Consequences (12 page)

A high white room, in which she lay on a high bed; people went to and fro, their footsteps tapping on the lino; a face came swooping down over hers: “Push, please, push now.”

She pushed, and the pain swept her up, took her away to some awful private place.

The face came back: “Here’s your little boy.”

Silence. They have all gone. No, there is a back at the far side of the room; someone in white is doing something at a sink. And she can see a metal cot, and the baby—a small dark head. But she cannot really see; everything has gone gray and misty. And she cannot move; she tries to turn her head, and cannot. She knows that something more is wrong, and she must tell them. But she cannot speak; she tries to tell the person over there at the sink, but nothing comes. And then the person turns around, walks across, leans over her. She hears a bell start to ring.

The room is once more full of people. They seem to crowd around her. Faces; voices. But she is floating now, she is so weak that it is as though she were dissolving, and then she can neither see nor hear, the people ebb away. She is alone.

Lucas sat in the hospital corridor, outside the room with swing doors that sometimes opened or closed as someone hurried in, or out. Nobody looked at him, or spoke to him. Once, he tried to waylay a nurse as she came out: “Can I see my wife?” The girl smiled and was gone.

He sat on, and on. At last a man in a white coat appeared. He had a stethoscope round his neck, and there was a splash of blood at the hem of his coat. Lucas stood up: “C-can I…” He wanted to say can I see her now, but the doctor interrupted. “Let’s go in here, shall we?”

He led Lucas into an office. “Please sit down. I’m afraid I’ve got to tell you something.”

The baby, thought Lucas. The baby is not all right.

And the doctor told.

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I’m so very sorry.” He said some more, about a hemorrhage, and shock, which Lucas did not take in. No, he was crying out—no, no, no. But he did not speak.

The doctor said, “The baby is fine. He has come through well.”

Lucas nodded.

They both got up, and the doctor touched his shoulder. “I expect you would like to see her.”

She was lying on a trolley, and the baby was beside her in a cot on wheels. Lucas stood looking at her for a long while, and then he put his hand for a moment on the baby’s head, which was warm and furry. Then he went.

Presently a hospital porter came across this long lanky fellow sitting on a bench in the car park with his head in his hands and his shoulders shaking. “You all right, mate?” the porter said. “Anything you need? You’d find a cup of tea in the canteen.” He was not unused to this sort of thing; that’s hospitals for you.

Part 3

THERE WERE THREE OF THEM,
in the tall house: Lucas and Molly and Simon. At first Simon did not count, as a person, then gradually he began to do so, acquired personality and language and inclinations. Sometimes, Lucas’s mother was there. She would arrive and instantly set about a whirlwind rescue operation, scrubbing and dusting, cleaning out cupboards, filling the washing line in the garden. “Lucas lacks any domestic instinct,” she would tell Molly. “But he has a lot on his plate, poor dear.” And Molly, sitting at the kitchen table in her school uniform, eating a rather better tea than was usually on offer, would nod. It seemed best to agree all around.

These incursions were something of a relief. Mrs. Talbot would make an assault on every front; Lucas’s shirts would acquire buttons once more, Molly would no longer have to keep her school skirt up with string, her knickers would have new elastic, her socks would be darned. Simon would be systematically cleaned and aired, for as long as the visit lasted. Normally, he was in the care of Mrs. Selwood, who came in by day, supervised Simon and did some perfunctory cooking and cleaning. She was fond of reminding Lucas that she had looked after more children than he had had hot dinners, and Simon was devoted to her, but there was no escaping the fact that Mrs. Selwood’s methods were slummocky; Simon had dirty ears and was fed on much bread and jam. As Molly got older, and looked at the world beyond, she made comparisons. She revised her own standards and tried to do something about both Simon and the general state of the house, which did not go down well with Mrs. Selwood.

“Madam here doesn’t seem to care for my way of doing things,” she would say to Lucas, tight-lipped, and Lucas would squirm in distress, and then take Molly aside, imploring her to tread carefully.

