Four Bare Legs In a Bed

by Helen Simpson

  Chitra was fiddling with a bangle, smiling, trying to keep at bay the thought that next month her husband’s overbearing, critical and diabetic mother was coming to live with them. The old woman did not speak English and would doubtless do all she could to keep Chitra in the house all day long. She would criticise her to her husband and enlist his support in everything. When she fell ill, she would expect to be nursed as tenderly as a baby. And she would force Chitra to give up her local friendships, dismissing good, kind Mrs Brumfitt as uncouth and this unmarried doctor girl as immoral.

  ‘Those pakora really were super,’ said Hilary, in an unaccustomed attempt at ingratiation. ‘I’d love the recipe.’

  Chitra fluttered her hands.

  ‘They are very easy, but you must have time and patience,’ she said. ‘One day before your new job begins you must come to my house and watch me make them.’

  ‘You should see her do nan bread,’ Mrs Brumfitt chimed in, smacking her lips. ‘All puffed up and blistered under the grill.’

  ‘Yes, nan bread too!’ said Chitra. ‘And also stuffed paratha! We will have another tea party.’

  ‘Just so long as you don’t ask the Perfect Mother,’ said Mrs Brumfitt. ‘Her and her precious bambini. Did you ever? I see nobody’s touched those almond slices. Well, I’m not too proud to eat shop-bought. Pass them over, Hilary. By the way, I’ve been meaning to ask you a favour, I’ve got something funny here on my side and I was wondering if you’d take a look at it for me one day when you’ve got a spare minute.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Hilary crossly, thinking: honestly! give them an inch.

  An Interesting Condition

  ‘THINK OF YOUR cervix as the sleeve of a sweater,’ said the snake-hipped young midwife. Beside her on a beanbag crouched the Health Visitor, knitting away at what looked like a circular bag in meat-pink wool.

  No, thought Alice, I won’t, and allowed her mind to cast itself back into last night’s dream when the new-raised brown beads on her nipples had resolved themselves into fruit seeds, like the gold flecks on strawberries, before easing away to leave her as smooth and pale as before.

  Career Girl wrote, ‘Cervix = sweater sleeve (?)’ in her notebook. Home Birth rearranged her heels on her thighs. Teenager yawned and wriggled. There were nine women in the room, variously disposed at floor level on foam wedges and cushions. Chairs were not part of the Health Centre’s Antenatal Class equipment. The women were supposed to seat themselves in such a way as to encourage the stretching of their sacro-iliac joints.

  ‘All those years of Mummy telling me to sit with my legs neatly arranged,’ Miss Bandbox had commented. ‘And now they tell us to sprawl splayed out all anyhow. She’d have a fit.’

  ‘If your waters break and they are brown, khaki or green,’ read the midwife from her clipboard, ‘then ring the hospital. The baby’s in distress.’ Alice stared round the walls for distraction. Professionally printed posters about heroin, Aids, alcoholism and syringe exchanges gave a silly look to the home-made felt-tipped drawings captioned ‘Is it Time?’ (a stick woman in a triangular skirt with a pool of water between her feet) and ‘How will I Cope?’ (the same stick woman minus her skirt, encircled with syringes and scissors, pear-shaped tears dripping from her face).

  ‘Bruno,’ thought Alice, ‘Guy, Leonie, Felix, Rosanna, Adrian.’ It was Derby Day and she had made Eddie promise that morning to put a pound on the horse of her choice, on his way to work. Her favourite from the list of names was Woodpecker Zeus. Trust you, said Eddie; 300–1. I don’t care, said Alice; he sounds lucky.

  The midwife drew a plastic-headed rag doll from the jaws of her black bag. A crimson silk sachet was attached to its body by a long cherry-coloured ribbon.

  ‘This is the placenta,’ said the midwife, holding up the sachet. ‘Have you got the pelvis, Audrey?’ The health visitor scrabbled in her carrier bag of wool and produced a large bony structure.

  ‘Excuse me for knitting,’ she addressed them chattily. ‘I’d hoped to get it finished last night but my husband threw a wobbly. What a shame, it would have made it all so much clearer.’

  ‘Audrey is knitting a womb,’ explained the midwife coldly. ‘A uterus. Well, you’ll just have to imagine. Anyway, the baby starts off inside the uterus, which is a stretchy bag…’

  Audrey, grinning, raised her knitting needles to display their dangling burden.

