16

To explain what happened between Jake and myself is impossible, I know that. We didn’t love each other as most people love: and yet the moment I have said that I think of the men and women I have seen clasped together with eyes full of loathing, men and women who murder each other with all the weapons of devotion. There’s nothing new under the sun and even I have read — well, in parts — The Origins of Love and Hate. This is something you can’t find in your magazines, Ireen, though by now, if you’re still alive, you may have learnt it.

One of the greatest differences between Jake and my other husbands is that they were all peaceful men capable of great physical exertion, but Jake is a violent man who wears a sluggard body for disguise. Sleepy, amiable, anxious to please, lazy, tolerant, possibly in some ways a little stupid: this is the personality he wears as a man in the world. His indestructible energy, aggression, cruelty and ambition are well protected.

Perhaps he should never have let me seen them. At the point where I learned what I was fighting, loving, I knew that I was bound, in the end, to lose. I dispensed with the formalities of tenderness, pity, the ceremonial flattery that should go before disciplined massacre. I fought, I suppose, like a woman, uttering distracting cries, making false moves, hitting below the belt. I was incapable of giving up, and unable to escape. But I was no match for Jake. He went on loving me even after I was beaten, propped up with my wound wide open, emptied of memory or hope.

My mother began to be irritated by me: I put things in the wrong place, forgot the fireguard, was extravagant with the Quix. She was also melodramatic about my pregnancy, suggesting that I should drink more gin. It seemed to me that she had recovered sufficiently to be left. I had not heard from Jake since the cremation and although every midnight I went to the telephone determined to call him, I could never make myself do so. It was not that I was frightened of his anger: I would have welcomed it. I was frightened that he would not be there.

I telephoned Dinah and said I was coming back. She said thank goodness, it was all chaos. What kind of chaos, I asked eagerly. She didn’t know. Everything was fine. She had become a Deist. Yes, since the cremation. They were all well, but hurry back, it’s absolute chaos.

It was snowing in London. The house was empty when I arrived. I walked round it looking for signs of life. There were very few. The dolls, bears and horses lay in orderly rows, the diaries and Biros were neat on bedside tables, the gramophones shut up, books back in the bookshelves, even if they were upside down. In Dinah’s room howling guitarists, a copy of Honey, Tindal and Voltaire. In the boys’ room, Gagarin and Glenn, a half-built Meccano windmill. In the nurse’s room, the electric fire left on and a dirty teacup with one cigarette stub in the saucer. In Jake’s study, nothing: the typewriter covered, ashtrays clean, wastepaper basket empty. It was like walking into a stranger’s house, or into a house left desolate by some plague. Who are these people? Who are these children of varying sizes and sexes? Do they feel, do they think, do they look forward to anything, do they remember? Are they happy? They had built snowmen out in the garden. They were an army, self-contained. I was suddenly frightened of them; afraid that when they came back they would find me here, trespassing, and judge me coldly. Across the gardens I could see a great bonfire built by the demolition men. Its flames leapt up, fed by mantelpieces and doors. It crunched them and spat them out, ravenous.

I went up to the attic. Snow had piled on to the skylight and I couldn’t see without the light on. I hauled out a cot and a rubber bath. The rubber had perished and stuck together. There was a high chair and a pair of scales piled up at the far end of the attic, but I couldn’t reach them without moving a dozen suitcases. I heard, far down in the house, the front door slam. I threw the cot and the bath back into the attic and shut the door. What would they think if they found me grubbing about up here? They would think that I had gone crazy.

When Jake and I were first married — after the three eldest children had been taken away — we lived together in the evenings. Like actors, our lives began when the curtain went down. We ate and quarrelled and made love, cooked and drank and talked through the night, while the audience slept. Then, beginning with Dinah, the children began staying up later. They needed help with homework. They needed food. They needed conversation. They needed more and more of our lives. In a useless attempt to keep something for ourselves, we gave them bed-sitting rooms, television sets, new electric fires; but at eight o’clock, then nine o’clock, then ten o’clock they would be sitting in a patient row on the sofa preparing to talk to us or play games with us or perhaps just watch us, their eyes restless as maggots, expecting us to bring them up. My guilt and Jake’s exasperation loaded the atmosphere until, to me, it became unbearable. But the children breathed it in placidly. There were now more great bored ones staying up in the evening than there were small, manageable ones asleep with their teeth cleaned. The nurse went off duty, as she called it, at half past seven, seldom failing to remark that she had had a twelve hour day. We went out, in order to be alone, to the great dirty pub on the corner, to the cinema, anywhere where we might be anonymous and behave, if necessary, unsuitably to our age and situation. That night, after I came home, there was no question of going out. We waited, with bad grace and burning impatience, for them to go to bed.

