Authors: Amanda Prowse
She left the confines of her bedroom only to venture to the loo and this she did on the wobbly legs of a drunk and with the headache of someone who had been on mother’s ruin all night. Waves of nausea swept over her, which made eating impossible.
At some point Dee had crept in and placed her small hand on her big sister’s cheek. ‘Don’t cry, Dot, I made you something!’
Dot forced her eyes open and looked at the picture of a rainbow that Dee had painstakingly coloured in with crayons. It reminded her of their day in Selfridges; she thought about the brown paper bag nestled in her chest of drawers and her material that was almost the colour of the St Lucian sky.
‘Thanks, tin ribs,’ she managed, through a mouth twisted with distress.
It took two weeks for Dot to pluck up the courage to visit Doctor Levitson. He was known throughout Limehouse. He had delivered her and tended to her every ailment since she was a baby, from whooping cough to chicken pox and most things in between. He was the same doctor that had helped deliver Dee, ministered to her nan when she was sick, diagnosed her Dad’s dicky chest and lent an ear to her mum when times were darkest. It was going to be an awkward encounter. Dot plodded up the surgery steps and sat in the square waiting room with all the old ladies who sniffed into tissues, rubbed at joints or exhaled deeply for no apparent reason.
Doctor Levitson had always been ancient. He had prominent features, wide-set eyes and large ears from which tufts of grey bristle peeked. The furrows on his forehead were deep and his eyes disappeared into them when he smiled, which he did a lot. Before applying his large hands to his patient’s skin, he always warmed them by placing them up his jersey first, and when Dot was little he could make a coin appear from behind her ear, which was quite impressive.
‘Mum okay?’
‘Yes.’ Dot didn’t want to discuss her family; it made them seem present in a way that made her uncomfortable.
‘Dad resting up?’
Dot nodded.
‘Good, good and what can I do for you, little Dot?’
She swallowed. She liked being little Dot, but knew that in approximately twenty seconds she would vault the line from child to woman.
‘I’ve not been too well, Doctor.’
‘You do look tired, a little peaky. Your mum said you are up at Bryant and May? How’s that working out?’
‘S’okay. Nice bunch of girls…’
‘Good, good.’ He smiled again and was silent, clasping his hands in front of him on the desk. Dot focused on a small hole in the sleeve of his hand-knitted jersey; it had been darned with orange cotton, forming a little nub that drew your eye. Surely Mrs Levitson could have found a better match.
‘Thing is, Doctor Levitson…’
He stared at her, waiting.
‘The thing is, I think I might be in trouble.’
‘I see. What kind of trouble, Dot? The police are chasing you and you need to take refuge in my cupboard under the stairs, or the pregnant kind?’
Dot nodded as her tears spilled. ‘The pregnant kind.’
It was the first time she had said the word aloud and it felt terrifying. Two syllables with such a terrible connotation, two syllables with the power to destroy her whole life. She shook inside her coat.
Oh God, Oh God…
‘Okay. Well, first things first, let’s do a test and make sure of the facts; otherwise we could be getting in a lather over nothing.’
Dot nodded. Yes, a test would be good.
‘And then if you are, Dot, we can take it from there. If you are, is marriage an option, does the father know?’
Dot shook her head and closed her eyes; it was somehow easier to voice the facts without being able to see anything. ‘No. He’s done a runner. I thought he loved me, we were going to get married.’
‘Oh, Dot, if I had a shilling for every time I’ve heard that.’
She opened her mouth to protest, to explain that she and Sol were different, that they had been in love and she was not like all the other girls who got caught with the promise of a ring and happy ever after, but stopped when she realised she was exactly like that.
‘And if you are, you will have to tell your mum and dad, you know that, don’t you?’
Dot nodded and could only imagine how that conversation would go.
Four days later, Dot sat in the same chair in front of Dr Levitson and he confirmed what she had suspected for some time. She was having a baby, she was having their baby.
‘Promise me, Dot, that you will tell your parents.’
She nodded.
‘And sooner rather than later?’
Again the nod. Too stunned to speak and too frightened to move.
What on earth was she going to do?
