Bad Blood (31 page)

I wanted my body back. I'd never until now thought of it as mine, really, now that it wasn't. Pregnant, I was my own prison but you could tick off the days on a calendar; it wasn't a life sentence. Except for the baby, and I imagined him (babies then were nearly always male beforehand, you couldn't find out their sex in advance) playing in a corner, a quiet little ghost of futurity, while we construed elliptical bits of Lucretius. I planned to sit my A-levels as well. No one could prevent me from entering as an external candidate, and unless the dates were wrong and the baby came in June like the exams, instead of the end of May, I could manage both. The mutant version of marriage Vic and I were making up as we went along didn't automatically mean family life as my parents knew it (he the wage-earner, she the dreamer), but none of us said so, we simply went ahead at cross-purposes. We were all temporarily exhausted by the crisis and peace was declared while we waited for the end of the school term.

The more my parents saw of Vic, the more they liked him; he was much less intransigent and bloody-minded than me. My mother, in particular, was gratified to find that he was always hungry. It began with the leek soup. Glossy packets of soup mix had started appearing in the shops and, true to her conviction that vegetables were only edible when denatured, she bought lots and served them with big lumps, gluey on the outside, powdery inside. There was always leftover soup in a pan on the stove and one evening that waiting winter, when he brought me home to Sunnyside, she asked him would he like some warmed up, adding, in case politeness caused him to refuse, ‘It's only going in the bin.' He wolfed it down, although
his mother was a very good cook and he was well fed at home, for he really was hugely, indiscriminately hungry. ‘He polished it off,' said my mother, shaking her head in theatrical disbelief and laughing with amazement, and from then on she never stopped plying him with reconstituted horrors and some frozen things called ‘Chicklets' she especially fell for around then, which even my father rejected. In fact, she fed him up so successfully that he developed a kind of parallel paunch and put on weight as I did.

I tried to eat as little as possible, but it didn't work, and by December I was grateful for the shapelessness of school uniform and had swapped my skimpy Silhouette girdle for a heavy-duty version, bones and all. There was only one occasion when I felt close to being found out, but that is etched on my memory with panic's acids, complete with the kind of circumstantial detail that usually you don't store away because it's so ordinary and innocent. The school hall had an upper gallery that served as a corridor linking classrooms, and also as a vantage point for watching gym displays, drama rehearsals and so on. I cannot recall what was happening that day on the floor below, but one of my friends or fans – a fat girl who admired me – had dragged a stool from the biology lab to the balustrade. As I passed by she reached out, put an arm round my waist, pulled me on to her lap before I could escape and exclaimed with what sounded like triumphant malice, ‘Ooh! You've put on weight!' In that moment the smell of formaldehyde from the rats pinned out on boards in the lab, and the familiar, claustophobic feel of the closeness of other girls' bodies, inspired such fear and nausea that I was beside myself. I was an outsider, harbouring an alien, an alien myself. Having such a secret was like having cancer – a disease which couldn't be mentioned except in shamed whispers.

Not that anyone ever confessed at the time to thinking like this. Uncle Bill's favourite sex-kitten, Brigitte Bardot, who was now twenty-five and would soon (January 1960) be looking radiant in the newspapers, posing with her husband and their new baby, said years later that she had come to love her son Nicholas with a passion, but then (‘
mais à l'époque!
') it had been like expelling ‘
une tumeur
'. Even in 1996, when her autobiography was published, there was a public outcry over this passage. True, her whole account of her one experiment with motherhood was provocative. For instance, pregnancy tests then involved the use of female rabbits, and BB – ever the animal lover, Gail would have approved – tells us that she insisted on redeeming her rabbit and taking it home with her. But to admit that she regarded the baby she was carrying as a life-threatening lump was unforgivable in itself, so ingrained still is the notion that nature is bound to adjust your feelings to your condition, unless you're a monster.

