Friday Night — Charlotte
‘Did you have a good time?’ Dan said. I could feel him watching me, his eyes following me about the room as I fussed about with the things from my case, folding each garment two or three times, as a diversion and excuse to avoid meeting his gaze.
‘What did you do today?’ he asked. He was lying in bed, one arm behind his head, propping it up on the pillow.
‘Oh, shopping. I didn’t buy anything. I went to the Tate,’ I replied, finding it irksome to lie, slipping in a bit of the truth, as much as I could.
‘And how’s Frances? Did she go with you?’
‘Frances is fine, and no she did not come with me today, she’s got a job you know,’ I said, sounding a little exasperated, attacking to defend.
‘Did she tell you I phoned last night?’
‘What is this, an inquisition?’ I turned to face him, using resentment to muster the strength needed to meet his eyes.
We looked at one another for a few moments but I refused to see the misery and anguish. I could not allow myself to recognize it. I did not want to confess or be forgiven, as I knew I would be. I needed to feel resentment and irritation to make it all bearable.
I turned back to my case.
‘I assume Frances did not tell you,’ Dan persisted, although less insistent and with a note of defeat in his voice.
‘No, I expect she forgot. Why did you phone anyway?’ I felt bound to ask and wished I had thought to call Frances before coming home.
‘It doesn’t matter. In fact I can’t remember now,’ Dan said unconvincingly.
I did not pursue it but went out to the bathroom to take off my clothes away from his gaze. Perhaps he would allow himself to be convinced there was no cause for his suspicions. It would be like Dan to turn a blind eye in the hope that all would be well again in time. Generous, self-effacing, he could do it and survive, justified and strengthened by his magnanimity, a crisis confounded. But then it all depended on me, did it not? I wanted some sort of crisis and could feel my heart hardening towards it, shutting out the inevitable awfulness, like craving a drug and disregarding the after effects.
Part of me had wanted the crisis to happen as soon as I got home, instantly before it had time to recede, but another part had hoped Dan might be asleep. Dear Dan, who didn’t deserve the deception or the sense of antagonism and mistrust I felt towards him simply because he was there and had a right to question. Unwittingly he had become the enemy of my emotions: he threatened them and I was, I suppose, frightened of him because of them.
I had not meant to come home so late. Earlier I had thought about getting back in the afternoon and cooking a nice meal, making everything appear normal, but Nick and I had talked, a long intense talk which had brought the crisis nearer.
‘I suppose we have fallen in love,’ he had said, almost without emotion, making it sound more like a statement of fact than a declaration but it had been a monumental thing to say.
‘Whatever happens. Whatever you decide. I’ll go along with it,’ he had said.
‘Thank you,’ I told him, although the two words sounded ridiculously inadequate.
I suppose it was Nick’s businesslike approach to the affair, his general air of coldness and reserve contrasting to such extreme with the way he was in bed, that made the fascination so strong. I did not disagree with his statement about having fallen in love because perhaps I had, although love, real love, the only way I could equate it was to think how I would feel if the ‘loved one’ was killed or maimed and there was only one person for whom such a fate would seem intolerable — Vicky.
Powerfully, in the bathroom, I decided not to think about it, but shuddered in the cold shadow of that imagined divine retribution. On the way back to the bedroom I stopped outside Vicky’s room. The door was open, the room dark, the bed flat and empty. I wished she was there, and was overcome with an unaccountable longing to touch her and feel her close.
Back in our room Dan, asleep or feigning it, had his back turned to me as I got into bed and lay down in the dark. I listened to his breathing, too shallow for sleep I thought. I don’t suppose either of us had ever been more acutely aware of the other, stiff and alert, both wondering what, if anything, might happen next.
