The Fall (33 page)

Yours, with respect,
Diana S.

She wrote and rewrote the letter, not substantially but in the detail. She tried
Yours affectionately
rather than
Yours, with respect.
She originally wrote
joining up
rather than
participating in the war effort.
Things like that. She shifted it from the familiar and faintly regretful to the formal and indifferent. It surprised her
to discover how she could manipulate words to achieve a subtlety of effect. It surprised her to discover how readily she could
consign Guy Matthewson to her past. There was within her a hard kernel of rationality that she had never expected to be there.
Emotion had always been something that she claimed as hers: in her personal ladder of beliefs the affective response counted
high above the rational one. Now there was this cold center of logic and reason that she had uncovered at the very core of
her personality.

M
EG FOUND THE MAN,
of course. Meg knew people, who would themselves know other people. “It’s not cheap, darling,” she warned.

“How much?”

“Fifty.”

“Fifty pounds?”

“Actually, darling, I think it’s guineas.”

Diana felt sick. Was it real nausea, the sickness that she had been feeling so often these days, or the shock of the cost?
“I haven’t
got
that kind of money,” she whispered. “I only earn six pounds a month, for God’s sake. Meg, what’ll I do?”

“Look, we’ll go and see. We’ll go and talk about it. I’m told that the man is very good. A friend of a friend knew someone
who had it done by him. Perhaps we can get him to reduce the fee. I can lend you some. We can work it out.”

“Is he…?”

“Is he what?”

“You know. Is he a
doctor?”

Meg smiled reassuringly. She should have been the nurse, with that lovely, reassuring smile. “Of course he is, Di. That’s
why it’s guineas. Don’t worry, I’m not going to put you in the hands of some dreadful backstreet abortionist. Actually, he’s
much more than just a plain old doctor; he’s a gynecologist and a surgeon. A Mr. Mandeville. Harley Street no less.”

“Harley Street? But I thought this kind of thing was, well, illegal.”

Meg patted her hand. “There are,” she explained in her knowing manner, “ways and means.”

They had to wait a few days for the appointment. It was in the early afternoon, so it wasn’t difficult to get there as long
as she was back on watch by six. Apparently there would be an examination. Meg came up from Croydon, and they met at the station
and then took the Tube to Bond Street and walked from there. It was a cold and leaden day, the clouds lying low over the city
and a thin drizzle brushing the air. Meg had her issue greatcoat, so she was all right, but Diana’s coat was threadbare and
did little to keep her warm. And there was something else: the chill of expectation. That was internal, not external—the icy
anticipation of what was to happen to her, of how she would lie on her back with her legs up in stirrups while some strange
man poked around inside her. No amount of outside insulation could dispel that cold.

Harley Street was forbidding in its restrained splendor, the impassive frontages in dark brick, the doors and windows and
railings picked out in white, the brass plaques announcing arcane specializations and recondite qualifications.

Mr. Humphrey Mandeville,

FRCS, FRCOG

There was a nurse in starched white and a receptionist whose disapproving expression suggested that she understood the purpose
of their visit all too well. They waited in a drawing room, with copies of the
Tatler
for diversion. The pictures on the wall were reproductions of paintings by Stubbs: horses—stud mares, no doubt—with their
grooms.

Mandeville himself was a tall man with a stiff collar and pince-nez hanging from a chain around his neck. He had the aspect
of a bird: part owl, part eagle, wholly predatory. He sat behind his expansive desk and glared at the two women with a look
of barely concealed ferocity. “Which of you ladies is Miss Sheringham?”

“It’s
Sheridan,”
said Diana. “Diana Sheridan. A bit like the actress.”

“You are an
actress?”

She blushed. “No, not me. My name’s a bit like the actress’s. Dinah Sheridan. Diana Sheridan.”

The man frowned. In his stiff collar and pince-nez he seemed to be glaring at them as if from another century, an era when
even an actress was something disreputable, never mind a pregnant and unmarried woman. “What actress? Why are we talking about
an actress if you are not one?”

Diana felt an unnerving mixture of emotion: part shame, part anger, part the embarrassment of a child made an object of ridicule
by an adult. Sweat crawled like an insect down from her armpit into the fabric of her slip. “It doesn’t matter,” she mumbled.
“It really doesn’t matter.”

“So if you are not an actress, what are you?”

“A nurse.”

“A
nurse,
indeed?”

“An auxiliary. I work with an ambulance unit in Clerkenwell.”

“An
auxiliary.
Is that so?” He rested his elbows on the arms of his chair and placed his fingers tip to tip and bounced them gently against
each other. “May I ask, Nurse Sheringham, how you came to be in your…ah…present circumstances?”

“Well, I wanted to do something for the war effort, and nurses seemed likely to be needed, so I did a course —”

Mandeville’s expression contracted as though with pain. “I think you misunderstand me. I do not wish to hear reasons for your
commendable efforts toward the defeat of Nazi Germany; I mean your being with child. How did your
pregnancy
come about, girl?”