Unreconciled and undetected, I made it to the end of term and the school dance. Fear of discovery didn't blight life entirely: I remember that the get-up I wore to that last dance had for me a special, pleasureable, private meaning. I was about to take a step into the dark, so like a heroine of romance I wore a strapless dress, black with midnight-blue splodgy flowers, tight-waisted and full-skirted, and I looked – as I'd wanted to two years before – a lot older than I was, voluptuous, hooked-and-eyed into a ferocious corselette that pushed up my breasts, with stiff crinoline petticoats, dark-blue stockings and spiky high heels: all the trappings of slang glamour. When Vic came round to collect me, with slicked hair and narrow trousers, we stood before the mirror over the fireplace in the sitting-room at Sunnyside and looked at our reflections. The dance would
be our farewell to teenage limbo, we were out on our own and the realisation that no one would know it that evening but us was bitter and heady. The flickering firelight held us in a pocket of warmth, not for the first time.

Once, earlier that winter when my parents and Clive were out and Grandma had gone to bed sated with
Sunday Night at the London Palladium
, I'd wantonly used up all the hot water and come downstairs wearing only a bath towel and a dusting of talcum powder to let him in. We'd lain on the hearthrug, melting in the gloom and listening for tyres on the drive. All dressed up for the dance, watching ourselves in the mirror, we both remembered and put on world-weary smiles to match our finery.

Ten days later we were married. I had on my new winter coat, whose fur collar didn't reconcile me to the concealing lines that had attracted my mother. Our shotgun wedding – us holding the gun to their heads – took place on Boxing Day, for my father had found out that the Register Office was obliged to open for business on 26 December, although it was seldom called on to do so. That year we were the only customers. He drove us through the empty early-morning streets to the town hall, where a dyspeptic registrar pronounced the words and we signed the right forms, witnessed by Mrs B. R. D. Sage and Mr and Mrs E. P. Stockton. Then we came out into the cold sunshine on the High Street. No one took any photographs, there was not a soul in sight, the pavements were rimed with frost and salt, and it was so quiet that you could hear the tinsel streamers strung across the road rattling in the air.

We bundled into the car and back to Sunnyside, where the Christmas tree lights were on the blink again and had to be tested ritually one by one by my father to locate the faulty
bulb that must be replaced before they'd work. He didn't mind, this was the kind of task he liked to have to occupy the time when he wasn't working and it came in especially handy that day, since we didn't know how to fill in the interval until the cold turkey. It was hardly an occasion for celebration – although over the years it would be added, like New Year's Eve and my January birthday, to the festivals for which the Christmas decorations would also serve. When he'd finished with the blue-green-red-white lights, my father went upstairs to attach the mirror to the dressing-table of the new bedroom suite which he'd bought at the same Christmas market as the tree, and which would replace my single bed and chest of drawers, and shoulder aside the bookcase with my old William books and George Macdonalds. My bedroom was transformed into a barer version of my parents' room across the landing, and so normality and decorum were restored to Sunnyside. For the first time in our lives (on our wedding night, like a respectable couple) Vic and I shared a bed, and in the morning, after my father had left for work, my mother brought us mugs of sweet tea and that settled the matter. Vic was one of the family. This, of course, allowed for the possibility that he was wretched, disaffected, myth-ridden, what have you. The important thing was that he should join in the general conspiracy to make life seem plausible. My mother wasn't the star of the Women's Institute drama group for nothing, she had a frightening capacity for damage limitation, for pretending that nothing bad had happened, which she must have acquired in her childhood and adolescence, surviving all those murderous vicarage rows. (Once upon a later time, when she and my father were staying in my house, I quarrelled with him into the small hours and, vowing drunkenly that I wouldn't spend the night
under the same roof
, I went out and lay down on the dewy grass – it was
high summer – only to find my mother standing over me next morning with a mug of hot, sweet tea.) The show must go on and so it did.

I slept soundly for a change, Vic cupped against my back or vice versa. And I dreamed, one dream in particular, again and again, of a white space – a cinema screen, a canvas, a sheet of paper. From one corner a black line starts indelibly to meander, snaking its leisurely way around and across, doodling aimlessly until little by little and without any system it fills almost the whole empty space and there's only one pinprick of light left, and I wake up gasping for breath, looking for the dawn oblong of the window. My blocked sinuses were the obvious explanation, they reacted badly to all that lying still and so did my insomniac self, which resented rest. Didn't Dr McColl say I had more time than other people? Well now, suddenly, I hadn't. Sleep was dangerous, it spelled regression. Vic and I, having conspired so successfully to become legally independent, seemed strangely more childlike. Cuddling under the covers in our freezing bedroom (all the bedrooms were freezing) had a memory nesting inside of it, long lost: my little brother Clive and I climbing into our parents' empty bed at The Arowry, burrowing under their puffy blue nylon quilt to make a tent and drowsing there in the warm.