At some time during the night I must have fallen asleep because I got into my old recurring nightmare. I was in a strange foreign land which had been devastated. It was like a Salvador Dali painting although the surrealism was not so pronounced because the people seemed alive, rushing about, hiding, fearful, doomed, amidst dead trees on a scorched landscape. What had happened to create this scene was never clear but the atmosphere was fraught with catastrophe or rather the wake of it. Something terrible had happened and I was involved, as a victim but also, in some inexplicable way, as a perpetrator. I ran with the others but I was not one of them. They could turn on me at any moment although they all appeared remote and preoccupied and hardly seemed to notice I was there at all, but then why should they as they had their own problems. And then Dan would appear and seeing him I would rush to where he was, full of relief and gratitude only to find that he did not recognize me, did not even see me, as if I had become invisible, a figment of my own imagination.
Dan’s appearance usually came at the end of the dream and I would wake up, startled out of sleep by the horror of it all. I would then be quite overcome with thankfulness because the dream, for all its strangeness, had felt utterly real and by far the worst bit had been not having Dan to turn to.
This night I awoke at the same point, my heart beating furiously, my eyes blinking in the dark, trying to find a chink of light so I could see Dan next to me in the bed, but he was not there. I reached across to touch his pillow as if I had to feel as well as see; perhaps I was still in the dream. I felt frightened and lonely but waited. Time seems different at night, long and short but never normal. You can lie awake for ten minutes and it seems like half the night or you can fall asleep and wake the next morning feeling as if only a moment has passed.
I lay in the lonely bed and knew that if Dan had been there I would have given way, told him everything; but I was quite unable to get up and search for him. The moment had been instant: I could carry on now and wait a little longer for the crisis. I realized that I was beginning to see the situation as if it did not involve me. It was as if I was waiting for some outside force to dictate what would happen. I had never felt this before. In all the old crises I had always relied on Dan to rationalize and point a way. I had always turned to Dan, instinctively, without hesitation as if being turned to by me was his purpose in life. I had never thought of him as ancillary, yet that was how he had been treated. It was shameful, although he had never complained. He had put up with a lot from me, maybe too much.
It had started even before Paris and that awful moment in the Montmartre café when I told him I was pregnant. He had allowed the Chad thing to happen. He stood by and observed. He allowed things to take their course rather than influence that course himself.
Chad was different from Dan in that he preferred to do all the wrong things while Dan seemed irrevocably righteous. The two were like opposite poles of a magnet and I felt pulled between them, from one to the other, back and forth. The contrast made them both irresistible and the flaw in my character prevented me from making an immediate choice. Like Chad, I found it stimulating deliberately to go the wrong way but at the same time I yearned for the comfort and security, the acceptability of conforming; so I played both and ended up in trouble.
Chad, of course, was much older than me. He had been married and there were children whom he had abandoned at tender ages in order to rid himself of any trappings alien to the irregular lifestyle he set about achieving. He was a weak man really and I eventually came to suspect that perhaps it had been his wife who had done the abandoning, taking the children with her. But I did not see this possibility until much later.
When I first went to the art college, post-Rocker phase, and into a new era of serious academia, or so I thought, Chad had stood out as innovator, leader, philosopher. Everything he said sounded amazing and original. He seemed to have a different perspective on life to everyone else but one that was instantly appealing to minds so receptive to any alternative view.
He gathered around him a privileged group, derided and envied by other factions within the college but exclusive and invincible.
For the first few weeks of the term I floated about without identity, an unknown quantity to myself and everyone else, as miserable as I had been in the beginning at the new school after the convent. I had to wait to find where and how I should be. And then suddenly I found myself in the Chad set.
I had been to one of his lectures. It was about light, Turner’s use of it in particular, but then he had gone on to tell us about the different light in South America and how he believed the quality of light affected not just that of art but of life in general. We were spellbound by this nonsense, utterly taken in and illuminated to the secret of being. The lecture ran over time but nobody shifted until the caretaker appeared and broke the spell. The room cleared but I was at the back and became caught up with some of the students who were already part of Chad’s group. They were all going off to a pub and Chad, suddenly noticing me, suggested I join them. And so I became part of the group and again felt special and different, made to feel so by Chad who seemed so special and different himself.