Dot decided to wait until she had got her head around the situation before she faced her mum and dad; a couple of days would make little difference. She considered going to see Sol’s parents, but decided against it. Her humiliation at the last visit still caused her cheeks to flame. She would just have to figure something out, although quite what, she couldn’t begin to imagine.
Joan wasn’t sure if there was a magic potion that could cure a broken heart, but she trotted up the path of the doctor’s surgery nonetheless. She flicked through a copy of
Woman’s Own
until it was her turn. Dr Levitson beamed, seemed pleased to see her.
‘Ah, Joan, how are you?’
‘Oh you know, Doctor, bearing up.’
‘I expected to see you—’
‘Yes, I need a tonic or something for our Dot. I’m worried about her. She’s got no energy at all and she can’t go on like this, not eating, sleeping all the time.’
‘I am delighted that you are being so supportive, Joan. It’s not something I see every day and it’s a credit to you and Reg.’
‘Of course I’m supportive. I’m worried about her, tha’sall. She’s me daughter!’
‘Yes, she is and, once again, Joan, you are to be commended for your attitude, truly. It’s not something I see very often, I’m afraid. The good news is that the heavy fatigue and nausea, loss of appetite and so forth will all fade as she gets further into the pregnancy. It’s the first few months that can be the trickiest, I’m sure you remember!’
The next sound was Joan Simpson’s body hitting the linoleum floor. She had fainted.
Dot was halfway up the stairs with a glass of water when she heard her mum’s key in the door. She turned and waited, ready to see if she needed any help with the tea. Her mum clicked the door shut behind her and stood with her back against it. Her skin was ashen, her eyes wide. Dot noticed the tremor of her hand as she removed her scarf. She fixed her daughter with a stare and it was in that single second that Dot knew her secret was out. Joan undid the top buttons of her coat as though desperate for air. As she slipped down and sat on the door mat, she looked broken.
Approaching her slowly, Dot reached out to help her mum stand. ‘Mum, I…’
‘Don’t touch me!’ Joan managed beneath gasps. And then, ‘What have you done?’
For Dot it was a full ten days of going through the motions. Working, sleeping and waiting. She spent hours sitting on her bed in the wee small hours, listening to her parents’ shouts and whispers, which came in alternate waves as they tried to figure out what to do for the best. Finally she was summoned.
Dot trod carefully down the stairs, placing one foot after the other on the worn runner that ran up the middle of each step. She padded along the hallway and eased open the door of the back room. It felt incredible that she had known the room and the people in it – her family – her whole life. This was the room in which she had opened eighteen sets of birthday gifts, blown out the candles on eighteen home-made cakes and rushed in barefoot and breathless to find Father Christmas’s offerings on eighteen separate cold December mornings. Yet pushing the door open tonight, she felt no kinship. These people had become strangers and in its way this was more scary and lonely than being upstairs by herself, where she could pretend that there were people in the house that cared about her.
Her dad sat in his vest and concentrated on rolling cigarettes ready to stack neatly inside his old tobacco tin. His braces hung down to his thighs. His flat, broad thumbs had a ring of black grease under the fingernails. He’d probably been fixing his bike. He did not look up from his task, content to let her mum talk on behalf of both of them. Dot noted how his fingers shook as he brought the sticky paper up to his mouth for its lick. Trembling hands that contained the anger and distress that he fought to control; for this she was grateful. He flicked his head occasionally, not to acknowledge her, but to get his long, brilliantined fringe out of his eyes.
‘Sit down, Dot.’ Her mum’s voice was soft. If there was the slightest bit of empathy in her tone, this was cancelled out by the set of her mouth and the narrowing of her eyes, as though having to look at something as unsavoury as her pregnant daughter revolted her. She pointed at the chair opposite Dot’s dad. Joan stood slightly behind her husband, with her hand resting lightly on the back of his seat. Dot drew a deep breath and opened her mouth, but then closed it again. It was a further minute before she finally found the courage to speak.
Dot was unsure of the protocol and spoke as she would under normal circumstances, which of course these were anything but.
‘Is Dee all right?’ It had been ten days since she had seen her sister, who crept mouse-like along the hall and into her bed at night so as not to disturb her ‘poorly’ big sister.
