Authors: Barbara Vine
I went into the drawing-room and contemplated the books on the shelves in there. But not for long. My eyes turned to the big window from which the garden can be seen. It began to rain, and not just to rain, but to come down in floods, beating on the glass and bouncing off the stones. Through it, the shuddering veil of it, the lawn and trees and bushes were a dense mass of varying greens. Lightning struck while I watched, lighting up glittering slate roofs and tossing treetops. I told myself what I sometimes tell my students in a comment on what I have found in their essays: do not subscribe to the pathetic fallacy. James and I had nothing to do with the weather, and the weather nothing to do with us. The thunder came so long after the lightning that it made me jump.
I wondered if James, in spite of what he said, was even now confessing to Andrew. Would he tell me if he was? I went up to bed but couldn’t sleep and came down again in my dressing gown. This time I did pick up
The Child’s Child
and started to read the first page again, but I got no further than the first line:
He knew it was wrong of him, but his life today was so full of wrong actions that it seemed to him one long sin.
It reminded me of me. Except for the sin part.
Sin
is a word that has gone out of our vocabulary, except, I suppose, for Catholics in the confessional.
I had started leafing through it, passing the point I had reached, looking for a date, when I heard the front door close softly. I did a stupid thing. I switched off the light. No one could have been deceived because anyone coming to the front of the house could have seen it, but I left it off, sitting there feeling like a fool and waiting for one or both of them to come in. To walk through the drawing-room and maybe burst into the study. Neither of them did. The porch light went out, the hall light went out, and I wasn’t just sitting in the dark, I was in the profoundest, deepest blackness. I don’t know why I felt for the window and then for the curtains. Pulling them back revealed the half-lit street, a cat
as grey as the night sky emerging from under a car and streaking into the dense foliage of a garden.
As far as I could tell, the whole house was now in darkness. My green digital clock told me it was half past midnight.
I
N THE
morning, after Andrew had gone to work, James came down to talk to me. Like the ghost, he knocked on the drawing-room door, something he had seldom done before. He sat down, picked up
The Child’s Child,
said, “Here’s the book you showed us, isn’t it?”
I nodded.
“I met him once,” he said. “Greenwell. He was very old by then. It was at someone else’s book launch.”
Silence fell. I wasn’t interested in someone else’s book launch and nor really was he. His face had become grave, the eyes half-closed. I said that I supposed he hadn’t said anything to Andrew.
“No, and I’m not going to. We’re not going to. Think about it, Grace. What would be the point? You might say, who benefits? Not you or me, certainly. Andrew would be devastated, and that’s one instance where that overused word is absolutely apt. He would be. And he would hate us both. I know how jealous he is. You don’t. You can’t. So who benefits?”
“Truth, I suppose,” I said, feeling like a prig. “What politicians call transparency.”
“Oh, please.”
We sat there, looking at each other, for a while in silence, then starting the argument all over again. I stopped it by reaching or apparently reaching his point of view. “All right,” I said, “we’ll say nothing. We’ll even try to forget it.”
“Thank you, Grace. I don’t think you’ll have any regrets.”
Before all this started, I would have expected if it had reached this end to have felt enormous guilt, but I didn’t. What I felt was
relief, as if all along I had wanted to avoid telling Andrew, and perhaps I had. Once James had gone upstairs, had kissed me on the cheek and held me in a sexless hug for a moment before saying I had saved his life for the second time, I felt a burden lifted from my shoulders. I had agreed to do something I had thought was wrong and I would never agree to; whatever he said, I wouldn’t do it, and suddenly I was agreeing to it. I felt fine. It was all over, my brother and I would be to each other what we had always been, there would be no recriminations, no pain, no accusations and bitter reproach. All things would be well, as that weird woman Julian of Norwich said. I sat down at the computer and got back to my thesis.
A
NDREW HAD
a week’s holiday owing to him, and James and he went to Italy, to Lucca, where neither of them had ever before been. They had never disturbed me and I hope I hadn’t disturbed them, but I was able to work better while entirely on my own, and by the time I saw them again I was well into the thesis.
