“Don’t worry.” It had not occurred to me that sexual games could be played with an unborn child. “How many months are you, Brigid?”
“The doctor thinks four, but I say five.”
“That’s good. What about the father? Does he know?”
“What father?” She glanced at me as if I had not yet learned the facts of life. “She doesn’t have a father.”
“It could be a boy.”
“It’s a girl.” She spoke with complete certainty, then lay on the bed and raised her knees to expose her vulva. I knelt in front of her, drawing her buttocks onto my thighs, and eased my penis into her vagina, moved by the thought of sharing this private space with her unborn infant. For the child’s sake, I hoped it was not a son.
“Just take your time. You won’t hurt her.”
Who was the father—one of the Danes or Norwegians, or some Canadian railroad worker waiting for her in the trailer town behind the grain elevators?
“Did Captain Artvin ever come here?”
“Who’s that again?”
“Artvin—the Turkish pilot who disappeared.”
“They all disappear, believe me. I went with some of the Turks. Yvette likes them, but I couldn’t get to them. What did this one look like?”
“I never met him. He took off one day and flew away.”
“Sounds like a great idea. Next time he can ask me to go with him.” She held my scrotum, drawing on my testicles. “Come on, baby, more now … that’s it, push for Momma…”
Later I lay beside her, gazing at the curve of her abdomen. One day soon, a midwife would be using similar words to her. Accepting that I had no prurient interest, she let me raise the petticoat and put my hand on her skin. I was surprised by the size of the child. Now and then a small tremor moved the surface, as if it recognised my hand.
“You come from England?” Brigid asked. “I always wanted to visit there. Maybe I’d see the king and queen.”
“The king died. But I’ve seen them—they came to my college.”
“On the level?”
“Sure. A big limousine pulled up and four little people stepped out, the king and queen and the princesses. They looked as if they were landing on the Earth for the first time.”
“That’s something. Did you really get to meet them?”
“Almost…” As an undergraduate prank I had taken off my academic gown and laid it in a pool of water under the wheels of the approaching Daimler. Describing the incident, I realised that I had impressed Brigid at long last. When I entered her body she saw me as working for her, doing my bit to help the unborn child, but now I was more than twenty Canadian dollars.
In the next room David and Yvette were asleep. I was glad that David had calmed himself and was able to embrace Yvette without needing some elaborate ruse. Flying, and these matter-of-fact women with their direct view of the world, had settled him.
Brigid lay on her side and pressed my hand to her abdomen. “It doesn’t bother you?”
“I used to be a medical student.”
“Then you know about it. Yvette says it’s going to be hard in the last months. You can attract the wrong kind of guy.”
I was massaging the small of her back, in a way that I imagined young husbands caring for their pregnant wives. I felt the child stir, as if woken by the music. The likelihood of Captain Artvin being the child’s father was remote, but something bound them together in my mind. Assuming that Artvin was dead, and that I alone knew his resting place, as a fellow pilot I had some notional responsibility for this infant. I tried to think of Miriam, but her letters had become more and more infrequent.
“Tell me, Brigid, would you like to go to England?”
“Sure. I could meet the queen—you can introduce us.”
“I mean it. I have enough money.”
“So?”
“So we go together. You can stay with me there.”
“Together?” She turned from me and lay on her back, moving my hand from her abdomen. She pulled down the black slip.
“Why not?” I waited for her to reply. “You think I’m too young?”
“Just a little. You NATO boys … you’re going to be flying around with your atom bombs, making the world a safer place. Let’s get to sleep while there’s still time left…”
* * *
Her coolness hurt, however naïve my drunken scheme seemed in the uneasy light of the next day’s hangover. A week later, flying over Deer Lake, I tried to remember the position of the drowned Harvard. Somewhere to the northwest I had seen the turtle-shaped lake, but it had vanished into the featureless landscape. Warmed by the late February sunlight, the surface ice was beginning to melt, and the lakes were changing shape as the snow retreated to the original shorelines. Abandoning my navigation exercise, I flew back and forth across the white land, past the isolated water towers and grain elevators.
