Slipstream (19 page)

By now I’d got to know K more clearly. She was of medium height, with an unremarkable body, rather sturdy and shapeless. She had ‘bad’ legs and her hands were like a
man’s – strong and well shaped. Her most beautiful and striking feature was her large head with her hair cut very short, shingled at the back, which accentuated its shape. She had a
fine complexion, with a large, well-shaped nose, and beautiful eyes of a blue between gentian and cornflower that looked at everything with a penetrating intelligence. If the family
made jokes that seemed too silly, or that she didn’t understand, she would laugh with some discomfort and say, ‘Silly ass.’

She told me fascinating stories. When she was in Paris, studying with Rodin and living in a small room on the Left Bank, someone came and told her that an English poet had died in a neighbouring
hotel, and would she come and help to sort out his books. This she did, and was given one for her pains. The poet was Oscar Wilde. She’d been a great friend of T. E. Lawrence, and once let me
have breakfast dressed in his Arabian headgear.

Wayland was very like her, with exactly the same shaped head and blue eyes. She told me that she’d had proposals of marriage from both Bill and Lawrence at the same time, and that
she’d gone abroad to make up her mind. For weeks, she said, the newspapers speculated that she was going to marry J. M. Barrie, but there was no truth in that story. She loved dancers, and
beautiful bodies. When I knew her she’d begun to have heart trouble, and wasn’t sculpting any more; she spent much of her time on a sofa doing wool embroidery that she devised
freehand.

She had an inexhaustible interest in everything that Pete was doing and he delighted her by telling her every single detail. From these conversations I learned more about his job in the Navy. I
discovered that the merit of the new steam gunboats was silence; you could hear the engines of an MTB long before it was hull up on the horizon. The disadvantage was that its steel plating was so
thin that a single well-placed bullet could put it out of action.

It was during this time that Derek Leaf, a commander of an MTB operating from Yarmouth, was killed. He had come to lunch at Fritton only a week before. K invited his widow to the next lunch she
gave. The girl sat silently throughout the meal, looking stunned, as though she hardly knew where she was, even though a little mechanism in her involuntarily produced acceptable responses to Bill
when he talked gently to her. I wanted to cry. When she’d gone, K said, ‘She was always a pretty girl, but really she looked quite lovely in her grief.’ A jar.

When Pete’s leave came to an end in the autumn of 1941, I journeyed to London with him where we parted, he to his boat and I to Sussex, where I spent the rest of the
winter. It was decided that it was no good my continuing to follow Pete from port to port: much better if somewhere was found in London.

That winter was very cold, or perhaps it was simply the Beacon that was so cold. Grannia, doubtfully in her right mind, was now in a nursing-home near there and we visited her when petrol
allowed. She lay in bed, fat and restless, but her face was still beautiful and her complaints continuous. Colin was at Summerfields, a prep school fairly near. A few people came to stay, and my
father occasionally turned up at weekends. But much of the time it was simply my mother and me. She’d acquired five hens called Flossie, Ruby, Queenie, Beryl and Connie – because my
mother disliked those names and didn’t care much for hens. They were to provide me with a few extra eggs. As I was pregnant, I got an extra pint of milk a week and priority eggs – that
is to say, any left over after the rationed ones had been claimed. I got four of those during the nine months. During that winter, my teeth went to pieces, and I had to pay endless visits to
Tunbridge Wells for fifteen fillings – or ‘stoppings’, as they were called. My mother also took me to London to see our family doctor, who’d brought Colin into the world.
I’d begun to feel sick again, and he said I had a mild liver complaint, but that nothing could be done about it until I’d had the baby. It was on this occasion that I went to Harrods to
buy a bear for Falcon, as I felt that no one
should start life without one. While I was there, it occurred to me that he would also need a suitcase, and I chose a very handsome
leather one. ‘What initials, Madam?’ they asked. I thought quickly. Although it was generally assumed I’d have a son, there was always the chance I might not, and in conversations
with Peter on the subject, I’d said if it was a daughter, I wanted to call her Nicola, which seemed to me a beautiful name. I’d recently read Rosamond Lehmann’s
The Weather in
the Streets
in which there is a very beautiful girl called Nicola Maude. ‘You’ve chosen Falcon, so I think I should be allowed to choose the girl’s name,’ I’d said
to Pete, who agreed.

