Sunday Morning — Nick
‘Where’s your mother?’ I asked Paul, who was sitting in the kitchen, eating a hunk of fruit cake.
‘Gone for a walk,’ he said, avoiding looking at me. His back was hunched up. It was an attitude he had inherited from Marion. He sounded morose, but that was not unusual these days. He was still only twelve but big for his age, more a teenager now than a child although the transition had been barely noticeable. It simply had happened, or perhaps I had not been home enough to see it.
‘Is that your breakfast?’ I asked, going to the coffee pot and finding it empty. I had drunk it all last night while Marion went over all the same old grounds of recrimination, angry and bitter, pleading and tearful until we had gone to bed and found ourselves going through the motions of sex.
‘Now you’re being unfaithful to her,’ she had said, her voice still hoarse from crying.
‘Stop it, Marion. Shut up,’ I said, strangely roused by the erotic combination of her sense of revenge and my own consciousness of finality. She made an effort to be violent. She wanted to hurt me, physically, and I thought I would let her but it wasn’t in my nature and in the end I finished it quickly, seeing some sort of temporary release for both of us but feeling nothing, except impatience to get through whatever had to be got through.
I had woken to find myself alone in the bed and the sun streaming through the window regardless. I was neither happy nor unhappy but aware of a new sense of vitality which centred on Charlotte. That was the first impression, the confusion would settle in soon enough.
‘Paul,’ I began. ‘There’s something I have to tell you about.’ Did it sound too doom-laden? I hoped not. Keep it light. Sell it to him. Fruit cake for breakfast. Perhaps he’d understand.
‘You and Mum are getting divorced.’ He made the announcement flatly, as if it were old news.
‘Well, I don’t know about that. Parting, anyway.’ I was blustering. ‘Your mother told you?’
‘No, I heard you last night, and Friday,’ he added, without looking up, his tone not accusing but somehow resigned, sad and world weary. He made it sound no more than he had expected for some time. He was so much like Marion, intuitive and imbued with a sense of passive resentment, but they were essentially female characteristics and set me ill at ease with Paul.
‘He’s sensitive. Please don’t bully him,’ Marion had pleaded with me in the past when I had reacted to Paul’s martyred sulks with exasperation.
‘He’s never going to get much out of life if he carries on like this,’ I had said.
‘Maybe he’s going to be one of the givers rather than takers,’ she replied, implying the virtue of giving as opposed to my own taking.
But I wanted Paul to be a taker. Surely that was natural, to want your child to be a winner rather than a loser, and I could not help going on reacting, driving the wedge of antipathy between us because Paul was in many ways just as I had been as a child, miserably introverted, although for him there was no excuse, no drunken father to beat him silly for wetting the bed, and mother too frightened herself to change the sheets. The stench of stale urine was how I remembered my childhood, and long after I had stopped soaking my own bed, because my father had done the same himself, in the bed he shared with my mother, on the couch in the living room when he had been too drunk to get upstairs. The stench was always there.
Marion was overprotective towards Paul. She excused this by pointing out that neither of us had been allowed particularly happy childhoods and therefore we had to ensure Paul’s was different. She would say this as if I did not want just as much for him as she did and the implication would fill me with a furious sense of injustice, because I too wanted everything for Paul but seemed unable to communicate this to either of them.
Once when Paul was in his first year at school Marion and I had been invited to a parents’ evening. For some reason I was not able to go and Marion on hearing this had flown into a temper. Our relationship had been at a particularly low ebb at the time and the incident had developed into a full-scale row, one of our worst, bad enough to remember.
‘You never wanted a child. You hate Paul. No, not even that, he’s just a nuisance to you,’ she had screamed at me.
It was the second time that I hit her. A terrifying moment of lost control that sent my hand across her mouth, and drew blood from her lip where the force had jammed it into her teeth. But the blow seemed to satisfy her. Instantly her anger subsided and she was looking for my remorse, hungry to forgive and reconcile. I apologized but I despised her as much as I did myself.