An hour later, when I found the Harvard, I had almost run out of fuel. The turtle lake had become a long ellipse, one of a cluster of small lakes separated by yellowing meanders. Algae covered the fuselage, but I could see the blurred numerals on its wing. Circling the lake at five hundred feet, I fixed its map position—once the lake warmed in the early spring, a month before we moved to the jet school at Winnipeg, I would rent an inflatable dinghy and show the Turks where their comrade was buried. I hoped that they would decide to leave him in the lake, sealed away from the world in his cocoon of algae, still embarked on his solitary flight.
Twenty miles from Moose Jaw the fuel tanks were empty. By luck I found an empty stretch of road between two deserted wheatfields. At the last moment, as I came in to land, I saw the fencing posts beneath their upholstery of snow. The Harvard touched down in a storm of icy mud that sluiced across the silent fields. It lost its starboard wing tip, then ground-looped and careened to a halt in the ditch beside the road.
Fifteen minutes later a mink farmer in a slush-covered Cadillac drove up as I sat stunned in the cockpit. He stared calmly at the blood leaking from my helmet and drew on his cigarette with his hard lips. At last he raised his window and rolled away. I learned later that he had never contacted the airfield, perhaps hoping that I would freeze to death behind my cracked windshield.
* * *
The senior Canadian officers hearing my case openly admitted their bafflement. I had been seen over Deer Lake, but they were puzzled that I had managed to consume the Harvard’s ample reserves of fuel. They had already decided that I should cease training and be returned to England, but they examined and reexamined my flight plan, suspecting that I had been navigating a secret course of my own.
Did they think that I might be planning to defect and was rehearsing the same escape flight made by Captain Artvin? In a sense they were right, as David was well aware. He made no attempt to intervene on my behalf, knowing that it was time for me to leave the air force. Whatever mythology I constructed for myself would have to be made from the commonplaces of my life, from the smallest affections and kindnesses, not from the nuclear bombers of the world and their dreams of planetary death. By revealing the location of the lost Harvard I might have persuaded them to alter their decision, but I had seen enough of the RAF. I wanted to forget Shanghai and the Avenue Edward VII and the flash of the Nagasaki bomb, and there was a simple way of doing so.
I would never lead the Moscow run to the Third World War. The unborn child in the Iroquois Hotel had given me my new compass bearing. Miriam had written to say that she had taken a job on a Fleet Street newspaper, and I wanted to be with her again and be amazed by her American underwear. I was sorry to leave David, endlessly driving the long roads of Saskatchewan in his secondhand Oldsmobile, but he was happy now and had his own destinations. Flying had helped to free him from the past, and already he talked of leaving the RAF at the end of his initial engagement period and becoming a commercial pilot. For the time being he was right to stay in Moose Jaw and do his best to cheer up the Turks. The NATO boys would stage their mutinies and fill
the bar of the Iroquois, while the VD films played in the meteorology theatre and Captain Artvin continued his long flight home.
6
MAGIC WORLD
“Shall we go to Magic World?” I asked the children.
“Magic World! Yes!” Four-year-old Henry was already at the gate, rattling the iron catch. He shouted to the neighbours’ dozing retriever: “Polly, we’re going to Magic World!”
Three-year-old Alice skipped down the path, admiring her shiny shoes. “Magic World, Magic World…!”
Miriam leaned against the door while I hunted for sunglasses in the clutter of toys and unread bills on the hall stand. She waved to the children, smiling as if she would never see them again and wanted to remember this moment forever. When we returned from the walk Alice and Henry would have changed in a hundred small and marvellous ways, leaving their present selves somewhere in the woods. Parents were nostalgic for every second of these lost lives.
“Keep an eye on them.”
“They’ll keep an eye on me. We’ll be gone for an hour—you’re sure nothing’s going to happen before then?”
