Goodness (3 page)

A Classic Case

The first time I threw in my weight in an attempt to tip the scales toward sanity and common sense was on the occasion of Peggy’s first pregnancy. I would have been living in Leicester by then. Shirley and I had moved in together, having found ourselves quite a decent semi some miles from the university; it was pricey, but we shared with a couple of other students and Mr Harcourt, her father, unwittingly provided what I couldn’t always afford.

It would be difficult to exaggerate what a release this change of scene was, how wonderful at last, at last, not to have to worry that Mother would find out what one was up to, not to have to face her silent and suffering reproach, her insistent, if never spoken, ‘Be thou me! Be thou me!’ I didn’t go back home from one end of term to the other and certainly not for such minor events as Grandfather’s prostectomy or Aunt Mavis’s suicide attempt. Mother wrote asking me to come and I wrote back asking what possible help could I be, and explaining that the important thing for me surely was to get the best degree possible and so escape the poverty trap that in the future world of high technology and high unemployment people from my sort of unskilled lower middle-class background were in every danger of falling into.

Mother wrote to say she understood, though it would be nice if I could make it home just sometimes, and she kept me up to date on such events as the death of Peggy’s dog Jagger (fed chicken bones by Grandfather), the church meetings she spoke at, what she had cooked when so and so and so and so, who were missionaries in Borneo or clergymen
from Nigeria, had come to lunch, her contacts with Peggy (scrubbing clean some slum my sister was squatting in, lending her ten pounds she would never see again), stories of a stray cat she had taken in, a tramp she had fed who had walked off with Grandfather’s favourite lighter, so and so who had been converted when so and so came to speak to the youth fellowship, conversations with the next door neighbours about the state of the sewage pipes under the garden, our sycamore that took light from their front room, the rotting fence they wanted to fix and Mother couldn’t afford to, etc. etc.

I didn’t go home. I was happy as I had never been before: work, play, parties, independence, self-indulgence, Shirley. Until mid way through the third year Mother sent a telegram: ‘Peggy in family way, please please come.’

It was a classic case of people not doing what was most sensible and convenient for everybody concerned, and thus a forerunner of events to come. Worth dwelling on. Mavis, I discovered on arrival home (Mother’s letters were clearly rather less informative than they liked to present themselves), had come back to live in Gorst Road after swallowing a half bottle of bleach. Her second attempt. Bringing only the minimum dole with her, she spent her days listening to old Elvis Presley records in her room and whining about Bob who had now left the Mormons and joined some Eastern fringe religion based in Indonesia and run by a charismatic figure known as the Bapi. This had disorientated Mavis. The Bapi had ordered Bob, as he did all his converts, to take a new name. So Bob was now Raschid. The root cause of their break-up had apparently been that Mavis, in a surprising show of independence, had infuriated Bob by refusing to call him Raschid or to contemplate changing her own name. She was Mavis and she liked to be called Mavis. I suppose the only positive thing about all this was that it was a good story to tell at dinner parties. Financially it was a disaster.

Peggy meanwhile had been squatting in Islington playing drums in a small folk group and helping in a War on Want shop on Camden High Street which had been raided for
drugs on three occasions. Thrown out of the squat a few days before, she had temporarily returned home, more to make a visit than out of any real need for refuge, since Peggy could have found a bed at a moment’s notice almost anywhere in the city, so extensive was and is her network of friends, or rather of those people who immediately recognise in her one of their own subculture.

She came home and over tea quite by the way and without the slightest sense of momentousness, told Mother that she was pregnant. Later in the same conversation, throughout which Mother had with her customary infinite caution been trying to find out more, Peggy asked her for a large, indeed by our family standards huge, sum of money, without specifying why she needed it. At which Mother had quickly put an old-fashioned two and two together and telegrammed me.