It was true that I had not wanted a child when Marion had started talking about coming off the pill. We had been married less than a year, were still living in the flat and the newspaper we both worked on had not regained the lost circulation caused by the strike. Its survival hung in the balance and none of us knew how long we would still have jobs.
Fleet Street had become a more distant dream, perhaps because the singleminded motivation needed to break in had inevitably lost momentum when I took over the newsdesk. But it went deeper than that. Despondency had crept over the newsroom since the strike. Nobody seemed really to care any more about the stories they wrote, maybe because so many had gone untold during the weeks of the strike and it had not made so very much difference to the course of events during that time. Journalists should not strike. Ultimately such action serves only to create a sense of futility over what cannot be influenced and changed. The cynicism that had previously been healthy we had turned in on ourselves.
For myself the effect was compounded by a continuing relationship with Jane Hillier whose bed I went to on the evenings Marion spent dutifully with her family following Frank’s redundancy and a conviction for indecent exposure. Mercifully I did not have to go with her, having been temporarily sent to Coventry by Ruby for failing to keep the case out of the paper. But my visits to Jane, intellectually stimulating and physically adventurous although without emotional involvement on either side, were unwholesome. I still viewed life in terms too black and white to be able to emerge unscathed from Jane’s flat, knowing that at other times she shared her bed with a woman. But I couldn’t stop it. Jane represented escape from the normal, decent, ordinary and mundane existence implicit in living with Marion, and having a child could only increase the stifling permanency.
So I prevaricated. We should wait until my job was more secure, until we had a better home, until the autumn, until the winter.
‘I want a baby,’ Marion wailed one night, flushing her pills down the lavatory.
‘I don’t!’ I shouted at her and slept on the couch for a fortnight.
‘I’m leaving. Going freelance. I’m pregnant you see,’ Jane told me the night Marion conceived. ‘I expect you’re the father, but that’s just a minor detail,’ she said. ‘My baby will have two mothers. We want a baby. We’re grateful to you.’
I caught sight of her a few months later, tall and still thin, the pregnancy like a football stuck up her jumper. It was a few days after Marion miscarried.
‘And I did so long to be a granny,’ Ruby blubbered, falling into my arms. ‘But there’s plenty of time. I’m young yet, still young enough to be a mother myself.’
She came to the flat every day for a week, a look of acid benevolence smeared across her face. Marion stayed in bed, quiet and vaguely reproachful towards the world in general, or so I thought. I felt sorry for her and was surprised to find that I too regretted the loss of the baby.
Ruby fussed around, altering the way Marion had arranged the little furniture we had, setting chairs and table symmetrical, making her presence felt. She turned up each morning looking as if she had spent a good hour in front of the mirror and wearing the sort of outfits not normally associated with comforting mothers. She stayed until I was home in the evenings and sat opposite me at the kitchen table while I ate the huge platefuls of food she had prepared. As the week went on she remained at the flat later and later and on Friday evening she had settled herself in front of the television when I came out of the bedroom after a particularly harrowing half hour with Marion who had retreated further into a sort of inner despair she could neither explain or understand.
‘She’s very down, the poor treasure, isn’t she?’ Ruby said, patting the seat of the couch next to her to encourage me to sit down. ‘But you mustn’t worry about her too much, Nick. It’s natural for a girl to be depressed when something like this happens.’
I sat down heavily where she had patted.
‘How long do you think it will last?’ I asked, throwing my head back against the cushions as a tribe of black and white Red Indians whooped across the television screen.
‘She’ll be better when she gets another one on the way,’ Ruby said, watching me. ‘I lost several, you know, before Marion’s brother came along. The trouble was … well,’ she laid her hand on my knee. ‘I hope you won’t mind me saying this to you, Nick, none of my business I know, but Frank, you see, Frank, he just thought he would carry on as before. Of course he was too insensitive to understand and I had to make him go in the spare bed in the end. I know it’s hard for men, you have your appetites. You do understand what I mean, don’t you?’
