After the Peace

by Fay Weldon

  I too had assumed Clive would come in with us. I helped Xandra out of her bright little yellow car. Xandra could hardly stand without toppling over.

  ‘Of course I won’t leave her,’ I said, grabbing her. She smelt of blood, sweat and tears.

  Xandra had looked forward to the culmination of the pregnancy. She had sailed through life so far, why should luck desert her now? Birth was a natural, normal thing, and so long as you breathed and visualised properly, surely medication of any kind would be unnecessary. Only wusses fussed.

  ‘Try and understand, darling. You and Gwinny chose another father. It just doesn’t feel right for me to be there at the birth,’ pleaded Clive, the lovely black-fringed eyes opened wide and beseeching, as they always would be when he felt under attack; his Liberty of London cravat (not cheap) perfectly tied, his pale grey jacket (Armani from the look of it) suave and smooth, his brow unruffled. Hoot, hoot, all around. Still he went on.

  ‘Let the turkey look after his own. You’re a big healthy girl, and childbirth is a natural process, not a medical condition. You’ve kept telling me so.’

  ‘I didn’t know I’d be so frightened.’

  But now he heard the blaring horns.

  ‘I must go. I’m holding people up. It’s a very important audition by the way, but of course that means nothing to you,’ and he slammed the car door between us and zoomed off towards Soho, where indeed his agent had a penthouse, or towards wherever it is that men go in their very best clean clothes when their wife is having a baby.

  I helped Xandra up the steps. She was enormous, and already shuddering, and wondering why she had embarked on this in the first place. There being no father in sight, it was me she shouted at and hit and scratched while giving birth, screaming ‘I hate you!’

  A Much-Filmed Child

  Rozzie was filmed as she was born; as the determined little head eased into the world and her mouth took its first breath, a camcorder watched (wielded by me, I know, I know! Who else?). Even earlier, her very heartbeat – biddy-de-de-boom, biddy-de-de-boom, very strong and fast – could be heard and was credited by name – baby Rosalind Smithson, HBM135, female, 8 months 16 days – also starred in a training video for aspiring midwives, though one understandably never shown – it was not a well-managed birth, and the mother tore quite spectacularly, though baby Smithson’s HBM maintained a steady 140 even throughout labour.

  Even as Rozzie left the hospital two weeks later in my arms – Xandra didn’t trust herself with the burden – a CCTV camera watched us. That was for our own safety. New mothers have been known to break away and run to the nearest high-rise car park and throw themselves off.

  And as the tiny, perfect baby grew, the world came to Rozzie through the TV in the room: everything the film makers thought worthy of the public’s attention – mainly shock horror, war, violence, sex, crime, both ‘real’ and fictional if that failed. Criminals, terrorists and sexual perverts have very little imagination, unlike writers, but now the writers are at hand to add their own rich fantasies to the brew, and female death by broken bottle, once seen, becomes quite normal on our BBC. [‘Cut,’ says the Writers’ Huddle, ‘one of your rants coming up.’]

  But it’s what Millennials have been brought up with for years. Rozzie is just as an example; once the nasty person could only be as nasty as his neighbour, now thanks to the internet he can be as nasty as the nastiest person in the world. Who wants One Man and His Dog (surely sexist anyway?) and the Naked Chef (likewise), when there are richer, sexier serial murderer drama series to be found? Argument flares up for a while: can children be influenced by what they see on the screen, but the answer from trade research always comes back ‘oh no’. But what could anyone even mildly cynical suppose the result would be?

  So could it have been scenes of slaughtered babies in the Congo, starving ones in Somalia or Queer as Folk on the telly that turned Xandra’s milk sour as she failed to bond with Rozzie? Well, something did. The birth itself had been fairly traumatic, and I daresay it’s difficult to pin down any particular source of blame. Nevertheless, how the tiny Rozzie cried and wailed in distaste for her first two months! Not that breastfeeding went on for long, only six weeks. Xandra couldn’t wait to get back to work, to leave pain and shame behind. It had to be bottle, not nipple, no matter how wave after wave of ‘bloody Breast Nazis’ (Clive) from the National Childbirth Trust argued ‘Breast was Best’ to make you feel bad when you couldn’t, it hurt so much.