‘You stay away from her, d’you hear me!’ Her dad’s tone made her flinch. Small flecks of spit flew from his mouth and landed on the rug between them.
Dot swallowed to ease her own dry mouth. ‘I’m sorry… I just…’ She didn’t know what she was apologising for, her confusion made her stutter. She only wanted to know how her little sister was doing.
He pointed a finger towards her face. ‘I’ll say this to you once: you don’t go near her. Do you understand? You don’t even talk to her. Is that clear?’ His top lip curled.
Dot nodded.
‘I don’t want her mixed up in all this.’ This he addressed to his wife, who nodded in agreement and placed her hand on his shoulder as though that could calm his rage.
Joan coughed, although the lump in her throat would not be so easily shifted. ‘Your dad and I have been trying to work out what’s to be done for the best. We’ve been over it night after night and have decided.’
Dot looked at her mum. She wanted to comment that she had a right to be involved in the decision-making process, but knew it would only inflame an already intolerable situation. She kept quiet and waited for the verdict. Her bowels turned to ice and her stomach seemed to shrink around her intestines. She fought the urge to be sick.
‘You are not that far gone and so there are options…’
Dot instinctively placed her hand on her stomach. No way, she would never get rid of this baby, never. They’d have to kill her first and if they were going to force her to have an abortion, then she’d rather be dead, so all good.
‘But Daddy and I respect our faith too much for that to be considered.’
Dot exhaled. Relief.
‘You are going to one of the big houses. A mother and baby home in Battersea. But you can’t go there till you’re nearly ready to drop, so before that we’ll just have to think of a way to keep you hidden, once you start to show. I don’t want no one around here knowing anything about it. If you tell anyone, anyone at all, then you can’t come back here, Dot. Not ever. We’ll be finished, a bloody laughing stock and I will not have my house and my name disgraced. I won’t have people talking about me behind my back, knowing my business. But if you stay there until it’s born and it’s adopted out, you can come home and we’ll say no more about it. I’m sure you’ll be as relieved as we are to have a solution, Dot. It could all be much worse and if we do like we say, you can move on with your life and put it behind you with the least damage done.’
Dot didn’t bother to try and stem the steady flow of tears that trickled down her face. Her cry was the almost silent whimper of the defeated. There was so much she wanted to say. Primarily she would have liked to point out that it wasn’t an ‘it’ but her baby. She also did not want to go to Battersea to live with nuns. But mostly, she did not want her baby,
their
baby, put up for adoption. She could not risk speaking up, incurring their wrath, in case they threw her out there and then. She had nowhere to go and no money. She considered telling Barb, but knew it would be the final straw for her parents if Mrs Harrison and the rest of the street were to find out; it wasn’t that Barb was disloyal, but she had never been able to keep a secret. Dot nodded, slowly blinking her swollen, red eyes and fighting the rising desire to scream. After a further minute of silence, she correctly assumed that she was dismissed. She made her way back up the stairs to the comfort of her room, where she began to digest the latest miserable development in the story of her life.
Lying on top of the candlewick bedspread, she stroked her tummy and whispered to her little one. ‘I will fight them all the way. I will fight to keep you, baby; don’t you worry, darling, they will have to get through me to get to you and I am tougher than I look. Your daddy wasn’t interested, but I’ll make up for that, you just wait and see. So don’t you worry, no one is going to take you away from me.’
Sol’s words drifted into her head as they did each hour, various phrases, utterances, promises, all made in deceit, all lies. She knew they were lies, but to recall them hurt just the same.
‘The idea of only having sixty-three years with you horrifies me, frightens me. Because it’s not enough, not nearly enough. How long would be enough? Eternity. I’d settle for eternity.’
* * *
Dot carried on working at Bryant and May for another month, then effectively spent the rest of the summer lying on the bed in her little bedroom. At first it felt like a nest, somewhere safe and undisturbed where she could sleep, think, and grow their baby. She revived the games from her childhood, then counted all the flowers within the stripes on the iridescent pink flock wallpaper. She pondered the water mark on the ceiling, from when a tile had blown off the roof and let the rain in, making the stain into as many animals as she could think of and then people and then buildings, although how it could simultaneously be an elephant, Karl Marx and Buckingham Palace, she didn’t know.