The Child's Child (8 page)

I’d rehearsed no preamble and I plunged into the middle of things. “I’m pregnant. It’s yours, so please don’t ask.”

He was silenced as he might well have been.

“I thought for a while I’d have an abortion, but now—well, I can’t. I want this baby. If I got rid of it, I know I’d regret it all my life and I might never have another.”

A flush had crept up over his face and dyed it a dark red. He looked like a young boy caught in some misdemeanour. “I’m not going to ask you to do that, I wouldn’t do that,” he said. Then he said the one word, the one name. “Andrew.”

“I know. I thought of telling him and you a lie, saying it’s someone else’s or the result of sperm donation. But there are objections. He or she may look like you.” Looking at James’s handsome, sensitive face, pale again, I felt for the first time that I hoped it would. “I even hope she or he will. As for you, tell me if I’m wrong, it may be your only chance of being a father. And I’m Andrew’s sister, which makes the baby halfway to being his as well. You see I’ve thought of all these things.”

“I’ll get the coffee,” he said, and when he came back with it, I saw his hands were shaking. The tray was shuddering in his trembling hands. I took it from him, set it down, wished it had a hefty shot of brandy in it, that alcohol I’d made myself give up for the next seven months. “I don’t think Andrew will see it that way,” he said. “Another possible lie is that it
was
a sperm donation.”

That made me laugh, though I didn’t feel much like laughing. “Wouldn’t we have asked his permission first?”

Another silence fell. I drank the coffee, which was strong, and asked myself if it could be good for the baby. Apart from eschewing
alcohol, this was the first time I had such a thought, but it wouldn’t be the last.

“Do you want me to tell him?”

I said that I couldn’t leave it to him, but that we should both tell him together, all three of us together. This was a gross mistake on my part, but I didn’t see it at the time. James sat in silence, and for a while he closed his eyes, then made a gargantuan effort to change the subject, asked me about my thesis, which I told him I sent off two weeks before. He obviously was in shock.

“I’m sorry, Grace. I’m trying hard to get off the subject, but I just come back to you and me and Andrew. Would you mind leaving me alone now to think about it?”

So of course I left him alone and went outside and sat in the garden. It was a lovely day, and though I thought I ought to be unhappy and anxious, I was not, not a bit. The second flowering of the roses had come, and the hollyhocks and
Anemone japonica
were out. The sun was warm but not hot, and I lay back and lifted my face to the clear, still light. For some unknown but surely stupid reason, I felt sure things would be all right. Forget all ideas about an abortion. How could I have considered it? I was going to have a baby, and it was going to make me so happy.

That theory of mine about the baby’s being halfway to Andrew’s as well because I was his sister still seemed sound. Both James and I would be blamed at first, but Andrew would get over that. James would be the dad (
father
is becoming an obsolete word, as
mother
is), and Andrew would be his or her uncle. Nothing wrong with that. We would be a family. I smiled up at the sun, not seeing what a crass fool I was being or how I would caution or even reprimand any friend who said things like that to me of her own experience.

“N
O WORRIES
” is what people say today, and for lots it means “thank you.” I think it started in Australia, though I’m not at all sure about that. When I was a child, it used to be “no problem.” Anyway, having told James and not having been denounced or made to feel wicked (another word I use in its correct sense), I had no worries apart from a little, niggling fear that my thesis might not meet with wholehearted approval. Well, of course it wouldn’t, I would have to defend it, but no real worries.

That afternoon I was going to have a look at the Grand Union Canal and try to match it up with the descriptions in
The Child’s Child
. So after lunch I went out and got on the 46 bus, which took me to Maida Vale. As in Martin Greenwell’s book, the canal was coated with bright green weed, a kind of algae, I supposed. Why it was there or where it came from I didn’t know, but I’d seen it before and knew it might all be gone by tomorrow. Quite a lot of people were about, so I walked along the canal bank on the south side for a while, but past the second bridge and the pub that used to be called the Paddington Stop, I left it and walked up to the path that runs along here past the church dedicated to St. Mary Magdalene with the tall spire. All the other buildings here are modern—well, post–World War Two. Nothing of the old Victorian houses remains. There would have been terraces of them, a slum of the kind that clustered round great railway termini and in some places still do. Greenwell’s description is probably sound, a grim area of tiny, overcrowded houses, and one would say the bombs did good service but for the loss of human life. St. Mary Magdalene was built in the shape of an isosceles triangle with one end sharply pointed and was probably made that way to fit in among the streets of houses. It is of red brick, red-tiled with dark stained-glass windows.

