Not only was I glad that our child would be born in Shepperton, but I almost believed that I, too, had been born there. The past had slipped away, taking with it my memories of Cambridge and Canada, of the dissecting room and the snow deserts of Saskatchewan, and even of Shanghai. The warm light over Shepperton reminded me of the illuminated air that I had seen over the empty paddy fields of Lunghua as I walked along the railway line, but the light that filled the splash meadow came from a kinder and more gentle sun. The children Miriam had borne and the others who played by the stream had taken the place of the dead Chinese lying in the Lunghua creeks and canals.
For the first time I was living in an endless present that owed nothing to the past. The skies over Shepperton were crossed by airliners taking package tourists to the holiday beaches of Corfu and the Costa Brava. Soon the whole planet would be on vacation. At Cape Canaveral, the Americans were readying themselves to fly into space. On television we watched Richard Sutherland reporting from the space centre, the Florida sun gleaming through his blow-dried hair. He was now a presenter of popular-science programmes, one of the new breed of media academics who taught the world to feel at ease with itself. His upbeat commentaries dovetailed perfectly with the commercials for candy bars and fabric conditioners. Past and future had been annexed into a present as depthless and cheerful as a child’s colouring book.
I woke in the sleepy heat of the meadow grass, aware that the children were fighting inside the toilet roll. A light aircraft soared overhead, its propeller catching the sun. A single-engined Piper, it had flown from the west, where Fair Oaks airfield lay in the woodland beyond Chertsey. It turned in a wide circle above the studios, flaps lowered as if the pilot were trying to land in this secret meadow.
The children broke off their quarrel. Alice ran to me as I knelt in the grass and hid in my shoulder.
“Is that a bad plane, Daddy?”
As always, I was surprised by her shrewdness. She had seen me frowning at the aircraft and its camera pylon mounted behind the passenger door.
“No, it’s a good plane—it might bring you a present.”
Henry sat against my knee, pushing Alice’s hand from my chin. “Daddy, has it got a bomb?”
“A bomb? Who would want to bomb Shepperton?”
“Uncle David might. He has a bomb, Daddy. He told me.”
“Not anymore. Besides, he’s much too fond of you and Mummy. Home, everybody…”
* * *
David Hunter came to see us that afternoon. He had left the RAF at the end of his short-service commission, after active service against the terrorists in Kenya and a last tour flying the Vulcan nuclear bomber. “Think, Miriam,” he liked to remind her, “if that Turk hadn’t defected to the Russians, your husband and I could have dropped the first hydrogen bomb on Moscow. How does it feel to be married to a man who might have started World War III?”
His scatty charm still protected him, but he had the edginess of a man who expected the past to come up behind him and tap him on the shoulder with some absurd but nagging inquiry. For a year he had drifted along the fringes of private aviation, and then bought a small company specialising in aerial photography. He would be away for months, photographing industrial complexes in Brazil or hotel developments in the Seychelles. For the past week he had been based at Fair Oaks, making a cine-film of the prewar Brooklands motor-racing circuit.
As rootless as ever, he never ceased to be amazed by my quiet domesticity, suspecting that I had repressed a large part of my true nature. Aware that Miriam felt uneasy at any talk of Shanghai, he rarely referred to our war years together.
He arrived with presents for the children, a bottle of whisky for me which he promptly opened and began to drink, flowers for Miriam and lavish compliments she was too delighted to resist.
“Why are pregnant women so erotic? Tell me, Miriam. In my bones I know we’ll get married one of these days.”
“There’s a queue forming,” Miriam warned him. “Richard Sutherland, Henry, Jim … You’ll have to fight your way down the aisle.”
“God, woman, I’m kneeling by the altar.” He placed his hands on Miriam’s smock. “It must be due any moment—if it comes this afternoon, can I watch?”