‘I’m not sure I do,’ I said, too exhausted to want to be bothered with fathoming out Ruby’s abstruse attempt to say whatever it was she hoped I wouldn’t mind her saying. And then it struck me that she was referring to the relationship with Jane Hillier. Appetites. A Ruby sort of word. Pseudo genteel, sitting too close to me on her daughter’s couch, her hand lingering on my leg, her own slightly varicose pair a little too exposed for a mother-in-law. Her chest puffed out. Her lips imbued with a Kathy Kirby succulence.
‘How did you know?’ I said, the moment unguarded.
‘Marion told me. Perhaps she shouldn’t, but you mustn’t be cross with her. She does so want a baby, your baby, Nick,’ she said, adding the last bit with a coy little casting down of her eyes.
‘But who told her?’ I went on, beginning to feel vaguely nauseated.
‘Women just know these things,’ Ruby answered obliquely. ‘I knew that was the problem when I miscarried, but Frank wouldn’t see it,’ she added with vitriol. ‘Too selfish, that was his trouble. Still is. I told him,’ she went on, her tone softening again, ‘that I didn’t mind if he went elsewhere if it was so important to him, anything so long as he left me alone until the baby had, well, settled.’
I realized then that we were not talking about Jane and mercifully, Ruby was too intent on having her say to be aware of the divergence in our trains of thought.
‘You do understand, don’t you, Nick,’ she said.
‘Yes, Ruby. No sex for nine months.’
‘Just a little consideration,’ she said, ‘that’s all that’s needed, but if you find it too much of a strain I’m sure that Marion would turn a blind eye. She needn’t even know. That would be best.’
‘You are amazing!’ I said, getting up. ‘You’re her mother, for Christ’s sake!’
‘I know that, Nick.’
‘Coming out with all this lascivious nonsense.’
‘There’s no need to use bad language.’
‘You are amazing.’
*
Marion stayed in bed for another week to recover from Ruby’s looking after. Uneventful months ensued although we were each suffering from a growing sense of panic, of time slipping by, Marion over motherhood and me over the direction, or lack of it, my career was taking. Marion made love only with a purpose and became preoccupied with dates and temperature charts she brought home from the doctor. Our bed seemed to take on a clinical air and the performances within it a mechanical routineness. And then one afternoon when I was at home and Marion was at work a delivery van drew up outside the flat and a pram was wheeled out.
‘It’s unforgiveable. Thank God my wife wasn’t at home,’ I stormed down the telephone to the firm who had arranged the delivery.
‘But the pram is paid for Mr Matthews, and we have no record of cancellation.’
I slammed down the receiver, left the flat and drove to the address on the delivery note, the months of frustration and guilt suddenly concentrated into this one unfortunate incident. The pram had come from a dingy showroom painted on the outside in pink and blue, faded and peeling. The display area fronted what turned out to be the factory where the prams were made. I stood by a frosted glass partition with ‘Reception’ painted on it. Someone had stuck a piece of paper with ‘Con’ printed on it over the ‘Rec’ although it had slipped and the paper was starting to curl. I banged on the glass. The place was seedy, almost run down, the two rows of prams flanking the strip of floor in front of the offices dusty and unappealing.
‘Yes?’ A girl’s head peered round the side of the glass, insolent and out of patience.
‘I want to speak to the manager,’ I demanded.
‘We’re just finishing for the day. You’ll have to come back tomorrow.’
‘I’m not leaving until I’ve spoken to someone in authority. I’ve got a complaint,’ I said, glaring at the mean-mouthed little face.
The girl disappeared without speaking again but with a look of officious exasperation. A few minutes later she reappeared. She had her coat on and evidently was about to leave.
‘Miss Parkin will see you in a minute,’ she threw at me and stalked off past the prams.
I waited about a quarter of an hour and was about to start hitting the glass again when a fair-haired woman of about forty came out and addressed herself to me.
‘I understand you want to make a complaint,’ she said, her hands were clasped together, the knuckles white with tension although the rest of her appeared quite calm and in control.