  ‘… Then it squeezes out and comes down through the pelvis like this. But sometimes it gets stuck – like this, or this – and sometimes it’s upside down which usually means a Caesarean. Once it’s out, we tug the umbilical cord’ – she pulled on the ribbon – ‘and out pops the afterbirth.’

  ‘Be prepared for a lot of blood,’ said Audrey, nodding sagely. ‘I wasn’t, I fainted.’

  ‘Coffee time,’ said the midwife.

  While they dipped digestive biscuits into their plastic beakers, they watched a video of a woman howling in labour. Alice deliberately blurred her vision so that all she could see was an impressionistic moving landscape of seafood and offal.

  ‘Surely it can’t be like that all the way through,’ whispered Career Girl to Alice. ‘These must just be the edited highlights, like cricket after the news.’

  Alice saw tears perching on the brims of her eyes. The last time she had cried was three months ago when she had finally made Eddie understand that it was too late for her to have an abortion. ‘Trust you to miss the sell-by date,’ he had said.

  ‘Breast-feeding,’ said the midwife, snapping off the video. ‘We’ll have to run through breast-feeding quickly if we’re going to squeeze in some relaxation. Here we go then, a) Breast is better than bottle, b) Careful what you eat when breast-feeding – no red wine, tomatoes, garlic or champagne.’

  ‘Guinness is good, though,’ interrupted Audrey. ‘Lots of vitamins.’

  ‘Anybody can breast-feed,’ said the midwife severely. ‘Those who say they can’t are only making excuses. Another thing, the baby doesn’t suck the breast, it pumps it by chomping away with its gums. Its stools should be yellow and watery and not foul-smelling. Sometimes one of your milk ducts gets blocked and that causes mastitis. See a doctor. You might get an abcess too in which case they treat it surgically to let out the pus. Any questions before I move on to the vexed question of cord care?’

  ‘I’d just like to say,’ said the fat weary-faced woman seated by the window, ‘I’d just like to say that it’s not as easy as it looks. I have been through it, you see.’

  She looked pointedly at the midwife, who obviously had not.

  ‘And what I think,’ continued the woman, ‘what I think is, bottle-feeding is better. My first was latched on twenty-four hours a day for the first two months. I still wasn’t up or dressed by mid-afternoon. Also, it was excruciating. It made me bleed. He just sucked on the end like it was a straw. It felt like red-hot pincers. Another thing they don’t tell you’ – she raked the class with an indignant glare – ‘another thing is that milk spurts out in fountains during you-know-what. It’s very embarrassing.’

  ‘You’ve obviously had an unfortunate experience,’ interrupted the midwife frigidly. ‘Shall we move on?’

  ‘I tried one of those electric breast pumps,’ continued the woman inexorably. ‘Never do that. I saw my nipple stretching out to six times its length before I could turn the damn thing off.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said the midwife, to a general intake of breath and flinching. ‘Any questions?’

  ‘Do the brown bumps on your nipples go away?’ asked Alice, blushing.

  ‘They’re perfectly natural,’ said the midwife. ‘They’re Montgomery’s Tubercles.’

  ‘What, as in the Desert Rats?’ said Career Girl, looking puzzled.

  ‘They don’t ever really disappear,’ said the midwife, ignoring her. ‘Nor will your breasts be the same. They’ll be smaller and less firm than before and they’ll have lost their upper roundness. Sometimes after two or three years they start getting back to normal.’ />
  ‘But by then you’ll probably be in the family way again!’ interposed Audrey, nodding and smiling.

  Mariana, Julian, Victor, thought Alice; Josephine, Basil, Paul. Woodpecker Zeus.

  Towards the end of the session, the midwife invited the members of her class to express their feelings about the state of pregnancy, which was perhaps unwise of her.

  ‘It’s pretty awful, isn’t it?’ pleaded Miss Bandbox with a worried laugh. ‘I mean, I feel really hideous with all this extra weight and suddenly a double chin and now swollen ankles too.’ The class assessed her chin and ankles in silence. She was the dressiest woman there, wearing a scarlet leisure suit appliquéd with characters from Tintin, snow-white socks and navy-blue deck shoes.

  ‘I mean, I don’t blame the poor guy for feeling a bit put off,’ she continued, smiling desperately. ‘What a huge great barrage balloon, what an elephant!’