It was Clive, now, who showed the most obvious signs of disturbance. He had been sent to a new school in Whitchurch, a private one, for crash courses in numeracy and literacy to compensate for Hanmer school's muck-shovellers' curriculum, and he hated it. Every afternoon he'd burst back into the house like a mad boy, first flinging his football kit along the hall, then his satchel, then himself, in an ecstasy of rage. When Vic and I got back from the Register Office that December day, only Clive let on that there was anything out of the ordinary
happening: he danced around us having his own joke, pretending Vic was from outer space or a Frankenstein's monster, pointing at him in mock-terror: ‘It walks! It talks!' And so Vic became one of us.

The district nurse who visited Grandma – no longer Nurse Burgess with her blunt needles and Hanmer history, but a younger, less substantial woman – shook her head and said that they should try to persuade the baby to turn over, a good midwife would know how to do it with massage. But they didn't bother with that at the antenatal clinic in Shrewsbury. ‘He' was, it turned out, a breech baby, the wrong way about, set to arrive in the world bottom first, which meant his head wouldn't get squashed, but I might well have trouble delivering the broadest bit at the start. They measured my pelvis, however, and decided that I could perfectly well manage it, although I'd have to go to the special maternity unit at Crosshouses Hospital where they dealt with Caesareans and difficult deliveries.

Crosshouses was an ex-workhouse twenty-five miles away in the middle of nowhere on the road between Shrewsbury and Bridgenorth, a Victorian pile inherited by the National Health Service. It had a reputation to go with its name. People talked in whispers about the ‘complications' that sent you there and over it hung an air of grudging public charity. The Crosshouses consultant, who saw me at the clinic and gave his opinion that I'd been built for child-bearing, made it clear that he thought me a peasant. I never saw him again, though, for he was shortly to be hauled up before the Council of the British Medical
Association and written up in the
Shropshire Star
for charging for National Health beds. He acted on his contempt for the NHS more boldly than most, but his attitude wasn't unusual: you were getting something for nothing, in the good old days you'd have had short shrift and all of this obstetrical expertise would have been reserved for your betters, whose pelvic bones were naturally more daintily designed.

In other words, you should pay and if you couldn't pay in cash you'd pay in dignity. Unmarried mothers had the worst of it, but being married didn't improve your status much with the professionals, for their resentment of patients in general was compounded by the atavistic idea that pregnant women in particular were just walking wombs, only Baby mattered. The clinic was a humiliation which I endured in an impotent sulk, plotting the red dawn, when they'd swing from the lampposts, or – given darkest Shropshire – a handy oak. Meanwhile, the only person on whom I took revenge was myself, since I refused to take the extra calcium Dr Clayton prescribed for my bones and teeth, and didn't rub cream into my stomach, and so acquired a lot of fillings and a set of stretch marks. Smocks I also scorned, I wore Vic's shirts and jeans instead, and they fitted to the end thanks to my mother's menus.

Every day she'd bring us a mid-morning snack of buttered cream crackers and milky Camp coffee in the dining-room where we sat doing our day-long homework, sharing the table with my father's ledgers, huddled over an electric fire. The fireplace didn't work because the chimney was blocked with close-packed twigs: the ground floor of a two-storey bird's nest that went past the fireplace in our bedroom above and stuck out of the chimney pot on the roof. Sunnyside wildlife wasn't confined to the garden and the paddock. There was a spring that came up in the cellar and occasionally flooded, as it did
that first year, when it must have brought frogspawn with it before it receded, because one day the cellar floor was swarming with tiny albino frogs who couldn't get out, who'd been eating each other down there in the dark. In May came may bugs, big gold-and-green armoured beetles who threw themselves against our lighted windows late at night like a shower of stones. My mother shuddered with horror at each new plague, but didn't really mind. She greeted the cat when he knocked at the back door using a mouse or a vole for a door knocker with little, pleased screams.