‘Yes,’ I began. I explained what had happened and waited for her reaction. She looked at me hard for a moment and said: ‘Don’t I know you, Mr Matthews? I’m sure I’ve seen you somewhere before.’ Recognition came into her face. ‘I know, you’re Nick Matthews. I always read your column in the paper. I thought it was such a pity when it finished.’ I’d stopped writing the column when I moved on to the newsdesk: it had appeared once a week for a couple of years, latterly with a head and shoulders photograph of me under the heading, although this was the first time anybody had recognized me from it.
Miss Parkin’s knuckles were regaining their natural tone. Her anxiety seemed to have been replaced by a sort of relief, even pleasure. She invited me to her office which was sparse and drab but looked as if it had only recently been cleared out. There were marks on the walls where furniture had stood and a pile of old files was stacked by the waste bin. We sat down and she offered me a cigar from a tarnished silver box on her desk.
‘My father’s idea,’ she said, holding the box open in front of me, ‘cigars for the men and a cup of tea for the women. “Complaining customers cannot be too cross if they’re drinking your tea or smoking your tobacco”, he used to say.’ She smiled hopefully and watched me take a cigar.
Miss Parkin, large of bust, slim-ankled, smartly dressed and only just past her prime, had inherited the business from her father two months earlier, she told me. A heart attack had made the transition rather sudden, she explained, although he had been ailing for some time and the business had naturally suffered. She talked on, enumerating the problems surrounding the prams. It was as if there was no one else she could tell all these things to so I listened, content to dwell on somebody else’s troubles for an hour, if only as a release from my own. And then the conversation took a new and more positive turn. Miss Parkin was not after all telling me all this only with a view to unburdening herself. She knew what the business lacked, she had been in commerce of one sort or another all her working life, she knew what it was about. Her father’s pram business basically lacked marketing and that included public relations, and public relations included customer relations, did it not, and wasn’t that what had been lacking in my particular case?
The hopeful smile appeared again.
‘Perhaps you can help me, Mr Matthews? I need someone to write about Parkin’s Prams — to get us more publicity so that we can take a bigger share of the market and afford to run a business that doesn’t make insensitive mistakes.’
*
‘How old is she?’ Marion asked warily when I told her about the job.
‘What’s the woman’s age got to do with it?’ I snapped.
‘Nothing, I’m sorry, I was just curious,’ she replied. ‘If this job is what you want then you must take it.’ She sounded doubtful, her tone echoing my own misgivings over quitting newspapers.
‘PR pays well, a lot better than journalism,’ I justified.
‘Even in Fleet Street?’ Marion asked.
‘You don’t want to live in London anyway,’ I retorted.
‘I would if I had to. I wouldn’t mind.’
‘You’d hate it,’ I insisted.
‘I’d rather move to London than be accused of holding you back.’
‘It’s a little late to be saying that,’ I said unfairly. The look of hurt that I had come to know so well appeared in her eyes, but its familiarity had bred contempt and I had become incapable of responding other than by compounding the injustice with the guise of indifference.
A month later I left the newspaper and started working for Parkin’s Prams. ‘Selling your soul to commerce,’ one of the reporters said and I had an uneasy sense that he was right, but PR, about which I knew nothing, quickly became an all-engrossing obsession. I lived and breathed Parkin’s Prams, not so much the prams themselves any more than it was Morgan-Mackie’s marmalade that turned me on in years to come, but the challenge of convincing a fickle public to choose a Parkin’s or a jar of M-M’s rather than anyone else’s. Image creation, at its best achieved by subliminal influence — the process fascinated me and the fascination meant that I spent more and more time at work. Often in the evenings I would go to Dorothy Parkin’s office, now refurbished in elegant style, and we would scheme and formulate new departures for Parkin’s, diversifying, under her influence, into collapsible bicycles and a new streamlined wheelchair designed by a famous racing driver.
Dorothy was a shrewd businesswoman who knew enough about the mechanics of PR to guide me through the early months. We got on well, respected one another, and shared the same passion to succeed.
