrived there, damp, cold and hungry, at a quarter to seven, by which time the 2CV was parked outside No. 24 (1999: not yet any double yellow lines in Standard Road, or even single ones) and Clive was already home.
Gwinny, always a quick thinker, shoved the clinic’s glossy donor brochure into Xandra’s bag as they parted ways, Gwinny into No. 23, Xandra into No. 24. Xandra did not refuse it but covered it up with her nurse’s blue scrub cap, which she just so happened, and probably illegitimately, to have with her, in case she ever found she’d left her petrol cap behind in a garage as she’d been known to do, the scrub cap being good enough as a replacement. She took the brochure indoors.
Clive had gone to bed, so Xandra assumed because he had not got the job and, more, his virility had been insulted. She realised men could be very stubborn when it came to their own bodies and did get virility and fertility confused – well, the words are similar. But she assumed Dr Vellum was right: pre-pubertal mumps could be disastrous. So she heated up some fish pie in the microwave and shook out a bag of mixed salad leaves for supper and went to bed next to her beloved. He had taken sleeping pills so she did the same. It had been a very tiring day, starting with the two crash calls and one death, and Gwinny, much as she loved her, could be quite a tiring companion, as well as looking rather extraordinary, and people tended to stare. She was so practical and sensible but when it came to feelings could be rather insensitive. She took sex lightly. Xandra didn’t want any old baby, she wanted Clive’s baby, and if it turned out she couldn’t have that then she’d adopt, or go without. Which would be the right thing to do in an overcrowded world.
Xandra At Work
Xandra got home from her shift in a very good mood. To find that she was fertile was more of a relief than she had expected. To find out that Clive was not and she and Gwinny had been right was somehow cheering. Clive himself had been not too bad over breakfast. He seemed not to have noticed that the squeak was back and had other things to think about than the state of his sperm. He had managed to recover the text of the novel or the play, whichever it was.
True, it had been another tiring day on Intensive Care – she’d been one junior short, and had to put another on reprimand for panicking and dialling 217 for the crash team unnecessarily and now ‘lessons would have to be learned’. But then in her lunch break she’d been down to her post cubby (thanks to her intervention as head of the Stakeholders’ Contributory Team all senior staff had them now) and there found an official letter from Jan Eyres, Nursing Superintendent, to say she had passed her Associate of Science Degree, and could from now on call herself a nursing consultant. This would mean a whopping rise in salary, though she’d have to wait to the end of the month to find out exactly how much. Jan, the dear, had added a handwritten note to say there was a vacancy on the Risk Assessment Legal Team and suggesting Xandra apply, which of course she would. After a year or two in the post she’d be able to move to the private sector and get some senior job in medical insurance and never have to wear scrubs again. She could kick off her flats and wear high heels for the rest of her life.
Xandra made sure such letters went into her post cubby in the hospital and never reached home. She kept her work life away from Clive as much as she could. In his view, and indeed in Gwinny’s, all of life must be a battle against mediocrity, entropy, ordinariness, the dreaded Little Boxes of the Pete Seeger song. That was why Clive was so against her employment with the NHS, or National Death Service, as he liked to call it, seeing it as a descent into bourgeoisity, a betrayal of his own creative aspirations, which of course it was not, just the cruel necessity – which Clive was so reluctant to face – of making a living for both of them. That she actually enjoyed it made the matter worse. That she might strive for promotion in the desert of bureaucratic unreason would be seen at home as almost satanic.
At least Clive thought she was doing a properly female job, seeing her in his mind’s eye in a frilly apron and cap, like some parlourmaid whose job was to bring people cups of tea. He just wasn’t interested, and assumed hospitals and doctors were for the weak and helpless, whom he despised.
She and Clive’s ways had really parted right back when he became Joseph of the Dream
coat and she got Wife of Benjamin, abandoned her own hopes of stardom and got a proper job. If no longer as a doctor (she’d given up medical school to follow Clive to drama school) at least as a trained nurse she could get a good job at a moment’s notice. Wherever Clive’s star went she could follow.