I supposed the canal would be straight, but it soon started to curve like a river and had a beauty of its own. I was back on the
towpath now, along with the cyclists who used the path and politely thanked me for moving back against the walls of warehouses to let them pass. On the opposite bank were pagoda-like blocks of flats, whose common garden, dense with shrubs and trees, stretched down to the water and reminded me of that bit in
Hamlet
about a willow “that shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream.” It was all a surprise to me that everything was so rustic and charming. Then came Victorian, four-storey houses whose rear walls were actually in the water, and I wondered if they ever flooded. Then I remembered being told that the water level in the canal barely changes no matter how much rain falls. Those houses must have been there when Greenwell has John Goodwin drown, his death perhaps based on a real drowning he had heard about.

In places the water’s surface was covered with weeds. The geese and coots glided through them, apparently oblivious of the green coating. Their bright colour showed up the empty bottles that bobbed up and down and the drifting plastic bags. Then it was all gone; I reached a stretch of clear, weed-free water, and on the other side was the back of a black-painted pub called the Grand Union, with a garden full of topiary box trees, spherical and the size of footballs. In the distance were the two gasometers that marked the edge of the great cemetery, as thick with dark evergreens as a forest. I could climb the stairs now onto a blue-painted bridge and catch a bus in the Harrow Road, but I decided instead to walk back the way I had come, and I turned sharply, nearly getting knocked down by a cyclist.

I stood still, leaning against the wall for a minute or two after this, the cyclist having brushed against me, actually touching my hand and making my arm swing. I thought of what might have happened and it frightened me. If I’d fallen, for instance, if I’d crashed face-downwards—womb-downwards. I soon recovered, but I didn’t stop thinking about the baby, protecting the baby. That was when all doubt went and I knew how much I wanted
the baby and how absurd it was for me ever to think I could destroy it.

If Teds Café were still here, I would have gone in and asked for a cup of tea. But it was long gone, and where it was there ran a long brick wall with buddleia branches and long, purple flowers hanging from its top. Ted would long have been dead, and Reenie too, I expect. Here, on a day when no green weed was masking the water, the man who was based on James’s great-uncle died, struck on the forehead by a heavy wooden oar. Did that really happen, as it does in the book? Now that I was here, at the scene of the crime, I shuddered at the thought of it, the pain and the fear of death. Although his being pushed in can never have appeared as a joke to John, he may have thought Bertie saw it as a joke until suddenly it changed from a gross comedy sketch to intentional death-dealing, and the death dealt by someone he loved with all his heart. The thought of it upset me, and I realised I was far more easily upset than I used to be if I could be distressed to this extent by an incident in a book. I was pregnant, that was the reason, and I said to myself, It’s fiction, it didn’t really happen.

The beautiful day was over. The sun had clouded over and I realised I was alone down there, a notorious place where not long ago a gang of boys murdered a woman by throwing her into the canal and leaving her to drown. Normally, I wouldn’t be in the least afraid. It was daylight, it was still just about summer, I was only a few yards from the Harrow Road, but I was afraid. I thought of the child I was carrying, a child I wanted to be fit and healthy, safely carried to full term, and I walked “inland” over the green slopes to Westbourne Green.

W
AS IT
pregnancy which was making me into a creature not only of fear but also of moods? I woke in the night; it was only one in the morning and I had woken to an appalled sense of what I had
done. Was James even now telling Andrew? I had a feeling, aghast and sick (though my morning sickness was a thing of the past), that James wasn’t the kind of person who puts off the evil day. He speaks out when he has to and God knew he had to now. I got up and walked down the passage until I was close to the door of their bedroom, expecting to see the glow of lights round the door. But all was in darkness, there was no sound, and I decided they must both be in there, sleeping side by side. Or in each other’s arms, as novelists say, though actually doing this is uncomfortable. At least, I couldn’t hear angry voices.