‘You will have to let me take you and Marion out to dinner,’ she said one evening when we were still in her office at nine thirty. ‘She must get fed up with all these late sessions.’
‘Marion understands,’ I said, but nothing could have been further from the truth. She was obsessed and depressed over her efforts to conceive again. I endured deaf and dumb meals, the food on my plate as dried up and shrivelled as the state of our marriage.
‘Why do you bother to come home at all?’ she asked accusingly one night when I came in after midnight.
‘Stud duty and sleep,’ I said, unconcerned as to how it sounded.
‘Well you can forget the first bit, there doesn’t seem to be any point any more, does there?’ she said, her mouth twisted down into a bitter expression that held a strong element of Ruby.
‘Not really, no,’ I said wearily, too tired for an argument but sensing the inevitability of one.
‘There’s someone else, Nick, isn’t there?’ she said next. ‘That woman you work for, it’s her.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I said, walking past her towards the bedroom, but she caught hold of me from behind, throwing her arms about my waist and pressing herself into my back.
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ she whispered urgently. ‘I didn’t mean any of it, please,’ but the sudden contrition only added to the great lump of irritation I had allowed to build up and prising her arms from me I walked on into the bedroom, feeling cold and mean.
The level of work staved off the sense of loneliness, filled for me the great aching gulf I had put between us. I did not really want it to be like that but I could not allow time to dwell on emotional problems and the longer I avoided the issue the less able I seemed to talk to Marion at all, although in a strange way I needed her and even began to be aware of a sort of possessive jealousy as we drew further apart. I wanted her to be in the flat when I got home even though we had nothing to say to one another. It seemed that by distancing her I was realizing the need and yet I remained incapable of communicating this to her.
Marion had been pregnant with Paul for nearly four months before she told me. The revelation came one morning when she inadvertently left the bathroom door unlocked and I found her standing naked by the bath, her hands flying to her stomach as if she had something to hide. I was surprised by the sense of elation within me when she said it timidly, almost apologetic, as if I might be angry, but still I was unable to show her any sign of feeling. To have responded would have been like an atheist admitting to belief in God. It was a humility I could not give, maybe because I saw Marion half hoped, half expected it.
A month before the baby was due I went to California for a week to attend a public relations seminar and also to look into the possibility of the Parkin’s bicycle being manufactured under licence in America. Dorothy Parkin was convinced that the Americans, with their craze for fitness, would really go for the Parkin’s collapsible. At the end of the seminar, which was full of esoteric and pretentious stuff relating little to the reality of business, I took a plane from Oakland down to Burbank, hired a car and drove into Beverly Hills, past the huge and immaculate houses, which made me think of Ruby, larger than life, almost unreal.
I turned into Rodeo Drive and began looking for a gymnasium called Gym and Tonic run by a woman Dorothy had known at university and who, intermittently, had kept in touch over the years. I found it near the end of the drive, a candy-striped awning over the door which was squeezed between a boutique and a chocolate shop. Ruby, as a Hollywood star, was still in my mind, and on impulse I went into the chocolate shop and bought a large and vulgar box of sweets with her name painted on.
The idea behind my visit was that Dorothy’s friend, who already knew about the bicycle project, should help promote it through her fitness programme at the gymnasium. A good proportion of her clientele were Hollywood names and the publicity possibilities seemed immense.
A waif-like Filipino girl in a white track suit directed me to the boss’s office and there I met Germaine Hartnell, blonde, bronzed and a glowing, glistening advertisement for her gymnasium. As I went in she was standing by a wall of glass which looked down into the gym. She stepped towards me, her hand outstretched, a smile across her wide mouth exposing a set of dazzling white teeth.
‘Nick,’ she said. ‘You must be Nick. Dorothy warned me you were gorgeous.’
‘I was given the same warning about you,’ I lied, amazed at the possibility Dorothy could have said any such thing, and at my own instant response; I had become more the PR man than I realized.