But a baby! By a donor? The great welling up of instinctive longing as she neared the end of her procreative life might be natural and normal, but was hardly rational. And at such an inconvenient time, even if she could somehow square the matter of paternity with Clive. It really was at a turning point in her career. Clive of course saw nursing as just any old job: Xandra saw it as patiently climbing up the ladder of excellence to reach a point where – in the language of the King’s Fund, a charity that supports the NHS – ‘passion, commitment and enthusiasm for change and the practical realities of making things happen within the constraints of prevailing system priorities’ were hers to bring about.
Clive would have laughed himself sick if she’d given that as a reason. At least Gwinny seemed to understand. The previous night, as they’d tried to get home in one piece, and when Gwinny had said ‘Go down the nearest pub and pick up someone who looks like Clive?’ it had seemed like a sensible enough suggestion, though she’d pretended to be shocked.
One needed the right kind of clothes to pick up men and she looked a sight, but Clive had asserted his fertility so couldn’t grumble if his wife was suddenly pregnant. She’d been wearing her comfy knickers straight from work. If in desperation she did such a thing Clive need never know. But the truth was she needed sex, she liked sex, perhaps even more than babies. It’s what Clive and she had in common. And what would happen if Clive turned out to be one of those Mother-Madonna-Whore men, the sort who go off their wives as soon as they turn into mothers, seeing them as Madonnas, too sacred to fuck any more, and go off to whores instead? His father used prostitutes, apparently.
Going Private
But nothing is to be gained by subterfuge; not for nothing had the King’s Fund instructed me as I studied for my certificate: ‘Leaders need to work on the quality of their inner game, or their capacity to tune into and regulate their emotional and mental states, before they can hope to develop their outer game, or what it is they need to actually do.’ Well, I’d have to do some rather quick work on tuning my inner game. Though first I’d have to find out what it was.
The neat solution was not to have a baby at all. I knew I’d made a real fuss about wanting one, even weeping and wailing in a lamentably unregulated emotional and mental state, but one does rather look round for something in life to explain a perpetual vague dissatisfaction and plumps for the ‘I am childless, therefore I am unhappy’ option, the better to nail it. But supposing it didn’t work? Supposing the unhappiness, the disaffection, that was inherent in all human beings simply returned after the birth?
Perhaps it did, which was why women went on having baby after baby, like Gwinny’s mum, trying to plug the stream of unhappiness and never managing. And if it did work, and you had a baby, think of the horror of having to breastfeed it in public. Breasts were erogenous zones, so far as I was concerned, and Clive would not like them abused, especially by some rug rat not even his own. Though of course he wouldn’t know that.
No, I decided as I drove home in my little Citroën deux-chevaux, my umbrella on wheels as Gwinny unkindly called it (I loved that car, and she’d have been glad enough of it last night if only Clive hadn’t taken it), that the outer game must be to agree with Clive that Dr Vellum was an idiot and didn’t know what he was talking about, just go on having sex, lots of it, knowing it wouldn’t work, and get on with the career.
No baby.
But then what about the inner game? The search for the real me? It was a toss-up whether I’d ever find her.
Taking The Plunge
It was Clive who found the brochure in Xandra’s nurse’s cap and decided his wife must have a baby by a sperm donor. He now had other fish to fry. Dreams of house-husbanding were out the window. Xandra was too exhausted to argue.
Clive called the clinic and apologised to everyone: to the receptionist, the Asian man and both doctors, explaining he had been under extreme stress, and they sent him the required sample. They warned him it was old stock, being anonymous, which had legal implications. It had been brought in when the Your Beautiful Baby Clinic went belly up in 1981. It was half price.
‘Suits me,’ said Clive as I wrote out a cheque for the required £2,000.
I’d warned Xandra that it was old stock and though the clinic said it would probably work they couldn’t guarantee it. She looked at me as if she was startled and then asked me for a coin. I gave her a two-pound piece – they’re rather pretty, I always think. My thumbs were pricking away for some reason. It had started when I wrote the cheque. (It hadn’t happened for ages and was so severe I thought perhaps it was carpal tunnel syndrome but it cleared up after she’d thrown the coin so I didn’t go to the doctor.) She used the back of her hand. It came out heads.