“Only if you can prove that you’re the father.” Miriam loved his attentions, as she loved those of other men, revived by their compliments far more than by mine. She had always been a flirt, but five years of marriage and children made the lightest flirtation seem a serious business. To a mother of two children, sex was all or nothing. I knew that sometimes she longed to get away, to live on her desert island with three strange men—though with husband and children tucked into a decent pension in the next bay—and that she encouraged my writing as a way of being adventurous by proxy. I dimly guessed that one day she would have affairs and this second childhood would be over. I had learned that a woman could love her husband and children but still feel restless enough to want to leave them.
* * *
As we stumbled around the broken toys in the garden, David came to the point.
“I’m off to Hong Kong at the end of the month. All expenses paid. We’re filming a housing project in Kowloon for a Chinese developer.”
“What a plum. There are lots of old Shanghai hands you can look up.”
“I’ll avoid them. I want to go up to Shanghai itself.”
“Think of me as you stroll down the Bund.”
“As it happens, I wondered if you’d like to come?”
“To Hong Kong?”
“Shanghai, mostly. You could take a month’s leave. We need to go back and see the place for ourselves.”
“David, I can’t. Even if I wanted to, there are Miriam and the baby. You’ll find someone in Hong Kong.”
“No, thanks. Those old Shanghai hands, and all that talk of tiffin and mah-jongg and how many servants they had—nothing to do with what really happened. That’s why you and I should go.”
“Nothing did happen.”
“For a start, Jim, we happened. That railway station you were always talking about in Moose Jaw. We ought to find it for you.”
“That was a killing. Sad for the Chinese, but it meant nothing.”
“You used to say he was trying to tell you something. You need to get away from this—it’s potty botty doo-doo all the day…”
“David, it’s the only time I’ve been happy.”
“But you shouldn’t be too happy, Jim.”
After David had gone I mentioned his offer to Miriam.
“David’s a fool!” She thumped her saucepan onto the kitchen table, where the children had set up a miniature replica of their Magic World. “You haven’t flown for years. He’d have you killed the first time you tried to take off.”
“He doesn’t want me to fly. He needs me to go to Shanghai with him, walk the streets where we played hide-and-seek. Sometimes I think he’s still playing there by himself. He’s like those old Shanghai hands he hates so much.”
Miriam knew that I had no intention of going, but held my arm reassuringly. “Dear, forget about it—you’ve put all that behind you.”
“One day I might write about the war—it would help to have been there.”
“It won’t. If you don’t go back anything you write will be far more true. When I visit Mother and Dad in Cambridge I look around the house and can’t believe I was ever a child there. It’s like a film set with these two old actors … even they can’t remember the script.”
* * *
Later, in bed, when the children were asleep and the old retriever had barked at the moon for the last time, I massaged Miriam’s tired shoulders. Strange scents hovered over her ears and armpits, quickening odours of hormones rising and falling, overrunning each other’s cycles. I touched her tender nipples, damp with some secretion I remembered from her earlier confinements.
“Tasty?” Miriam asked, finishing the glass of wine that helped her to sleep.
I touched my fingers to my lips, savouri
ng the racy flavours, closer to the taste of her vulva than to the milk massing within her breasts.
“Colostrum … in fact, men don’t like the taste of their wives’ milk.”
“Good news for baby. Nature’s way of making sure he gets his share. Have you tried anyone else’s milk?”
“No…” I thought of the pregnant whore at Moose Jaw who had wanted to meet the queen. “Ask your friends at the clinic for a sample.”
“Midwife Bell would love that.”
“Tell her we’re going into the dairy business. Mother’s Pride Milk Products. Slogan: ‘Putting Shepperton’s breasts to work.’”
“‘Butter freshly churned from mother’s milk.’ Oh my God, yoghurts and milk shakes. Jim, think…”
“We’d have a range of cheeses, flavoured by cigarette brand, lipstick, and toothpaste…”
“Policemen’s wives would give a sturdy goat-like cheese.” Miriam loved her flights of fantasy and had a healthy interest in the more wayward possibilities of human anatomy and physiology; she had always seen the mischief and humour in the Surrealists. Shepperton bored her a little, and she liked to provoke its domestic norms. As the secretion from her nipples moistened my hands she extemporised happily: “Vegetarians would make bland and mimsy cheeses, West End actresses overripe Camembert, queens and princesses a high royal Stilton…”
“We’ll stage a cheese-tasting for all our friends…”
“I can just see Peggy Gardner!” Miriam sat up, smothering her laughter in her pillow, abdomen heaving, the baby riding a roller-coaster of snorts and guffaws.
