SHE HAD only done it for a dare. At least, that was the glibber version of the truth that Diane had settled on. It had a sort of ironic resonance that now, nearly a decade after the trauma of Tommy's conception, she had come to find appealing. Life, after all, was so damnably dark and cruel that if you didn't laugh in its face, it just grabbed you by the throat and swallowed you. Naturally, the notion that her son was simply the result of a dare neither adequately explained nor justified what had happened.
David Willis had been one of a group of boys from St Edward's whom Diane, along with her best friend, Katie Bingham, and a few other Elmshurst rebels, used to sneak out to meet on those long summer evenings when her head felt it might implode from boredom. The two boarding schools had adjoining sports fields and there was a narrow, tunnel-like lane, overhung with sycamore and hawthorn, behind the sheds where the groundsmen kept their lawnmowers and rollers. The boys would always be there, waiting for them with packs of cheap cigarettes in their blazer pockets. Occasionally there would be alcohol too, though rarely anything more potent than a bottle of cider.
Most of the boys were either show-offs or stupid or both, but David Willis was different. He hung back a little, not exactly shy or aloof, just slightly disengaged, as if unsure that he wanted to be there. Diane would often catch him staring at her but he always looked away. She had never been able to resist a challenge and one evening, she smiled at him and he blushed and gave her a crooked little grin.
From then on he was the only boy she could be bothered with during these clandestine nicotine assignations. His father was in the Royal Air Force and every two years was posted somewhere else so the whole family would have to pack up and move. At fifteen, David had lived in half a dozen different countries and this, to Diane, immediately put him in a league far more exotic than all the other boys. His mother and father were currently based in Kenya and the stories he told her about going on safari and seeing lions and elephants and crocodiles made him seem almost impossibly romantic.
On Sundays, the pupils of both schools were allowed out for afternoon walks—though, of course, not together, for to consort with members of the opposite sex was a dire offence at both establishments. At Elmshurst these walks were the subject of strict rules of conduct: a minimum of four girls per walking group; school uniform to be worn at all times, including hats (hideous straw boaters whose sides the rebels would wet and bend to give them a racy, cowgirl look); walking was permitted only on certain designated lanes and footpaths; and, most important of all, absolutely no straying up into the rolling, bracken-clad hills that loomed wickedly beyond.
Upon diehard rebels like Diane and Katie, this last injunction naturally had an effect entirely opposite from the one intended. That nature should be deemed out of bounds served only to heighten its allure. And it was thus that on a sultry afternoon in late June, having abandoned, as well as hats and cardigans, their two complicit classmates, they found themselves strolling along one of the grassy trails that wound through the ferns with David and his friend Henry Littlemore, a shambling, acne-smitten creature for whom Katie had developed an unaccountable passion. It was Henry who had provided the cigarettes, some lethally strong, untipped Player's at which they were all bravely puffing and trying not to choke. The boys were walking some ten yards ahead of the girls and were talking about cricket, specifically whether England's Denis Compton could be compared with the legendary Australian batsman Donald Bradman.
No destination had been mentioned for the walk. But despite the temporary distance between them, no one had any doubts about its purpose, which laced the air as blatantly as the musky, moist smell of the bracken. Neither girl could be considered a novice. Their Sunday afternoon walks that summer had already seen much tumbling and fumbling in the ferns, sprigs of which they would later scrupulously pluck from each other's hair. Katie (or so Diane believed) was a lot more advanced in these matters, claiming to have done things with Henry Littlemore that Diane had difficulty even imagining.
The boys were still locked in discussion ahead of them, when out of the blue Katie asked her if she and David had done it yet.
"Katie! Sshh!"
"Oh, they're not listening. Have you?"
"No, of course not!"
"Why of course not? We have."
"You haven't!"
"Well, more or less."
"I didn't think there was a more or less when it comes to... you know."
Katie dropped her cigarette end and squashed it into the grass with her heel. Far below them a patchwork of hayfields stretched away into the distance, shimmering in the heat. The still air trilled with the song of skylarks.
"I dare you."
Diane laughed.
"Or are you saving yourself for the man you marry?"
The mocking tone made the idea sound so boring and bourgeois that Diane couldn't possibly admit that this was, in fact, precisely what she had in mind.