‘So that’s settled,’ I said, ‘whatever it is?’
‘No, it isn’t,’ she said rather sharply, ‘I’ll do it three times.’ She did it two times more and all three were heads. She did it another three times and they too came up heads.
‘In I Ching hexagram terms,’ I said, ‘in the Chinese Book of Oracles, that’s extremely lucky.’
‘Well, I think it’s spooky,’ she said crossly. ‘But oh well.’
And that is how I ended up plunging in the turkey baster that produced Rozzie.
Part 4
Rozzie As A Child
The date of impregnation was March 18th 1999, almost thirteen laggardly years after the Smithsons got married. Rozzie was born in the Whittington Hospital in Archway, on the last stroke of midnight on January 1st 2000. But Flora had at last come through. I can see now she had her reasons. The new century!
The Daily Mail was waiting. First babies of the New Millennium. I have the yellowed press cutting in my files: doctors and nurses raise a celebratory glass to the baby, and no doubt to the fact that the predicted Bug, the Y2K, has not struck and caused digital chaos throughout the land, so at least their premature cots are still working.
The mother is out for the count – it was a long labour (it had to be, to get the January 1st date, not December 31st) and I, Gwinny, as per usual, am the one holding the baby. The father is not to be seen.
For when it came to it Xandra, aged thirty-nine, and in medical terms an ‘elderly primigravida’, had not been as strong and powerful in childbirth as she had hoped to be, indeed expected to be. The ‘natural’ childbirth she had organised for herself did not happen. Xandra had never worked in a labour ward, but had done stints in A&E, where the first ‘ow’ gets a knock-out by a jab, and had yet to realise to what degree the female body ruled the female mind. The pride of feminist theory, alas, came before a biological fall.
Xandra found herself as outraged, weepy, howling, drugged-up and dependent as many new mothers are when the body takes over the mind and there is no mind left, just a convulsing mass of muscles you had no idea existed, shrieking in pain, abusing the staff, demanding the despised epidural, grabbing for the gas-and-air and furious. So furious when asked to push she actually pulled against all the forces of nature.
Though all this may have been, as she later alleged, because when the first severe pains had started Clive had unexpectedly parked outside the hospital steps not the car park, and just dropped Xandra and me off, which was not at all how Xandra had envisaged the birth scenario, in which Clive sat by her birth bed and mopped her brow while she peacefully laboured with controlled contractions coming at regular intervals, holding her hand and marvelling how well his darling was ‘doing this’.
But it clearly wasn’t to be like this at all. What was happening in front of the hospital steps was that Clive was letting the engine run and opening the door for Xandra and me to get out.
‘I’m not actually coming inside, darling. What,
did you expect me to? Surely not. A maternity ward is no place for a man. And I can hardly pretend to be the father when I’m not,’ Clive had protested on the hospital steps; he was holding traffic up.
‘Fatherhood is a social rather than a genetic description,’ Xandra had wailed. ‘A baby belongs to whoever looks after it.’ Brecht said so in The Caucasian Chalk Circle. Nurture always wins over Nature. We agreed! Please, please!’
I did (mostly) so love this couple. Even in extremis they would theorise. And they both adored Brecht. Honk, honk, went the cars behind.
‘We are not meant to resolve all contradictions but to live with them,’ quoted Clive, switching to William Blake. ‘You’re a feminist, you asked for a doula, a woman companion. Apparently a man isn’t good enough any more.’
Some two months ago and still working and Xandra, knowing Clive, had murmured that she would like me to be her doula, her female ‘birth companion’ and saying things like: ‘I so look forward to the birth! How strong and powerful I will be!’ He had said nothing at the time but evidently held this lack of trust against her.
Now I had watched my mother horribly give birth to four, and the fifth one carried her off. Marie Stopes had claimed back in the old days that with every birth, a mother’s risk of death rose by 50 per cent. I realised times were very different now but feeling at the time that Xandra was perhaps being over-optimistic, suckered by the National Childbirth Trust who so like to emphasise the joy of the process rather than the pain, so I had said, ‘Yes, of course I’ll be your doula. Whatever.’
‘But your doula won’t leave you, will you, Gwinny?’