At first it did not occur to me to think of him physically and it came as rather a shock, like discovering that a favourite uncle no longer sees you as a niece, when it became apparent that he fancied me. It was soon after Dan came back into my life and sort of joined the group, uncomfortably like an interloper but with a kind of dignified persistence which I rather liked. On reflection it was probably Dan’s entry on the scene as my friend that prompted Chad to want me. There were one or two casual relationships within the group but nobody else had brought in an outsider and I think Chad resented Dan, although I did not see that at the time, only that both men seemed to want me, a realization sufficiently seductive and ego-boosting not to need reasoning or explanation.
Dan had been strangely reticent about restarting the relationship which had begun in the field beyond his parents’ house two years earlier. I had rather assumed that as we had done it once, inevitably, now that we were together again, it would continue. After all, did not all men want sex and wasn’t it supposed to be women who resisted and yet became anxious if they did not have the chance to do so? But Dan waited, allowing the relationship, now so different, to establish itself before we embarked upon the next stage, because that was how he worked things out, in stages, one properly following another.
After meeting again in the country-club cellar we saw each other every week, at first only on Mondays and then at weekends as well. We would go out to pubs with the group and then sometimes alone. On Saturdays he had started going shooting with his father who was involved with a syndicate which had bought rights over an area of woodland some miles away. On these days I would not see him until very late but he would always find me, usually with the group, and I would be pleased to see him. We would go on to an all-night party but sometimes, if there was nothing much going on, if Chad was elsewhere, Dan took me back to his home, Lakeside, after his parents were certain to be in bed.
I felt as if I was being smuggled into the dark house, which seemed silently disapproving. Dan never said anything about his parents’ attitude and I guessed that they did not know he was seeing me again and would not have been particularly pleased if they had found me in the drawing room with their son, despite the long family association.
The room, which was vast with a high ceiling ornately patterned with plaster fleurs-de-lys and York roses, had a wonderful collection of old-fashioned sofas and button-backed chairs, casually arranged in little groups with the ones used most placed more or less in a semi-circle in front of the large red marble fireplace. Immediately facing it was a deep sofa with high back and sides held together at either corner by great silk tassels in faded gold. I would sit on this sofa while Dan made coffee in the kitchen and then brought it to me, without a word or a sound.
When we started doing this it was winter and his parents would have had a fire burning in the old cast-iron grate. By the time we got there the flames would have subsided but the embers still glowed and smouldered and sent off a soft warmth and enough light to leave the rest of the room in darkness.
The setting sounds, and was, romantically perfect but Dan, conscious of his parents in the room above, spoke in a soft whisper and gazing into the dying fire kept his distance.
We talked about Chad, but then everybody did. He was a conversation piece in the way people who inspire love and hate always are. But we talked about other things as well, including my visit to Lakeside of two years ago although never about what had happened under the tree. It was as if we wanted to pretend it had never happened, that it had been between two entirely different people, which in a way I suppose it had, as both of us had changed since then. We were both less extreme; we had grown up a lot. Dan had more confidence and tolerance and was very nice. I hoped that I was nicer too and thought I had to be; I could hardly bear to think about how I had been before, the embarrassment was too agonizing. Dan, sensing this, insisted that I had been quite all right underneath it all and said even the bizarre exterior had been like a much-needed breath of fresh air in what must have seemed a rather fusty home. Dear Dan, so nice, but if only he could have shown a little open passion.
And then one night the fire had not been lit. Dan’s parents had been out for the evening and had not used the drawing room.
‘God, it’s cold in here,’ I murmured, huddled into the corner of the great sofa as Dan came in with the coffee.
He put down the mugs and standing in front of me took off his jacket. Instantly I remembered the episode under the tree which had begun with him doing the same thing, although this time he handed the jacket to me.
‘Have this,’ he whispered.
Suddenly and in the same uncontrollably mischievous way I had provoked him that summer afternoon I said: ‘My legs are cold too: can I have your trousers as well or will the sound of the zip wake your parents?’ God, what had I said! I had meant it to be a sort of joke but it had come out sounding brazen and bitchy.