At last, lingeringly, with sad backward glances at the glorious day, they went. They could well look after themselves, but because I had been away I went about picking up socks, opening windows, telling them to hurry, tucking them in. Encouraged, they clung to my hand, each jealous of another, demanding to know about death and sex and other subjects which they hoped might interest me. When one of them pestered unduly, another would demand that I was left alone; when one of them called for me to go back and listen, another said crushingly, “You are a beast, can’t you see she’s tired.” By the time I left Dinah, dazed by the possibility of a Supreme Being, my longing to be alone with Jake had cooled and hardened into a longing to forget, to postpone, to sleep.

“I suppose you’re tired,” he said, the first words he had spoken directly to me for nearly two weeks.

“Yes. I am.” I sat down, kicking off my shoes, stretching my toes. Under cover of this nonchalant gesture I looked at Jake. He, feeling it, looked at me. We both turned to the fire, as though to a third person.

“You look terribly tired,” I said.

“I am.”

“You look … awful.”

“I feel awful.”

There was another silence. How many nights had we sat in this room testing, probing, waiting for the moment to strike? A year of nights, between Philpot and now? No, more than that. We were both nine years older, nine years more cunning, nine years more dependent.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know you’re upset. I know you don’t want this baby.”

“Do you?” A look of such hope struck his face that he sat blinking, as though puzzled with it. In fact, I had not known. Perhaps I had even thought that by some miracle he might by now be glad. I found that I was kneeling to him, holding his limp hands. “I’m sorry. Darling, darling Jake, I’m sorry …”

He said nothing.

I said, “I know just how it feels to have got someone into trouble. This must be just how it feels. I’ve got you into trouble, haven’t I?”

“It can’t be helped.”

The weight of resignation in his voice made me desperate. If he had shouted, hit me, I could have fought back. But he was shutting me out, retreating into lethargy.

“It’ll be all right,” I said. “I promise you. You’ll like it when it’s born, you always do, perhaps it’ll be a boy, you haven’t got anything like enough boys, you haven’t got as many as Giles even. One more won’t make any difference, I promise you it won’t. We’ll have the tower ready and we’ll spend the summer there. When we’ve got the tower we can spread out a bit, can’t we, and you really won’t notice it, Jake, I promise you …”

“All right,” he said. “It doesn’t matter.”

“But it does matter! I can’t have a baby you don’t want!”

He looked at me sadly. He had gone. Something had stopped in him. “You should have thought of that before,” he said, and almost smiled.

“You mean, you don’t … you really don’t want it?”

“No.”

I knelt upright, humiliated by touching him. I got clumsily to my feet. I stood with my back to him, looking vaguely round the familiar room, the walls, maps of the time we had spent together, pictures, objects, things.

“What… do you want, then?”

“It hardly matters, does it?”

“Oh. I see.”

By now I was used to fear. It no longer bewildered me as it had done the night Philpot left. Pounding heart, dry mouth, trembling, not a thought in my head but save me. But while it came and grew and I suffered it I knew that I was not at all afraid of what he had said; I was afraid of the reason for his saying it.

“Why?”

He hesitated.

“Don’t work it out,” I said. “Just tell me why.”

“Because I don’t want it. That’s why.”

“Yes. I see.”

The silences were the silences of a blackout in which actors run softly to take up new positions; they were longer than the tableaux in between, in each of which we were doing the same thing, but in different attitudes. I turned and faced him. “But… why?”

He sighed, looking at me. I suppose I looked absurd, shoeless, ravaged, demanding my answer with stiff hands. He patted the arm of his chair. “Come here.”

“No.”

“I want to tell you the truth.”

“Then tell me the truth.”

“But come here.”

I went slowly. After a moment he began to stroke my hair as though I were a dog who had to be calmed.

He starts by saying that he is not a good person, like I am, but he doesn’t say what he means by good. He says that he is weak, impatient and not to be trusted. He has done his best in the past, but even then he has failed me, dismally failed me. Does he believe this? Why this sudden humility? I want to believe it. I want to shut my eyes and be lapped by lies. Jake is humble.

He knows what’s wrong with me. He’s given me all the wrong things. Material things. He’s neglected me. Perhaps this is true. He has never spoken like this before: rather too solemn, a bit pompous. He feels about this. He means it. Jake is trying to say something he means. Because of this short-sightedness of his, I came to feel my life was pointless and empty. Quite rightly. So it was. I was perfectly right to feel like that. And since he was no help to me, I took the only way out that I knew: I decided to have another child.

He is not blaming me. Jake is blaming himself. (Is he saying I didn’t know any better? Well, if he is, it’s true.) His first reaction was that he had been cheated. This, he says, is why he behaved so badly at the cremation. Then, after seeing me there, he began to think. Jake began to think. He thought it out and he realized that it was he who had cheated me. He had left me in a vacuum and I had simply grabbed what I could get, the only thing I could think of to make me happy again.

