“I want to tell you the truth.”
“Then tell me the truth.”
“But come here.”
I went slowly. After a moment he began to stroke my hair as though I were a dog who had to be calmed.
He starts by saying that he is not a good person, like I am, but he doesn’t say what he means by good. He says that he is weak, impatient and not to be trusted. He has done his best in the past, but even then he has failed me, dismally failed me. Does he believe this? Why this sudden humility? I want to believe it. I want to shut my eyes and be lapped by lies. Jake is humble.
He knows what’s wrong with me. He’s given me all the wrong things. Material things. He’s neglected me. Perhaps this is true. He has never spoken like this before: rather too solemn, a bit pompous. He feels about this. He means it. Jake is trying to say something he means. Because of this short-sightedness of his, I came to feel my life was pointless and empty. Quite rightly. So it was. I was perfectly right to feel like that. And since he was no help to me, I took the only way out that I knew: I decided to have another child.
He is not blaming me. Jake is blaming himself. (Is he saying I didn’t know any better? Well, if he is, it’s true.) His first reaction was that he had been cheated. This, he says, is why he behaved so badly at the cremation. Then, after seeing me there, he began to think. Jake began to think. He thought it out and he realized that it was he who had cheated me. He had left me in a vacuum and I had simply grabbed what I could get, the only thing I could think of to make me happy again.
All right. All right, Jake. Go on. The fear is eased, the fire is warm, love is simple. Somebody is explaining things to me, understanding me. I’m resting now. I’ll believe anything.
He isn’t excusing himself, but he’s been terrified by the task of supporting us all. For years he’s been driven on by panic, taking on ghastly scripts he didn’t want to do, accepting everything he was offered; destroying, incidentally, his own talent in the process, but that doesn’t matter, the point is that he’s kept us, we’ve come out of it alive. But the irony, the bloody irony of it is that just at this point when he has realized how much he loves me, when we could for the first time start planning a happier, more sensible life, just at the point when we could start thinking of a little freedom — I’m pregnant again. The whole thing starts all over. Instead of love and a good time — he doesn’t of course mean a good time, he means a good time — and being able to go away together and see a bit of the world, broaden our horizons, enjoy what he supposes is our middle age — instead of all this, another child. To him, it’s tragic. We could have lived so differently. But now … it’s tragic.
Now he’s stopped talking. The caves of the fire blaze with icicles, stalactites seen through tears. I don’t speak, because he has something left to say.
Of course he knows, good God he knows, that the idea of abortion is repellent to me. It is to him, too. He would never dream of suggesting it. I must agree that he never has. It’s only that the doctor, that psyche, did say that I shouldn’t have another child. I’m in the middle of treatment, Jake says, for depression. An abortion would be perfectly legal. It wouldn’t be underhand, nasty, anything like that. Still, he supposes that the only thing to do is to take the risk and have the baby and get down to work again. They want him to go to Hollywood for six months. He was going to turn it down, take the summer off. He had wanted to get to know the children again, he says; he wanted to take them out and dust them and polish up their faces. Now … oh well, that’s life. Don’t be upset, darling. Don’t cry. I want to make you happy. Good God, after all, he’s got me into this. All those boring months, the pain at the end. He only wishes he could get me out of it while there’s still time.
I still say nothing. He is right. I believe him. But I can’t say so. I feel myself like a torrent being dammed, being forced back, turned into new channels. I am a dead weight, like water.
He asks me if I love him. I nod, stupidly, a mute. He waits, stroking my hair again. In a little while I shall tell him that I shall do what he wants, that is more important to me than the child. But not yet. For a few minutes we will sit here, wondering.
This morning I got a letter. It was forwarded from a magazine that printed a picture of us last month, and a story about Jake taking up script-writing to keep the wolf from the door. It is written on blue paper and came in what I think they call a Manila envelope, such as they use for bills.
