Bad Blood (32 page)

She was much happier than she'd been at The Arowry. Once she'd got used to my disgrace, she liked having Vic and me around the house, so long as we were out of the way. The same applied to everyone at Sunnyside. Grandma spent a lot of the time rearranging her treasures in her room, or watched children's television in the sitting-room. My father would often be working on a crippled truck down the back garden and Clive, when he wasn't at school, would be pulverising the things in the billiard room with his friend Jeff. My mother could walk into town to see Mrs Smith or do some light shopping whenever she chose (the groceries – still called ‘the rations' – were delivered weekly by Gail's Uncle Jack from the shop in Hanmer, because we couldn't afford to settle his account, which was months, perhaps years, behind). But she didn't yearn to get out as she once had. She had the kitchen to herself and it was the room she wanted, for her own purposes. There she half listened to the radio, read the paper, learned her lines, pottered and, as she said, was never at a loose end.

Now that the stables were a kind of depot my father's drivers – ‘the men' – called at the back door for cups of tea on a tray, and Uncle Albert would drop in from his coal round and sit on the
Daily Mail
s. She even cooked on weekdays sometimes
and, although she almost never ate the results, she was perversely proud of them. One meat pie was inspired by eggcups that came free with the cornflakes. At last she could prop up the pastry on top. However, disappointingly the pie came out of the oven sunken as usual. It wasn't until we'd eaten our glutinous portions (and Vic was on his second helping) that she poked around in the dish and burst out laughing. Eureka! Those eggcups were plastic, silly her! They'd dissolved into the gravy! Hadn't we noticed, she asked incredulously, didn't it taste funny? This was one of her best roles, the travesty housewife, the dreamer in drag, and she revelled in it.

It was well known that I couldn't act, so I wasn't expected to understudy cooking and cleaning. Vic and I worked at our books and started sending out the haulage bills (
Please
) in return for pocket money. The notion that he'd find a suitable job receded when he failed the Civil Service examination for entry to the Executive Class because he couldn't do maths, although he did far too well in English and French. At his interview they told him to forget it and go to university. We were back in the same boat, then. The headmistress had told my father that while a teacher training college, a truly Christian one (she was devout), just might accept a moral cripple like me, universities would not, but I didn't believe her. Nor, amazingly, did the senior ladies on her staff.

Miss Macdonald the music teacher, who'd despaired of me years before, stopped my mother and me one day in the middle of the Bull Ring to tell us at the top of her voice that seventeen was the ideal age to have a healthy baby and get on with your life. The geography mistress, Miss Heslop, sent encouraging messages along the same lines. And Miss Roberts timetabled weekly Latin tutorials at her house, and advised me to put in for Scholarship level as well, to impress the selectors. These
women, who were all around the same age as the century, all unmarried, were not only unshocked, but somehow pleased with me, it was their younger colleagues of my parents' generation who were censorious. And the Davieses, the youngest, must – I realised much later – have been horribly mortified. Did people think them somehow responsible for our fall? This didn't occur to us at the time, for it was so far from the truth. They were certainly embarrassed and a bit distant, although Mrs Davies set essays and marked work for us both.

As it turned out, we learned a lot more in those five months than we would have at school. Until the summer (the baby, the exams) we were in hiding, safe from distractions, self-exiled from the mesmerising teenage game of looking and being looked at, wearing our unisex uniform for the duration. And in any case, school – at least the county kind that Whitchurch schools aspired to – was stoutly anti-intellectual. Clever was always too clever by half. So we had a honeymoon with books once we'd left, especially Vic, who'd been much more popular at school, a much better clown and time-waster than me. He swapped his own Latin textbook for
Bradley's Arnold
on Latin prose composition, the one Miss Roberts swore by, and came along to revise over tea and cake to keep me company. Latin was the subject that meant most to me, for the same reason as it had when I started at the high school, because it was lucid, learnable, dead to the world. Whatever else had changed, that stayed the same.