He stared at me, amazed, shocked, disgusted, probably all three, but then he smiled. ‘You haven’t really changed at all, have you?’ he said. ‘Not one bit.’
‘I suppose not, basically,’ I said, a little defensively, wishing I had not upset the gentleness of our new relationship.
‘Are you sure this time?’ he said a few minutes later, holding my face between his hands and searching my eyes in the dim white moonlight cast across the room.
‘Quite,’ I said, unable to believe that we could stop anyway, lying naked in the deep sofa, trembling with cold and excitement.
Afterwards and quite stupidly I asked him if it had been his only concern. Perhaps I would have behaved better later on if I could have remained uncertain, although his tenderness should have been enough to tell me and probably would have if there had been anybody else to judge him against, but there was not, because it was only the second time for me.
The sofa, after that, became a major part of our first ritual, the first of the many rituals destined to form the pattern of our life together; and if there was predictability and a certain loss of spontaneity in it all, there was also a sense of belonging.
It was the other part of me, the bit that said my legs were cold, the bit that takes over and compels me to bring about changes, create risks and problems, that allowed Chad to take me to bed about a month before Dan took me to Paris.
I had been to one of Chad’s lectures in the morning. His theme had been even more abstruse than usual and at lunchtime he offered to take me to the pub to expound further on the finer points. It was the first time I had been alone with him and I suppose I knew, almost straight away, that this was going to be it.
Chad, leaning back in his seat, one leg at a right angle over the other, his big hands giving added expression to everything he said, was at his most mesmerizing. His brown eyes never left my face and all the time he was talking about the lecture they seemed to be saying something entirely different. He was alive with sexuality, it sizzled and threatened, heightening awareness, demanding recognition, challenging resistance.
It was a sort of visual and psychological foreplay, just beneath the surface of our conversation and entirely dominant although the actual words we spoke were only about art.
The pub cleared and as if there were no choice in the matter I went with him to his flat. I had been there before many times, with the group; Chad rented it from the council and it was on the top floor of a fairly new tower block. Inside he had turned it into what he optimistically termed his ‘den of iniquity’. There was one large living room, the walls draped with brightly coloured Indian cotton and the floor awash with huge oriental cushions. There was no solid furniture, apart from a record player which stood on the floor amidst a scattering of Peruvian artefacts.
‘Let’s not mess about,’ he said almost as soon as we were in the flat. ‘Take off your clothes, Charlotte,’ he commanded and obediently I did as I was told, quivering and entranced by such manifest dominance.
Chad’s lovemaking had a violent intensity that terrified me at first. I could not stop trembling and finding this rather tiresome and embarrassing kept saying it was cold in the flat.
‘Shut up and try to relax,’ he murmured, not unkindly. At this stage we were still standing up, he taller than me and seeming even more so than before now that we faced one another shoeless and naked.
He ran his hands down my body, accelerating the trembling, and then he used his tongue. My muscles stiffened with revulsion and then I began to experience unimagined sensations and an involuntary craving for them to continue. I closed my eyes, and began to moan and sway and jerk, hardly aware of what I was doing as the sensations inside me took over, insistent and uncontrollable until they reached an unbearable pitch and suddenly seemed to explode and disperse.
My body went weak and my legs seemed to lose all strength. I thought I would collapse to the floor but Chad held on and lifted me up against his chest. I threw my arms around his neck and buried my closed eyes in his hair as I felt him push up into me. I clung on, pinioned and breathless as he lifted my legs to go round his back.
‘You bitch, you beautiful bitch,’ he cried out a moment later.
*
‘Don’t you have a bed?’ I asked him later as we lay in the great soft cushions on the floor.
‘I don’t need one,’ he said. ‘That’s the trouble with Western society. It thinks it needs beds and three-piece suites and tables and chairs in order to be civilized but carpentry has nothing to do with civilization. It’s a state of mind, clouded by materialism in countries like Britain.’
