Love Fifteen (17 page)

Half Hazel's working life was spent as a Civil Defence planespotter and firefighter, the other in the elementary school in Bedminster. The sun of her optimism shone on children who usually lived in the shadow of the redbrick tobacco factory where their parents mass-produced the cigarettes so vital to the war effort. In her radiance they blossomed for awhile and a few, she believed, with a helping hand from her, would bloom well into adulthood, avoiding the destiny designed for them by their betters.

Sessions with Theo came between, whenever time could be stolen.

Just as Theo was edging away from Inky and Jake, she was losing sight of Geoff. Before the war, they'd become lovers more from conviction than ecstasy. Ideas of shared love had come down to them from the last century, from utopian puritans, Mormons and other radical communes in the States. Polygamy was only rarely on their agenda but free love as an ultimate ideal was as fervently believed in as the withering away of the proletariat. She'd been the more sensual partner in their hesitant and obligatory pre-marital affair. Now able to compare him with Theo, she thought Geoff more dutiful than ecstatic. As war approached, they were wed in a register office because, of course, Geoff would be joining up to fight Fascism and this civil contract would ensure a married allowance to support her while he was away. Thus, for the best of reasons, they avoided having to affront the bourgeoisie by anything as brazen as living in sin, a step she now saw he'd been reluctant to take. His presence, like his absence, had always been felt more as teacher than husband. His long, regular letters seldom mentioned love. They were empirical diaries implying (to a sensitive reader, though not to the military censors) how unjustly Society worked, the Empire supported across the globe by the native poor. She was included in his wide embrace, with the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The usual SWALKs and eandearments of correspondent lovers and pen-friends would have embarrassed him by, as he saw it, insulting
her
. Throughout their courtship, sitting together through many lectures on contraception as a social imperative, she'd never raised it as an issue between
them
. Malthus, Bradlaugh and Stopes could be discussed without much feeling of shyness but their acts of love were far from earth-moving. Hazel had known better screws with other more carnal less committed Utopians. With Geoff, she'd used no method, persuading him they should start a family well before he went to war. When nothing happened, she had to wonder about his infertility. Both were examined at a special clinic, to be told the biological trouble lay with her. Neither ever spoke of this again. He saw that she felt her womanhood rebuked but his parental urge was never strong and he was covertly relieved. His educational ideals were mostly to do with adults. Anyway he felt that to be concerned about fallopian tubes and hormones was self-centred and trivial when the world was about to tear itself apart. She raised the matter of adoption but was persuaded it was best to wait till afterwards, as they surely wouldn't want a child to grow up in his absence, a stranger to his own father. As Geoff's physical presence faded, replaced by Theo's, the end of the war now promised for her not bluebirds over the cliffs of Dover, apple-blossom time, the lights going on again, but more soberly the advent of the brotherhood of mankind, her husband's homecoming and a lifetime of lies. And, sooner rather than later, Theo had to be told that, though yes of course marriage
was o
nly legalised prostitution, she was still Geoff's wife and they'd both have enough to do helping to build the new world without learning to share their domestic life with a Sixth Former. In due course they'd come clean about their affair but for the time being Theo should best concentrate on his own life.

Scanning the sky in vain for Heinkels in her look-out post or dozing while her class traced the map of Canada, her mind fed on recent disclosures at Rosemount. She allowed a full week to pass before making her proposal one sunny afternoon in June. Rose had been home all day so Theo had to derive what fun he could from Hazel's tutorial on The Peasants' Revolt. Fred had picked Kay up from school and dropped a few of her friends at various points “‘on their way home”, as he called it, though in fact making detours as far afield as their old district, where they saw the whores now sat on the front garden wall of Villa Borghese for the white Yanks who'd replaced the negroes in the orphanage. Over tea, Fred raised the question again of the logistics of Kay's delivery. He was as obsessed with it as someone planning a bank robbery. Obviously she must be taken conveniently ill before her state became too protuberant to be hidden from their posh new neighbours, then go for the final stretch to his broader-minded London relatives before coming back at the last to have the baby secretly delivered in Rosemount by Harriet the midwife. After that, said Rose, she and Kay would bring the baby up, here in Henleaze, perhaps passed off as Rose-and-Fred's. Their new neighbours were nothing like as nosy as the old ones at Villa Borghese and preferred to keep themselves to themselves. Sometimes Rose pined for the old companionship they'd known there, the chats over the garden wall and in the queue for the Co-op. But this lack of interest was now a blessing.