  ‘Body image, body image,’ said the midwife abstractedly, identifying the issue and looking up the answer in her notes. ‘Be positive. Your newly changing body is not ugly, only different. C.f. slimming, anorexia.’

  ‘Also I can’t stand the thought of the actual event,’ continued Miss Bandbox. ‘It’s so undignified, feet in stirrups and all that. I’ve seriously thought of taking in a mask. Would anyone object, d’you think?’

  ‘What, a surgical mask?’ asked the midwife.

  ‘No, papier mâché, in the shape of an autumn leaf. I bought it last year in Venice. Then I wouldn’t feel so embarrassed by all the doctors and students, not if they couldn’t see my face.’

  ‘I think you’ll find embarrassment is the least of your worries once you’re actually in labour,’ said the midwife drily.

  ‘My husband thinks it’s a great idea, ’ she babbled, laughing fast, unable to stop now. ‘He says he’s going to bring a bottle of chilled Prosecco, it’ll be like the Carnival.’

  ‘I’ve been earning my living for fifteen years,’ said Career Girl suddenly. ‘How do I get used to saying please and thank you all of a sudden? He’s started throwing his weight around already and I haven’t even stopped work yet.’

  ‘Bastard,’ said Home Birth. ‘My God, you’re the one who’s going through all this and he’s going to get a share of the baby, isn’t he? There ought to be some way they’re made to pay.’

  ‘Child-minders,’ said the midwife, riffling through her papers. ‘Be positive. Marital counselling.’

  They ignored her.

  ‘I miss my mates,’ said the Teenager. ‘I can’t go out like this. They’d laugh at me down the disco.’

  ‘I’m bloody lonely,’ said another woman with savagery. ‘At least you get some social life working in an office, out for a drink of an evening, a good laugh now and then. But stuck in the flat all day? No thank you! I’m going up the wall, listening to that radio chattering on and on, I hear the news six times a day, can’t help it, and all those programmes about lemmings and consumer rights and Mrs Antrobus.’

  ‘I listen to the Archers too,’ said Audrey brightly. ‘Wouldn’t miss it for anything.’

  ‘Isolation,’ said the midwife. ‘Contact your Health Visitor.’

  They all looked at Audrey.

  ‘That’s me!’ said Audrey, shaking her knitting and smiling enthusiastically.

  ‘Does the man have to come in with you?’ asked Alice. ‘I mean, wouldn’t it put him off for good?’

  ‘Rubbish!’ yelled Home Birth from across the room. ‘It does the selfish bastards good to see what we have to go through. My God, they’re not the ones writhing in agony, are they? Wham bam, thank you ma’am, that’s their attitude unless you rub their noses in it. Every woman should force the man to be there.’

  ‘We do encourage the mother to bring her partner or at least a friend,’ said the midwife. ‘The thing is, there simply aren’t enough midwives to go round, not to be there with you all the time, anyway.’ She checked her watch with evident relief. ‘See you next week, ladies, same time, same place. If you’re still here, that is.’

  Outside, Alice exchanged wary smiles with Career Girl and Miss Bandbox.

  ‘Wasn’t that awful,’ said Bandbox.

  ‘Time for a coffee?’ suggested Career Girl.

  They heaved themselves around a table at the nearest sandwich bar.

  ‘I keep dreaming about it,’ said Bandbox, whose real name was Julie. ‘Last night they gave me a carroty little beast with one leg and stunted arms. When I cried they said, Never mind, you’ll learn to love it.’

  ‘Have you bought all the equipment yet?’ asked Career Girl, who was called Carol. ‘Look at this list my friend gave me: six crotch-fastening envelope-necked vests, six babygros, three dozen elasticated disposable nappies, Moses basket for first six weeks, drop-sided cot for afterwards, it goes on and on, I mean, I ask you.’

  ‘You don’t have to buy all that,’ said Alice stoutly. ‘My mother put me in the bottom drawer of her chest-of-drawers when I was a baby. My cousin’s just had twins, and she sleeps them side by side in an opened-out suitcase.’

  ‘I get back to the house in the evening,’ said Carol. ‘I go to its room and look at all the silly plastic toys and changing mats that people have already given us, and I think, Why on earth? I mean, it’s a gigantic red herring, isn’t it. That’s all it is.’