The next two days were dominated by Germaine’s teeth, flashed at me every time I looked in her direction and seemingly ultimately set to eat me which they nearly did on a vast round bed in her vast house a few hours before I was due to leave.
‘Dorothy said you could do with a bit of fun,’ Germaine informed me, her firm forty-year-old breasts pressed against my side, ‘and I guess she was right!’ In the two days it had indeed been all ‘fun’, no business at all which, with a plane to catch first thing in the morning, was beginning to concern me.
‘I know this doesn’t seem like the appropriate moment Germaine, but I wouldn’t like Dorothy to think I hadn’t done any work.’
‘Ah, don’t you worry about it, me and Dorothy, we fixed the whole thing over the phone. I guess she just thought it would be nice for you to come along down here for a bit of a break.’
‘An expensive break,’ I murmured, an uneasy sense of having been benevolently manipulated creeping over me.
I flew straight back to London, driven to the airport at six A.M. in Germaine’s white Cadillac, the hire car left outside her house. She did not wait to see me off, that was not her style, a final flash of teeth, a blown kiss and she was gone. I got on the plane and as it taxied for takeoff realized I had nothing to take back for Marion, not even a box of chocolates.
I telephoned the flat from Heathrow but there was no reply and I assumed Marion had gone to Ruby’s but felt disinclined to call her there. It seemed to take longer to get to Birmingham from London than it had to fly the Atlantic and when I eventually reached the flat I had lost track of the hours, jet-lagged, time-zoned and paying with exhaustion for the two sleepless days and nights spent with Germaine. I went into the kitchen and found a note by the sink, Marion’s small, neat handwriting: ‘Gone to the hospital’, and as if she had known I would not remember which hospital, the name and address were on the card under her message.
I had not spoken to her for three, it could have been four days, I was not sure; a brief, terse telephone call from the hotel in Oakland before I went down to Los Angeles. The line had been as clear as if she had been in the next room but the distance between us had seemed even greater than the thousands of miles it was. Neither of us had known what to say, so out of practice were we, if there had even been a time when we had said anything very much to one another; we no longer communicated even when we were together so what hope was there over a trans-Atlantic telephone link? Not that I had tried very hard although it had seemed necessary to make the call. The problem now was I could not tell when her note had been written, I could be a father already and unaware of it. I rang the hospital number, a sudden sense of panic and impatience getting through the confusion of tiredness.
‘Mrs Matthews, wait a moment please, I’ll check for you,’ an efficient-sounding impersonal voice told me.
‘Are you a relation?’ it came back a few seconds later.
‘Her husband, for Christ’s sake,’ I shouted, my heart thumping in my chest, ‘I’ve just got back from America.’
‘You had better come immediately, your wife is in the final stage of labour. She’s been here two days.’
‘But it’s a month early,’ I heard myself saying as if to justify my absence.
‘Babies don’t always come when they’re supposed to, Mr Matthews,’ the voice said with a long-suffering note. ‘I suggest you put the phone down and hurry if you want to be here when the birth takes place.’
I ran out of the flat and found my car parked down the road. I got in, started the engine and pulled out into the dark, empty street. It was the middle of the night and I had gone about a mile before I saw another car and realized I had been driving on the wrong side of the road. I swerved over, the lights of the other car blazed on to full beam and I nearly hit a parked lorry. A sudden vision of Germaine’s smile on Ruby’s face flashed through my mind; I rammed my foot down on the accelerator and tried to subdue such involuntary rovings of my mind’s eye by concentrating on speed.
At the hospital all was quiet, the aura of night time and sleep seemed to engulf the place and yet babies were often born at night were they not, screaming out of the dark into the dark; the hospital was silent. I found a solitary nurse and followed her along corridors to the place where Marion was, a single room with a piece of glass in the door so that I could see her, lying on her back, her body distorted, a mass of hospital equipment and green-gowned people clustering about the bed.
‘You’ll have to be quick.’ The nurse was holding out a similar green gown for me to put on. ‘You’re not a fainter are you?’