Perhaps it was the use of the word
girl
that annoyed Meg so. She interrupted angrily: “I’d have thought you’d have known that, seeing as pregnancy is your line.
Di slept with a man. They made love. How else do you do it, Doctor?”

Mandeville turned the weapon of his eyes away from the blushing Diana and onto Meg. “Thank you for that. You see, that is
precisely the point, Miss…?”

“York. Like the city. And I’m a lady, not a girl.”

“I’m delighted to hear it, Miss York. Well, you must understand…both of you must understand, that the circumstances surrounding
the conception of this child are of immense importance. If Miss Sheridan did, as you have just suggested,
make love,
then it is difficult to see how one can justify the destruction of the child.”

The phrase hung in the air, reverberated from the window-panes with their crisscross of adhesive tape, echoed through Diana’s
skull.
Destruction of a child.

“Do you have to put it so bluntly?” Meg demanded.

“But that is precisely what it is, Miss York. The abortion of a fetus is the destruction of a child, specifically outlawed
under the Offenses Against the Person Act of 1861. For carrying out an abortion, under the terms of paragraph 58 of this act,
both Miss Sheridan and I might be liable to penal servitude for life.” He looked from one to the other of the two young women
seated on the far side of his desk.
“Life,”
he repeated, as though he were saying
death.
“Even you, Miss York, for aiding and abetting, might be liable to up to three years in prison.”

There was a silence, like the silence of a courtroom. Outside, a car drove past. You could hear the tires cutting through
the wet. Inside Mandeville’s office, Diana sat with her knees primly together and her hands clasped tight in her lap and her
mind ringing with words: the word
life,
the word
destruction.

“On the other hand,” Mandeville continued, “the Infant Preservation Act of 1929 provides for the possibility of performing
a lawful termination. But to be lawful, I would have to be satisfied that by ending the life of the child I was preserving
the life of the mother.” He looked over his pince-nez at Diana. She appeared eminently healthy, bursting with health, and
guilty, crawling with guilt. As though tasting her, tasting both health and guilt, the man passed his tongue over his lips.
Then he sniffed, glanced down at his desk, and went on with his legal dissertation: “The Bourne ruling of 1939 defines the
life of the mother in rather broad terms.” He held up a sheet of paper as though reading it to a jury. “Termination may be
allowable if—and I quote—‘the doctor is of the opinion on reasonable grounds and with adequate knowledge of the probable consequences,
that continuing the pregnancy would be to make the woman a physical or mental wreck.’”

He looked up from the page. “Strong language, is it not? ‘a physical or mental
wreck.’
In the Bourne case, the mother in question was a fourteen-year-old girl who had been raped. Doctor Bourne performed the abortion
and was acquitted at the subsequent trial. The question is this: can I be convinced that Miss Sheringham —”

“Sheridan.”

“Miss
Sheridan
would be left a physical or mental wreck by proceeding with her pregnancy? If she too had suffered the misfortune of rape,
then perhaps I could do so, even though she is clearly not fourteen. But Miss York has suggested that Miss Sheridan and her
partner
made love.
And I see before me a perfectly healthy young woman who gives every indication of being able to bring an equally healthy
child into the world. Of course, I haven’t yet examined you, Miss Sheridan, but unless you have any marked physical problem,
then all I can say is that you are asking me to perform an illegal act. An illegal act of the gravest kind. And, I might add,
an immoral act. Which is not necessarily the same thing.”

Mandeville stood. His pince-nez fell from his aquiline nose and hung down his front like a dead mouse. “I assume that any
medical examination is superfluous—it would, in any case, incur costs for you—and I suggest that we bring this whole unpleasant
meeting to a close. I further suggest that you go away and bring your child into the world and turn yourself into a decent
mother. There is enough death and destruction at the moment. Why not take part in the creation of life, Miss Sheringham?”

They went out into the rain. Just down the terrace from Mandeville’s consulting rooms, a house had been bombed. There was
only the shell left, looking like a tragic mask—empty sockets, vacant mouth, frowning brow, and hollow cheeks. At the back
there were charred wooden beams like ruined bits of a theater set. Outside this place, in the drizzle, Diana sat down on a
low wall and wept. She wept for many things: for herself, for her child that would never be, for her fleeting, fractured love
for Guy, but also for those nameless people she had seen broken by the bombs—the baby she had seen exploded on a sidewalk
in Stepney, the pregnant woman she had helped extract from rubble in Clerkenwell and subsequently had watched die, the bewildered,
ragged East Enders who sifted through the rubble to find what remained of their lives. She wept also out of pure, unmitigated
tiredness, for she was tired: exhaustion was a cancer that ate away at her mind and her limbs, that eroded the arteries and
dissolved the nerves. She sat and wept, and Meg stood over her and the drizzle came down like tears out of a cold gray sky
so that the wet on her cheeks and the smudged mascara might have been the one thing or the other, a mere meteorological phenomenon
or a personal disaster.