‘But aren’t these cushions simply a different sort of furniture? I mean where do you draw the line? How do you justify living in this flat and not in a mud hut or a tent in a field?’ I asked, somewhat facetiously because it seemed to me there was something not entirely ingenuous about his parameters of civilization and I suppose it occurred to me for the first time that he was striking a pose.
‘Ah, but would you have allowed me to seduce you in a mud hut?’ he answered. ‘I think not, dear Charlotte. Sex, the great antidote to western civilization. It’s the only thing that makes it all bearable. We all have to compromise our ideals to satisfy the more base human needs. Ultimate civilization, that would be akin to perfection. We strive for both but rarely stop to think how sterile and boring it would be if either were ever truly achieved. Perfection cannot exist. It contradicts itself.’
An uneasy sense of confusion began to take hold of me. It was not that I failed to understand what Chad was saying but that I no longer heard him in the same way as I had with the group when everything he said had sounded profound and meaningful. Base human needs had exposed him to me as fallible. To hear him grunt and cry out and see his face, red and blotchy, beads of sweat glistening on his balding head and then to listen to him giving forth on an esoteric conundrum was too great a contrast. Suddenly I saw him as he was, a pseudo, conning himself as well as the rest of us, cynical and captious about everything except his own image of himself in relation to the rest of the world.
Nothing ever happened the way you wanted it to, I thought bitterly. Everything was spoiled and the worst part about it was the feeling that the spoiling was from within me. I wanted to blame Chad but my own fallibility seemed greater than his.
‘Do you sleep with the lad?’ he asked me.
‘Don’t call him that,’ I said, turning away so I no longer had to look at him. Dan leapt into my thoughts and I almost groaned with the awfulness of the damage that had been done. Everything spoiled. Chad tugged at my hip, pulling me round to face him again.
‘You do, don’t you, but it’s not so good. Nowhere near. He’s not enough for you.’ His eyes seemed to have glazed over. I stared into them, horrified and frightened by their sudden opacity. He wrenched me towards him and pushing me on to my back lunged straight into me. The cushions had parted and I was lying on the bare floor. Unrelenting, Chad, his full weight trapping me under him, rammed on as if it was necessary to prove Dan’s inadequacy with his own fierce thrusting, harsh and painful.
*
‘I love you,’ Dan said, awkwardly, the words seeming to catch in his throat.
‘Oh, don’t say that,’ I pleaded, ‘please.’
‘We’ll get married. It’ll be all right, I should have been more careful.’
‘But it may not be yours,’ I repeated.
We were lying in bed, a soft sagging French bed which kept us together in the dip. Dan had his arms around me and I lay against him, still feeling slightly sick.
‘But it could be,’ he said, tightening his hold.
‘Oh, it’s all such an awful mess,’ I moaned. ‘And it could have been so good. I wish I loved you, I really do, Dan. You see I like you so much. I’m sorry, so sorry.’
‘You mean you like me, but you don’t fancy me any more,’ he said, kindly, calmly, as if it had always been inevitable.
‘I suppose so,’ I answered miserably. ‘Although it could be just the state I’m in. They say it changes the way you feel.’
‘The baby.’
‘Don’t call it that. I don’t feel like that about it, it’s just a condition, like an illness.’
We lay still and silent for a time. The room, narrow and lofty, with faded nondescript furnishing, smelt vaguely of drains although we had pulled open the tall windows which swung into the room away from the metal shutters. Light from the street lamps below filtered in through the horizontal slats and fell across the bed. Sounds came from both out and in, late traffic with the occasional horn blurting into the night and then a sudden groan and gurgle from the hotel plumbing, amplified through the cracked basin by the door. The room, for all its seediness, could have been special, saved from being sordid because it was the very best that Dan could afford.
‘What are we going to do, then?’ he said, breaking into my despair.
‘You still say “we”?’
‘What did you expect?’
‘I don’t know, but I’ve got no right to expect anything from you. It’s my problem, my body.’
‘Yes, but it could be something of mine in there.’
He had not asked who else’s it might be but then I suppose he must have guessed.