Bradley's Arnold
trusted to Caesar and Cicero, so most of the examples came from war and the law. On every page, cool constructions made order out of mess, cruelty and corruption: to translate ‘Caesar having taken the enemy massacred them' you'd say, not ‘
Captis hostibus eos Caesar trucidavit
', but ‘
Caesar captos hostes trucidavit
'. The main murderous verb, of course,
stayed the same. There was a grim wit at work in
Bradley's Arnold
. In Exercise LXVII, ‘those hanging back were punished
non verbis solum sed etiam verberibus
', not only with words but also a flogging, a bit of imperial wordplay that sounds like a sly threat to the public-school boys the book was originally designed for.

Miss Roberts herself had a steely quality. Her bearing was upright, and her hair was white and swept back stylishly from her bony, powdered forehead. Unlike the other spinster teachers, who tucked their hankies into their enormous bloomers and lost their tempers, she went in for irony and dressed formally in tailored suits. Orderly in herself, she always had trouble with discipline and conducted lessons with her jaw set, speaking very quietly through clenched teeth against a noisy hum of indifferent gossip. She regarded most of her pupils with patient contempt and they judged her stuck-up, for she had an unmistakable air of inhabiting in her head other times and other worlds that were a lot more spacious than post-war England, let alone Whitchurch.

One winter she appeared in an aggressively smart costume she'd obviously bought somewhere else, made of deep-purple tweed. After lunch in the staff room – and after tea at home – she would hungrily smoke a cigarette, inhaling deeply and flaring her nostrils. When she taught us modern European history in the fifth form she used a textbook illustrated with period cartoons and caricatures, and concentrated on the French Revolution; and for her, Latin meant stoic, Republican virtues, classical civilisation, progress, enlightenment. She was an agnostic, adored reason and savoured satire. Her tidiness was essentially of the mind and she wasn't irritated by my messy hair or slovenly handwriting, but praised my prose and showed me how to tighten my arguments.

She took the latest blot on my copybook coolly for granted, only insisted more discreetly than ever on mind over matter. I had always felt flattered by her approval and now I clung to her good opinion. She was still reserved – although she did unbend to the extent of passing on to me her copies of the
New Statesman
, which I read religiously and which introduced me to a style of socialism very different from Uncle Bill's proletarian party line. The
Statesman
had caricatures, too; in the back half there were mocking group portraits of intellectuals at play, in which Bridgid Brophy stood out because she was often the only woman. Miss Roberts seldom said what she thought directly, and when she learned that Vic and I were poring over visionary epiphanies out of Blake and Shelley, and that he was fascinated by Gerard Manley Hopkins, she drily loaned us Aldous Huxley's
Doors of Perception
(including
Heaven and Hell
) and
The Perennial Philosophy
. Her interest in us impressed my parents and helped make the prospect of university look real, for she lent authority to our amorphous conviction that you could live on your wits. But most of all, and most urgently, the grades she gave me for Latin prose helped me survive day by day, because they weren't just reassuring mock results, they meant that I had a brain, that I wasn't engrossed in breeding as Dr Clayton had foretold.

The time crept by all the same, the baby stretched and lunged but didn't turn over, and Crosshouses loomed. One day Grandma, visited and reanimated by her old anger, made a speech in which she denounced Vic, my father, Grandpa and all males everywhere including Clive, who'd grow up to be a hairy ape like the rest, throwbacks to a man (except for her Billy). Then she cried over me, remembering the horrors of childbirth. I refused to think about what would happen in any detail. Words like ‘delivery' and ‘confinement' (threats,
promises) hung around in my imagination, but stayed just words. In truth I was more fearful of the hospital than of the event itself and I had evolved a secret plan (secret even from Vic) to have the baby at home – simply not to tell anyone that I was in labour until the last minute, when they'd have to call 999 and improvise kettles and clean sheets, which seemed, judging from the movies, the only props you needed. Peasants – real peasants – gave birth between one shift in the vineyards or the paddy fields and the next, didn't they?