While they were away, some kind of notice had come—the sort of thing that’s called a
communication
rather than a
letter
—telling James he wouldn’t be needed as a witness at Kevin Drake’s trial. Apparently, the police had enough witnesses without him. He and my brother came to tell me, inviting me to have dinner with them. While we were in the restaurant, the now happy and enormously relieved James told me that he wanted to apologise to me. While they were away, he’d read a piece about a particularly dreadful kind of social engineering in Spain in the 1930s but, almost incredibly, continuing until the 1980s. Under this scheme the Franco regime and the Catholic Church removed babies from unmarried mothers and, telling them their children were dead, placed them with women of higher moral character. At first he could hardly believe it, but he checked it out and found it was
well known and not only in Spain, where all over the country there are children’s graves containing nothing but stones. He was sorry he had said I exaggerated the suffering of the mothers of illegitimate children.
We were all happy after that. I told them I was still only halfway through the thesis, though Carla had told me not to hang about with it too long. She had once had a graduate student who could never bring himself to relinquish his and finally given up.
Perhaps it was strange that I could now look at James and talk to James without thinking about the “incident” in the study. It was over, it was past, and just as I had no urge to repeat it, so I was sure he hadn’t. I did think of it enough to marvel that I had ever considered telling Andrew. A good principle in my philosophy is to be careful never to confess something to a friend or a lover (or I suppose a husband or a wife) unless you can be entirely sure you’re not doing so out of self-indulgence or even, God forbid, pride. Yet nothing like that had prompted my powerful need, immediately after the “incident,” to admit the whole thing to my brother. Luckily, it wasn’t an impulse that had lasted long, and now I felt the same as James: keep silent, forget.
Nothing now, I thought, could make me feel that need to confess to Andrew, nothing could impel me to come out with the truth. I was wrong.
T
HEY CALLED
it “being in a fix” in those days, though Martin Greenwell doesn’t. It never crossed my mind. I had taken the occasional risk before, being a sporadic user of the pill, and never had a scare. Now it was six weeks since my unexpected encounter with James, my period had failed to come, and the pregnancy test I’d bought had tested positive. Of course I had to put an end to it, I refused to be in a fix.
Abortion
is a nasty word, and the euphemism
termination
is only slightly better. But I didn’t have to think about that yet. So long as I had it done by, say, the end of August, everything would be fine. I was not one of those girls in fiction whose attitude to their pregnancy must have been a constant dwelling on it, from ghastly realisation through cringing acceptance to death wish.
There was no need for James ever to be told. I had seen him in Andrew’s company and he was much, much better. Andrew said James was suddenly lighthearted, went out for long walks, and hadn’t touched the oxycodone since that “communication” came. The book he was halfway through he had abandoned, but he told Andrew that when the trial was over, he might write a novel about the murder of Bashir.
I worked on the thesis, resisting—I’m not sure how success-fully—an urge to enter into the emotions of some of these girls who found themselves heading for disgrace or disaster. I did allow myself to dwell a bit on the almost uncanny power of marriage,
a ceremony, “a piece of paper” as it’s often called, that in two or three promises and a hymn or two or a couple of names and a few words could save a life or transform a life or bring with it unimaginable relief. All gone now, of course, but once a cornerstone of social life, the magical process that made women pure and children honourable.
So I was careful to keep the things cool—
businesslike
was the word that came to mind—while all the time this undercurrent of dread and a strange kind of excitement was running along beneath the surface. The weeks passed, summer was coming to an end. One evening my brother and James were going out to celebrate Andrew’s birthday and they asked me to go with them. I said I would, then said I wasn’t well. To be with the two of them, both of them ignorant of what was happening to me, but Andrew much more so than James, Andrew
innocent.