"It wouldn't be the first time for David," she said instead.
"How do you know? Boys always lie and pretend they've done it."
"I believe him. He did it last summer in Kenya. With a native girl."
"Crikey."
"I know."
"I dare you."
The odd thing was, Diane wasn't one of those slightly unhinged girls (of which, at Elmshurst, there were several) who found it hard to resist a dare. She would always weigh the fun against the consequences of being caught. But that afternoon, for some reason, she didn't. And half an hour later, when they'd reached a suitably deserted spot and gone their separate ways, each couple wandering off to make its own discreet nest among the ferns, Diane found herself lying on her back while this virtual stranger rummaged inside her clothes and kissed her nipples and slid a hand slowly up her thigh.
That was when she should have stopped him. But she didn't. She even helped him pull down her sensible school underpants then watched while he fumbled with his buttons and pulled down his own. She'd seen artistic depictions of penises, of course, but not one in earnest and the sight was so comical she almost giggled. His face was clouded and flushed and he wouldn't look her in the eye, just lowered himself upon her and, tentatively, as if at any moment he expected to be scolded, found his way into her.
She'd been told that it would hurt but it wasn't as bad as she had expected. The pushing was more painful than the sudden fleshy shock as she gave way. And it was over almost as soon as it had begun. He gasped and twitched and she felt the spurt of him inside and then he rolled off and flopped beside her on the crushed ferns. And he looked so worried and wretched and ashamed that she smiled and stroked his face and gave him a little kiss on his forehead. And then she lay there, gazing at the motionless clouds and listening to the incessant twitter of the skylarks and wondered why this curiously disappointing act was invested with such mystique and importance.
It was almost three months before she knew the answer. Her mother, never overly tolerant with illness of any kind (except, of course, her own) clearly suspected her daughter's morning bouts of nausea were part of a cunning plot to delay going back to school. And only in September, when the family doctor was at last summoned to deal with what they all, Diane included, believed to be an unusually persistent strain of gastric 'flu, did reality finally dawn.
Dr Henderson was a Scotsman with gingery bristles sprouting from his nose and ears and a pair of half-moon glasses which made him seem in a state of permanent surprise. He played golf with Diane's father and belonged to the same Masonic Lodge. He sat that morning on her bed and made her stick out her tongue, then told her to cough while he held the cold plate of his stethoscope to her chest and her back. Finally, in answer to some increasingly intimate questions that seemed to embarrass him rather more than her, Diane disclosed that she had missed two periods, a fact to which she had perhaps surprisingly attached little significance. Dr Henderson made a strange guttural sound, as if he had swallowed a fish bone, and left the room to confer with her mother. And a few moments later, the more or less comfortable world of the Bedford family exploded.
With the help of Dr Henderson's red leather pocket diary, while her mother wailed the scandalous news to her father over the phone downstairs, Diane was able to pinpoint the Sunday afternoon when her morals had so shockingly deserted her. Dr Henderson made the interesting observation that this was the very same day that North Korea had invaded the South, an event that still looked likely to provoke a third world war, for which Diane would no doubt also be held responsible.
Tests confirmed the venerable doctor's diagnosis and there was so much hysteria during the following days and weeks that Diane's recollection of them, a decade later, was little more than a series of blurred images. Her mother crying uncontrollably in the kitchen, pouring yet another gin and tonic, howling on about the shame of it all, the shame; her father hunched over the telephone every evening, conducting hushed conversations, making arrangements of which Diane as yet had no inkling, then retreating to his workshop to piece together the porcelain fragments of someone else's shattered happiness.
Diane had, some time ago, gathered that her parents had tried for years for another child, and she wondered if her mother's self-pitying rage was somehow tinged with jealousy that her daughter had succeeded where she had failed. Whether or not this was so, she left Diane in no doubt about what now must happen. Auntie Vera had a friend, she said, who knew a man in Birmingham who dealt with things like this. It took Diane a little while to understand what her mother meant by this, but when she did, she was outraged. She never had the remotest doubt that the baby would be born and her intransigence on the issue surprised even herself.