All right. All right, Jake. Go on. The fear is eased, the fire is warm, love is simple. Somebody is explaining things to me, understanding me. I’m resting now. I’ll believe anything.

He isn’t excusing himself, but he’s been terrified by the task of supporting us all. For years he’s been driven on by panic, taking on ghastly scripts he didn’t want to do, accepting everything he was offered; destroying, incidentally, his own talent in the process, but that doesn’t matter, the point is that he’s kept us, we’ve come out of it alive. But the irony, the bloody irony of it is that just at this point when he has realized how much he loves me, when we could for the first time start planning a happier, more sensible life, just at the point when we could start thinking of a little freedom — I’m pregnant again. The whole thing starts all over. Instead of love and a good time — he doesn’t of course mean a good time, he means a good time — and being able to go away together and see a bit of the world, broaden our horizons, enjoy what he supposes is our middle age — instead of all this, another child. To him, it’s tragic. We could have lived so differently. But now … it’s tragic.

Now he’s stopped talking. The caves of the fire blaze with icicles, stalactites seen through tears. I don’t speak, because he has something left to say.

Of course he knows, good God he knows, that the idea of abortion is repellent to me. It is to him, too. He would never dream of suggesting it. I must agree that he never has. It’s only that the doctor, that psyche, did say that I shouldn’t have another child. I’m in the middle of treatment, Jake says, for depression. An abortion would be perfectly legal. It wouldn’t be underhand, nasty, anything like that. Still, he supposes that the only thing to do is to take the risk and have the baby and get down to work again. They want him to go to Hollywood for six months. He was going to turn it down, take the summer off. He had wanted to get to know the children again, he says; he wanted to take them out and dust them and polish up their faces. Now … oh well, that’s life. Don’t be upset, darling. Don’t cry. I want to make you happy. Good God, after all, he’s got me into this. All those boring months, the pain at the end. He only wishes he could get me out of it while there’s still time.

I still say nothing. He is right. I believe him. But I can’t say so. I feel myself like a torrent being dammed, being forced back, turned into new channels. I am a dead weight, like water.

He asks me if I love him. I nod, stupidly, a mute. He waits, stroking my hair again. In a little while I shall tell him that I shall do what he wants, that is more important to me than the child. But not yet. For a few minutes we will sit here, wondering.

This morning I got a letter. It was forwarded from a magazine that printed a picture of us last month, and a story about Jake taking up script-writing to keep the wolf from the door. It is written on blue paper and came in what I think they call a Manila envelope, such as they use for bills.

What should I say to Mrs. Evans?

“Dear Mrs. Evans, I enclose a cheque for £10. This, of course, is tax free and therefore worth double …” “Dear Mrs. Evans, I am about to have an abortion and wonder if you could give me some advice …” “Dear Mrs. Evans, We have a fine tower in the country, bring all the children and live in it …” “Dear Mrs. Evans, We all get what we deserve. I myself am not going to have another baby. Why not learn Italian or take up some useful…”

Dear Mrs. Evans, my friend. Dear Mrs. Evans, for God’s sake come and teach me how to live. It’s not that I’ve forgotten. It’s that I never knew. A womb isn’t all that important. It’s only the seat of life, something that drags the moon down from the sky like a kite and draws the sea in and out, in and out, the world’s breathing. At school the word “womb” used to make them snigger. Women aren’t important.

You have a vote, Mrs. Evans. Now why don’t you take advantage of it? I have a vote. Really, anyone would think that the emancipation of women had never happened. Dear Mrs. Evans, let us march together to our local headquarters and protest in no uncertain terms. Let us put forward our proposals, compile our facts, present our case, demand our rights. The men — they are logical, brave, humanitarian, creative, heroic — the men are sneering at us. How the insults fly. You hear what they are saying, as we run the gauntlet between womb and tomb? “Stop trying to be a man! Stop being such a bloody woman! You’re too strong! You’re too weak! Get out! Come back! …” When we were young, we said the hell with it and used our breasts as shields. But the tears fall so easy when they take away love. Be a man, Mrs. Evans. It’s all that’s left for you.

“What’s this?” Jake said. He glanced at the letter, taking it from me. “Oh, one of those.” It drifted into the wastepaper basket. He put his arm round me. “Not crying again?”

“No.”

“I saw the doctor. He thinks you’re perfectly right.”

“Oh. Good.”

“He says there’s no need for you to go and see him unless you want to.”

“I don’t want to.”

“He’ll write to this … gynaecologist. I’ve made an appointment for you tomorrow.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re so brave. So splendid. It’ll soon be over.”

“I don’t mind.” I held him tightly. “So long as you’re happy.”

“I’m very happy.”

While he held me, rather formally, in his arms I kept my eye on the wastepaper basket; it contained the only evidence I had in the world that I was not alone.