  ‘What I dread,’ drawled Julie in distress, ‘what I dread is one of those, you know, those episiotomies. They use scissors, you know.’

  ‘What’s an episiotomy?’ asked Alice.

  Julie told her.

  ‘Apparently,’ said Carol confidentially, ‘the stitches are agony afterwards. You have to sit on a rubber ring for weeks.’

  ‘My sister used a packet of frozen peas as a compress because they’re, you know, flexible,’ said Julie.

  ‘I have heard,’ said Carol carefully, tearing the edge of a sugar packet into a frill, ‘I have heard that you should freeze a rubber glove full of water and then use the ice fingers one by one as they melt, along the, the affected area.’

  ‘No!’ squealed Julie.

  ‘I haven’t got a freezer,’ said Alice.

  ‘And as to the stitches,’ continued Carol with relish, ‘my sister’s friend got a very tired junior doctor in the middle of the night and he stitched her up all along, I mean, the whole way, by mistake.’

  ‘No!’ shrieked Julie.

  ‘Yes,’ said Carol. ‘They sued. But how embarrassing.’

  Alice felt out of it. She was a good six or seven years younger than either of them and none of her friends intended to have babies for years and years. Neither had she, of course.

  ‘My husband’s uncle is a gynaecologist,’ said Julie. ‘He also grows wonderful tomato plants. And can you guess what he puts around their roots?’

  They leant forward avidly. She turned pink.

  ‘Placentas!’ she whispered.

  ‘No!’ said Alice.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ said Carol.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Julie earnestly. ‘They’re very much in demand, you know, among the hospital staff. Generally the midwives snaffle them because they can sell them to face cream companies for hundreds of pounds. I’ve told Markie, that’s my husband, to insist on having it packed up to take away. I don’t see why I should subsidise the NHS.’

  When she got back to the flat, Alice found her landlady in the hall examining a parcel addressed to her.

  ‘I’ve just been to the Health Centre’s class on how to have a baby,’ she volunteered.

  ‘What a waste of taxpayer’s money,’ snorted old Mrs Ruddle. ‘As long as you’re well and they can hear the babby’s heart beat, forget the rest of it. I had all my four in that same back bedroom where you sleep now. Same bed, too, come to think of it. We used to get married before having babbies in them days,’ she added meaningfully.

  ‘We’re getting married in February,’ said Alice.

  ‘I’ll believe it when I see it,’ said Mrs Ruddle. ‘It’s not everyone would have
allowed you to stay on. I must be soft.’ She stumped off down the hall to her kitchen.

  Alice climbed the stairs and crawled straight into the unmade bed. The parcel was from her mother, a book entitled Wedding Etiquette, and a note in which she was instructed to Be Nice to Eddie, and, Not to Let Herself Go (More than Necessary).

  ‘Be nice to Eddie,’ she said aloud.

  A few months ago she had been positively entranced by him. The excitement of moving in together had been acute. But this pregnant state made her feel light years away, as though she were living with an old flame from another decade. She had been kidnapped by lassitude, was grown brutally indifferent to the outside world, and all thoughts had narrowed to the area around her navel.

  Even when it emerged that evening, watching the News at Ten, that Woodpecker Zeus had romped home while Eddie had failed to place the bet, even then her disappointment at losing chimerical Moses baskets and envelope-necked vests failed to rise to any respectable level of emotion.

  ‘Things on my mind,’ said Eddie with truculence. ‘Responsibilities.’

  I don’t much like you, thought Alice.

  ‘You don’t much like me,’ she said, dishonestly.

  ‘Don’t start,’ he replied. ‘I’m marrying you, aren’t I?’

  ‘Who knows,’ said Alice.

  Who cares, she thought, as sleep descended on the silent roll call: Roland, Charmian, Nina; Belinda, Gabriel, Lee.

  Labour

  A Dramatic Story observing not only the Aristotelian Unity of Time (taking place within twenty-four hours) but also the later stricter Unities of Place and Action

  Dramatis Personae

  WOMAN

  1st CHORUS OF MIDWIVES

  2nd CHORUS OF MIDWIVES

  UTERUS

  Before impregnation, a small central female organ shaped like an inverted pear; by the end of pregnancy, a large bag of spiral muscle bundles housing the baby; otherwise known as the womb