Her mother begged and bullied her to reveal who the baby's father was, but made the tactical error of saying that what he'd done, to a girl of only fifteen, was against the law and that men went to prison for such things. Diane had a vision of David behind bars in striped fatigues, a ball and chain shackled to his ankle. She wasn't going to do that to him. In any case, she didn't want him to find out. It had been her decision to allow him to do to her what he had, so it was her responsibility to cope with the consequences. Had anyone dared suggest that in some sly corner of her mind, she saw motherhood as a means of escaping the prison of Elmshurst, she would have reacted with fierce indignation. The idea had not, however, entirely passed her by.
With abortion deleted from the list of options, attention moved on to another A word: the baby would be given up for adoption. But Diane announced that she wasn't going to let that happen either. At which point her mother lost what sliver of patience she'd managed to retain. Auntie Vera was summoned to talk some sense into the girl.
Auntie Vera wasn't family. The Bedfords had no family. Both sets of grandparents were dead and Diane's father was an only child. Her mother had a somewhat dissolute brother called Ted who had emigrated to Australia before the war and all but disappeared. Once every four or five years a postcard would arrive from some new and unpronounceable place to prove he was still alive. Vera Dutton was simply her mother's best friend. They had once worked in the same typing pool and shared a more or less misanthropic view of the world as well as a penchant for gin. Every Tuesday afternoon they played whist with two other friends and on Fridays went into Birmingham to do some shopping and have their perms tweaked. Auntie Vera was even shorter than Diane's mother and always wore pale blue and a thick layer of orange-tinted make-up. She had no children of her own and was married to a bank manager called Reggie who was almost as irritating and snobbish as she was. Apart from Dr Henderson, Auntie Vera was the only outsider who knew about the Bedfords' new and shaming secret.
"Your mother's so worried, dear," she said.
They were sitting, just the two of them, on the little white wooden bench under the cherry tree on the front lawn, sipping tea from willow-patterned china cups, the ones that were only brought out for special occasions. Diane's mother was pretending to be busy in the kitchen.
"I know."
"She only wants what's best for you, you know."
"I know."
"And they'll find it a lovely home—"
"It?"
"The baby. A family who really want it."
"I really want it."
"You may think you do now, dear. But you're only young."
"And too stupid to know what I want."
Auntie Vera's face hardened.
"You know perfectly well that wasn't what I meant."
She stared into the distance in an irritated way and took a long puff at her cigarette. When she blinked, Diane noticed that her eyelids were painted the same powder blue as her dress.
"Is this boy going to marry you?"
Diane laughed and this seemed to annoy Auntie Vera even more.
"Of course not."
"It doesn't concern you what people will say?"
"No, not really."
"You won't mind them calling your baby a bastard?"
Diane wasn't going to give the woman the satisfaction of seeing that, at last, this had touched a nerve. She simply shook her head, trying to look nonchalant.
"They can say what they like."
Auntie Vera sighed and flicked her cigarette end into the hydrangeas.
"Well, it's your life, dear. If you want to ruin it, I suppose it's up to you."
"Is that why you never had children? In case it ruined your life?"
It was the last conversation of any length they would ever have. But the issue of adoption remained unresolved for at least another three months. Diane did not, of course, return to Elmshurst. Instead, the school was informed that during the summer, she had developed a pulmonary condition that required specialist medical attention and prolonged convalescence in a healthier climate. In late October when the pregnancy became difficult to conceal, accompanied by her mother, she was dispatched, by ferry and overnight train, to a little town in the Swiss Alps. Everything had been arranged through a discreet chain of Masonic contacts. For the remaining months of her pregnancy, Diane would be confined, along with two other young Englishwomen in a similar predicament, to the home of a rotund and rosy-cheeked widow called Frau Muller.
Her mother stayed long enough to satisfy herself that the medical and educational conditions were satisfactory and the scope for mischief strictly limited. She needn't have worried. Behind the benign smiles, Frau Muller, in her high-necked black gown and tightly coiled tresses, was a stern custodian. And the town, which nestled hygienic and wholesome beside a lake, was as boring as it was beautiful.
A suitably lugubrious doctor from the local hospital came to visit the girls once a week. They were tutored by an arthritic retired schoolmaster called Herr Schneider in English, French and German and by Frau Muller herself in the more vital arts of needlework and etiquette. Diane soon knew the correct way to leave a room of mixed company (head for door, turn only upon opening it, smile, exit) as well as how to get in and out of a motor vehicle without revealing inappropriate amounts of leg (in: knees together, lower backside on to seat, swing legs; out: knees together, swing legs, gracefully raise backside).