  Naming The Child

  Against the noise of the battles on TV Clive and Xandra argued about the baby’s name. They couldn’t go on calling it ‘it’ for ever. Clive wanted Rex, which Xandra argued was a good name for a puppy but she’d given birth to a human not a dog, in spite of what Clive had probably hoped.

  Xandra was not in a good place. Rozzie was five weeks old and Xandra had not yet forgiven Clive for deserting her on the hospital steps and going off God knew where – he’d said it was an audition, but was it? – and she was having trouble feeding and everything about her still chafed or dripped or hurt.

  They were great theorists, the pair of them; Xandra had always been a Bertolt Brecht enthusiast – having once had a small part in The Caucasian Chalk Circle – and chose Michael for the baby’s name after Grusha’s baby. Determined that there was no real difference between male and female, she had added the ‘a’ to the name only after much persuasion from Clive and myself. It was to be Michaela, not Rex.

  ‘A girl called Michael is going to go through hell at school,’ he’d argued. ‘Don’t do it to her.’

  ‘Then people should learn not to be so sexist,’ snapped Xandra. ‘Surely the sooner gender nomenclature is reformed the better.’

  ‘Such a little thing, an a at the end of a name.’ I, Gwinny, ever the peace-maker, mediated. Xandra had been going through a thoroughly feminist phase since the baby had been born, though battered, bruised and traumatised as she was. She had not quite yet abandoned feminist theory in the face of reality.

  ‘It’s not in the least little, it is enormous,’ Xandra reproached me. ‘It’s like acknowledging that Eve was created out of one of Adam’s ribs. It’s symptomatic of female acceptance of male superiority.’ But not having the strength to pursue the argument she had relented in the end. When I suggested Rosalind she simply accepted it. I like to think Xandra acknowledged that while she was good at theory I was good at practicalities.

  I am a fraction too early for the boomer generation of post-war decades, being conceived in 1938 and only born in 1939, and so have the remnants of the survivalist instinct, as well as seeing common sense as a virtue. Clive and Xandra are late arrivals of the X generation – energetic, confident, non-compliant – but regard common sense as expendable, a rejection of right thinking. They are relativists.

  Much as I loved the Smithsons, both Xandra and Clive tended to see the world as their own construction and political correctness went deep into its foundations: even as Clive railed against it, he was conscious of it. I saw transitional demands as ephemeral; wishful thinking drifting here and there, not solid at all. Make Poverty History. Make Love not War. Might as well be Apple Pie for Everyone. Nice work if you could get it. Unachievable. That was the point.

  [Writers’ Huddle: ‘Do you think this is the right group for you, Gwinny? These days you don’t seem willing to take our advice. Can we recommend the Hampstead Huddle? It’s much more experimental!’]

  I once listened to Clive rehearsing for an audition as a voice-over for some TV commercial company, when the squeak was only occasional and technology could get rid of it. More or less. You can get good money as a voice-over. Clive was reciting Kipling’s poem The Gods of the Copybook Headings.

  Alas, Clive’s voice simply wasn’t up to it: the poem needs a kind of throaty roar and Clive was offering a plaintive squeak. At this stage he was still in denial about his vocal cords.

  ‘And that after this is accomplished,’ he squeaked, ‘And the brave new world begins, When
all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins, As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn, The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!’ Xandra had interrupted, but objecting apparently not to the voice but to the message of the poem.

  ‘Oh, the cynicism! You can’t possibly use that piece, Clive. There’s such a thing as progress, you must admit!’

  So Clive chose another poem: on my recommendation, Joyce Kilmer’s Trees, which could offend no-one and which happened to be Xandra’s favourite, and for once he actually got the job. They didn’t seem to mind the squeaky voice but then it’s always seemed to me to be a rather soppy idiocy of a poem. Droopy and feeble. But then I do have ultra-sensitive ears, as had been pointed put to me by the dirty-toed folk singer when I was a stage door groupie. I wonder if Anthea has inherited perfect pitch, and if so was it from dirty-toes or from me?