Dear Madam, it says,
I saw your picture in a book at the drs with all your wonderful children and read about your good luck in life. That is when I thought of writing in case you have something you can say to help me as I need some help badly and your face looks kind, I hope you do not mind this. I feel so terribly alone and so wrongly full of self pity that I had to write to you if only to get things off my chest, perhaps my letter will not reach you, I may not post it, but my life is so hard to live and such an empty place I feel I’d like to end it now. I am married with three children, all wonderful babies who I love dearly. Four months ago I had an Hysterectomy operation, I get up at 6 a.m. and go to bed about 9. My weekly wash for us all including a young boy who lives in I do in a copper boiler, the sort with fire beneath. I clean ten rooms a week, two toilets, cook dinner every day for the six of us as well as keeping my little ones happy, so I never get out for a night or get holidays. I’m behind in HP payments and get paid Saturday morning, broke Saturday night. Perhaps I’m lucky compared to some but I feel so unhappy, tears fall so easy. My husband doesn’t make love to me any more to make it seem worth while. Please write to me before I do something I’ll regret because my love for the babies won’t hold me here if things don’t change.
Yours faithfully,
Meg Evans (Mrs.)
P.S. I am sorry for the trouble but you didn’t always have things easy so I was hoping you might know.
What should I say to Mrs. Evans?
“Dear Mrs. Evans, I enclose a cheque for £10. This, of course, is tax free and therefore worth double …” “Dear Mrs. Evans, I am about to have an abortion and wonder if you could give me some advice …” “Dear Mrs. Evans, We have a fine tower in the country, bring all the children and live in it …” “Dear Mrs. Evans, We all get what we deserve. I myself am not going to have another baby. Why not learn Italian or take up some useful…”
Dear Mrs. Evans, my friend. Dear Mrs. Evans, for God’s sake come and teach me how to live. It’s not that I’ve forgotten. It’s that I never knew. A womb isn’t all that important. It’s only the seat of life, something that drags the moon down from the sky like a kite and draws the sea in and out, in and out, the world’s breathing. At school the word “womb” used to make them snigger. Women aren’t important.
You have a vote, Mrs. Evans. Now why don’t you take advantage of it? I have a vote. Really, anyone would think that the emancipation of women had never happened. Dear Mrs. Evans, let us march together to our local headquarters and protest in no uncertain terms. Let us put forward our proposals, compile our facts, present our case, demand our rights. The men — they are logical, brave, humanitarian, creative, heroic — the men are sneering at us. How the insults fly. You hear what they are saying, as we run the gauntlet between womb and tomb? “Stop trying to be a man! Stop being such a bloody woman! You’re too strong! You’re too weak! Get out! Come back! …” When we were young, we said the hell with it and used our breasts as shields. But the tears fall so easy when they take away love. Be a man, Mrs. Evans. It’s all that’s left for you.
“What’s this?” Jake said. He glanced at the letter, taking it from me. “Oh, one of those.” It drifted into the wastepaper basket. He put his arm round me. “Not crying again?”
“No.”
“I saw the doctor. He thinks you’re perfectly right.”
“Oh. Good.”
“He says there’s no need for you to go and see him unless you want to.”
“I don’t want to.”
“He’ll write to this … gynae
cologist. I’ve made an appointment for you tomorrow.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re so brave. So splendid. It’ll soon be over.”
“I don’t mind.” I held him tightly. “So long as you’re happy.”
“I’m very happy.”
While he held me, rather formally, in his arms I kept my eye on the wastepaper basket; it contained the only evidence I had in the world that I was not alone.
17
They not only terminated, as they called it, my pregnancy. They sterilized me, so that I should never again have to worry about having children. I consented to everything. Not only did I believe in Jake; I began, very tentatively, to believe in myself. It was as though I were feeling my own face with my fingertips in the dark.