Fifteen minutes later her labour began.
* * *
“We’ll make you tidy, dear. We want baby to find a nice bedroom.”
Midwife Bell moved expertly around the room, stirring up the dust and old talc as she ran a damp towel over the dressing table. She hung Miriam’s maternity smocks in the wardrobe like a theatrical dresser stowing away unwanted costumes at the end of a season. Beneath the bed she found a one-legged teddy bear and a child’s potty, ancient contents fossilised in place, and handed them to me with a refined grimace. She had arrived after midnight, soon after Miriam had finished her bath, but insisted on shaving and bed-washing her again. She changed the sheets as Miriam lay on the bed, employing a series of complex folds like a conjuror demonstrating a trick of large-scale origami.
Now that mother and bedroom met with Midwife Bell’s satisfaction, the child could be born. On the bedside table were her instrument case, gloves, and gas cylinder, everything except the legendary hot water, not a drop of which had I ever been asked to boil.
Disturbed by the noise, Alice had begun to cry in her sleep. Henry woke and shouted at her, rocking his cot against the wall. Miriam lay quietly, her large eyes on Mrs. Bell’s composed face, waiting for her next contraction. I went off to settle the children, played a short word game with Alice that she enjoyed, and then handed Henry his comforter, an ancient baby blanket that was a universe of friendly smells.
By the time I returned to the bedroom Miriam’s contractions were coming every other minute. Nightdress rolled back to her breasts, she filled her lungs with deep, measured breaths as Mrs. Bell sat beside her, listening to the child’s heartbeat with her stethoscope.
“You can hold your wife’s hand—I know she’d like that…”
I pressed Miriam’s fingers. She smiled briefly, but I could see that she had already withdrawn from me. Only the midwife and the child were properly in the room with her. She moistened her lips, staring at the shadowy ceiling and the frayed lampshade on the headboard, as if this were the only delivery that had ever taken place, the primeval birth from which all life had sprung. As Miriam released my hand I felt that she and Midwife Bell had returned to a more primitive world, where men never intruded and even their role in conception was unknown. Here the chain of life was mother to daughter, daughter to mother. Fathers and sons belonged in the shadows with the dogs and livestock, like the retriever growling at Midwife Bell’s unfamiliar car from the window of my neighbours’ living room.
Nonetheless, I was glad that Miriam had overruled Mrs. Bell and insisted that I be with her during the delivery. Richard Sutherland, for all his sense of the modish, had squeamishly declined to be present when Miriam half-jokingly invited him to watch the birth. He claimed that the ordeal of a woman in the extremis of labour, exposing her genitalia and gasping with pain, unconsciously mimicked the act of rape and diminished the wife in her husband’s eyes, as if he had witnessed her assault by an invisible stranger. Not for nothing did the world’s oldest cultures segregate women during confinement, preserving the mystery of the wife’s body.
By contrast, I felt my closest to Miriam during these last minutes. Everything bonded me to her: the sweat on her thighs, the mole above her navel, her freckles and pearly stretchmarks, the shaved skin of her pubis and the bright petals of her labia, her engorged clitoris with its endearing leftward tilt, the childhood riding scars on her knees and the spots on her bottom, the damp talc gleaming on her breasts and shoulders.
She farted lustily and reached up to grip the headboard. Midwife Bell averted her nose, but the air was heavy with the smell of anaesthetic gas.
“We’ll be waking the whole street if we go on like that. Push again now, dear. Baby’s ready. Push harder…”
Miriam frowned at the headboard, concentrating as she waited for the next contraction. Panting, she clenched her fists.