‘How does that make you feel?’ I asked with shameful curiosity.
He sighed and turned his head away.
‘Come on, you said it as if you thought it was rather good,’ I persisted, a sense of resentment welling up inside me. He thought he had rights, he assumed them, I thought, unjustly, the resentment gathering force.
‘You’d like to think of it as yours, your baby, wouldn’t you?’ I accused him.
‘Yes, I would,’ he answered, simply. ‘Is that so terrible? Do you find me so repulsive?’
‘Yes, I mean, no. I just don’t love you like that,’ I said and overcome with self-disgust felt tears coming from my eyes. I had to let go then and began crying and sobbing into the pillow, obscene visions of Chad forcing themselves from the dark corners of my mind. It had been only that one time, at his flat. I had tried to avoid him since. It had been a mistake, a most awful disgusting mistake that had allowed him to know about me and the knowledge was there, in his eyes, each time we did meet, the worst when we had been in the pub on the last day of term and he had held my head between his hands, forcing recognition.
Dan and I had made love since but the sweetness of his gentle restraint was lost to me. As Chad had said, it was not enough, but I loathed and despised myself for needing more.
*
Dan took over then and the confusion deepened. Dan, kind and good, motivated by civilized concern, found an abortionist, borrowed the money, drove me in his old Austin to the grey Victorian building in a litter-infested side street off the South Lambeth Road in South London. Perhaps Chad had been right, that there was an element of basic truth in his denigration of this civilization, although I did not allow myself to think about it then. It was necessary to concentrate on the immediate predicament rather than see it as one created by a supposedly caring civilized society which used labels like bastard and unmarried mother, and appeared to live by a code based on what the neighbours might think. Better to abort, better still to have kept out of trouble in the first place, but better to get rid of the shame and pretend it had not happened. Pay two doctors, civilized men, to sign a piece of paper to say you were in danger of going mad. A social slip of paper.
The room was painted green, pale Palmolive, hospital green. A Venetian blind covered the window, black London dust on the grey slats. There had been three other girls and an older woman waiting in the hallway. The girls looked foreign, maybe Spanish, they sat together, their dark eyes cast down, guilt-ridden and terrified. The woman, who was next to me, was thin and nervy with long greying hair, sallow skin taut over a bony face. She kept crossing and then uncrossing her legs and anxiously chewed at her fingers between urgent little puffs from a cigarette.
‘Is this your first time?’ she asked suddenly, glancing at me.
I nodded.
‘You must come alone,’ the doctor, who had a middle-European accent, had said. I yearned for Dan. Wished he could have stayed with me.
‘Mine too,’ the woman said. ‘Got five already. Couldn’t cope with any more. Doctor’s a Catholic. Wouldn’t help. Conscience. You know.’
I nodded again. My head ached. I felt a bit faint. My mouth was dry.
The woman fell silent. She had said her piece, explained herself, justified her being there.
A tall, middle-aged woman in a nurse’s uniform came out into the hallway and in a businesslike tone said we should all go with her upstairs. The foreign girls looked at one another and waited to see what the older woman and I would do. They followed us up the wide, uncarpeted stairway. There was a pervasive smell of disinfectant and yet the place felt unclean. The stairs opened out on to a wide landing with several doors leading off. The nurse opened the first and indicated that I should enter. I glanced back at the grey-haired woman who had told me her story downstairs; our eyes met and there passed between us an intense moment of shared fate and then the door closed and I was alone in the green-painted room. In the centre there was a high sort of bed with two metal poles sticking up either side at the foot and small slings attached to the tops. The bed was spread with a dark green sheet and beneath it, on the floor, stood a galvanized bucket. Apart from the bed the only other piece of furniture was an upright chair which had a white gown resting on it.
The stark utility of the room made my stomach turn. I went over to the window and pressed down one of the Venetian slats. Outside the sun was shining. The day was warm and humid. There was a playground across the street and a group of West Indian children yelping and laughing together as they ran about. The door opened and the nurse’s head appeared. She told me to take off my clothes and put on the white gown. The door snapped to and she was gone.