At first I lay for hours staring at the murky oblong of window to the left of my bed. I imagined all the other patients in the nursing home lying in the same attitude, their windows magnets for eyes set in barely moving heads. The wound didn’t hurt, but for the first time in my life I could not move my body freely. To be cut open and sewn up makes one realize how much is contained inside skin and muscle: we’re only stuffed with life, and can easily burst open. Jake was careful not to touch me, or to enquire too much. He came every evening on his way back from the studio, and stayed until they brought my hot milk and pills. He usually ate my dinner, since he was missing his own, and I wasn’t hungry. He held my hand and we talked rather desultorily about his work, the tower, the children. We didn’t talk about the future. He seemed to have exhausted himself. I was rather shy with him, as you are with someone with whom you have made love once, for a single time.
After a few days the nurses said I was more lively. Every morning Jake’s florist sent flowers. The room was crowded with flowers. There was a pale pink azalea from the Conways — with love from Bob and Beth — and a Japanese garden from John Hurst, complete with bridges. Flowers were cabled from Hollywood, New York and Rome: they all said with love, with fondest love, with much love, even those from people I had never met. I had the impression that Jake’s world was wide open, longing to take me in, while mine was already disposed of, burnt up along with the garbage.
Every morning Jake’s secretary came with magazines, books, letters. I was allowed to send her out shopping, if I needed anything. I had never really known her before, but now I began to realize that she, too, lived with Jake. “Oh, Mr. Armitage would snap my head off if I did that! … Oh, Mr. Armitage — you can never tell what he’s going to do next … Well, Mr. Armitage doesn’t know what it’s like getting up from Croydon every morning …” She was a pale, anaemic girl with a great beehive of yellow hair and a boy friend in Insurance. Her mother suffered from dizzy spells, she never knew when they were coming on, sometimes she had to go racing back to Croydon in the lunch hour just to cope with one of her mother’s dizzy spells. “There’s no one else to look after her, you see. It’s the worry of thinking she can’t get hold of me, that’s the real thing. She may be ringing the office now, or she may be ringing your home, or Elstree. One of these days I think I may get back and find her dead. You’d understand, of course, but don’t tell Mr. Armitage. I’ve got to hold my job down, but I never know from one day to the next whether she’ll ring and ask me to come back, or whether she won’t be able to get me and I’ll go home and find her dead.”
Dinah came to see me after school. She brought a small bunch of violets, their stalks twisted in silver paper. “Though, gosh,” she said wonderingly, “with all the others you’ve got …” I said truthfully that I preferred the violets. I didn’t know how to tell her why I was there, I didn’t know what to tell her. In the end I told her nothing.
“It’s a sort of … womb thing, I suppose, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said. “Something like that.”
“Does it happen to everyone?”
“No, of course not.”
“Gosh, you know, it’s hell being a woman. Look at men. They can do just what they like. It makes me sick when I think of men.”
“Does it?” I asked. I was seeing her for the first time as though she were static, complete, no longer part of a moving chain. I wondered if all the children would appear like this, in focus, their outlines sharp and permanent: the youngest for ever the youngest, with no one to bully or protect. They seemed much nearer to me than they had done for many years. I talked to Dinah about them. We analysed each one. Where Dinah found fault, I defended; where I criticized, Dinah said it would pass. She was still there when Jake arrived, and the nurses said oh well, they’d have to leave me for once, if I died in the night they’d take the blame.
“Hullo,” Dinah said. “I haven’t seen you for ages.”
“No,” Jake said. “How are you, then? How’s Trotsky?”
“That just shows how out of date you are. Of course if you ever got up the morning, I might see you.”
“If you didn’t leave for school at half past seven in order to get there at nine, I might see you. What do you do, anyway? It can’t take an hour and a half to get from home to South Kensington.”
“It does,” Dinah said, “if you don’t happen to go by Jaguar.”
She left, and I said, “Perhaps you shouldn’t come here so much. You ought to see them. You ought just to see they’re all right.”
“They’ll keep,” he said. “Anyway, I go straight home when I leave you.”
“Then why don’t you see Dinah? It’s early when you leave here. It’s only ten.”
“She’s always in bed or … messing about in her room, or something.”
“Is she?”
“Yes!” he shouted suddenly. “She is! Didn’t I tell you so?”
“I’m sorry …” For the first time, my hands moved involuntarily to my stomach. They lay over the hot dressing, the wound I had never seen. I watched Jake inspecting the flowers.
