The Facts of Life (19 page)

Listening to gossip in the commissariat later, Edward heard how her broken wrist was no childhood accident but the brutal work of her first husband. She never returned the handkerchief and he pictured her maid puzzling over its mysterious initial. He began to watch out for her, half-consciously waiting for other unguarded moments when he might catch another glimpse of this sincerer incarnation. He sensed that, like him, she was distorting herself to make a living, swept along by a process beyond her control. In a moment of rash naïveté, he began to convey this to Sally. Shame cut short his explanation however, leaving her merely to laugh at him, ‘And you accuse
me
of being star-struck!’

One night he worked late with the sound editor in the dubbing lab until long after the hour when the studios were usually deserted. Leaving his colleague to finish splicing the sequences they had edited, Edward walked to call the lift. Someone had left its downstairs door open, however, so when he pressed the button a distant bell rang to summon the night porter. Before the porter clanged the door shut and sent the lift motor back into trundling motion, Edward heard voices coming from an office further along the dingy corridor. He heard Jerry Liebermann’s unmistakable drawl then, after the sound of breaking glass, Myra Toye, raising her voice to something near a yell and using vowels and colourful epithets that were a far cry from her ladylike screen image.

‘Go suck it yourself!’ she shouted. ‘Or find yourself some little slut from the chorus.’

‘At least they’re not stuck-up,’ Jerry Liebermann yelled back.

The office door opened, suddenly increasing the argument’s volume and clarity. Deeply embarrassed, Edward hunched around to face the lift door.

‘Come on,’ he muttered, frantic to be out of the way as Myra put in her parting shot, ‘They’re not fussy about size either.’

The office door slammed just as the lift arrived. Thanking his stars, Edward darted in and pressed G. Footsteps patted along the landing linoleum.

‘Hold the door. Hold the door,’ she called out.

Edward held the door back with his arm and Myra Toye, adored by millions, ran in past him. She was in her stockinged feet, clutching her high heels. Her dress was disarranged and entirely unzipped at the back. The celebrated blonde hair was askew and her mascara had run.

‘Thanks, Teddy,’ she said, stooping to pull on her shoes as he released the door. She tidied her hair, using the lift’s control panel as a mirror. ‘You heard, didn’t you?’ she asked, rubbing her eyes and cheeks clean with a handkerchief which she then stuffed into her thin gold slip of a bag.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t very well help it.’

Along with a trace of alcohol, she had brought an extraordinarily rank smell of sex into the lift’s confining space. Edward pictured her frail body crushed against a desk by Jerry Liebermann’s swarthy bulk, thought of the cigar still burning in Jerry’s lips as he pounded away. He found this unpleasantly exciting.

‘Everybody knows, don’t they?’ she asked.

‘Miss Toye, I –’

‘Don’t they?’ She brought an edge of steel back to her voice. Edward nodded. She sighed.

‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘I’m through with him. I’m going to marry again. Someone better. Do you know Julius?’

‘No,’ Edward said. ‘I don’t, actually.’

‘Julius is sweet,’ she said. ‘Really sweet. I want a church wedding and a nice house with a garden and I’m going to have babies. I want babies and fuck the figure.’ The lift reached the ground floor with a jolt. The door opened and Edward reached to slide back the outer one but she held on to Edward’s sleeve, gently detaining him. ‘Is yours born yet?’ she asked.

‘Mine?’ he blurted. ‘Er. No Sally isn’t due for another month.’

‘You’re a lucky boy, though,’ she said.

She was playing the older woman, a role she knew to perfection.

‘I … I know,’ he said.

She stroked the side of his face then, quite suddenly, cupped his chin in her slightly pudgy, childish hand and kissed him, lips apart. He felt the brief touch of her teeth against his. He flailed his hand to swing back the outer door, anxious lest they be borne upstairs to the wrath of Jerry Liebermann. The clatter of the gate startled her and she pulled back.

‘Sorry,’ she said. She tried to laugh. ‘Sorry.’ She hurried past him into the shabby-grand foyer that led to the commissariat and out to the car park.