Kay sat with eyes closed and lips pursed. Hazel saw this as her chance to put her case. She was nearing thirty, childless and barren. With a baby to care for, Kay couldn't take up her Exhibition. The obvious solution was for Hazel to adopt it/him/her/even them. Her class study of Canada had kept the Dionne quintuplets in her mind. Great-aunt Hattie had concealed enough unwanted births to know the ropes. No-one need ever find out.

“D'you mean hand over the baby to you?” Kay said.

“You could see it again, of course, any time. But a clean break would be best. I understand what often happens is the mother's happy to let it go till it appears, when she grows too fond and can't bear to part with it.”

“But,” Fred said, a male floundering in murky feminine waters, “will your husband agree?”

“I'm sure. When I found out I couldn't have my own, we did discuss adoption. Of course I must write and put it to him but why on earth wouldn't he?”

Kay was staring at her hands on the damask tablecloth. Hazel took them in hers.

“Kay, love, you owe it to your sex – and your class – to take up this opportunity to go to Oxford.”

“I don't know what class has got to do with it,” Rose said, taking umbrage, “plenty of middle-class people go to college.”

“Not
lower
middle class, Mrs. Light,” Hazel insisted, “and even fewer girls. You mustn't let this pass. It's a blow for equality.”

“It makes sense, my dear,” Fred said, sitting beside his daughter, embracing her with one arm.” Here you are in a club you never wanted to join, about to miss your entry to a life among the powers-that-be. And here's Hazel wants to be a mother and can't – um –”

“Conceive,” said Theo.

“Though not for want of trying,” Hazel added and Theo blushed and they avoided each other's gaze.

“‘But hasn't your husband been abroad for ages ?”' asked Kay.

“‘There was time before he went,”' said Hazel.

“My Lord, girl, it's heaven-sent!” Fred said in conclusion.

Next time he and Hazel were alone, Theo wanted to know how this outcome would affect their future. Given that Kay and Geoff agreed, in seven months their families would be drawn even closer. As well as their intended ménage à trois – another new phrase she'd given him – she'd be mothering his niece or nephew, and as uncle and part-time father he'd have a hand in the baby's upbringing. He offered help in writing the letter to Geoff, to introduce himself as Hazel's surrogate lover and outline their future domestic arrangements. But she told him to stop talking, sit still and listen to her for a minute.

The old plan wouldn't do any more. Surely he could see that?

No, he couldn't see at all. The kid's parentage was neither here nor there but, if she thought it mattered, there was no need to tell Geoff the mother's name. He himself thought all that was okay and quite like the new Preston Sturges comedy where Betty Hutton's pregnant by an unknown G.I. Watching it one afternoon at the Whiteladies', the similarity struck them both.

Hazel repeated an old truism: films weren't like real life. And Theo gave his old reply: high time they were.

But they aren't, she insisted. He was wrong anyway: the child's parentage mattered a great deal. Given that Geoff agreed, the adoption carried through, the child becoming theirs, it was too much to expect him also to share his wife with the baby's uncle. The far more dangerous possibility was that Kay would want to keep the baby once she saw it.

Theo found all this possessiveness beyond him. His this, her that, their something else. Aren't we all members of the human race? Didn't they believe in common ownership, an end to marriage, family and property? Hadn't she'd explained to him that's what the war was all about? A new start, building a better world from the wreckage of the old, like the last shot of
‘San Francisco
' with Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy marching forward while Jeanette MacDonald and everyone else sang their balls off about Golden Gates? He and Inky had done that bit many a time in Blaize Castle Woods once they'd got bored with duelling like Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone in Sherwood Forest.

