Alive, Alive Oh! Read online

  Alive, Alive Oh!

  In my early forties I thought of myself as a rational woman, but while I could sleep alone in an empty house for night after night without worrying, there were other nights when my nerves twitched like a rabbit’s at the least sound, regardless of what I had been reading or talking about. On the many good nights and the few bad the chances of a burglar breaking in were exactly the same: the difference was within myself and signified nothing which I could identify. And I had always been like that over the possibility of pregnancy.

  For several months it would not occur to me to worry, but then I would be convinced, perhaps as much as a fortnight before the month’s end, that this time it had happened. The anxiety seemed in itself an indication: why this sudden fret if there were no reason? I would start working out how to find the money for an abortion, or whether I was capable of bringing up a child single-handed, and when the anxiety proved groundless I would feel foolish as well as relieved.

  This last month had been an easy-minded one. I happened, for once, to know the date on which, in this sense, it should end, having filled an idle moment by marking little crosses in my diary some way ahead; but although I was often a few days early and never late, I was so far from worrying that I hardly noticed when the day came and went. Six more days passed before I said to myself: ‘Hadn’t you better start acknowledging this? The curse is six days overdue and your breasts are hurting.’

  Rational? How did I square that with the fact that, in spite of the fluctuations in anxiety, I had taken no precautions against pregnancy for almost two years? From time to time, at the end of an anxious month, I had thought of it: ‘If I’m let off this time I’ll never be such a fool again.’ But I never did anything about it. ‘Not today,’ ‘Not this week,’ ‘Another time,’ or even, ‘What’s the point? I’ll only put the damned things in a drawer and forget to use them.’ The mere thought of it seemed too tedious to bear. Although I had twice become pregnant in the past, that was now such a long time ago, and surely I had reached an age when it was less likely? After all, month after month had gone by to confirm my optimism.

  If anyone had said to me, ‘There can be only one reason for an unmarried woman in her early forties to ignore good sense so stubbornly: she does it not from an optimistic belief that she will not conceive, but because of an exactly opposite subconscious optimism: deep inside herself she wants a child,’ I would have answered, ‘Of course she does. I do know that, really. I suppose I must have been choosing to ignore it.’ But although I had not been able to prevent my subconscious from undermining my reason, I saw nothing against putting it in its place. I had overruled it twice before and had felt no ill effects. ‘All right, so you want a baby. Who doesn’t? But as things are you can’t have one – I’m sorry but there it is, too bad for you.’ Neither time had it put up any fight. It had accepted its frustration placidly – and placidly it had resumed its scheming.

  I had once met a man who had been persuaded to consult an analyst about, of all things, his constipation. He had found the experience interesting and beneficial, and summed it up in words that delighted me: ‘It’s fascinating to learn what an old juggins one’s subconscious is.’ That was what I now felt: what an old juggins! What a touching and in some ways admirable old juggins! I saw my subconscious plodding along, pigheaded, single-minded, an old tortoise lumbering through undergrowth, heaving itself over fallen branches, subsiding into holes full of dead leaves. Sometimes, no doubt, the obstacles had been almost too much for him and he had lain, panting slightly, staring up at the sky and blinking in apparent bewilderment, but then a blunt foreleg would begin to grope again, his toes would scratch for purchase and on he would go. The question was this: did I say, ‘Impressive though such persistence is, he is still a juggins,’ or did I say, ‘Juggins he may be, but such persistence is impressive’? Did I, in other words, slap my subconscious down again by finding the necessary cash and the obliging doctor from the past (if he was still taking such risks), or did I capitulate and have this child?

  The reasons against it were these: I was unmarried, forty-three years old and had no private income. I could live comfortably on what I earned, with nothing to spare. I would like to preserve these conditions.

  The reasons for it were these: if I did not have a child now I would never have one, and I loved Barry, its father.

  Barry was married – well married, to an admirable woman who had done him no wrong and to whom he owed much. He had begun an affair simply because he had been married for seven years, was no longer romantically in love with his wife, and was polygamous by nature. He had come to take the affair seriously because we suited each other in every way, one of our strongest bonds being that neither of us was possessive. He might have been described as sitting pretty, married to a good, dependable wife, without whom he could not imagine himself, and in love with a good, dependable mistress to whom he could turn whenever he wished. But it was more complex than that. I was nine years older than he, which, together with my nature, had given me a certain authority over the situation. He saw me as having chosen this form of relationship rather than having been persuaded or manoeuvred into it, and he was right: there was no reason why he should develop a sense of responsibility towards me except in our own terms of honesty and tenderness. It was a perfect situation for him, since he had no money and was trying to live by writing; but the fact that one partner is well suited does not necessarily mean that the other is ill used. I myself might have condemned some other woman’s lover in a similar situation, but I knew him and myself too well to condemn him. He was what he was: the person with whom, being as he was, I was most at home. What, then, would be the point of wishing him otherwise?

