Sail Upon the Land (25 page)

When Munty and Margaret had come to fetch her from Heathrow on her return from India, Margaret did not comment on the way home, but Damson knew that it would only be a matter of time. Margaret’s often expressed approval for the way the twins presented themselves told Damson all she needed to know. But it was already September and she was busy getting ready for Cambridge, so she didn’t need to put up with Margaret’s ‘helpful’ comments for long.

In her bedroom at Castle Hey, which she had insisted was not touched by the ever-present decorators, her wardrobe was still exuberant with strapless taffeta ball gowns in bright colours, whispering the ghost of Rive Gauche. The fact that Granny had made all her dresses caused her to hesitate for a moment. But the desire to reject colour and prettiness and femininity was very strong. She also did not, for the first time in her life, want to see or be seen by her grandparents. She feared her grandmother’s sharp eye might seek out her shame. She knew her grandparents never worried about her. She didn’t want them to start worrying now.

She left the dresses where they were, deciding not to think about the dancing and flirting, the high heels and glamour. She drove herself into Canterbury and scoured the charity shops for a replacement wardrobe, and that was when the comments started.

‘I understood when you got back from India that you might be looking a bit scruffy, but you don’t need to dress like that now, do you? There’s no need these days to look like a man to do a man’s job, dear,’ said Margaret one morning over breakfast. Munty hid behind his
Daily Telegraph
.

Damson was defensive but determined. ‘It’s comfortable and practical if I’m going to be in the labs all day. Don’t want to wear heels and stuff. Anyway, I like dressing like this. Like Annie Hall,’ she had trailed off. Margaret said nothing more to her relief.

When she got back to St Bennet’s, she made straight for the women’s lavatories and peeled the wrapper from the wand. She read the instructions, her hands shaking so much she could hardly focus, let alone hold the stick still enough to pee in the right place. When she had managed it she wrapped the fateful stick in loo paper and crept back to her room to wait ten minutes for the result.

She sat on her narrow college bed in her sunny little room, so hopefully furnished with posters from Athena. Bending right over, she clutched her upper arms with her hands and squeezed herself tightly. The sobs that would not be suppressed geysered up to the surface. It was a relief just to let the hot painful tears come and she grabbed at her box of tissues, blowing her nose and mopping her eyes and beginning to plan what she would do if it were positive. Which she knew it would be.

The future that had seemed so exciting and defiant, that would mark her out from the tide of obedient helpless women, was in danger of being ripped away, leaving a jagged edge that she could not confront. Her mind veered and tacked wildly across a grey and stormy sea of blame, regret and visceral pain, trying to find any kind of safe harbour. What would she do if she couldn’t be a doctor, if she had to be a single mother instead? She couldn’t keep a baby conceived in that stupid way. Flirting, kissing, going too far, giving him the wrong idea. All her fault. No one would force her to keep it, would they? Her mind shied away from the shameful scene in the Indian stable. It wasn’t her choice to be a mother. It wasn’t even carelessness that had led to this conception. She was raped, wasn’t she? What would people think? She couldn’t see a way back to the person she had been before. The person her grandparents never worried about.

After ten minutes she went over to the loo paper bundle on the window sill and unwrapped it. There it was, the big purple positive splodge.

What to do? Who on earth could she talk to who wouldn’t either judge her or be unbearably upset? How could she tell Granny, the person she loved the most in the world, that she was pregnant? And in such a compromising way? There might be fear that Damson would die as well of whatever it was that had killed Melissa. After all, Melissa hadn’t been much older. Damson knew with piercing certainty that her grandmother would want her to keep the baby. But she could not imagine herself wanting to hold on to a reminder of the worst thing that had ever happened to her. She had never disagreed with Granny about anything. How could she now? At all costs, she must never know.

She began to search her mind, conjuring pictures she’d seen of Melissa. Standing with Granny, both dressed for a ball. They were holding hands. Another one, a white-bordered snap of Melissa, in the garden of her grandparents’ house, wearing a stiff yellow mini-dress and displaying pretty legs. Melissa, as a little girl in the Fifties in a party frock, skirt sticking out, strap shoes and knee socks, holding her mother’s hand. Always holding
her
mother’s hand.