He now grasped for the first time how much he stood to lose. He'd agreed to share her with Geoff and in return had never promised to be hers alone. Or asked that she be his. Such an arrangement would be against all their beliefs. As well as which, put the case, far-fetched as it may be, that the sublime Margo Carpenter offered herself one day, without reservation, perhaps on the promise of a starring role in one of his films,. Well, he could hardly be expected to turn her down, could he, just because he was involved with Hazel and Geoff? He knew Margo was almost as remote a planetary body as that old galaxy of starlets and ravaged Miss Europes that used to decorate his bedroom wall. She was as cool as ever when their buses coincided, still more beautiful and unattainable in her Observer Corps uniform, and Hazel was thus far his only lover. So, if her adopting Kay's baby meant they had to separate, this plan was totally duff. If life really had been a film, he'd have re-shot the whole sequence, editing out that sub-plot. Give up Hazel for the sake of some midget Churchill that all babies resembled? Not Pygmalion likely, as Fred would have said. His tears and entreaties moved her so much that this first episode ended in her reassuring him in bed. Next time they met, he had at least accepted the possibility and by degrees came round altogether. At that point, she confessed she'd already written to her husband and he'd replied agreeing in principle, though felt they should defer any action till war was over and he was home. She now had to hurry him pronto into saying yes. Without naming her, she told Kay's story, showing how urgent the expectant girl's predicament was and how vital to the cause of progress that she should be free to take up the offered place in the enemy camp at Somerville College.

The social argument bore fruit where the personal one had fallen on stony ground. Geoff consented. Soon after this news, Fred drove mother, Kay and Hazel, with Theo to keep him company to Aunt Harriet's house. Father and son waited outside in the Wolseley while urchins milled about examining the bodywork. Fred called to them to clear off and finally climbed out, threatened them to call a constable and stayed on guard, polishing the chromium wings above the bonnet with a damp shammy. The kids scattered, jeering and calling out a series of vowels that Theo noted were undivided by consonants but full of archaic vocatives.

Hazel described for him later how uncles Stan and George were again sent to the back yard for a smoke while Tilda, Harriet, Rose, Kay and Hazel drank tea poured by Gwen and Dora from their usual dark corner under the Great War portraits. Harriet, the aged matriarch and midwife, first gave a homily on modern morals and how in her day this would have meant a spell in the poorhouse for Kay and – for the baby – a life of orphanages like the ones opposite Villa Borghese. Rose was blamed for setting a bad example with her Vinces and Canadians.

“But Cousin Harry was family,” she insisted, close to tears.

Harriet shrugged and Tilda shook her head while the daughters sat with folded arms and pursed lips.

“Like those hags round the guillotine in
The Scarlet Pimpernel
,” Theo put in as Kay described the scene.

This done, Harriet had explained procedures. As Kay refused to come there, the delivery would be at Rosemount. One of Fred's medical brethren had agreed to provide a certificate. Hazel would take the child home from there and in a few days Kay would recover and see out the last of her time in Sixth Form before going up to Oxford for the Michaelmas term, whatever that was. The former Theo (and Inky) had seen universities as places where swots studied unborn babies. Or where toffs sneered at Yanks before being beaten by them in some race that was mostly run by bods of the sort Sergeant drilled on the playground. But now he knew how much more serious it was: a class conspiracy where Kay and other girls like her were going to form a sort of Fifth Column in the class war but with any luck do it a hellish sight better than Eric Portman did in converting Canada to Nazism in
‘49th Parallel
'.

For Kay's sake, Hazel did all she could to help dispel the gloomy air that hung about Harriet's murky living-room. Whenever the expectant girl seemed daunted by the daughters of death, Hazel made faces, smiled or rolled her eyes. Once the urgent business was done, Gwen read the leaves in their cups. The auguries were all of ships coming home, sudden fortunes and the return of long-lost family members. When Kay was promised a meeting with a tall dark stranger from a faraway land, she gripped Hazel's hand tighter and closed her eyes, an odd gesture Hazel only later understood.