  And could I make him otherwise, if I wanted to? No. And I didn’t mind that, because I was perfectly willing to accept that we, as we both were, were each other’s unexpected bonus from life. It was this that had established so much ease and sweetness between us. If, when I told him I was pregnant, he were to offer to leave his wife and come to me, I would be quite as anxious as I would be happy. I would not, whatever I decided, try to make him do that. Perhaps this was cowardice – a fear of actually having to face a lack of success which I thought I could envisage with equanimity. Or perhaps it was vanity – a desire to go on representing freedom, pleasure, stimulation, all the joys of love rather than its burdens. Or perhaps it was really what I would like it to be: the kind of respect for another person’s being that I would wish to have paid to my own. But there was no doubt that, if I was pregnant, life would be a great deal easier if my lover and my love were otherwise than they were.

  So it would be sensible to have an abortion. In my experience it was not a profoundly disagreeable thing to have. The worst part of the actual operation, performed under a local anaesthetic, in the circumstances prevailing at the time when I first experienced it, was the grotesque position into which one had been trussed on the table. I had found that I could see a tiny but clear reflection of myself in the globe of the lampshade above me, and at that I almost lost grip but screwed my eyes shut instead. There was this humiliating ugliness, and there were sounds, and for a few moments there was a dim sensation of pain. If the doctor was businesslike and kind, treating one (as mine had done) like an ordinary patient, there was no sinister or shaming atmosphere to contend with. One was simply having a quick little operation for a sensible reason . . . So it was odd that I should start to shiver slightly as I thought about it. No, I did not feel that a murder is committed during that operation. I would go so far as to say that I was sure it was not: no separate existence, at that stage, was being ended, any more than when a sperm was prevented from meeting an egg. But that old juggins, the pin-headed, pig-headed tortoise behind my reason: he was tough, he was good at recovering from setbacks, but at the prospect of yet another of them he was showing signs of turning into a porcupine. He wanted me to have this child.

  Having acknowledged the situation, I found myself no nearer a decision,
only slightly more aware of reluctance towards either course. It was still early. I could have an abortion, if I so decided, at any time within the next three months. So the best thing to do seemed to me to be nothing: go blank, drift for a week or so, think about it as little as possible and see what happened. Perhaps I would wake up one morning knowing what I wanted to do.

  The next two weeks dragged. I managed to keep my mind on other things for much of the time, but the fact of pregnancy was always there, lying in wait for any unoccupied moment. It seemed common sense not to begin worrying again at least until I had missed my second period, but long before that date came I felt that my condition had endured for months. Each morning, when I awoke, I would lie still for a minute or two trying to overhear my state of mind, but all I picked up was irritation and depression at being in this quandary. About ten days after the start of my ‘truce’ I spent a weekend in the country with my mother, and the depression increased: supposing I had the child, how appalling the family explanations would be, how impossible it was to imagine the degree of consternation such a decision would raise in my mother and the rest of the family. In the train on the way back to London I looked up from my book and bumped, as usual, into, ‘What am I going to do?’ ‘Oh God,’ I thought, ‘I do wish it would all go away.’

  ‘Well,’ I thought next morning, ‘if that’s the best I can do I suppose I had better make it go away: get the money in, anyway.’ There was a sum waiting for me in New York, where I had planned soon to spend a holiday. If I called in half of that, would there be enough left for the holiday? Probably not. Resentment and disappointment were added to the depression, but I called my agent with a story of unexpected bills as a result of moving house, and he cabled me the money at once. That done, I had only to call the doctor – his number, on a grubby scrap of paper, discreetly minus his name, still lurked at the back of a drawer in my dressing table after all those years. ‘I’ll do it soon,’ I thought. ‘Next week, perhaps. I’ve got the money and that’s the main thing.’ I spent a couple of days in a rage at missing my first chance to visit New York, and another couple arguing that I needn’t miss it after all: if I spent only three weeks there instead of four, and lived very cheaply, I could manage. If that were so, I was not only being sensible, I was not going to suffer for it, so there was nothing to be depressed about any more.

  It was on the fifth morning after the arrival of the money – a morning in April – that I awoke congratulating myself on living in my new flat and opening my eyes in my new bedroom. It was the top floor of a house which might almost be in the country – the last house in a short street which projected like a little promontory into a park. All the windows looked onto trees and grass, and my bedroom window had gardens as well, the long range of gardens behind the houses of the street at right angles to mine. Cherry and pear trees were in flower, and a fine magnolia; daffodils and narcissi twinkled in the grass. Soon the lilacs would be out, and the hawthorns, and the irises – it was a galloping spring after a mild winter. The sun shone through my bedroom window, and the birds were singing so loudly that they had woken me before my alarm clock went off: each garden seemed to have its own blackbird. I got out of bed to lean out of the window and sniff the green smells, and found myself saying: ‘What a morning for birds and bees and buds and babies.’

