by Paul Ableman
Your blood pressure shot up critically.
A month before term they decided to induce labour.
It should be all right, they said. Eight-month babies were perfectly viable and its small heart was thumping in your belly.
You lay now with a weary, proud, expectant smile. I was allowed to visit you at any time. Clear fluid, from a bottle on a stand beside your bed, discharged slowly into one of your veins through a needle bound to your wrist. The fluid contained a substance that induced uterine contractions.
But your uterus proved sluggish. Why not? All the nerves in your body had been numbed for months. Why should they suddenly leap to attention and respond? Drop by drop, bottle after bottle, hour after hour, the intravenous drip continued to tickle your recalcitrant womb. With the rubber tube bound to your arm and the needle still discharging into your circulation, you ate, slept, woke and slept again. Then finally, as the pressure of my anxiety showed signs of rising above the danger point, the first slight contractions started. The sister said:
— Go and have dinner. Come back about nine. Nothing will happen before then.
I galloped down the road and ordered squid in tomato sauce. I craved squid. I hadn’t eaten squid since I’d been in Italy years before. It came reeking of garlic. I groaned as I ate it, at the heat and your plight and the folly of consuming pungent squid when I should remain clinically fresh for any demands that might be ahead. I gulped the squid down hastily although I had two hours to spare. Then I groaned again at the bill. I had no money. Oh I had enough to pay for the squid but I had no business eating expensive squid when we needed to save every penny—yeah every copper cent!—for the baby.
I paid for the squid—paid a lordly young Spaniard—and hurried out into the heat. I went into a pub and drank red wine.
What if it had started?
I left the pub, bolted up the hill and shot into the maternity home. Then I stole nervously up the stairs, along the corridor and peeped into the ward.
I gazed appalled! Blood shrank from my face, then flooded back again and then swiftly retreated once more. I flapped away down the corridor and couldn’t find anyone. I hurtled down the stairs and then sprinted up them again. I saw a nurse washing urine bottles.
— My wife. She’s disappeared. She was in that ward.
Even as I said it, I loathed myself. I was still making literature out of life, being picturesque, exaggerating my alarm and creating a touching impression. The nurse put down a bottle and accompanied me:
— Oh yes. Mrs. Soodernim. We’ve taken her to the theatre.
— What? Why?
— Well, she’s getting close. Come along. I’ll take you to her.
And there you were, now surgically gowned, the drip no longer attached to you, lying panting on a platform. You gasped:
— Oh! Billy!
The nurse smiled pleasantly.
— She’s having contractions. Stay with her. Ring that bell if you want to call sister.
Between the bouts of exertion you beamed wan smiles at me. Apart from giving you my hand to grip, and rejoicing at being able to share your ordeal even to the trivial extent of feeling your nails digging into me, there was nothing I could do.
Shouldn’t the doctor be there? Your laboured breathing accelerated again and I felt the gauge of your nails piercing my flesh. Moans were wrung from you. Shouldn’t someone be there? I was proud to have the care of you in those terminal minutes, but was it safe? You gasped:
— Must—press down—
I gazed at your red, glistening face again straining back in effort. Suddenly you exclaimed:
— Oh! Something happened then!
What? You mean—I quickly glanced down under your gown. Between your quivering legs protruded a small, black dome. I rang instantly. What was it? So dazed was I with vicarious effort that it was only shortly before the sister hurried in that I understood that what I had seen was not some dreadful, morbid sign but the top of the baby’s head.
— Yes. Good. Would you wait downstairs, please, Mr. Soodernim?
— Well yes—I mean—couldn’t I stay?
— Wait downstairs, please.
The young doctor entered. I squeezed your hand once more and edged out of the theatre. Then I stood downstairs in the marble hall for a long time. Two, three cigarettes—and a pretty nurse hurried up to me.
— You’ve got a son. What are you going to call him?
— Is he all right?
— Yes.
— I mean—all right?
— Yes, yes, come along!
I gazed at the tiny, blood-streaked thing. It was surprisingly active. Alien, convulsive movements shook its little limbs and its goggling face was mobile. It had quite a lot of hair and was streaked with ridges of white grease.
I went in to you. You smiled peacefully and asked:
— Have you seen him?