‘Wait,’ he said.

‘What?’ She paused, suddenly nervous.

‘Your dress.’ He reached out and pulled up the zipper on the back of her dress so that the sheath of black velvet once more hugged her contours as the designer had intended.

‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘Thanks, Teddy.’ She smiled sweetly and walked on down the corridor, calling a greeting through the porter’s cubbyhole as she went. Edward waited, so that the night porter would not think they were together and wondered why she bothered to dress up in such finery when everyone knew that she only had a short drive home to a studio bungalow.

He had worked so late he had intended to sleep in the studio trailer he sometimes used, but the encounter had unnerved him and filled him with a kind of panic to be back in bed beside Sally.

Driving through the dark, he fancied, time and again, that the car was filled with the cat-house smell that had clung about him in the left. He wound down the window until he felt chilled, then closed it – only to have the scent creep back. Finally, aware that his behaviour was entirely irrational, he stopped the car and darted into a strangely busy roadside convenience on the outskirts of Colchester to scrub at his hands and face until they smelled only of pink municipal soap, blameless as an alderman’s chain.

What her mother maddeningly referred to as Pop-the-Cork Time was upon Sally sooner than expected.

The day continued the pattern of that summer, being hot, with no breath of wind from the fens to stir the pollen-laden air that hung around The Roundel like a bad mood.

Edward was at home, thrashing out a score for a period drama starring Myra Toye’s principal rival. The film was about an adulterous duchess who drove her wretchedly well-intentioned husband to suicide and her lover to a violent death before making a spectacular repentance and dying, an exemplary nurse, in a fever hospital she had set up in the Belgian Congo. He had reached the Congolese section and the house was filled with his noisy experimentation with various ethnic percussion instruments a studio researcher had tracked down for him. This, and his thuds in the deeper range of the piano, had driven Sally outside.

They had spent some of his new earnings on a pair of reclining wooden chairs, delivered from Heals the previous week. She dragged one down to the stream – which the lack of rain had reduced to a lethargic trickle – and made herself a kind of bower half in, half out of the willow tree’s shade. Ensconced there with cushions and a jug of lemonade, she soon gave up her attempt to begin a new Elizabeth Taylor novel. Hoisting up the skirt of her maternity dress to let her legs brown, she thrust her dark glasses back on the bridge of her nose and settled back to do nothing. Edward’s noises came to her across the grass now and then, as did the occasional cries of birds and small, animal splashing on the water’s edge. Then she dozed off. In the two hours or so she must have been asleep, she dreamed, repeatedly it seemed, that she was being harangued by her unborn child for misdemeanours she could not recall committing.

Something woke her. She barely had time to glance at her watch and find that half the morning had slipped by before she felt a contraction around her uterus. She had felt a curious, niggling tightness over the last few days but the midwife had dismissed these as mere muscle flexing.

‘She’s just practising,’ she said.

The midwife always referred to Sally’s body in the feminine third person singular, as though pregnancy had sundered it from her personality, giving it a bizarre independence. As the delivery day drew near, there was a truth in this grammatical quirk, for Sally felt herself increasingly at the mercy of her own flesh; ruled by all-powerful biological imperatives.

For a moment Sally interpreted the contraction as another of her body’s rehearsals for the real thing. Then she realised that the ache in her lower back was inflamed beyond its usual dullness. As the muscles relaxed, she shifted on the chair to rearrange the cushions and felt a stickiness between her legs. Frowning, she flicked up her skirt and dabbed inside her drawers with her fingers, unable to see over her belly. They came up with a trace of the bloody mucus midwives referred to, with almost veterinary zeal, as ‘a show’. She glanced at her watch again, automatically, so that she could time the interval before her next contraction, then lay back on the cushions to wait. A faint breeze stirred the lime green strands of the willow about her head, then all was still again.

‘My time is on me,’ she said aloud and tried to chuckle.

She had rehearsed this moment so often in her mind during the monotonous unemployment of past months that she felt no panic, only a simple recognition of symptoms and swift recollection of how she must react.