“Sorry I shouted,” he said. “I’m tired.”
“It’s all right.”
“Did you write to the Conways, thank them for this?”
“Yes.”
“Good. People like Conway … you know, they’re touchy.”
It was almost time to go home. I knew now that it was all right, that I could make life work again. Although Jake and I didn’t talk about it, I was full of plans. I planned during the day, when I was alone. I had hated the nurse for too long: she must go. I would take back the children and in the summer we would live in the tower. I would live with Jake. I realized that for the first time in my life I could make love without danger. Danger? For the first time in my life I could make love. It was an amazing thought, as though I suddenly had the gift of tongues, the ability to fly. I could hardly contain my love, it ran out of my arms and eyes like lightning. “Be careful,” Jake said, “you’ll hurt yourself.” I laughed till the tears came and it really did hurt. “You’re crazy,” Jake said. “What’s the matter with you?” “Nothing. I love you. I’ve been such a fool.” He laid me back against the pillows. “No,” he said, “you’ve never been a fool.”
The next morning they took the stitches out. They came at the time that Jake’s secretary usually arrived, so I told them to ask her to wait. I saw the wound for the first time. It was larger than I had expected, a long, blood-caked gash between my navel and shaved pubic arch. It was very ugly. They covered it with sticking plaster and said it would soon fade. I knew they were lying. A scar is what they call a distinguishing mark. It lasts for ever.
Jake’s secretary was nearly an hour late. She literally ran into the room, her beehive tumbling; her mascara had spread so far that her face appeared to be covered in small footprints. “It’s happened,” she said, “I wasn’t in the office five minutes before they rang — she’s been taken to hospital!”
“You shouldn’t have come round here. Hurry. Get a taxi — ”
“Well, I didn’t know what to do, Mr. Armitage told me to take his letters down to the studio, he won’t be in the office today. It’s having to hold my job, I can’t
do it, Mrs. Armitage. I wondered if you could give them to him this evening? I’ll have to phone him of course, I don’t know what he’ll say, he’ll probably sack me.” She wept into a clenched handkerchief and burrowed in a briefcase with her free hand. I told her to leave the letters, whatever they were, on the table, gave her a pound for a taxi, promised to clear her name with Jake, asked her to ring me to say how her mother was. She ran off clutching her hair, a girl with a desperate problem. I telephoned Jake at the studio. He said, “Blast the woman.”
“She can’t help it, darling. Do be a bit kind.”
“There’s a pile of work waiting for her down here. What am I supposed to do?”
“You’ll have to borrow someone else. Is it awful?”
“One of the camels has got ’flu and John’s going round telling the whole camera crew that Doug ought to be directing TV commercials and Dante’s got a temperament and Beth’s still not back. What d’you mean — awful?”
“Not back from where?”
‘She’s been off for a week, God knows what’s the matter with her. Well, see you tonight if I’m still alive.”
“Take care of yourself.”
I got up now, and walked about my room. I already knew it so well that lying in bed with my eyes shut I could reconstruct it exactly, green-painted furniture with stencilled motif slightly chipped, basket chair with cretonne cushions, crack in the wall over the wardrobe (why do ill people need wardrobes?), squat taps in the basin polished every morning, locker with ink stain, Victorian commode, two strips of cretonne hanging from ivory rings over the window. There was nothing to do in the room but walk round it. I brushed my hair three hundred times, watered the azalea, cut off a few daffodil stems with a pair of nail scissors, looked out of the window. It was a freak March, they said it was seventy degrees. Dinah, excellent with news, told me that the tortoises had come out of their straw. I could only see a jagged chunk of blue sky and people far below in the narrow street walking hatless, their coats open. In a week’s time the workmen would be finished and we could move into the tower. I was in love with Jake; it was a convert’s love, passionate, wholly occupying. I sang as I pottered round the room. The nurse, bringing in my lunch, said, “You sound chirpy enough, time we got rid of you.”
The Pumpkin Eater Page 12