— Yes.
— Do you like him?
— Yes.
I struggled for some comment to reward you and mask my misery. You said:
— He looks very Jewish, doesn’t he?
— Yes. And he’s got white stuff—white—
— That’s because he’s premature. It always happens. Do you like him?
— Yes, of course.
I stayed with you a little longer and then they told me to go away. It occurred to me that I might call on mother, tell her the news and ask if I could spend the night there. I had an idea that if I were alone I might founder.
I stood in my mother’s comfortable room and explained that I felt rather disturbed. The baby had been born, was alive and healthy and Lucy was fine. But I was not happy. I hadn’t felt any affection for my new son. I hadn’t liked the look of him at all. Before long I began to cry. This weeping became convulsive and irresistible. It slackened off, and I murmured:
— Oh God.
And it started again. I hadn’t wept for years. I had never wept like this before, not even in childhood. It was not like the customary spasmodic reaction to pain or misery but as if my whole moral existence had liquefied and was draining out of me. I would be left a husk, a withered pod, a fossil. I gasped:
— I can’t—I’ll never be able to love him. Oh God!
My mother was ironic and sensible. She reminded me that I had been under a good deal of stress myself. She pointed out that fathers often reacted negatively to the first sight of their offspring. No brand new baby was appealing. She urged me to eat a sedative pill—which I did—and get some sleep. I went to bed in a spare room.
And went on moaning.
The trouble was I hadn’t told mother the truth. I hadn’t told her that what I had seen, when they had held my squirming son up before me, was a caricature of a Jew’s face. The beaming nurse and sister, awaiting my enthusiastic exclamation, had turned suddenly into jeering Nazi matrons. Nauseated, striving to model my rigid features into some semblance of a smile, I had gazed at the ancient little face, the hooked nose, the close-set eyes and black hair already forming spectral kiss-curls and I could hardly breathe. I felt as if, in that instant, I had turned into a column of slime. All the anti-semitic jokes and jibes, the fascist obscenities, boiled to the surface of my mind. Then you said:
— He looks very Jewish, doesn’t he?
Did that mean you too repudiated him? I stood again in the captain’s suite of the two-thousand tonner in the Pool of London and heard the fervent young captain, an Israeli hero, rasp:
— No! It doesn’t matter who she is. If you go with a goy, sooner or later she’ll call you a dirty yid.
And were you now calling me, or my son, a dirty yid? I went on smiling feebly down at you. But my mind raced. What of the future? I would have to wheel this little gargoyle through the streets, nourish and protect him, raise and educate him? I’d never make it! I hadn’t the strength! I hadn’t the strength of character. I went on smiling. I wondered that you couldn’t see through me, through the translucent slime I had become and discern the rotten
core.
The only comfort left to me was that I hadn’t really been deceived about you. You had said:
— He looks very Jewish, doesn’t he?
Because it was true not because you found it offensive. For an instant, in the extremity of misery, I had found hideous significance in the remark, but I had still not really doubted you. I sensed quite clearly that you loved him from the first glance, loved him because he was little and helpless, loved him because he was our son, our baby, our bit of new life. And, in a sense, this made things worse. I would never be able to match your tenderness.
I lay snivelling in the bed in my mother’s house and asked myself if I had ever really faced my Jewishness? Hadn’t I always taken pride in a hypothetically non-Jewish calmness of manner, in a reasonable imitation of an upper-class English accent, an objective attitude to personal and social matters? Jewish acquaintances sometimes accused me of being anti-semitic because I bitterly denounced Jewish racism and alleged that it was prevalent. Was all this mere window dressing, a contemptible attempt to ape gentile manners? After all, look at me now, wailing with self-pity, virtually a caricature of a hysterical Jew? Surely my present emotional countenance was just as exaggeratedly semitic as I had fancied my new little son’s face had been?
I fell asleep.
I moved sullenly about the next morning. I would have to face it. It was done—sealed, confirmed and irrevocable—from the moment my seed spirted into your soft tunnel of life. From the union of a code with a code had sprung new consciousness. Looked Jewish? All right he looked Jewish. So what? Who didn’t? Anyway we all wore the flat, flayed face of a foetal ape. We all looked weird, upright caterpillars, nodding at the stars. I would sear from my consciousness every taint of literary glamour and I would—oh God!—love my son as myself.