The next contraction came in twenty minutes, and the one after that. Was it her imagination that made them seem progressively stronger? She had been unable to decide whether to have the baby at home or in hospital. The Roundel was so lovely and peaceful, even with Edward’s rattling and Congolese bells. She loathed maternity wards for the way they seemed to cap the indignity of pregnancy with a male-dominated conspiracy to steal from the mothers any moment of charm or intimacy that might make the whole ordeal worthwhile. The practicalities of needing to allow exhausted patients some precious sleep meant that their miraculous creations were corralled to bawl their new-born lungs out in a separate room, like so many calves in a veal pen. They were even tagged like cattle, and one still heard tales of them being muddled up or even wilfully exchanged. Obstetricians bullied, other mothers criticised and scaremongered, older children sulked in the visitor’s area, terrified babies wailed for the moist security they had lost; motherhood could scarcely have a less welcoming base camp.

Another contraction. Sally checked her watch. Twenty minutes again.

She trusted the time-honoured skills of a midwife more than the surgical steel and book-lore of any male specialist, and yet, to have her first child at home was, perhaps, a temptation to fate? What could go wrong? Sally began to list in her mind the grisly possibilities, but was cut short by another contraction. She knew, this being her first delivery, that this stage could last for anything up to fifteen hours. If something began to go wrong, there was always Edward and the car. In her indecision and fear, she had already packed a bag, just in case.

She noticed that her face was bathed in sweat, and she wiped it on her sleeve. Gingerly she lowered her feet to the grass and hoisted herself upright. Then she supported herself on the willow’s trunk for a few minutes, summoning up the strength to cross the hot expanse of garden which now seemed so much longer in the high noon sun.

On seeing her, Edward broke off from playing a passage through at the piano and jumped up. She dropped her eyes to follow his stare and saw that there was a trace of blood, along with the patches of sweat, down the front of her dress. She explained.

‘But it’s not due for two more weeks,’ he protested.

‘Due or not, it’s on its way.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Of course I’m sure!’ she snapped.

He didn’t take chivalric control as she had hoped he might. He merely dithered. Hearing his voice on the telephone to the midwife as she hauled herself upstairs, she began to wonder whether a maternity ward might not be a wise option after all. But once she was flat on her back between cool, garden-scented sheets, all resolve left her save the determination to stay still, rest and gather what powers lay at her command.

The midwife came, soothingly joked that this was going to be one very impatient baby, and sighed at Sally’s decision to have the delivery at home. Sally knew she was pleased at a pregnant doctor’s reliance upon a midwife’s competence. She timed the contractions and felt briskly around Sally’s nether regions, placing expert hands on the unborn child as though to assure it, too, of her knowledgeable presence.

‘Now,’ she said, as Edward hovered in the bedroom doorway, ‘I’ve just got Mrs Storey to help though hers over at Digby’s Farm then I’ll be getting my breath back at home when you need me. It’s her fifth, so it shouldn’t take long. Get Mr Pepper to call me out when your contractions are coming every five minutes or so. It shouldn’t be for, oh,’ she glanced at the watch that dangled upside down on her bosom, ‘at least another ten hours or so. Call me sooner if the pain gets bad or you think something’s going wrong and you’re frightened. Don’t look so
worried
my love! You’re not ill. Thousands of women go through this every day and live to tell the tale.’

Sally smiled obediently, wondering how thousands of women could face going through this more than once and not demand superior living conditions, a state maternity allowance and festivals in their honour. She never usually thought much about religion, except fleetingly at Christmas, but now she found herself thinking about Jesus; and the archetypical God with flowing beard and voice of thunder. She was astonished that the pair of them had got away with ruling the roost for so long while the woman who had gone through childbirth to make it all possible allowed herself to be relegated to the puppet role of Carnival Queen. Edward came back from seeing the midwife off and asked her nervously what she was giggling about. She started to tell him but a contraction scrambled her thoughts and she sent him instead to fetch some lunch and to heave the radio upstairs for her.