I went over to the chair and picked up the gown, leaving a black mark on it from where I had touched the blind. I undressed and put the gown round me, shivering with cold and fear; the warmth of the day outside had not touched the green room. The nurse came back and told me I had the gown on the wrong way round, it should be open at the back, she informed me flatly as if the mistake was wearisomely common. I was told to get on the bed and wait for the doctor; I wasn’t to smoke, she added and went again. I wondered how many other rooms there were. The woman who had spoken to me downstairs was probably in a similar one. Perhaps she had lit another cigarette and the nurse had told her to put it out. I tried to imagine the woman, waiting in a white gown like the one I had on, in a room the same, but she had become remote, like Dan and everyone else, removed as if to another existence. I longed for it all to be over. I just had to steel myself to stop thinking, to close my mind to everything and escape to a sort of nadir in which there was nothing left but mechanical response devoid of feeling. It was the only way to overcome the fear and stop me from grabbing my clothes and bolting.
In this state I saw the masked doctor enter the room followed by another similarly anonymous figure wheeling a trolley laden with chrome instruments. A needle went into my arm and obediently I began to count. I felt my legs being lifted, limp and heavy, and closed my eyes as I saw the slings at the top of the poles appear round my ankles.
When I came to the room was empty. I was lying flat on the bed; the sun, now high in the sky, had penetrated the gap in the blind and streamed across the floor. I lay still as slowly the realization that it was done filtered through the muzziness of the anaesthetic. A great surge of relief coursed within me and I wanted to laugh out loud as happiness returned.
The doctor and the nurse came in. The doctor no longer wore the surgical mask. He was a good-looking man, quite young, a clean, strong jaw and cornflower blue eyes.
‘How are you feeling?’ he asked, smiling down at me.
‘Fine,’ I answered. ‘Fine,’ and gazing up into his face felt my eyes begin to water. He took my hand in his and gave it a little squeeze.
‘It’s all over,’ he said. ‘All over now.’
‘I know,’ I said, holding on to his hand, and was filled with overwhelming gratitude towards him.
‘Thank you,’ I said. The smile remained fixed on the handsome face as he extricated his hand and stepped back from me. He went out but the nurse remained. I started talking to her, banal chatter about the sun shining and the injection not hurting.
‘You’ll have to get dressed now,’ she said. ‘This room is needed.’
‘How’s the woman with the grey hair?’ I asked, struggling to lift myself off the bed. My legs and arms suddenly felt leaden now that I tried to use them. My head slumped forward as my feet touched the floor. I saw that the bucket was gone.
‘She changed her mind,’ the nurse told me, still with the same disinterested tone. ‘A pity, hers was a genuine case. She should not have needed to come here.’
*
For some obscure reason I was not allowed to wait at the clinic — turnover maybe and not so obscure. I was not even permitted to use the telephone and had to trudge along the hot dusty street to search for a public kiosk. Dan had said he would come for me at six but it was only a few minutes past four when I left the clinic. He had booked a hotel for the night and said he would be there if I needed him. The telephone and room numbers were written on a prominent piece of paper in my handbag. Dan had put it there.
‘Just in case,’ he had said.
‘Of what!’ I said with the dumb innocence I had adopted to carry me through the sordid little arrangement.
‘They kill you as well as it. Someone would have to tell your mother,’ he said.
The remark was so completely un-Dan-like, harsh and untempered, it made me notice him again, as I had not for the past month since we had returned from France. I had been so miserably preoccupied with my problem I had failed even to go through the motions of the sort of relationship we were still supposed to have.
We had both let the remark pass but I kept hearing it now and desperately wanted to be with him so that I could give him some expression of feeling. Suddenly it seemed as if it might all be too late and the brief respite of relief and false happiness gave way to a ferocious impatience to find a phone and hear Dan’s voice.