“God Jesus! My piles are killing me…!”
I knelt down and placed my hand between her buttocks, pressing my fingers against her swollen anus. The bloated lining of her rectum ballooned outwards, and I pushed the spongy cushion into her anus, then held it there as the last contractions came.
“One last push, it’s coming now, another push for the head…”
Miriam’s vulva had expanded and the crown of a minute head had appeared between her legs. The black hairs were moist and neatly parted, as if a thoughtful nature had groomed the child for its first appearance in this world.
“Push now, we’re almost there…”
The whole face had emerged, a high forehead, miniature nose and mouth, and closed eyes, streamlined as if by time, by the aeons that had preceded this child down the biological kingdom. Waking into the deep dream of life, it seemed not young but infinitely old, millions of years entrained in the pharaoh-like smoothness of its cheeks and its ancient eyelids and nostrils. Its lips were composed, as if it had patiently endured the immense journey across the universe to this modest house with its waiting mother.
Suddenly it was young again; in a last rush of fluid a pink and hairless puppy bundled itself into Midwife Bell’s arms. As the tears wept from my eyes I felt Miriam’s fingers grip my hands. The dawn light was filling the spaces between my neighbours’ roofs. After a few hours away from me, Miriam had returned and was a wife again.
* * *
Miriam slept during the morning, the baby girl in the wickerwork cot beside her. At noon Midwife Bell called, bathed the baby, and pronounced herself satisfied, as if willing to accept the formal entry of our child into the mundane world of time and space. Before leaving, she handed Miriam her makeup case, hairbrush, and mirror. Midwives sat close to the fire, busy with their washings and breaking of the waters, drawing life into the light. By contrast, Miriam’s local physician, Dr. Rogers, with his jovial humour and misplaced advice, resembled a light-headed tour guide searching none too confidently for the sacred spring.
Alice and Henry crept into the bedroom and inspected the baby, curious but faintly disapproving.
“Will she stay with us?” Alice asked.
Miriam laughed at this. “Don’t you want her to stay?”
“I might…”
Henry was more interested in the remnants of the midwife’s equipment, the foil caps, spare swabs, and mouthpiece. Miriam sat up and hugged them tightly. Later I drove them to spend the afternoon with local friends of Miriam, and they were already planning ga
mes and initiation ceremonies for their new sister. Seen through my sleepless eyes, Shepperton had changed. The air was more vivid, as if the town were being lit for some large-budget production at the film studios. The women sitting under the driers at the hairdressers, the cashiers behind the counter at the bank, resembled extras recruited to play the roles of ordinary suburbanites. At any moment the action would begin, and I would find that I had a walk-on part and lines of dialogue I had forgotten to learn.
When I returned home Miriam called to me from the bedroom. She had put on a fresh nightdress, combed her hair, and rouged and powdered her face. The slash of lipstick on her mouth was a pennant flying proudly above the debris of this quiet room.
I looked down at the baby. She had changed yet again, more puckered and more alive, her lips moving while she slept, as if she were trying to remember a message entrusted to her by the unseen powers of creation. Within a few hours she had recapitulated her roles, from archaic messenger to slippery water sprite baptised in her mother’s caul, and then a dreamy swaddling whose skin flinched at the light and air.
“Lucy?” I suggested.
“Yes … Lucy.” Miriam beckoned me to the bed. “You must be exhausted. Come and lie down for an hour.”
I undressed and lay beside her, my hand against her shoulder. The faint, smothering odour of anaesthetic gas clung to the pillows, and I felt myself drifting back into the heady night from which Lucy had emerged.
“Hold me…” Miriam pressed my hands to her waist. She lowered the neck of her nightdress and exposed her breasts, their swollen nipples already quickened by the baby’s lips. She pushed back the sheet and drew the nightdress to her hips, reached down and held my penis in her hand. Knees in the air, she smiled as I massaged her feet and calves and caressed her thighs.
The Kindness of Women Page 12