Time was passing and I had told no one but James. But I had told the abortion people that I’d changed my mind and kept my first appointment at the hospital. All appeared to be well, very well, and I felt extremely well. Except that I was tired. The explanation was simple. I couldn’t sleep. I woke up worrying about Andrew, and now that whole thing had mounted up to huge proportions. I know that if I didn’t tell him soon, he would be able to see for himself. My jeans were so tight I’d had to give up wearing them, and my skirt waistbands wouldn’t do up.

Another dilemma was telling Fay. Should I do it before the inevitable showdown with Andrew or wait until after? The difficulty was that I didn’t know how bad the confrontation would be or even if it would be bad at all. Fay wasn’t the kind of mother to take offence at apparently being excluded from her children’s business, but this could be different. Being unmarried is no longer an issue and hasn’t been for years, but being unfaithful to one’s brother with his lover is and always will be.

It was Saturday, so Fay would be at home. Instead of phoning to say I was coming, I walked across the few streets to where she lives. It was a dull, miserable sort of day, grey, dry, and still, and I realised how many English days were like this. I also realised, after I’d rung Fay’s doorbell, that it was only seven fifteen in the morning. Malcolm opened the door in his dressing gown, a mug
of tea in his hand. He asked the inevitable question when someone does something out of the ordinary.

“Is everything all right?”

I told him it wasn’t, not really, but no one was dead or injured or ill. He said that that was all right then and if it was my mother I wanted to confide in, she was still in bed but awake and would I take her tea up with me. So I found myself carrying two cups of tea up on a tray.

“Look at your face,” she said when she saw me. “As miserable as sin, as my mother used to say, though I’d have thought sin was more happy and triumphant than miserable. If you’ve come to tell me you’re pregnant, I spotted that weeks ago.”

I hadn’t realised how prominent my stomach had become, doubtless because I pulled it in every time I stood in front of the mirror. “It’s not just that,” I said. “It’s James’s.”

“Who’s James?”

“Andrew’s James.”

“Oh, Gracie.” She only called me Gracie when I’d surprised her or even upset her. So I sat on the bed, took a great swig of my tea, and told her all about it, ending with “And I’m keeping it.”

“Does Andrew know?”

“He may do by now.”

In the past few days I had become a terrible coward, staying awake half the night in case my brother hated me, running to Mummy with my troubles, looking ahead to a friendless future, my family all turned against me. “I know it’s stupid, but I’m afraid to go back.”

“In case you’re counting on my going with you, I’m afraid it’s no. I’m not getting involved in this, Grace. Malcolm and I are going out to lunch, and before that I’ve some very complicated case histories to read through. Give me a call when you’ve had your confrontation—if you do—and then we’ll—well, I don’t know what we’ll do, but no one’s going to kill anyone or even smack them.”

“I hope you’re right.”

Of course I put it off for a few hours more, thinking that maybe they would go out and I wouldn’t be able to do it. I started the walk home, thinking that no pregnant woman in Victorian times could have used the phrase I’d used, “I’m keeping it.” She had no choice. I thought about this for a while until I was overcome by an awful feeling of foreboding as I approached our house but before it came in sight. I didn’t know what I expected, but maybe—I was now in some realm of fantasy—Andrew and an army of loyal friends standing in the front garden with the gagged-and-bound James, all of them armed and ranked in a row waiting to advance with a war cry as soon as I appeared. When I got there, the front garden was empty and all that had changed was that a window in what was their bedroom was half-open, the upper sash lowered a few inches.

Trollope says somewhere that any piece of unpleasant news is best imparted by letter. Well, he says something like that. This was all very well in his day, the day of all those poor girls disgraced by having babies without getting married first. Imagine telling your brother by e-mail or text that you’re going to have his lover’s baby. Or even on the phone. No, it had to be a confrontation and it had to be today. I knew myself so I knew it had to be done on an impulse. I had to be doing something else, maybe starting on a second read of
The Child’s Child,
and suddenly in the midst of it, jump up, run across the hall, and burst in on them. With my news, my news that it was not too far-fetched to say could ruin my brother’s life.