Once Upon A Time in the West . . . Country (13 page)

‘We need to appoint a secretary,’ said Rose.

‘Well, are you willing to do it?’ I asked.

There was sensible logic behind this offer. Rose had thought that we needed a secretary and therefore Rose should
be
the secretary. It was borrowed from the sensible logic of children – a kind of ‘he who smelt it, dealt it’ approach.

The remaining committee looked at Rose. She raised her eyebrows.

‘Well, I suppose I
could
do it,’ she said.

‘Excellent,’ I said, getting into the swing of things. ‘You can be secretary then.’

It felt like I was a team captain and we were picking sides in the school playground.

‘What about a vice-chairman?’ asked Brenda.

‘Good idea,’ I said, ‘can you do it?’

‘Well, I suppose I could,’ said Brenda.

I was on a roll. Why had I not been in government before? I was a natural.

‘Right, I think that’s all the positions filled,’ I announced. ‘Shall we make a date for a proper meeting next week?’

‘Yes, and I’ll write an agenda for it,’ said Rose.

‘Good.’

‘And I’ll prepare a treasurer’s report,’ said David.

‘Splendid. Everyone all right for Thursday night at 6.30 p.m.?’

Nods followed. No London-style consulting of agendas, or negotiation on the time slot, so that it could be ‘squeezed in’ between other meetings. Here in Britain’s rural countryside we all seemed to be frighteningly available.

‘Well done, everyone,’ I said, ‘I look forward to Thursday night.’

‘We’re a great team,’ said Rose.

We were indeed. OK, we hadn’t done anything yet, but that is always the high point for any government or organisation. This was our ‘Obama moment’. We were popular for two reasons. We were different to what had gone before, and we hadn’t done anything yet.

It would be all downhill from here.

6

The R Word

The seventh of August was another scorching day. It was the kind of heat you expect when you alight from a plane in a far-off, exotic location; the kind of heat that hits you, as you walk onto the aircraft steps and cannot help but exclaim, ‘Wow!’ – such is the contrast to the dreary, cloudy mediocrity that you’d just left behind. Now we had it all on our doorstep. No need to fly anywhere. Devon was a holiday paradise with few shortcomings.

Everything seemed right with the world. OK, snippets of the global news accidentally reached my ears via the odd radio dotted around the place, so I knew that all was not well everywhere. However, Devon remained blissfully devoid of drones, landmines, terrorists, freedom fighters, corrupt dictators, human rights abusers, food shortages, contaminated water, power shortages, and disease.

‘I am,’ I said to myself, ‘a lucky, lucky bastard.’

Fran was not so lucky this morning, though, complaining of feeling unwell. We had recently registered with the doctor in the neighbouring village, so I called up and made an almost instantaneous appointment – something that in London might have taken a few days to achieve, following a conversation not unlike this:

‘I’d like to make an appointment with the doctor, as I’m not feeling very well.’

‘The first appointment I have is in a week’s time, at four p.m. on Thursday.’

‘But I might be better by then. Or dead.’

‘In which case, make sure you have someone cancel the appointment for you.’

I shouldn’t moan. It’s incredible that we even have a National Health Service. I grew up taking it for granted. It had been all I’d known and it seemed a sensible way to do things. If you felt unwell, you went to see someone and they helped you. They didn’t ask you for money or demand to see insurance paperwork. It seemed normal and remarkably civilised. It was only after reaching the age when I started to travel that I learned this was not necessarily the natural order of things. There were places in the world where doctors would leave their citizens in all kinds of discomfort until they were sure they could perform the operation that they deemed most important – the location and removal of money from their patients’ bank accounts.

‘I am,’ I said to myself, in the comfortable, clean environment of the surgery waiting room, ‘a lucky, lucky bastard.’

A copy of
Devon Life
and a host of other kindly magazines stared up at me from the coffee table, but I was content simply to sit and wait, occasionally eyeing other patients and having an inward guess at the reason for their visit. Fran had been gone less than five minutes, when she appeared in the corridor.

‘Tony, you’d better come,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Just come.’

Fran turned and headed back into Room 4. I followed her down the short corridor, my mind beginning to fill with fears. Was this going to be the announcement of some earth-shattering news? A terminal illness? An amputation?

I entered the room and was immediately greeted by a pleasant-looking lady doctor of about Fran’s age. She was smiling. Good. That was comforting. Doctors don’t smile when they announce terminal illnesses. It’s not something they learn in their formal training, but it’s a little thing they pick up along the way.

‘Congratulations,’ the doctor said, ‘Fran is pregnant. You’re going to be a father.’

Blimey.

So that’s it? Pregnant.

Blimey.

OK, I’ll be honest. This had been at the back of my mind. Fran and I had stopped using contraception a few months previously, and in that sense we had been ‘planning’ to start a family. However, we hadn’t bothered to work out when Fran would be at her most fertile, and I hadn’t cut down on hot baths, or done anything to facilitate the production of top-quality sperm. All we’d done was halted the deliberate prevention of pregnancy. In truth, probably neither of us was quite ready for this news. Especially me. I was definitely in shock.

‘I think I need to sit down,’ I said, rather like a feeble geriatric.