“I don’t know…”
In the last month of her pregnancy, time seemed to slow for Miriam, stretching her smallest gesture—a hand raised to ease her heavy breasts, the lipstick drawn absentmindedly across her mouth. She was moving into the timeless realm of the child in her womb; mother and child would begin life together. She pressed against me, knowing that I liked to feel the warm bulk beneath her smock, and lightly patted my penis.
“Just making sure you have everything you might need on the walk.”
“Sh … Midwife Bell will hear you. She disapproves enough of me already.”
“She adores you. Without you she’d be out of a job.”
I embraced Miriam, breathing the familiar heady scents of baby talc, basil, gloss paint, and washing powder that clung to her smock. On its hem was a brown potty stain left by one of the children, taking its place among the countless stains and smells of our little house, a realm of soft armpits and swollen nipples in which I had spent an entire life.
“Rest now. Don’t start rebuilding the bedroom.”
“Bring me back some magic.”
* * *
With a last wave, I latched the gate and set off with Henry and Alice down the sun-filled street. Polly the retriever had decided to join us. He trotted beside Alice, now and then detouring to quiz and spray a lamppost. The modest houses in Charlton Road sat in their quiet suburban gardens, but seeing them through the dog’s and the children’s eyes transformed the rosebushes and rockeries, the freshly painted front doors and forgotten roller skates. They became more vivid, as if aware that Polly and the children would soon forget them, and were urging themselves more brightly into existence. Our own house was as modest as the others—my salary as assistant editor of a scientific journal barely matched the small mortgage—but Miriam, Henry, and Alice turned it into an endless funfair of noise and cheer. Behind other doors in Charlton Road were other Miriams. Young wives and their children strolled the streets of Shepperton and played in their gardens like agents of an exuberant foreign power.
The number of children always surprised me—this small Thames-side town was a life engine. When we reached the end of Charlton Road we had already collected a sandy-haired boy on a tricycle, two ten-year-old girls, and the infant daughter of the local builder. The splash meadow was filled with children playing on the grass and fishing for minnows along the reedy banks of the stream. I could almost believe that the bright summer frocks, fishing nets, and children’s voices were a dream conjured from this placid stream asleep beneath the willows.
Alice and Henry ran towards the bank, where two mothers kept watch on a park bench. I took off my tennis shoes and walked in bare feet through the cool pelt of the meadow. Beyond the willows lay the calm surface of a gravel lake, its giant excavator rising like the gantries at Cape Canaveral.
Water surrounded Shepperton—the river, the gravel lakes, and the reservoirs of the metropolitan water board whose high embankments formed the horizon of our lives. Once I told Miriam that we were living on the floor of a marine world that had invaded our minds, and that the people of Shepperton were a new form of aquatic mammal, creatures of a new Water Babies.
“You’re Tom, the poor sweep,” she told me, as if placing me for the first time. “Poor Tom…”
“And who are you—Mrs. Do-as-you-would-be-done-by?”
“I don’t think so, somehow. More like Mrs. Do-as-you-would-like-to-do-with…”
But we were all water babies. Alice was shrieking at the green slime that Henry flicked with a stick from the stream. I showed them a dead water beetle, but they were more interested in an aerosol paint can that floated between the reeds. It still held some of its propellent gas, and Henry fired a burst of spray at a dragonfly that veered too close.
Trying to repaint the air, we moved through the willows to the water splash that crossed the road. The water ran clear over the worn pebbles, but cars taking a shortcut to Shepperton often stalled there. The exasperated drivers would look up to find a beaming audience of mothers and their children curious to see what they would do next. It was here that the water-splash sequence from Genevieve had been filmed. Whenever Miriam and I watched the scene of the stranded antique car we could see ourselves, Henry, and Alice out of shot as we leaned on the polished rail of the footbridge.
Led by the retriever, we set off along the upper arm of the stream, collecting more children on our way. The rectangular stages of Shepperton film studios rose above the trees. Their presence dominated the town as much as the marine world of the reservoirs. Many of the programmes we watched on television were filmed in the streets of Shepperton, and its leafy avenues stood in for locations all over England. In Henry’s intense four-year-old mind, Shepperton had begun to colonise the whole country.