‘I don’t think so,’ I mumbled.
‘In you go then.’
‘Nick!’ Marion smiled at me and then her face contorted, she closed her eyes and I saw her bite into her lip. Her hair was wringing wet, the limp strands hanging round her face making her look vulnerable and pathetic in the same way I had seen her the first time, outside the factory gates, rain-soaked but with a stubborn determination that dismissed the discomfort.
‘One more big push, dear,’ somebody said encouragingly. ‘Prop her up a bit more, will you,’ another voice said to me. I fumbled with the pillows. ‘No. Hold her. Support her shoulders,’ the voice ordered. Marion seemed to be concentrating hard, gathering her remaining strength. ‘Now, dear, now!’ the other voice insisted.
‘Come on. Come on. There’s a good girl. A little one now, just a little one.’ It was like arriving at a party stone cold sober while everyone else had been drinking all night; I felt awkward and out of place, an interloper on the scene, uninitiated, unprepared; and then the baby was born.
‘You’ve got a son!’ someone said.
‘I can’t believe it,’ Marion whispered, straining to see him, absorbed in joy.
I looked at the baby and then at Marion’s face and was almost overcome by a piercing sensation of love, a single, crystal-clear moment of emotion that seemed to scoop a hole within me which then filled up with a pride I had not expected or realized possible. Gratitude came next, a feeling even beyond that towards the people in green gowns and over the fact that I was capable of this new joy and able to respond to instinct after all. The blockage had been removed and I could love Marion. But something else was happening. Through the reverie of it all I became aware of concern, heightened all around the tiny room, a resurgence of busyness.
‘I think it would be better if you left for a few minutes,’ someone said, their face, relaxed and smiling a few moments earlier now taut and the eyes suddenly distant. Marion, her white face composed and content, seemed as unaware of the sudden change of atmosphere as I was to understand it.
In the corridor I was told to go and sit down and to wait. The baby, in a small canvas cot, was wheeled by and a moment later a large trolley swiftly shunted into the room where I had left Marion, white and inert, sunken in the bed.
The whiteness of her filled me with terror and a guilty sense of helplessness. Drained of life blood, the skin on her face had been almost translucent. More people came along the corridor, their pace alarmingly hurried. A red light had gone on above the door of Marion’s room.
‘She’s going to die,’ I thought. Morbid pictures of having to hand over the care of our child to the tender mercies of Ruby loomed up; and then the awful remorse of time lost, guilt over the years of indifference and deliberate hurtfulness, at least it seemed now as if it had been deliberate. If Marion died now she would be a haunting spectre for ever more.
‘Where have you been?’ I looked up and saw Ruby scurrying towards me. ‘Two days my little girl’s been in here and where were you?’ she demanded aggressively.
‘America, Ruby, remember?’ I told her, momentarily indignant, rising to the aggression, using it as a sort of relief.
‘You should never have gone, not with Marion in her state, but I suppose it’s too late for all that now, the baby’s here and that’s that. Where are they?’ she continued along the corridor, peering in through the glass doors.
‘No! Ruby!’ I called after her, ‘something’s gone wrong. Marion’s … ill, something, I don’t know. We’ve got to wait.’
The prospect of waiting with Ruby was too awful to contemplate. She came back to where I was sitting: ‘What’s wrong with her? The baby, the baby’s all right?’ she asked insistently, a note of hysteria in her voice.
‘Yes, I think it’s all right.’
‘It! He’s your son and you only think he’s all right? And Marion, what’s wrong with her?’ she was almost shouting.
‘I don’t know!’ I shouted back.
‘You men, you’re all the same, pathetic in a crisis, and it’s all your fault. Don’t think I don’t know how miserable you’ve made my daughter. Oh, she told me, I know.’ Her voice had gone low and venomous. She almost spat the indictment at me.
‘Shut up, Ruby!’ I said, looking up into her face which was puffy with anger.
‘I think I’ve held my tongue too long,’ she went on. She looked old. She had come to the hospital without her make-up, but she had chosen the moment well, I was in no mood to fight her.