I reached the end of the street and turned into Wandsworth Road. A considerable way down I could see a telephone box. I began walking towards it, a little too quickly. When I got there I felt exhausted and pulling open the heavily sprung door stumbled into the ranksmelling kiosk. In front of me the telephone receiver hung down, dangling on the end of its wire, the mouth and earpieces smashed in.
Back on the pavement I kept my eyes down. The distance to be covered did not seem so great if I watched the measure of each step. The sun had gone from my side of the street and I began to feel cold. The shivering turned to nausea and in the pit of my stomach a heavy creeping pain kept accelerating into dragging waves.
Eventually I reached the underground station. The rush hour had begun and people hurried by me, accentuating my slow progress. I descended the stone stairs, my head beginning to swim. I thought I was going to pass out and began to be plagued by the thought of making a scene, drawing attention to myself, being taken to hospital and my mother finding out. That was the worst bit. I had been terrified she might guess sooner and that between them she and Dan would talk me into early motherhood. It was too late now, of course, but I did not want her to know; I could not bear the thought of her being hurt because I had not confided in her.
I had to wait for a phone to be free but at least that meant they were working. I walked back and forth to keep myself conscious. Nobody took any notice of me although I felt so awful I feared some kind stranger asking if I was all right.
Dan, I just needed to speak to Dan and it would be better.
A man came out of one of the phone booths and I went in. I took the piece of paper from my bag and dialled the number. A woman announced the name of the hotel and I told her the room number.
I waited.
I put a second coin in the slot.
‘I’m sorry, there’s no answer.’
‘There must be.’
‘I’ll try again.’
I found a third coin.
‘No reply.’
‘You are ringing the right room?’
‘The number you gave me, miss. They are not answering. I’ll check the room key if you like.’
‘Please.’
‘The key is there. The room must be empty.’
‘Could you check the register, please.’
The phone went dead. I had no more coins.
It was nearly five o’clock. I left the underground station and began walking towards the clinic. It was not far but seemed a long way. The sun had gone and the street had become windy. I crossed over to the playground I had seen from the window in the clinic. It was deserted now. All the children must have gone home for their tea. I sat down on a swing, the seat was cracked but I did not have the energy to move and they all looked broken anyway. I clasped hold of one of the chains that supported the seats and rested my head against my knotted fingers. The clinic stood in front of me, a vast grey miserable building, reproachable and profane. I shrivelled in its shadow but felt exposed and utterly desolate.
Time seemed to lose its perspective. I just sat on the swing and waited, no longer expecting Dan to come, but waiting because I could not summon the willpower to do anything else. Why should Dan bother with me any more? He had got me out of trouble. It was done. He had every right to hate me. The thought of seeing me again probably repulsed him, maybe not even that but simply indifference now that the baby, which might have been his, was gone.
The wind whipped a flurry of dust from the ground into my face. My eyes stung but remained dry. Everything about me seemed to have dried up, drained away into some pit of emotion I had shut off but which now strained for release. And then I heard a car coming down the street and almost with disbelief saw that it was the Austin.
I watched Dan getting out but remained on the swing, still unable to move. I saw him start up the steps leading into the grey building and then, as if some sixth sense had told him where I was, his head turned.
He hurried across the street.
‘I’m sorry I’m late. It’s taken more than an hour to get here,’ he was saying as he came towards me. ‘I got stopped by the police. An MOT check and the damn thing’s run out. I’d quite forgotten.’
Tears began to run down my cheeks and a great sob came from nowhere.
‘It’s all right. It’ll only be a fine,’ he said, reaching the swing.
He stopped in front of me. Our eyes met but he quickly looked away.
‘Come on, let’s go,’ he said rather awkwardly.
*
In the hotel that night he rang for a hot-water bottle which I clutched to my stomach before falling into a deep and dreamless sleep. The abortion was something we never talked about then or since but three weeks afterwards we went out on a Saturday morning and bought a Victorian ring in an antique shop. It was set with turquoise stones and tiny pearls. In the afternoon we showed it to his mother whom I had not seen for nearly three years.
‘That’s very nice, dear,’ she said to me and looked at Dan, a question mark over her face.