These confusions of image and illusion gave Shepperton its special charge, as if true reality rested in the merging of the two. Next door to us lived a married couple whose daughter was a minor television actress. Twice a week the children watched her appear in one of their favourite series, and sometimes would turn from the screen to see her in Charlton Road, stepping from her car on a family visit. Henry and Alice would rush out to greet her, taking for granted that her real character lay somewhere between her fleeting street-self and the far more solid broadcast figure on the screen. Many of our neighbours worked as extras in feature films made at Shepperton studios, and I sometimes felt that Miriam and I were playing our parts in some happily chaotic sitcom whose script we extemporised as we went along.
The children squatted on the edge of the gravel lake and stared at a submerged motorcar resting on the sandy bed. The lake had been stocked by a local fishing club, and rainbow trout swam through the open windows. These drowned cars never failed to intrigue Alice and Henry.
“Henry, where’s the car going?” Alice asked.
“Going a long way,” he told her. “Going to China.”
Miriam had explained that a hole dug deep enough in our garden would emerge somewhere in China. The gravel pit was the largest lake that Henry had ever seen, and he often tried to convince me that it was this hole that went all the way to Shanghai. Once when I dived into the lake he watched me as if I were about to set off forever to the world of my childhood.
“Daddy, are you going to swim to China now?”
“Well, it’s too far to swim before tea. Let’s go to Magic World instead.”
I waited for Polly to round up the children and led them towards a screen of fir trees. Mattresses and rusting bicycles lay among the pinecones, and we followed the dark path to an enclosed meadow behind the film studios. The sunlight played by itself on the knee-deep grass, and the children ran ahead of me, their faces bobbing like lanterns.
Standing in the grass was a collection of stage props abandoned by the companies shooting television commercials. A candy bar the size of a small car lay in the sun,
its papier-mâché wrapper peeling from the wooden frame. Beside it were a detergent pack my own height, its plywood sheeting warped by the rain and sun, and a fibreglass ketchup bottle painted in red enamel. Canvas peeled from the shampoo sachets and toothpaste tubes, but this never dismayed Alice and Henry. They ran squealing through the grass, fascinated as ever by the magnified versions of the objects that made up their domestic world.
Pride of place in their affections was taken by a ten-foot-high replica of a pink toilet roll. On earlier visits Henry had pulled back a flap of the rotting canvas, and through this small door the children crawled one by one. I could hear them shrieking with delight at this notion of a toilet roll large enough to live in. They waved their arms through the canvas, shouting to Polly, who was frantically trying to nose his way into the dim interior.
“Let’s have a party!” someone shouted.
“Party, party…” Alice was skipping inside the giant roll, eyes on her shiny shoes in case they vanished from her feet.
I lay back in the grass, thinking contentedly that there would soon be another child to dance in this enchanted meadow. I was glad that our third child would be born here, as much from the stream and the splash meadow as from Miriam’s womb. Her first labour, at the nearby maternity hospital, had been over before I returned home, expecting to be called the next day. Our huge son, solemn as any alderman, was asleep in his mother’s arms when I reached the ward. But the infants were separated from their mothers for long periods of the day, bellowing together in their cribs behind a heavy door, and Miriam vowed to have her future children delivered at home, in our own bed.
So we conceived and slept beside the growing Alice as she came to term, and made love an hour before the labour began. Miriam lay back on her own pillows, hands grasping the headboard with its erratic reading light, surrounded by the wardrobe and her familiar clothes, her mother’s photograph and her friends’ flowers and greeting cards on the dressing table. In this warm midden with its utter lack of hygiene she had swiftly given birth to Alice as I stood weeping behind the capable shoulders of Midwife Bell. That night we slept together with Alice in her cot beside us, as Polly the retriever nosed the dustbin, snuffling for the placenta in its parcel of newspaper. The next day Miriam was up to welcome her friends and see me off to work.
The Kindness of Women Page 11