  ‘I think that I shall never see’ – it goes – ‘A poem lovely as a tree. A tree whose hungry mouth is prest, Against the sweet earth’s flowing breast, A tree that looks at God all day, And lifts her leafy arms to pray.’

  But that was before his voice had got really bad.

  The Good Neighbour

  Xandra, usually so small, neat and contained, had in late pregnancy seemed to somehow overflow. I had thought it rather unwise of her to snap at Clive, when in the seventh month she found her libido increased to such an extent that Clive was staying out of the marital bedroom for fear of harming the unborn baby. ‘Why do you care?’ she had complained, she who normally never complained. ‘It’s not your baby anyway. If you want to find someone “normal” find someone else. I’m not a jealous person. Sexual exclusivity is against my principles.’

  How little people know themselves. It could have been me in my wild-child days but was not sensible for someone like Xandra, nearing forty and on the brink of the twenty-first century. It was a time when fidelity was all the rage and broken marriage vows tended to end in divorce and swift remarriage. Men sought the ‘authenticity of their feelings’ – however transitory those feelings turned out to be – weekend or holiday and set out by bus or train to locate their latest step family. In which case little Rozzie would have had yet a third father to deal with. Birth father, legal father, stepfather.

  If Clive had taken Xandra at her word and found someone less energetic than his wife, at least on a temporary basis, that might well have been the end. I did not doubt his love for her, just its exclusivity. Xandra and Clive did not mind being overheard. They never seemed aware, during our many long and lovely candlelit dinners in No. 24, just to what extent their love and lust for each other could be heard through the walls of No. 23. Our bedrooms were adjacent, and the walls rather thin and ticky-tacky, having been built for the Victorian lower orders, who were known to put no premium on privacy.

  I was the good mother neither of them had ever had. They trusted me, and if they were a tad exhibitionist – well, both did have a theatrical background. All art, I used to think, circled at a distance from the central act; the eye of the storm, as it were, the swirling centre of the hurricane, once too dangerous to approach, or only if you were the Marquis de Sade and had quite a literary following.

  Now the act is on everyone’s iPhone, I fear there is no more art, or only shadows of what went before, and few are interested anyway. Sex? A good dinner with selfies is more absorbing. [‘Okay,’ say the Writers’ Huddle. ‘You can probably get away with that.’ They too suffer.]

  Getting By With A Baby

  The once longed-for motherhood had more problems than Xandra had anticipated. There were so many other considerations to worry about. Her duty to her patients: they depended on her, needed her, deserved more, surely, than did the ungrateful pain-monster in the IKEA cradle. The baby would be better off without her, they were both so un-bonded. She’d thought all mothers bonded with their babies; well, she just didn’t. It was a two-way street. Perhaps this happened because it was a turkey-baster baby, a stranger to the household, and not a real one born out of love and familiarity?

  Clive even seemed fonder of the baby than she did. He didn’t seem to mind whose it was. He carried it round and cooed at it even when it was squalling, which was most of the time. And called her Rozzie, a name she hated. Rosalind sounded civilised but Rozzie was too like rozzer, an old-fashioned stupid policeman. All Gwinny’s fault.

  Clive had even volunteered to be a house-husband, at least when he was resting, and said there was Gwinny next door to understudy him should need arise, and that the TV in the corner was the best baby sitter imaginable. The baby stared at the screen all the time, the only thing that seemed to stop it crying. As soon as Xandra was back at work she would be able to afford a new 32-inch screen. At least the telly didn’t teach you to swear all the time, unlike Gwinny and Clive, fuck, fuck, fuck and the occasional cunt. [Writers’ Huddle: ‘No! What about audio sales? They’ll choose another to avoid argument.’]

  In the meantime Rozzie imbibed TV with her formula: no longer breast milk, no cuddling and gazing into one another’s eyes, no ‘one-step-two-step-tickle-you-under-there’ nonsense, and she was right off sex.

  Clive found the baby more interesting than he found Xandra. And next to the baby was TV. He liked to have it on as a background to life.