My mother and aunt returned from the maternity home. Glumly I listened to them burbling about:
— His dear little round head.
They were blind anyway! Or so eccentric in their capacity for admiration as to be worthless as critics. Anything small, anything human and small, was to them intrinsically lovely and it was inconceivable that a new bud of the family would seem to them other than regal.
In the full blaze of day I strode up the hill. It was done, sealed and confirmed. Oaks from acorns and the voluptuous convulsion exacts a lifetime of concern. It was done and must be faced.
You smiled and asked:
— Have you been in to see him?
— Not yet.
— He’s in an incubator.
— I’ll go now.
I walked out of the ward into the corridor. A nurse tied a gauze mask round my face. Why wasn’t I strong and adult? She led me into a tiny room containing a sink, medical stores and two glass-topped boxes. Anyway, here I was. For a while, the night before, I’d wondered if I’d have the strength to look at him again. The nurse pointed to one of the boxes and I trudged to it and gazed in.
After a while, I asked her:
— Can I pick him up?
I fancied her eyes smiled above her own gauze mask. She nodded.
— Just for a moment. I’ll be back in two minutes.
I bent down and picked him up and looked at him closely. Then I carried him over to the other incubator and gazed into that. No, there was no mistake. That ruddy, broad-cheeked child had never issued from you. I looked at the babe in my own arms again. No, there was definitely no mistake. Now I could perceive, faint but unmistakable, traces of me and of you. I didn’t actually weep. I had done my stint of that. And if I had done, it would have been neither from sorrow nor joy but literally from amazement.
He was so tiny—and so beautiful!
I gazed and gazed. I searched for some echo of what I had seen the day before, and found none. Perhaps I was quite off my rocker. Perhaps I was really in some asylum, hallucinating experience. I gazed at my little son. His nose snuffled and wrinkled in the air and his lips moved rapidly in vain suction. Wait—babies get squashed being propelled down the vaginal canal. Had it been the random crumpling of his tiny countenance that had produced the devastating effect? Had he now popped back into shape like a rubber toy? The metamorphosis, in one day, was unbelievable! I had thought his face long and thin and it was round and incredibly beguiling and his nose was perfectly proportioned and his hair was brown and silky—
I replaced him in the incubator.
It was no good. I had no right to enjoy him. I had forfeited my claim to proud paternity by my sordid weakness of the previous day. But he was so beautiful! So little and frail and—
I sat down on your bed.
— Well?
— He’s beautiful. I hadn’t realized yesterday that he was—so beautiful. Oh, Lucy! Yesterday I—yesterday—
But I couldn’t tell you! You still thought I was semi-divine. I couldn’t expose to you the gross crusts of clay that were my feet.
I couldn’t stay away from him.
Now when I visited you. I fidgeted beside your bed for a few minutes, then rushed off to the incubator room to gaze at our exquisite product. He was tiny. The full-term babies swaddled beside their mothers seemed enormous, huge, prodigal mounds of coarse flesh, compared to our blue-veined, delicate boy. But he was vital enough, crying and clawing eagerly at your breast when they brought him to you for feeding and soon sucking you sore. I had no right to love him because I had failed the test—I hadn’t been able to love him when I thought he was ugly. But he was so appealing and so lovable, I couldn’t resist. My unworthy love cascaded about him.
You were whole again. You wrote me a letter. It ended:
— I think we must love our bit of Billy, because of all the different things.
I knew what you meant. It stabbed me. Your simple, fragrant words always did. You meant we must love him, must love him, not just because of your long pain in growing him, not just because he was our first, and was likely to remain our only, child, not just because he was tiny and pretty and lovable but—because of all the different things, because of all that had passed between us in words and looks and deeds of love, because of—all the different things!
And now we don’t live together.
Copyright
This ebook edition first published in 2014
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
All rights reserved
© Paul Ableman, 1968
Preface © Margaret Drabble, 2006, 2014
The right of Paul Ableman to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
The preface by Margaret Drabble is reproduced with kind permission of the Independent, where it first appeared.
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–31417–1