The date they'd worked out at the clinic was 29 May and punctually at dusk on the twenty-eighth, when I was pacing restlessly in the garden tugging at weeds, the first twinge came and soon there was no question. Contractions. True to my resolve, I said nothing all evening, we went to bed as usual and although I couldn't sleep, that wasn't odd – my sleeplessness had returned with the discomforts of pregnancy, and Vic and I would read to each other into the small hours. That night it was his turn. The book we were in the middle of was John Wain's novel
Hurry on Down
, which would be fixed for ever in our memories by the grotesque coincidence of its title and the event.

It was a variant on the angry-young-man theme – a young man evading his middle-class destiny, a portrait of the artist as gag writer, recounting the string of comic misadventures that led him to this low-life calling. The jokes were laboured (ho, ho), but I laughed, let out a groan at the same time and gave the game away. Perhaps I'd lost my nerve. In any case, matters were taken out of my hands, the ambulance was called and Vic came with me for the long, bumpy and increasingly painful ride along back roads to Crosshouses. When we got there, around 3.30, I stepped down into a puddle of my own making, in a state of panic. The Sister on duty, who seemed
instantly to know that I was late on purpose, briskly slapped me in the face two or three times, sent Vic off back to Whitchurch with the ambulance and hauled me into the Delivery Room.

There, time caught up with me. While the slap-happy Sister woke the doctor, I lay where she'd put me and watched the clock on the wall between my knees. Things were happening too fast. ‘Don't push!' she yelled (she wanted the doctor to be there) but I couldn't stop pushing, and although it felt as if I was being torn apart (I was) and the second hand loitered round the dial as slowly as it does for someone on speed, the adrenalin of my fright and my seventeen-year-old's abdominal muscles soon brought an end. The ruffled, sleepy Indian locum who arrived, pinning up her thick plait of hair, was too late, the Sister was already crooking my nerveless arm around a baby girl (girl!) wrapped in a blanket, her face streaked with blood (I remember thinking, whose? mine?) and whisking her away again. Then it was all over except for the stitches, which hurt like hell, so they gave me some gas and air, and left me alone until the real morning came. I watched the clock, fascinated. It was still only 4.15, the liminal pre-dawn hour, and I'd never felt so awake, as though I'd died and been born again knowing how to tell the time. Ages later an orderly pushed a mop into the room and, seeing me there, brought me a cup of hot, sweet tea under telepathic orders from my mother, and I was immediately, violently sick (never mind, she said, mopping it up) and fell asleep.

I came to consciousness on the Maternity Ward, where the Crosshouses day was beginning. The regime was rigid: it wasn't only that temperatures, blood pressure, bedpans and medication were done on the dot, there were endless other rules. Hair-washing was strictly forbidden, even if you were well enough
to walk to the bathroom; bathing was rationed; and make-up was frowned upon. Anything that might make you feel less wrecked and dirty was disallowed on principle, because Baby came first and by Crosshouses logic washing your hair was vanity, therefore traitorous to Maternity, morally unhygienic and dangerous. As a result, everyone had stiff, sweaty hair sticking out in tufts, some of it grey, for one of the offences several of these mothers had committed against order and decency was to go on having babies into their forties. By contrast the nurses, Sisters and Matron were as good as vestals, unmarried or at least childless, their baby worship was pure. They served the cause of motherhood selflessly, unlike the feckless women in their charge, who'd probably been thinking of sex, or failed to plan, and who didn't deserve babies.

So mothers were dirt and fathers hardly came into it at all, for visiting hours were brief and the hospital was nearly impossible to reach by bus. There were no public phones. The ward was the world. The babies were segregated in a nursery a couple of corridors away, where mothers weren't allowed, and where they were bottle-fed in the night and cried continuously, waking each other up. In the daytime they were handed out at four-hour intervals for breast-feeding, which had suddenly become the rule and created many more minor offences to do with having too much milk or not enough, or the wrong sort of nipples. When Matron made her rounds, I said I didn't want to breast-feed, but luckily she wasn't listening, she'd spotted down the ward an enormity, a woman with red nails. Marching smartly to the bedside she picked up the woman's hand and flung it back at her with disgust: ‘We don't feed our babies on nail varnish!' she announced, looking around her in triumph, and sailed through the swing doors.