I arrived in the afternoon towards three. In a clearly agitated state, so unlike the serene air of wisdom she would offer her walking wounded, Mother caught me at the door before I could ring the bell, so as to grab a private word: she had stalled Peggy over the issue of the money, she said, though in reality she could never afford such a sum. She had stalled her to prevent her from going elsewhere before I arrived. She wanted me to talk to her rather than doing it herself because she knew Peggy considered her something of a religious fuddy duddy whereas coming from me the advice would have much more authority. Peggy respected me. She was always saying how much common sense I had and how well I was doing. And of course I was young. Everybody set so much store by what generation you belonged to these days. I must tell her that it was wrong to have an abortion. Quite wrong. It was killing a child. It was murder. There was nothing more one could say about it and all the modern arguments in its favour were just unadulterated institutionalised selfishness. How could they be anything but? A child was alive and you killed it, and it was so shameful that something that called itself the women’s movement supported such carnage. Peggy must have the baby. She must. If she didn’t want
it afterwards, Mother herself would keep it. Something somehow could always be arranged. There were so many people wanted babies and couldn’t have them.

I was a shade overwhelmed. Every day, or at least every month of her life in her role as self-appointed social worker Mother must have dealt with more or less similar situations; she’d had plenty of girls from the church come to her pregnant by the wrong man, or by the right man at the wrong time. Yet her sense of urgency now, her determination to persuade, was extraordinary. The wrinkled corners of her soft mouth trembled. Her hands were clasped together with unnatural force. Her living soul-self seemed to be concentrated in the fluttering, watering eyes looking at me so intensely. You could see how for her, for my mother, a simple suburban abortion was raised to the level of a vast metaphysical showdown between good and evil. There were angels and demons perched all over the furniture.

‘Please, George,’ she said. ‘Please.’

Fresh, or rather stale, from coach and tube, still struggling a little to reaccustom myself to the prayer-meeting rhetoric, I pointed out that Peggy could hardly want the money for an abortion, since abortions, like it or not, were now free on the health service. Mother stopped. She was breathing quickly: ‘Oh, of course. Of course. How stupid of me. How stupid!’ And she asked: ‘Is there any chance she doesn’t know?’

Peggy apparently was out the back soaking up the year’s first sunshine. I said I would go and talk to her, get to the bottom of it at once. ‘Please,’ Mother said again. ‘Okay,’ I said.

So far we had talked in undertones amidst the pungent shoe and old geranium smells of the porch, but now, crossing living room and kitchen to reach the back, I was struck as never before by the dinginess of my old home. The wallpaper was a glazed yellow brown, the carpet threadbare – a rug aslant, itself badly worn, rather obviously covering the hole by the passage door. Sofa and armchair with their washed out once elastic covers were more than ever tattered and shapeless.

I looked, and found it desperately poignant to think of my dear mother wasted in that unpromising environment. I felt a surge of moral energy. I was the success of the house. I was about to graduate. These people needed help and it was up to me to give it to them. Rather than staying away, I should be making regular visits to check the situation out, see what ought to be done.

I opened the back door. Outside was a twice folded handkerchief of lawn surrounded by rosebushes and other, for me nameless, flowers which my mother somehow found time to cultivate and water and worry about. They about half-hid the black creosoted fence that sagged behind. I stepped out, ducked under a line straining with damp washing, and found Peggy sprawled on a patch of dandelions in bra and pants, exposing her chunky pale body to sunshine that seemed barely warm. A scruffy little dog nobody had told me about was idly licking her ribs.

‘Peggy.’

She sat up and broadly smiled surprise. ‘You too!’ she said. ‘Quite a reunion. How nice.’ Falling forward as her body came up, her breasts were plump. She stroked the little dog. ‘Do you like Theo? He waylaid me on the Heath and refuses to go away.’

I pushed aside a damp green nylon sheet and squatted down. I paused. I said: ‘Mother tells me you’re pregnant.’

She was squinting still to adjust her eyes. ‘Oh you’ve grown a moustache.’ She burst out into one of her laughs. ‘Makes you look a bit AC/DC.’

