Vac (14 page)

And wouldn’t that be best!

I read with dismay the description of pre-eclampsia which could usher in, with great rapidity, the convulsions of
eclampsia
which often had a fatal termination. Wouldn’t it be best, safest, to sacrifice the present incumbent of your womb and start again? Toxaemia in one pregnancy by no means
guaranteed
it in the next—though it increased the probability.

Your pressure rose again and they summoned you. I took
you, trembling and wretched, to the maternity home and installed you in the ward. Then I consulted the houseman. He said that deep and prolonged sedation could save the child and continual monitoring would enable them to act swiftly if your pressure shot above the danger point.

So you went away from me and we didn’t really meet again for months. I visited you daily and saw your swelling form under the blankets and you rolled your head towards me and sometimes your hand came fumbling across the bedclothes to mine. Actually they timed the doses so that you were most rational at visiting times and often we were able to chat gently, if vaguely, but your brain was swimming in chloral hydrate and you were never ‘all there’.

Summer began to rage.

The equator had kinked and a loop had snagged London. The city bleached white and the sun burned the clothes off girls’ backs. Heat rained from the uncanny blue. The grass parched. A double row of eggs with limbs gasped in your stifling ward and, modesty dissolved in Fahrenheit, continued to mope prostrate above the sheets in no more than
diaphanous
nylon when we husbands shuffled dripping in at visiting times.

Night after night, after seeing you, I blinked out of the maternity home into sub-tropical glare. I clambered into my ancient, straight-backed Ford and rattled away to The George or The Prince of Wales or some other pub, dreaming of willing girls.

I saw them everywhere, lithe, promiscuous and glorious. Some I had met. They had been to our flat, after pubs, with moody Irish boy-friends who tortured them. We had been to parties in their deceived husbands’ studios or in the amusing flats they shared with two air hostesses and a radiologist. They were everywhere and smiled joyously to see me. And I took their hands fondly or circled them fervently round the waist and always, just as my exquisite lust was knotting itself into some unmistakable proposal for having drinks together, or a
meal, or going driving or—they gazed intently into my eyes and asked about you. Were you all right? When would you be out? They thought you were marvellous. Their voices, their expressions, the melting gleam in their uterine eyes said:

And, fuming coward, I struggled in the trap of our
legendary
devotion, unable to menace the touching image and declare my fermenting desire. I nodded sadly but hopefully, gave the latest medical bulletin and reeled on to the next such encounter.

How could I? With you lying there, a drugged mass on a sheet of clammy red rubber, a mere incubator of hot flesh, sustaining the long, medicated gestation in order to present me with temporal succession—how could I? Try to date
another
girl, compliment and caress another girl, be seen in these gossip-loving streets with another girl, make love to smother girl while you were making, out of our love, another life?

But how could I not!

This was last chance filling station! The desert was ahead! Our union alone had moated me pretty securely in fidelity. How would I ever worm out through the added fortifications of fatherhood? Hadn’t I originally promised that I would love you but not be faithful to you? Shouldn’t I keep my promises? If I couldn’t achieve adultery now, with the guard
temporarily
disabled, how would I ever manage it when it was doubled?

I plunged a quarter of a mile into the earth where the Genius of Temptation packed half the typists in London close about me. They wore nothing but a film of dyed fabric and the Genius, in his malign ingenuity, set the snakey red train swaying voluptuously. Hip jammed into my groin, breasts nuzzling my shoulders, buttocks, legs, arms, bellies crating me softly, I rocked shuddering into town and shuddering back in the evenings. A spectre, thinned by the immense
counter-stresses
of guilt and desire, I crept again into the ward to visit
you and found there another spectre, but one etherialized by the sufferings of love.

Then it happened.

A crane of necessity hoisted me dripping but still technically chaste from the tepid pool of desire.

Your blood pressure shot up critically.

A month before term they decided to induce labour.

It should be all right, they said. Eight-month babies were perfectly viable and its small heart was thumping in your belly.

You lay now with a weary, proud, expectant smile. I was allowed to visit you at any time. Clear fluid, from a bottle on a stand beside your bed, discharged slowly into one of your veins through a needle bound to your wrist. The fluid contained a substance that induced uterine contractions.

But your uterus proved sluggish. Why not? All the nerves in your body had been numbed for months. Why should they suddenly leap to attention and respond? Drop by drop, bottle after bottle, hour after hour, the intravenous drip continued to tickle your recalcitrant womb. With the rubber tube bound to your arm and the needle still discharging into your
circulation
, you ate, slept, woke and slept again. Then finally, as the pressure of my anxiety showed signs of rising above the danger point, the first slight contractions started. The sister said:

I galloped down the road and ordered squid in tomato sauce. I craved squid. I hadn’t eaten squid since I’d been in Italy years before. It came reeking of garlic. I groaned as I ate it, at the heat and your plight and the folly of consuming pungent squid when I should remain clinically fresh for any demands that might be ahead. I gulped the squid down hastily although I had two hours to spare. Then I groaned again at the bill. I had no money. Oh I had enough to pay for the
squid but I had no business eating expensive squid when we needed to save every penny—yeah every copper cent!—for the baby.

I paid for the squid—paid a lordly young Spaniard—and hurried out into the heat. I went into a pub and drank red wine.

What if it had started?