‘Can I hold your hand?’ Then: ‘Mummy?’ Her tongue was clumsy saying the word. Conscious that she had never said it before out loud.

She sat down again and shut her eyes, reaching out with her right hand. What? What? She had no physical memory of her mother at all. Her eyes snapped open. She looked down at her bitten nails and long strong fingers. Any hand Melissa knew had been something else. Something tiny and soft. She shied away from the idea of a soft new-born hand. Into her mind flew a poster she had seen in the women’s toilets downstairs.

Pregnant? Worried? Call Gate Advisory for confidential 24-hour service. Don’t delay.

OK, abortion. And quickly, before she could think any more about hands. She jumped to her feet, reaching for pen, paper and some change. A few minutes later she was in one of the row of scribbled fibreboard phone boxes by the Porters’ Lodge, armed with the number. It was horribly exposed and public, but she knew the walls were soundproofed, which immured whiffs of spit, sweat, breath and desperation.

The receiver was warm when she put it to her ear. She dialled the number, the line rang and a woman’s voice answered.

‘Hello?’ she whispered.

‘Hello, Gate Advisory here, how can I help you?’

Damson paused. She was nauseous and hungry at the same time, and tearful. Then she said quietly, ‘I think I’m pregnant.’

‘OK, have you done a test?’

‘Yes, and it’s positive.’

‘Right, how are you feeling about that?’ The voice was impersonally gentle, annoyingly so.

‘Terrible.’ Damson couldn’t say it out loud. She’d never said it out loud and she wasn’t even sure if it was true. Saying she’d been raped might just be a comforting excuse for stupidity. She paused.

‘Do you want to talk about it?’

Using that word was weak and wrong. Carelessness seemed like a better word for what had happened.

‘I want an abortion.’ Abhor. Abhorrent. Abortion. Horrible words. It came out like vomit.

‘Right, you have three options and abortion is one of them. I can give you some information now, but it would be better if you could come into the Centre tomorrow to talk to one of the nurses in person. Are you in Cambridge?’

‘Yes. But can you tell me what would happen if I did have an abortion?’

‘How many weeks along do you think you are?’

‘About eight.’

‘You’ll need to get consent from two doctors, but we can help you with that. Do you have any children already?’

‘No, I’m not married. You see, I’ve only just started my course. I’m a medical student, and I can’t have a baby. Not now.’ She was trying so hard not to cry.

‘Right, you’ll need to explain to the doctors that having a baby would upset your mental or physical health more than having an abortion. That means you need to tell them how the pregnancy would affect you. I think from the sounds of it, they would be sympathetic.’

‘So I can just tell them I don’t want a baby as I want to be a doctor?’

‘Yes, you’ll need to tell them that it will upset your mental health if you can’t study to be a doctor.’

I want to be a doctor, so I’m going to try and convince two doctors that I’ll go mad if I have a baby and I’m prevented from becoming a doctor. Like them, she thought desperately.

Her forehead creased into painful folds as she tried not to cry. It gave her a headache. She shuddered.

‘As it’s very early on in the pregnancy, the procedure is very straightforward, nothing to worry about. You’re in and out as a day case. And there’s plenty of counselling available before and afterwards. Our clinic is a little way outside Cambridge but we don’t advise cycling. There’s a bus, and we recommend a taxi home and rest for a day or two. But most of our patients are up the next day and absolutely fine.’

‘Fine?’

‘Yes, fine. As I say, it’s a simple, straightforward, safe procedure. The clinic is on Lawrence Road, Gate House, at number 135. Can you get there easily? We open at ten o’clock. If you like, I can take your name and you can make an appointment, but you can also just drop in for advice and support. In the end, it’s your decision, but we can give you all the information you need to make an informed one.’

Damson paused again. The nurse stayed on the line.

‘I want to know what they do.’

‘You want to know how the abortion is carried out?’

‘Yes, but what do they do? How do they get the baby out?’

‘Well, it isn’t a baby at this stage. Just a cluster of cells. There’s very little bleeding and usually you can go home after about an hour. But it would be much better to see you in person, Miss?’