Lucas is like a heron, Molly sometimes thought. Is that why the press is the Heron Press? Stalking about the place on his long legs; his thin beaky nose. He was all length and angular movement. Sitting down, he seemed to fold up. On the rare occasions when he put an arm around her, it was an edgy, bony hug. But Lucas was not a hugging and kissing person; his physical awkwardness extended to dealings with the world. His stammer got more pronounced when he had to engage with strangers. He blinked a lot, words rushed out, but disordered and apologetic. With those he knew, he was calmer, quieter, often quite silent. When he was sympathetic, he seemed to twist up into a state of vicarious distress, his legs knotting together. “Oh dear, oh dear,” he would say. “What a bother. Oh,
dear
…” And then he would busy himself violently with some task.

Much later, her most abiding memory of that time was of being cold. She was cold without and cold within. The internal cold was a great chill void, as though some essential part of her had gone missing. She would come to recognize this as extended grieving; at the time it seemed merely an appropriate complement to the all-pervading external cold—the frigid house in which there was localized warmth only from the kitchen range when it was going, and the little hissing gas fire in the sitting room. In the winters—the brutal winters of 1946 and 1947—she scrambled into her school clothes as fast as she could, washed in cold water, waited shivering for the bus. They all had fingers raw with chilblains; her bare knees, between her long socks and the bottom of her tunic, were permanently blue. The pursuit of fuel dominated their lives, dominated all lives. Lucas acquired a battered old pram from an elderly neighbor; together he and Molly would take this to the emergency depot and heave it back between them, loaded with coal or coke. Then they would do the same for the neighbor, four long treks through the icy streets each time word got around that there was an allocation of fuel. The old lady would reward them with her sweet ration: a treasured Fry’s Sandwich Bar for Molly to share with Simon.

This was a disheveled world. A landscape of bomb sites and houses with flapping tarpaulin roofs and boarded windows; households depleted by the war, minus their men. There were plenty of women without husbands, children without fathers—families that were glaringly incomplete.

Like them. Like Lucas, Molly, and Simon. Except that wifelessness, motherlessness were not the norm. They stuck out. They attracted sympathy, expressed with small gestures by way of some discarded toy for Simon, or an invitation to tea for Molly, but they lacked the official status of the war-damaged. Lucas was not an ex-serviceman, he was just another civilian; the circumstances of Lorna’s death owed nothing to the war. Theirs was not a historic misfortune—just something that could have happened to anyone, at any time.

Lucas’s role as an Air Raid Warden was remembered on the whole only by those with whom he had had words about infringements of the blackout or inappropriate shelter behavior, exchanges that were long held against him. He had relished the job of Warden, had felt that at least he could compensate in some way for his inadequacies as military material. He had been indefatigable, racing from post to post and shelter to shelter during those menacing, noisy nights, doing without sleep, without food, losing track of everything except the requirements of the job. He had known every street of his patch, every house, who lived where, who should be accounted for when the bombs came this way. He had coped with incendiaries, with burst gas mains, with an old man who had a stroke in one of the shelters. He had stood alone and exposed, watching the dark shape of a descending land mine, to know where it would fall and thus whom to alert. He had had to subdue drunks and sort out shelter disputes—the most taxing area of his duties. Bombs were less daunting than recalcitrant people. He lacked authority, and knew it. His uniform gave him formal power, but his natural diffidence was at once apparent to anyone at all combative. “Come along now,” he would say, wavering head and shoulders above some beer-sodden fellow causing mayhem in a shelter. “Pull yourself together and stop being a nuisance.” And the other shelterers would collapse into laughter, seeing him as a moment of much-needed light relief.