So, ‘F. or N. Scott,’ I said.

‘I beg your pardon, Madam?’

‘Here, I’ll write it down for you.’ I did, and he went away with a the-customer-is-always-right look. I’d chosen a charming toffee-coloured bear with a reliable
expression. The next thing was his name. Colin immediately said it must be Roper, after his best friend at school, so Roper he was and remains to this day, in spite of Colin coming home for the
holidays soon after and saying that Roper was now his best enemy.

I was simply longing for the baby to arrive – for it all to be over, was how I thought of it. My back ached, I often felt sick, and I looked awful in my gathered skirt and clumsy
smocks.

My mother and Aunt Antonia decided that, as their parents’ house was empty, it might suit Pete and me to have it at a very low rent of two pounds a week. It was 105 Clifton Hill, St
John’s Wood, a small, detached Gothic villa with a large drawing room, a small dining room leading off it, two large bedrooms and one small on the first landing together with a bathroom, and
two little attics on the top floor. There was also a cavernous basement and a small, square back garden.

My mother came up with me about four weeks before the baby was due. The house still contained much of my grandparents’ furniture, but the décor was drab and dirty and much in need
of
repair. The baby and nurse were to have the sunny bedroom that looked on to the garden, and I set about painting it white. My mother – this sort of thing brought out
the best in her – helped me. I struggled up and down ladders imbued with a kind of feverish nest-building energy. We managed to get the nursery and the drawing room painted before I gave up,
feeling too sick to do anything.

My mother had procured someone from Sussex to come as cook, and there was a daily woman called Mrs Jessop who came to clean. It was still a stage in the war when it was taken for granted that
there would be servants – not so many of them, nor necessarily such good ones, but none the less the work would be done by people paid to do it.

Three weeks before the baby was due, Pete came up for some leave. My mother, who had been going to Sussex the following day, went out for the evening. After we’d had dinner, he said an
early night would probably be a good thing. I’d begun to dread what was now routine on these occasions. ‘I’m too fat,’ I said.

‘Nonsense, darling. I love you however enormous you are.’

I gave up after that. My mother had said two things to me that had impressed themselves deeper than I knew at the time. The first was ‘Never refuse your husband – whatever you
feel,’ and the second, which I was to remember in the near future, ‘People of our sort never make any fuss or noise when they are having a baby.’

Pete went to the Admiralty, and my mother went out for the day after an early breakfast. I stayed in bed. Still, I was going to have quite a nice day. I was going to
Gone with the Wind
with Dosia in the afternoon, which she had off from the Bishop.

We met at the cinema and sat through the long, hugely enjoyable film, and Dosia came back for supper. It was arranged that she would lodge with us, and my heart rose at the prospect.

I felt very achy, tired and sick again, and told Pete I really didn’t feel well. I was having small, clutching cramps at irregular intervals, but they didn’t hurt, and I thought that
it was just fatigue, with
which I’d become very familiar. Pete said, Never mind, I still love you, and did.

The next morning, my mother said a music publisher was coming to lunch as she wished to discuss the possible printing of some of my grandfather’s unpublished manuscripts. He came, and we
had lunch, and now I seemed to be getting pains about every half-hour – not bad, but sharpish and disturbing. I waited until the publisher had gone before telling my mother. She was going to
Sussex that afternoon, and advised me to stay in bed until Pete came back.

That night, the pains began in earnest. This time they hurt rather, and they seemed to come about every fifteen minutes. Pete rang the nursing-home where I was to have the baby. It was eleven at
night, and they told him that it was doubtless a false alarm since the baby wasn’t due for three weeks but that he’d better bring me in. He drove me to the nursing-home, a gaunt stucco
building about seven storeys high just off Kensington High Street, delivered me to the nurse on duty and left. I wanted to ask him to stay, but he was gone before I could get up the courage.