Damson rang off. She sat in the box, breathing the spitty air in and out slowly to calm herself. Then she got up but had to sit down again because silver swirls appeared in her vision. She just had time to bend over, putting her head between her knees, grateful as full consciousness returned.

Back in her room, she made herself a cup of tea, wanting sugar in it which was not her usual taste at all. Damson had always been instinctively against abortion. She held the lofty view that people should do all they could to avoid an unwanted pregnancy, but if they did fall pregnant then to take the consequences of their actions. Why punish the innocent? But that was before she had any real experience. She was ashamed now to have been so judgmental.

Try as she might, she could not get her head around the idea that what was growing in her belly was just a random mass of cells. The trouble with the way she had conceived was that she had been unable to choose to use any contraception. So she couldn’t make a decision to be sensible, could she?

The memory of that night was crystal clear now. All denial was ripped away by the consequences. She knew with shame that she had been excited by Ronny’s attentions. She also realised that she had ridden into the milky Indian moonlight completely conscious of the sexiness of the situation. The horse’s body had been hot and vigorous between her thighs. Ronny’s frequent glances sent shivers down her spine – never mind his kisses, which made her burn with longing more than any of the soft boys who had kissed her before. What if it had been just a shade different, that episode in the stable? What if she had given in to what was happening instead of struggling against it, enjoyed it even? She might have been eager for more. But, as it was, she went out that night one kind of girl, and came back to her room in the morning a completely different person.

She tried to remember her last period. It must have been just after she arrived in India, because she remembered being glad to have packed so many tampons and the tiresome business of disposing of them properly. She had arrived in New Delhi around the twentieth of July? It was now the fifteenth of October.

The scientist in her kicking in, she took down her Obstetrics and Gynaecology textbook and looked up ‘gestational age eight weeks’.

‘Zygote, morula, blastocyst, embryo,’ she muttered to herself. ‘All clumps of cells, nothing very human there. Sounds like a spell.’

There was nothing magic about it though, just the rapid march of a biological process. She started to sob as she read, hardly able to see the words through her tears:
It is at the end of the ‘embryonic’ stage and moving to the ‘foetal’ stage.
‘You bet,’ she hiccupped, examining the medical drawing of a tiny human with bird-like ribs and an enormous, serious forehead.
In the normal foetus, everything needed for human development is already present. Ears continue to form, facial features take shape
.

It has a bloody face, how can a bunch of cells have a face?

The embryo is one inch long.

She flicked to a pregnancy calculator and worked out when the baby was due. June. By then she was completely lost and trying to suppress her yelps of grief and rage at this stupid thing she’d done.

The easy way would be to slip off to Lawrence Road tomorrow just after ten o’clock and get on the roller coaster to finishing the thing before it had started. Then she wouldn’t have to tell anyone at all. Ever. Simple, quick, virtually painless. Get-out-of-jail-free card. Lying to the doctor about going mad if she couldn’t be a doctor. The whole idea made her want to scream. Because it had started, however mistakenly, there was no denying its humanity, however tiny.

The other option was filled with terror, confusion and confrontation, but came without the guilt. What would Margaret’s reaction be? She’d spent a whole lot of money ‘bringing Damson out’ with the twins, and Damson knew she’d never expressed proper gratitude for that, or even for making Munty so much happier and more comfortable. In fact she resented it all, another source of guilt. The transformation of her scruffy old childhood home was not to her taste, but she could at least recognise that Castle Hey had woken up from its long sad sleep. Munty didn’t look defeated any more. Margaret took him to Trumpers to have his hair cut properly, bought him hand-made suits in Savile Row and stocked the cellar with excellent claret. She realised she was glad he had someone to look after him. Damson couldn’t look after him. She had wanted him to look after her

Margaret would be so furious when she found out Damson had ‘got herself knocked up’ as she would call it. If she carried it to term, what would happen to the baby? Should she just go home to Castle Hey and bring it up, forgetting about Cambridge and a career? She couldn’t imagine Margaret allowing that. A child messing up her lovely pristine rooms, full of chintz, swags, tails and draped tables, good china ornaments to break, fringes, tassels and cream-coloured carpets. One bright spot – if she decided to dodge the slippery temptation of abortion, she would at least attract Margaret’s approval as a Christian.