In the two weeks she stayed, her mother seemed to soften. The weather was still and sunny and unseasonably warm, the lake a mirror to the pine trees and the snowy peaks beyond. They took afternoon walks together along the shore and, in a little timber-walled cafe in the town square, feasted on apple strudel and glasses of hot chocolate topped with swirls of whipped cream.
On one such afternoon, her mother asked her what she might have wanted to do with her life, had she not fallen pregnant. And Diane heard herself admitting for the first time that all she'd ever wanted to do was act. The only things she had enjoyed about school were the plays they staged. She was nearly always given one of the major roles and everyone, even the teachers, used to say how good she was. Her mother smiled wistfully and nodded.
"You could have gone to one of those wonderful drama schools," she said and took a sip of chocolate. "In London. Ah, well."
She didn't rub it in, simply left the thought floating there so that Diane could fill in the subtext for herself. The implication was obviously that if she would agree to adoption, this dream might yet come true. It was a different and far shrewder tack from those initial hostile challenges about how would she and the baby survive the ignominy, where would they live and who did she think was going to pay the bills. A new, more subtle seed had been planted. And after her mother left and the snow began to fall and the weeks drifted by, so it slowly took root.
Her two fellow inmates, both Catholics—Angela, from Bristol, who never stopped crying, and Pam, a much more worldly girl from North London—were both giving up their babies for adoption. It was apparently all part of the package provided by Frau Muller in association with the local Sisters of Mercy, whose convent perched piously upon a little hill outside the town.
In the evenings, after supper, the girls generally retired to their own parlour to read. It was a cosy room with a woodstove and blighted only by an infuriatingly raucous cuckoo clock. On this particular evening, with the smell of boiled ham and cabbage still hanging in the air, Diane and Pam were sitting either side of the stove, trying to learn a passage of Goethe's Egmont, which they were expected to recite the following day to Herr Schneider. Angela had already retired and was no doubt already drenching her pillow. Pam, whose pregnancy was a month more advanced than Diane's, suddenly gave a startled little cry and laid both hands on her belly. Diane asked what was wrong.
"It kicked! Oooh. And again."
Diane got up from her armchair and knelt beside her.
"Can I feel?"
Pam took her hands and guided them to the right place and they waited.
"There! Did you feel it?"
"Golly! What does it feel like?"
"Like, a sort of... fluttering, I suppose."
"Does it hurt?"
"No. It's quite nice, actually."
When the gymnastics were over, Diane went back to her chair.
"Did you ever think of keeping it?"
"The baby? Good gracious, no! I'd have had an abortion but my parents are strict Catholics and think it's a mortal sin."
"What's a mortal sin?"
"I don't know. One that's more fun, I suppose."
Diane laughed.
"Don't you want to have children?" she asked.
"Of course I do. But not now. I want to have a life first. Get a job, do something. And then have children properly with someone I'm married to and love."
"You didn't love the father then?"
"Lord, no. He's an absolute bounder."
There was a long silence during which they both went back to Egmont. But Diane couldn't concentrate.
"Do they let you see the baby? I mean, when it's born?"
"I don't think so. They just whisk it off. You know, so you don't get all mumsy about it."
The prospect didn't seem to bother Pam at all. But Diane couldn't imagine allowing such a thing to happen to her baby. The cuckoo erupted from its little door to tell them it was nine o'clock.
"So help me," Pam said. "I'll strangle that bloody thing one day."
Diane hardly slept that night. And the following day, even after a stern reprimand from Herr Schneider for her slaughtering of Goethe, all she could think of was that there had to be some way of achieving both the things she wanted. The baby and, as Pam so succinctly put it, a life.
It was, perhaps fittingly, at Christmas that the plan was broached. And all these years later, Diane still didn't know what was the more astonishing: that she had come up with the idea or that her parents had gone along with it.