I hugged Fran, and held her hand as the doctor talked us through what happened next. I didn’t listen properly. For the moment, I felt I knew enough. Fran would get tubby, and then a baby would pop out roughly nine months from now. I’d get to grips with the technical side at a later date. My mind was currently preoccupied with what we’d be losing rather than gaining.

Freedom.

I felt a little faint. Sick even. Probably morning sickness. Here I was, just past fifty, finally about to embark on doing what almost every single one of my contemporaries had nearly completed – raising a family. Why these feelings of trepidation? Why not joy? That was what you were
supposed
to feel, weren’t you?

‘You must be thrilled!’ said the doctor.

‘Oh, I am,’ I said, failing to display any sign of such an emotion. ‘We’re both thrilled.’

Fran smiled, a twinkle in her eye. I could tell that she wasn’t as afraid as I was. I’d spent much of my life avoiding it, but now there was no escaping it. The R word.

Responsibility.

This was the word that was written on the bullets that would soon emerge from the barrel of the shotgun down which I was now staring. The doctor was saying something about midwives and appointments, but I could barely hear her above the deafening sound of the R word.

Responsibility.

Even though I was clearly grown up, I’d never been
a
grown-up. OK, I was no longer what most people consider to be a young man. But that’s not the point. I felt like one, and I lived like one. I’d never had a ‘proper job’. Most mornings I got up when my body was ready, and consequently, on those rare occasions when the alarm needed to go on, I always needed to remind myself how to set it. If I wanted to go somewhere, most of the time I just went there. Adventure was not off-limits. Risks (I preferred calculated ones) could be taken.

I was routine-free, often taking a kind of perverse delight in not knowing when and where the next paid job would materialise. I owned stuff, but I was prepared to lose it. I jumped in the air with the expectation that I would land on my feet, and if I landed on my arse, then I accepted the helping hand that always seemed to be offered. I didn’t want for much, and what I had, I liked. The only thing that was missing in life was . . . was . . . was, well, responsibility.

Perhaps I’d yearned for it without knowing. Maybe the very thing that scared me now was what I actually
needed
. The reality was that I had sown my seeds, and therefore roots were bound to grow. Maybe this was just supposed to happen and that up until now, for reasons that an expensive psychoanalyst might be able to figure out, I’d simply spent my life avoiding it? Or could it simply be that we all move at different speeds, and that I just happened to be ready twenty years later than most people, that’s all?

Either way, on the seventh of August in the thirteenth year of this millennium, I became a grown-up.

As we left the surgery I looked down the corridor. On the far wall there was one of those eye-test charts with letters arranged in varying sizes. I could only see one letter.

R.

***

‘How are you feeling?’ I said to Fran, as I drove her to her first hospital appointment, a fortnight after the revelation of the ‘thrilling’ news.

‘Fine. Just fine.’

Fran appeared to be having a relatively easy time of it. Apart from those initial feelings of discomfort that had prompted the first doctor’s appointment, she was now only experiencing tiredness. No throwing-up in the mornings. Not bad, given the enormous physiological changes taking place in her body. To me, it felt like Fran was living a science-fiction story similar to that in the movie
Alien
. She had another body growing inside hers. Quite extraordinary, except for the fact that it was so commonplace. And yet it felt so weird – another body growing inside hers . . .

Maybe I would have been less incredulous if I’d known more about the biology. My extensive ignorance on this subject (which I made a good fist of concealing from Fran) was entirely my own fault. In the past, whenever the subject of childbirth had arisen, I had zoned out. Words like labour, contractions, placenta, Caesarean and umbilical cord had all been signals for me to extricate myself from a conversation where I had neither any interest, nor anything meaningful to contribute.

There was an irony here, though. For all the time I’d spent pursuing female bodies over the years, I’d been comprehensively uninformed when it came to what was actually contained within them. Having been to a boys’ grammar school, where sex education had been non-existent, I’d been reduced to garnering any information regarding the workings of the female body through playground banter and occasional access to pornographic magazines. The vagina, according to teenage lads, had been created as a play area – a source of potential pleasure, not unlike a football pitch or table-tennis table (although ideally hosting very different activities). The pivotal role it had played in us boys actually
being there
in the first place, didn’t seem to concern us. We were, as Mr Mainwaring might have accurately described us, stupid boys.

However, it was an embarrassment that over the years my knowledge had not really advanced measurably. Yes, I knew (or thought I knew) what bits of a woman to touch in order to elicit the pleasure that I hoped would then enable my sexual needs to be sated. But I would never have picked the female body as my specialist subject on
Celebrity Mastermind
.
1

‘It’s an odd word “midwife”, isn’t it?’ I said to Fran, as we pulled into the hospital car park. ‘Do you know what it means?’

‘Not really. Doesn’t the “mid” stand for “middle” because the midwife is a conduit between the child and mother?’

‘Sounds logical. But why
wife
? That would mean that she’s halfway to being your wife.’

This might have been a dangerous conversational area to negotiate had Fran not been so level-headed. I’d never asked Fran to marry me, and I had no intention of so doing, even though we were about to be bound together in the most binding of ways. However, this was not a bone of contention, and we’d discussed the matter and found ourselves to be in agreement.