I left the pub, bolted up the hill and shot into the maternity home. Then I stole nervously up the stairs, along the corridor and peeped into the ward.

I gazed appalled! Blood shrank from my face, then flooded back again and then swiftly retreated once more. I flapped away down the corridor and couldn’t find anyone. I hurtled down the stairs and then sprinted up them again. I saw a nurse washing urine bottles.

Even as I said it, I loathed myself. I was still making
literature
out of life, being picturesque, exaggerating my alarm and creating a touching impression. The nurse put down a bottle and accompanied me:

And there you were, now surgically gowned, the drip no longer attached to you, lying panting on a platform. You gasped:

The nurse smiled pleasantly.

Between the bouts of exertion you beamed wan smiles at me. Apart from giving you my hand to grip, and rejoicing at being able to share your ordeal even to the trivial extent of feeling your nails digging into me, there was nothing I could do.

Shouldn’t the doctor be there? Your laboured breathing
accelerated again and I felt the gauge of your nails piercing my flesh. Moans were wrung from you. Shouldn’t someone be there? I was proud to have the care of you in those terminal minutes, but was it safe? You gasped:

I gazed at your red, glistening face again straining back in effort. Suddenly you exclaimed:

What? You mean—I quickly glanced down under your gown. Between your quivering legs protruded a small, black dome. I rang instantly. What was it? So dazed was I with vicarious effort that it was only shortly before the sister
hurried
in that I understood that what I had seen was not some dreadful, morbid sign but the top of the baby’s head.

The young doctor entered. I squeezed your hand once more and edged out of the theatre. Then I stood downstairs in the marble hall for a long time. Two, three cigarettes—and a pretty nurse hurried up to me.

I gazed at the tiny, blood-streaked thing. It was surprisingly active. Alien, convulsive movements shook its little limbs and its goggling face was mobile. It had quite a lot of hair and was streaked with ridges of white grease.

I went in to you. You smiled peacefully and asked:

I struggled for some comment to reward you and mask my misery. You said:

— That’s because he’s premature. It always happens. Do you like him?

I stayed with you a little longer and then they told me to go away. It occurred to me that I might call on mother, tell her the news and ask if I could spend the night there. I had an idea that if I were alone I might founder.

I stood in my mother’s comfortable room and explained that I felt rather disturbed. The baby had been born, was alive and healthy and Lucy was fine. But I was not happy. I hadn’t felt any affection for my new son. I hadn’t liked the look of him at all. Before long I began to cry. This weeping became convulsive and irresistible. It slackened off, and I murmured:

And it started again. I hadn’t wept for years. I had never wept like this before, not even in childhood. It was not like the customary spasmodic reaction to pain or misery but as if my whole moral existence had liquefied and was draining out of me. I would be left a husk, a withered pod, a fossil. I gasped:

My mother was ironic and sensible. She reminded me that I had been under a good deal of stress myself. She pointed out that fathers often reacted negatively to the first sight of their offspring. No brand new baby was appealing. She urged me to eat a sedative pill—which I did—and get some sleep. I went to bed in a spare room.

And went on moaning.

The trouble was I hadn’t told mother the truth. I hadn’t
told her that what I had seen, when they had held my
squirming
son up before me, was a caricature of a Jew’s face. The beaming nurse and sister, awaiting my enthusiastic
exclamation
, had turned suddenly into jeering Nazi matrons.
Nauseated
, striving to model my rigid features into some semblance of a smile, I had gazed at the ancient little face, the hooked nose, the close-set eyes and black hair already forming spectral kiss-curls and I could hardly breathe. I felt as if, in that instant, I had turned into a column of slime. All the anti-semitic jokes and jibes, the fascist obscenities, boiled to the surface of my mind. Then you said:

Did that mean you too repudiated him? I stood again in the captain’s suite of the two-thousand tonner in the Pool of London and heard the fervent young captain, an Israeli hero, rasp:

And were you now calling me, or my son, a dirty yid? I went on smiling feebly down at you. But my mind raced. What of the future? I would have to wheel this little gargoyle through the streets, nourish and protect him, raise and
educate
him? I’d never make it! I hadn’t the strength! I hadn’t the strength of character. I went on smiling. I wondered that you couldn’t see through me, through the translucent slime I had become and discern the rotten core.

The only comfort left to me was that I hadn’t really been deceived about you. You had said:

Because it was true not because you found it offensive. For an instant, in the extremity of misery, I had found hideous significance in the remark, but I had still not really doubted you. I sensed quite clearly that you loved him from the first glance, loved him because he was little and helpless, loved him because he was our son, our baby, our bit of new life. And, in a
sense, this made things worse. I would never be able to match your tenderness.

I lay snivelling in the bed in my mother’s house and asked myself if I had ever really faced my Jewishness? Hadn’t I always taken pride in a hypothetically non-Jewish calmness of manner, in a reasonable imitation of an upper-class English accent, an objective attitude to personal and social matters? Jewish acquaintances sometimes accused me of being
anti-semitic
because I bitterly denounced Jewish racism and alleged that it was prevalent. Was all this mere window dressing, a contemptible attempt to ape gentile manners? After all, look at me now, wailing with self-pity, virtually a caricature of a hysterical Jew? Surely my present emotional countenance was just as exaggeratedly semitic as I had fancied my new little son’s face had been?

I fell asleep.