‘Marion told us, Frank and I, that you didn’t really want the child, and how you punished her with silence all the time she’s been pregnant. You don’t care at all, do you? The only reason you’re sitting here now is because it wouldn’t look too good if you had stayed away.’
‘Please, Ruby, not now,’ I implored her.
‘I’m inclined to agree with you, Nick. It’s all too late now, far too late.’
A doctor came out of Marion’s room. I stood up, expecting him to speak to me, but he hurried by, his head down, as if he might be prised of some secret.
‘Oh, doctor. Doctor!’ Ruby called after him. The man hesitated and turned back to us.
‘Yes?’ he said, impatiently.
‘What is happening to my daughter?’
The doctor, his expression haggard but impersonal, looked at me. ‘Are you the husband?’
‘Yes.’
‘Your wife is very weak. She’s haemorrhaged but I think we’ve managed to stop the bleeding now.’
‘She’s going to be all right?’ I asked, incredulous but with a great surge of relief passing through me.
‘In all probability,’ the doctor reassured.
‘Can I see her?’ I asked.
‘Just for a few moments.’
I dashed past him. Outside the door I paused and looked through the glass. Marion was lying flat with her eyes closed, an array of tubes sprouting from her body, her face still drained of colour. I pushed open the door and then I was aware of Ruby immediately behind me. She brushed me aside and was by the bed.
‘My little girl,’ she murmured mawkishly. Marion opened her eyes.
‘Mum. Have you seen him? Have you seen my baby?’
‘Yes, darling, and he’s lovely — just like you.’
I stood watching them, by the door, separate unnoticed by Marion, pushed out by her mother. In default. Too late. The hospital hush made it impossible to tell Ruby to bugger off, although Marion might have. The wonder was spoiled, the moment destroyed.
I went home and changed. I had not slept for I could not remember how long and had fallen victim to the unjustified self-pity symptomatic of overtiredness. I drove to my office and wrote out a letter of resignation.
*
‘So you’re buggering off,’ Paul said with a defiant stab at indifference.
‘I don’t like to hear you speak like that,’ I said.
‘You won’t be around to hear it,’ he retorted.
‘Of course I’ll be around. Your mother and I are parting but that doesn’t mean I won’t see you any more.’
‘Darren Jones’ mum and dad are divorced. He never sees his dad.’
‘Will you want to see me?’ I ventured, suddenly afraid that he might not.
Paul’s gaze remained fixed on his plate of fruit cake crumbs, as if he was counting them.
‘Suppose so,’ he murmured, but the admission seemed to embarrass him and he got up, taking the plate of crumbs which he put down on the grass outside the back door.
‘Birds like fruit cake. Did you know that?’ he said, still not looking at me as he came back into the kitchen.
‘No, I didn’t,’ I said.
‘They like Mum’s best, the ones she makes.’
‘I didn’t know that birds had such highly developed palates.’ It sounded as though I was making fun of him although I had not meant it to come out like that.
Paul’s expression remained closed. We stood facing one another across the kitchen, neither of us able to think what to say.
‘Paul,’ I paused, ‘we’ll be able to spend weekends together, we’ll probably see each other more than we do now.’
‘Darren Jones’ father said that to him.’
‘I’m not Darren Jones’ father,’ I said.
‘He doesn’t like his father anyway.’
Again silence.
Paul turned to watch the birds taking the crumbs. I could hear them squabbling over the tiny morsels. The back of Paul’s thin body looked stiff and defensive.
‘Couldn’t you and Mum sort of share this house, but not be married any more?’ he said, without turning.
‘I don’t think that would work. Would you really want us to stay together even if it was making us both unhappy?’ I asked. In the instant of saying it I realized the terrible unfairness of such a question, asking the child to make the sort of sacrifice the parent had abdicated.
‘No, I suppose not,’ he said but it had cost him a lot to say and by accepting the burden suddenly had made it less easy for me to leave.