I didn’t go with them. I began on Greenwell’s book with its highly appropriate theme, the subject of the thesis and of my life at present. Next day I booked myself into an abortion clinic, telling myself all the time I gave my details and saw the doctor and fixed on a day that I was so lucky compared with all those poor girls I’d been writing about. I didn’t have to have a baby if I didn’t want to. It would be
wrong
for me to have a baby that was my brother’s lover’s child. That, I told myself, was true immorality, betrayal, treachery, positive cruelty. This way, I could have the deed done, it would be quick, no doubt I would be able to walk to the clinic and go home afterwards on the bus.
James need never know, Andrew certainly need never know. In a year’s time, in less than a year, it would be as if none of this had ever been. I finished
The Child’s Child,
rather pleased with it and gratified in the way we are when we read something that is so close to home as to be taken for a coincidence. My e-mail to Toby Greenwell told him that I thought the book was publishable, but I would like to read it again if he didn’t mind. By this time I was
a little worried that I hadn’t given the book the concentration I would have if I hadn’t been pregnant. No, I must correct that and say, if I had not been guiltily pregnant. As all those girls were, of course, but in quite a different way and for a different reason. If “termination” had been possible in their day as it is in mine, so easy, so straightforward, surely by this time without any moral censure, they wouldn’t have believed my talk of guilt. They knew what real guilt and shame were, they lived with them every day of their lives.
I
TOLD
myself I hadn’t been able to get James alone, but that was not true. I could have managed it in a hundred ways, but fear got in the way of every one of them. Now something else had happened. I had started throwing up in the mornings. This sickness had brought it home to me that unless I did something about it in the next few weeks, I was going to have a baby in seven months’ time. This was reality, which it wasn’t before, this was me carrying another person inside me. The idea of having an abortion and so putting an end to all this now seemed distasteful. It had gradually grown on me, this feeling, getting a bit worse every day. I was fascinated for a while, comparing my sensations to those of all the girls I’d been writing about—well, contrasting really because I was living in a different world. I couldn’t even say I too was a young woman witnessing changes to my body because those other young women were largely ignorant of what was happening to them. They knew they were in danger of dreadful physical damage and death; opprobrium, if that was the word, loomed over them, disgrace awaited them. None of this applied to me. Like them, I worried, but for very different reasons. I couldn’t sleep at night, but that was through worrying about having to tell James and, worse, perhaps Andrew—tell Andrew and James together. If I had a termination—horrible word—I wouldn’t have
to do any of that. I hadn’t told Fay. I sometimes caught her giving me strange looks, suspicious looks, but not without a touch of amusement. She said nothing and neither did I.
The doctor at the clinic asked me if I needed counselling before the abortion. I didn’t think so then and I certainly don’t now. I know I wanted the baby, beyond a doubt I wanted him or her. It was Andrew and James that troubled me because I knew only too well that telling them might lead to Andrew’s deciding he couldn’t continue to share this house with me. It might split them up, for what James and I did can be seen as a double betrayal. When someone betrays you, you believe that the treachery was deliberate, malicious, vindictive, but it probably wasn’t. You believe it was intentional, even vengeful. Very likely the betrayer didn’t think of you at all, perhaps forgot for a time that you existed. I had never been the victim of a betrayal, but I had read enough instances of it in literature to think it must be common. Now I knew what it was like from the point of the perpetrator, and I didn’t like it.
Every time Andrew and James and I met—and we seemed to do so quite often those days and amicably—I asked myself something else. Would we ever meet again after I told them? Would they move out of here or would I? Clearly, I had to tell James first and James on his own. That wasn’t as simple as it sounds. He and Andrew were always together, except of course while Andrew was out at work and James was upstairs writing.
I remembered how shocked Verity was when her next-door neighbour phoned her. How much more disapproving would she have been if she had known me to make a call to someone living in the same house. To someone born in the 1920s, someone who never had a phone in the house until she was ten years old, phoning an occupant of the same house who was sitting no more than a few feet away from you was both extravagant and lazy. Of course I could have gone upstairs, walked down the passage, and
knocked on the study door, but my reason for phoning was to ask if I might do this. I thought James might not answer but let his caller leave a message, which I wasn’t anxious to do. But he answered. He said, yes, of course, and come and have coffee.