  The Big Break

  Hope, Bacon’s ‘good breakfast but a bad supper’, lives eternal in an actor’s heart. The big break was bound to come. Clive still believed it. Xandra, though, had long ago accepted that such a thing was unlikely, faced the truth that she herself was only chorus material, not lead singer, and her legs were nowhere long enough for show-girl status. She would have to be the bread-winner so would do better to train for a proper job with opportunities for promotion. It was too late for medicine: she would try nursing.

  Clive could keep his dreams but their future lay in her steady job and a bourgeois life, and that, surely, would include a baby. Or even two, though it was getting rather late for a third. Somehow she would survive.

  So now the Smithsons had been living mostly on Xandra’s wages up at the hospital – a good thing she kept on passing exams, working hard and getting promotion but all the more tragic if she didn’t get back to work soon; she would spend quality time with Rozzie, and children benefited from the social life in the crèche and the nursery, as everyone knew. And Clive’s multimedia stage opus, a tragicomedy called Let’s Get out of Here!, in which a dumb (orally not intellectually) hero accomplished deeds of great valour which won him the respect of a threatened community. A bit like Jaws. The play would succeed and they would all be rich and famous again.

  Out Of The Dark Age And Into The Light

  All that time, while Xandra and Clive tried in vain to conceive – well, at least Clive did; Xandra was caught up in her nursing career – his Lordship’s seed stayed in the freezer. ‘Action man, aristocrat’ appealed to no-one else until the fickle finger of fate, in the form of Gwinny’s finger, fell upon it in January 1999. Twenty years unclaimed! Put in the archive freezer when the Your Beautiful Baby Clinic went out of business to be taken over by the Woolland Clinic and its Brilliant Baby division.

  Aristocrats must have been rather out of favour in the interim as a breeding opportunity, perhaps because of a growing radicalism in the nation at the time: the feeling that an elected House of Lords was preferable to one that depended upon inheritance. Rozzie, of course, meant to change all that.

  A conclusion that the US Senate came to a hundred years earlier. One of Rozzie’s earliest ambitions, when she could barely walk, was to be a cheerleader in an American presidential election. The TV, that excellent baby sitter, was kept on in Rozzie’s crèche and later nursery and of course when she was at home, where it was never switched off – for ease of viewing by day, to ward off robbers at night, and to save Clive from the terror of silence.

  These days far more sophisticated devices are available for self-fertilisation than a turkey baster. But this particular vaginal
basting was done in 1999 which was practically in the dark ages so far as the HFEA, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, was concerned, as later a bitter Rozzie was frequently to remark, once she realised her anonymous origins.

  A World Of Cameras

  Clive remarked in 2015 that there was one CCTV camera for every eleven people. These days there are far more. Every sensible householder has one over their front door. We have them over Nos. 23 and 24. Rozzie did not want her properties, as she prudently waited for them to go up in value, to be robbed or vandalised. We old people, Xandra, Clive and myself, were allowed to live here in our lifetime or until she chose to sell, whichever was soonest – Rozzie had very good lawyers – when we would be out in the cold and on welfare. There would be precious little left of my bequests; I’d spent prodigiously and carelessly when I could, much of it on Rozzie.

  ‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child! Act One, Scene Four, King Lear,’ as Clive would say. I am more tolerant of his irritating quotes than I used to be. Sometimes life is so puzzling one is driven back to the poetry and wisdom of the past. I find myself reading the concluding, rather sour verses of FitzGerald’s version of Omar Khayyam: With them the Seed of Wisdom did I sow, And with my own hand labour’d it to grow: And this was all the Harvest that I reap’d – I came like Water, and like Wind I go. And even Gibran: Let these be your desires: To melt and be like a running brook That sings its melody to the night. To know the pain of too much tenderness. To be wounded by your own understanding of love; And to bleed willingly and joyfully. All very well for Clive to gain comfort from them, I suppose, but too airy fairy to be any help for me.

  I have to remember that Rozzie is a Millennial. She had been born into a world of cameras, to be the observed, not the observer. She had been filmed and recorded since birth: the most observed generation since technology began, and the most self-conscious and the most riddled with anxiety.