They had come out to Switzerland to spend Christmas with her and see in the new year. Diane had prepared the ground well. She had found lodging for them in a pretty little Gasthof just along the street from Frau Muller's and had spent a long time (and too much of her modest allowance) finding the right presents for them. She gave her father a finely carved meerschaum pipe and a green felt trilby with a sprig of feathers on the side. For her mother she had found a black velvet waistcoat, prettily embroidered with alpine flowers. And from the moment she met them at the railway station, she had been sweetness and light.
Her mother, she could see, smelled a rat. But Diane's resolute good spirits, her enthusiastic efforts to show them around and introduce them to those in the town with whom she had made friends, seemed to work. Her father, particularly, was unusually affectionate and solicitous, sometimes even putting his arm around her on their walks.
The town had an ancient tradition on New Year's Eve, in which men and boys, all dressed in black, their hands and faces blackened too, and each carrying an appropriately sized cow bell, did a tour of the town. They processed along the streets in single file, clanging their bells, snaking in and out of the hotels and restaurants and the grander houses. The sight was macabre and the sound both thrilling and disturbing, like the gates of hell banging in the wind. When the procession arrived at the Gasthof where Diane's parents were staying, dinner was still being served, and everyone sat at their tables and watched, some—including her mother—covering their ears. When it had passed through, they all cheered and laughed and raised their glasses to toast the coming year.
Diane had been waiting for the right moment to make her radical proposal and this seemed about as right as it might get. Quietly and calmly she told them that she had been giving a lot of thought to what would happen after the baby was born. She saw her mother stiffen. Diane told them that she still couldn't bear the idea of giving the baby away. She was his mother, she said (there was no doubt in her mind about the child's gender) and nothing could change that. The idea of losing him forever was too terrible to bear. But... and here her mother's chin and eyebrows lifted a little. Diane had never seen her on such tenterhooks. But, she continued, she understood the shame they would feel at having an illegitimate child in the family. Loving them as she did, she could not bring that shame upon them.
She let that settle in for a moment. The nervousness that she had feared might wreck her performance had curiously evaporated. In fact, the sight of them in such suspense, waiting for her next words, made her feel empowered. Smiling sweetly, with just the right tinge of sadness, she went on.
"I know how much you wanted to have another child. And you know how I'd have loved a little brother or sister. So..." This was the moment. She swallowed. "Why don't we all treat him as if that's... who he is."
She smiled again. They were both staring at her. Her father cleared his throat.
"I'm not sure I quite—"
"You mean, pretend we're the baby's parents?" her mother cut in.
Diane nodded.
"I've never heard anything so ridiculous in all my life."
"Why? What's ridiculous about it? You've always wanted another baby."
Her mother frowned and looked around, clearly concerned about being overheard. Diane leaned forward and went on more quietly.
"Who'll know? You haven't got any friends—I'm sorry, that sounds awful, but it's true, isn't it? Only Auntie Vera and she knows already. You could tell everyone else that you've been to see some wonderful doctor here in Switzerland and he helped you have a baby."
"Good Lord, you really have given this a lot of thought."
"Yes, of course I have, Mother. I've done this dreadful thing to you and I feel so ashamed and... I've been racking my brains trying to think of a way to make it all work."
Up until now it had felt like a performance but suddenly it was real—although she would later discover, on stage, that these two things were often hard to distinguish. She began to cry. And her father reached out across the table and held her hand. Her mother glanced around again to see if anyone was watching.
"Please, Diane, don't make a scene," she whispered.
Her father dug into his pocket and gave her his handkerchief.
"It's all right, dear," he said. "Don't cry. It's all right."
"I'm sorry. I just thought..."
And that was where they left it. At least, for the time being. Back in her bed at Frau Muller's, she realized that she hadn't even mentioned the bit about wanting to have a life as well as the baby. Perhaps it was just as well. If she'd gone on to talk about going to drama school, her mother would probably have erupted and denounced it all as another typically selfish ploy.
The following morning the three of them took a horse-drawn sleigh to the station through the softly falling snow. They stood in awkward silence on the platform amid the steam and bustle while the luggage was loaded into the couchette. Her father was wearing his new hat and her mother a look of nervous distraction. When the guard's whistle finally blew, Diane asked if they had thought any further about her proposal. Her father gave his unlit meerschaum a thoughtful suck then removed it and cleared his throat.
"Well," he said. "We'll obviously have to move. You know, make a new start somewhere. Don't worry, old girl. We'll make a go of it."