But he had acquired resolve; those weeks and months hardened everyone, so that some discovered an unsuspected capacity for endurance, others became cynical, amoral, concerned only with self-preservation. Lucas found that in the last resort he could face down an argumentative householder, see off a looter, badger the control center for attention to an incident on his territory. This was a bizarre new society in which class barriers were not broken down but subtly eroded; people were cheek by jowl in a way that they had never been before, in the crammed street shelters, in the busy fetid little enclaves of the wardens’ posts. You still placed a person by their voice—Lucas was glumly aware that his own inflections nailed him for what he was as soon as he opened his mouth, and might antagonize accordingly—but other things mattered too. Confidence, efficiency, sang-froid, selfishness, greed, shirking. The brisk competence of the WVS somehow excused their resoundingly middle-class tones; the authority and expertise of the firefighters and the rescue workers made them natural leaders, acknowledged by all. Looters prompted universal outrage.

Lucas found a new ease with others. He was never going to be capable of camaraderie; he was always going to have difficulty face-to-face with someone unfamiliar but he discovered that he could join in the desultory chatter at the wardens’ post, that he could find a remark to soften a hostile householder, that in a curious way his evident awkwardness would often disarm potential troublemakers. He had become a sort of mascot in some quarters, he realized, seen as an amiable toff who might lack officer qualities but was patently doing a good job.

Equally, his own social assumptions had been brought into question. The prewar world in which he had spent his childhood and youth had things cut and dried: people were clear who they were and where they belonged; everyone assessed everyone else and placed them within or without their own sphere. This was a world divided into us and them, with many subtle and significant subdivisions. From whatever vantage point, people identified kith and kin, and lumped the rest together as that other lot—familiar enough but of a different order.Speech and dress were the defining factors; you listened, looked, and allocated. To be working class was to recognize your own complex society, with its hierarchies and gradations, and to see the rest as mysterious or offensive, according to inclination. To be middle class was to see yourself as among the chosen, but to be conscious of your own society’s treacherous quicksands—the codes and rankings.

Lucas knew himself to be indisputably middle class: father a bank manager, home in a leafy suburb, attendance at a minor public school. Except that he had displayed revisionist tendencies quite early on: he wouldn’t join the Cubs, he played rugby and cricket only under duress, he haunted the local public library. As an only child, he received much parental attention. His father was disturbed by what he saw as a bolshie streak; his mother was more tolerant. She was a woman of large energies and no qualifications. In another age, she would have swept to the helm of some organization. As it was, denied the possibility of a job commitment, she became a vigorous worker for local charities. When Lucas’s father died of a heart attack at fifty, she was able to make such interests a full-time commitment, disappearing every day to serve the Red Cross, Dr. Barnardo’s, the NSPCC.

At Oxford, Lucas fell in with sympathetic spirits. At last, it was all right to be besotted with books, to admire aspiring poets, to wear an open-necked shirt and corduroys, to sit up all night talking about art and literature. He joined the Fabian Society, and began to question the basis of his own circumstances. His father would have had a fit. His mother was more pragmatic; her own exposure to unsuspected areas of misery and distress through her commitment to good works had considerably tempered her outlook. “I’ll never vote Socialist,” she told Lucas. “But I can see their point.”

“Am I a snob?” he asked himself. “Are we snobs?” he had asked his friends, in those late-night sessions, wreathed in cigarette smoke. And they had decided that they were, but that this was not their fault. The case was put that you could be ideologically committed to Fabian beliefs, without being forced into comradeship with people from an alien background. “I’m just not compatible with working-class people,” said one young activist. “But I’d die on the barricades in their defense.” At the time Lucas had thought this comment unexceptionable but was perhaps slightly dismayed by the knowledge that he felt rather the same himself. His own dealings with those outside his class had been the routine contact with tradesmen, with shop assistants, with all those who serviced the world in which he lived, alongside a more familiar relationship with Joe, who came in to help his mother with the heavy garden work, and Mrs. Carter, who cleaned and did the washing and ironing. But now, at Oxford, he was alongside scholarship men, people his own age and in his own situation, who were doing what he was doing, who were his peers, but who had come from behind the invisible, unmentioned barrier; they spoke with what was called “an accent,” they were determined, hardworking, they could be truculent or contemptuous. He struck up a few friendships with such men, and found himself always a touch apologetic, vaguely defensive. He certainly did not feel superior; rather, it was as though he were guilty of some unstated generic offense which was not strictly his doing but for which he must carry the can.