The nurse took me up innumerable stairs to the top of the house. ‘We weren’t expecting you, so this will have to do.’ It was a small room. She told me to get undressed and I
crept into the freezing bed. She had a look at me, and said it was probably just hysteria, she’d give me something to help me sleep and I’d doubtless be going home in the morning. I
swallowed the pill, and she left. I lay rigidly in the dark, and the pill took over and I fell asleep.

Some time later I woke because the pains were so bad. They seemed to have got much worse and lasted longer. And then I realized that the bed was wet and sticky. When I turned on the light to
look, it seemed to be full of blood. The baby has died, I thought; I was really frightened now. I rang the bell by the bed, rang it several times, but nobody came. Eventually I staggered on to the
landing and shouted for someone to come, and eventually they did.
It was the same nurse, clearly displeased with me. ‘You’ll wake everyone up, shouting like that.
Let’s have a look . . . You’re having the baby all right – of course it’s not dead, that’s just the show.’

I’d no idea what she meant by this, and was too cowed to ask. What courage I had was fully occupied with the extraordinary surges of pain. ‘I’ll have to shave you next,’
and then, ‘I’ll get someone.’ Shave me? It was then I realized I knew absolutely nothing about what was going to happen. I’d read a bit about childbirth in novels, of
course, and a review of one where the writer had said how bored he was with the cliché of women straining at bedposts. Wayland and I had once had a conversation when we tried to define the
cliché, and decided that it was when one recognized its truth by experience. Here I was, recognizing one of them. Then I stopped thinking.

The nurse came back with a bowl of water and shaving equipment.

‘Pull up your nightie, then.’

I lay, unable to see what she was doing below the vast mound of my belly, and when she hurt me – a petty little pain – she said the razor blade was blunt and it couldn’t be
helped. She went, and was replaced by a sour-looking elderly nurse, who’d clearly been woken up to sit with me since she yawned a lot and then placed herself in a chair in a corner of the
room furthest from the bed and read a paper.

An air raid began, the usual droning and anti-aircraft guns popping away and distant explosions. The only good thing about the pains was that having reached a crescendo, when I felt my backbone
was being split in two, they slowly receded and there was a period of calm. After what seemed like hours, I asked her how long this was going to go on. Without looking up from her paper, she said,
‘I’m sick of people asking that question.’ Hours passed. I reached the point where I almost wished a bomb would drop on me and put an end to everything. At last, when I could see
the thin line of light at the edge of the blackout curtains, and the pains were
so awful that I couldn’t help gasping, someone brought in a black rubber mask that they put
over my mouth. They said it would make it better. It didn’t have the slightest effect. I said it didn’t seem to be working and they took it off. ‘It’s broken again.’ I
asked when the doctor was coming and they said he was on his way.

Jock Ledingham had been our family doctor for years and was famous for his skill in delivering babies. I’d seen him only a month before when he’d said the baby was the wrong way
round and had gently manipulated my tummy with his hands and put the baby back into the right position. When he finally arrived, I was so glad to see a familiar face and someone I could trust that
my eyes filled with tears of relief. ‘I’m so
thirsty
.’ I’d been thirsty for hours. He put a glass to my lips and as quickly removed it and said when the next pain
came I was to push. This happened three or four times with increasing agony, and just as I was going to protest that I couldn’t do it again, he put a pad over my face and I was out.

When I came to it was to see smiling faces above me – the nurses and Jock – all looking very pleased. ‘You’ve had a lovely little daughter,’ someone said.

‘Where is she?’

‘She’s being washed and dressed.’ It was ten a.m. on 2 February 1943, and Pete came into the room carrying a white bundle that he put into my arms. I looked at the tiny
crumpled pink face, frowning with sleep – this mysterious, completely unknown person – and then at the faces above me, which seemed full of expectation that I’d be radiant,
joyful. But all I felt was an immense, overwhelming fatigue. Pete said how lovely she was, and I agreed. Then they took her away. If
they
had all gone away, I thought, I might get to know
her, have her to myself, but even during that thought I fell asleep. The sleeping pill, the first I’d ever had, had battled all night against the pains and now came into its own.