  This sentence was still humming in my mind as I walked to the bus stop, past the walls of more gardens, not high enough to conceal the trees and shrubs behind them. During the previous winter, before moving into the flat, I had thought as I walked this way: ‘This will soon be my part of London – I shall see that pear, that crab-apple tree in flower, and then heavy with dusty summer green, and then with hard little London fruit on their branches – they will be familiar landmarks.’ And there they were, going into their spring performance with abandon against a brilliant blue sky, part of my daily walk to the bus. ‘It is a lovely place to live,’ I thought. ‘I suppose I am going to have this baby after all.’

  I was late, I had to run for a bus, those words evaporated and no thought of my predicament disturbed my morning’s work. Then my business partner came into my room, to spring on me a discussion of long-term plans for the firm. Someone might be persuaded to join us and if he did shares would have to be reallocated, certain changes of status would have to be made. ‘It concerns you, too,’ he said, ‘so you must think it over.’ I had a slight sensation of breathlessness and could feel my face flushing, but I made no decision to say what in fact I did say: ‘I don’t know that it will concern me. I may not be here then. I’m going to have a baby.’ And inside my head I was saying: ‘At last! The cat has jumped at last.’ I was also saying: ‘Oh lord, now I’ve done it!’ – but the dismay was a laughing dismay, not a horrified one.

  Perhaps my mood would not have held if my news had been received differently. As it was, my partner, a very old friend, said: ‘You mean you’re pregnant now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Have you seen a doctor?’

  ‘Not yet . . . of course it may be a mistake, but I’m sure it’s not.’

  ‘Well, then, are you mad?’ he said, sitting down on the radiator, frowning. ‘How do you think you’re going to support the child if you don’t stay on here?’

  ‘Oh, somehow – people do manage. And I thought it might be a bit embarrassing in the office . . .’

  ‘Good God! If anyone’s embarrassed they can bloody well get out!’

  Then, dropping his poker face, he asked if I had really thought he would expect me to leave, and I answered that of course I hadn’t, but it had seemed that it would be such an imposition . . . each of us slightly awkward at being pitched so suddenly into full awareness of our long and usually taken-for-granted affection for each other, and me the more so for having to produce thoughts which I had not yet formed about the practical side of this pregnancy. Then he kissed me and said that he was happy for me, and I was left grinning across my desk like the Cheshire cat, established in my full glory as an Expectant Unmarried Mother.

  After that I was happy. I was quite often frightened too, but on a superficial level compared with the happiness. The birth would be easy. I could take as much time off as I needed, drawing my salary all the while, and for so long as I could stay at home all would be simple. The house in which I had my flat was owned by a cousin of mine who herself lived in the rest of it, and who from the moment I told her of the pregnancy was eager to help. Neither of us had much money – I myself had to let one of the rooms in my flat to help pay its modest rent – so I was anxious not to become a financial burden on my cousin, but it was reassuring to know that if the worst came to the worst I would never be chased for the rent. But I could not take advantage of that reassurance for more than a short time, and didn’t want to do even that. And in addition to my usual living expenses I would have to pay for someone to care for the child while I was working, and for its food and clothes, and for its education – no, it would go to a state school, of course, there was a good one nearby – but for its bicycle and its roller skates and its holidays by the sea . . . Year after year of financial strain stretched ahead. Financial strain and, to start with at any rate, physical exhaustion: office all day, child for every other minute – would I ever again be free to write? Not for years, anyway.

  And no less frightening was the thought of the gap in the child’s life where a father ought to be. Material considerations could be smothered by ‘I’ll manage somehow – people do’; of course I would manage when I had to. But the argument advanced by my more sober-minded friends, and by my own mind as well, that one has no right to wish this lopsided upbringing on any child – that was less easy. Surely only an exceptional woman could reasonably expect to steer her child comfortably through the shoals of illegitimacy, and could I make any claim to be exceptional? To this question I found I could make no answer. I could only say: ‘Whatever happens, whatever the child itself may one day say (and there probably will come a time when it will say, “I never asked to be
born”), I believe that it will prefer to exist rather than not.’ But the real answer was not in those words, nor in any others that I might think up. It was simply in the rock-like certainty that the cat had jumped; that now, come what may and whatever anyone said, it was beyond me to consider an abortion. When I tried to force myself to think about it, I felt as though something physical happened in my skull, as though an actual shutter came down between the front part of my brain, just behind my eyes, where the thought began, and the back of my brain, where it would have to go if it were to be developed.

  The biggest immediate worry was how to tell my mother, whose outlook would make it very hard for her to accept such news. I veered between a desire to get the worst over by writing at once, and a longing to put it off for ever. Barry advised me to put it off for a month or so, just in case something went wrong, and finally I agreed, throwing a sop to my itch to get it over by writing in advance the letter I would send later, choosing a time just before one of my visits home so that my mother could get over the worst of the shock before we discussed it. I enjoyed writing that letter: putting into words how much I wanted a child and how determined to have this one I had now become. I found my letter so convincing that I couldn’t believe my mother would not agree.