In a low voice, I explained that Mother had telegrammed for me to come down to persuade her not to have an abortion, but that in fact I was entirely on her side. Entirely. So not to worry. Of course she should have an abortion. The feminists were perfectly right. It was her body to do what she wanted with. It was her decision. If she went and had a baby now what kind of career could she ever expect to have? Not to mention the poor child growing up in these slummy surroundings, with not even much prospect of work at the end of the day, and then the present international climate,
the threat of nuclear war and so on. Was it a world to bring kids into? I’d support her one hundred per cent if Mother started putting on any pressure, in fact I felt just about ready for a showdown, let her know what I thought about her repressive religious ideas, though seeing as it was really none of her business the best thing would be simply not to say anything and then to present her with a fait accompli. If she . . .

‘But I don’t want to have an abortion,’ Peggy blinked.

I was taken aback. She leaned over and ruffled my hair. She kissed my cheek, playing older sister. ‘Don’t worry your little head about it, Georgie, you’re so worked up, cool it, take it easy, I’ll sort it all out myself, it’s no problem.’

She smiled. Then she said: ‘So poor Mum thought I was planning an abortion?’ and she got up and ran into the house to tell Mother she had never had any intention of getting an abortion. Never. How on earth had she got that idea into her head? Oh, when she’d asked for money it was because she and some other friends were clubbing together to put up bail for one of the guys in the squat who’d been arrested. Completely trumped up drugs charges. The police should be ashamed of themselves. From the garden I could hear Mother weeping for joy, fierce hiccups of emotion, promising what funds she had.

Later, over tea and buns, which she insisted on baking and even icing as a sort of celebration, Mother asked: ‘Not the father, I hope?’

‘You what?’ Peggy was licking her finger to pick up crumbs from her plate. Mavis fed herself vacantly.

‘This fellow who’s been arrested. He’s not the father?’

‘Oh no,’ Peggy laughed.

I couldn’t help feeling as we munched away that I was the only one there actually concerned about the practical implications of this development. I said: ‘So maybe you wouldn’t mind telling Mum who the father is, since she’s probably going to have to look after the poor child.’

Peggy turned to me in surprise. ‘Oh my, aren’t we a sour puss!’

Mother said: ‘George’s only trying to help, dear. It was so nice of him to come down. Now do tell us about the chappie.’

‘His name’s Dave,’ Peggy said. ‘He’s an actor, a wonderful man. We’re going to get married as soon as we can. And we shall be looking after the child ourselves, thank you very much. Why ever shouldn’t we?’

‘Don’t look at me,’ Mavis came out in an inexplicable huff.

‘I thought,’ I said, ‘that getting married was one of the few things you could do from one moment to the next if you really wanted to.’

‘If you must know, brother dear,’ Peggy said with condescending sweetness, ‘we’ve got to wait until his divorce comes through.’

Typically my mother said nothing. She passed round the buns again, merely remarking that they hadn’t risen as much as they might and she hadn’t been able to fill them with buttercream as she usually did because there was only marge in the house these days and without running out to the shops . . . The fact that Peggy was plunging into the most precarious of situations (with an actor!), as a result of which Mother herself would suffer, certainly financially if in no other way, did not appear to worry her at all. She herself had refused to marry a perfectly decent and quite wealthy man ostensibly because he had divorced nearly a decade before, and now her daughter was having another man divorce to marry her and she didn’t say anything about it, when some serious comment might just have made her see sense. As a result of which, I was being forced into a position where I had to be unpleasant simply to express the only sensible opinion possible.

‘Seems to me,’ I began, ‘you’re hardly . . .’ But Mother caught the sound of the rotary sprinkler in the next garden and rushed out to pull in the washing. She preferred this to inviting our new neighbour, a vanguard of gentrification, to adjust the thing. No sooner was she out than Peggy leaned across the table towards me, her breasts swinging heavily: ‘What’s got into you, George?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘For heaven’s sake! You seem to be doing your best to ruin a happy situation and start an argument. Relax. Please.’ She was wearing earrings the size of saucers, punk dark lipstick.

I said: ‘I’m sorry, Peggy, but I thought I was trying to prevent an unhappy situation from developing.’

And when Mother came back in I told her I was off. I’d take the coach back to Leicester that night. I had a lot of studying to do. At the door she thanked me, as if it had been me had worked the miracle. She embraced me and kissed me. In the background Grandfather was complaining to the TV about the influx of Kenyan Asians.