However, on the whole, things worked out very well. I had a subsidized home help to begin with, and after a fortnight or so this woman whom Lydia had discovered, an amiable fat lady named Mrs. Jennings, came in two days a week while I dashed off to the library between feeds. Mrs. Jennings adored babies, and I found that all her chat about little darling tiny thingies, and where's her little tootsie wootsies, fell quite naturally and indeed gratefully upon my ears. I very shortly gave up feeding Octavia myself, as to my amazement I found the process quite infuriating and nervewracking: I stuck it for six weeks, hoping that as the more modern books said it would become a pleasure, or at least less of a drag, and the baby certainly seemed to enjoy it, but in the end I could stand it no longer and gave up. I didn't find the act itself disgusting, or anything like that, but the consequences were extremely messy; I grew frantic at the way my clothes got covered in milk, and in fact those six weeks have had a permanent effect on my life, for now I am as fussy as Clare about dirt, and am forever washing my clothes before they need it, sending things to the cleaners when I can't afford it, and paying secret nocturnal visits to the launderette. Also, despite evidence to the contrary, I could never believe that there was really anything there, that the baby was really getting anything at all to drink. What the eye doesn't see, I don't believe in, and the first time I gave her a bottle and watched the milk-level descending, ounce by careful ounce, I was overcome with relief, and I think I counted that as the first real meal of her life. Unnatural, I suppose, and I daresay we would have survived together in the desert, but just the same I was glad I had an alternative. Anyway, only posh middle-class mothers nurse these days, on principle, and I don't believe in principle. I believe in instinct, on principle.
Octavia was an extraordinarily beautiful child. Everyone said so, in shops and on buses and in the park, wherever we went. I took her to Regent's Park as often as I could face getting the pram up and down in the lift. It was a tolerable summer, and we both got quite brown. I was continually amazed by the way in which I could watch for hours nothing but the small movements of her hands, and the fleeting expressions of her face. She was a very happy child, and once she learned to smile, she never stopped; at first she would smile at anything, at parking meters and dogs and strangers, but as she grew older she began to favour me, and nothing gave me more delight than her evident preference. I suppose I had not really expected her to dislike and resent me from birth, though I was quite prepared for resentment to follow later on, but I certainly had not anticipated such wreathing, dazzling gaiety of affection from her whenever I happened to catch her eye. Gradually I began to realize that she liked me, that she had no option to liking me, and that unless I took great pains to alienate her she would go on liking me, for a couple of years at least. It was very pleasant to receive such uncritical love, because it left me free to bestow love; my kisses were met by small warm rubbery unrejecting cheeks and soft dovey mumblings of delight.
Indeed, it must have been in expectation of this love that I had insisted upon having her, or rather refrained from not having her: something in me had clearly known before I did that there would be compensations. I was not of course treated to that phrase which greets all reluctant married mothers, "I bet you wouldn't be without her now," so often repeated after the event, in the full confidence of nature, because I suppose people feared I might turn on them and say, Yes I certainly would, which would be mutually distressing for questioner and me. And in many ways I thought that I certainly would prefer to be without her, as one might reasonably prefer to lack beauty or intelligence or riches, or any other such sources of mixed blessing and pain. Things about life with a baby drove me into frenzies of weeping several times a week, and not only having milk on my clean jerseys. As so often in life, it was impossible to choose, even theoretically, between advantage and disadvantage, between profit and loss: I was up quite unmistakably against No Choice. So the best one could do was to put a good face on it, and to avoid adding to the large and largely discussed number of sad warnings that abounded in the part of the world that I knew. I managed very well, and the general verdict was, Extraordinary Rosamund, she really seems happy, she must have really wanted one after all.
I had thought, dimly, that after the birth I would once more become interested in men, as such, but nothing like this seemed to happen. I did from time to time think that it would be comforting to have a little adult affection, but in some strange way I did not seem to like anyone enough any more. I felt curiously disenchanted, almost as I might have felt had I been truly betrayed and deceived and abandoned. The only person of whom I thought with any tenderness, apart from my small pliant daughter, was George. I still listened to his voice on the radio, comforted to know he was still so near, however pointlessly, and wondering what he was doing. Occasionally, when roused to a pitch of peculiar transport by Octavia's charm, I felt like ringing him up and telling him about her, but I never did; I fancied that I knew enough about human nature to know that no amount of charm could possibly balance the quite unjustified sense of obligation, financial, personal, and emotional, that such a revelation would instantly set to work. So I spared him and myself. Sometimes I thought I saw a likeness to him in Octavia, and more often I thought I caught a glimpse of George himself, but it was never him, it was always smooth young men selling things in antique shops or expensive tailors, who might have been him.
And so the summer wore away, and autumn set in, and the baby started to sit up, and I finished my thesis, and Lydia seemed to be on the verge of finishing her novel, though hampered by an affair with Joe, and I began to worry about what would happen at Christmas when my parents came home. This last problem worried me a good deal and I reached the point where I thought that I had only had the baby because I had had the flat. Autumn also brought other problems, such as the cold. I had never noticed the cold before, being healthy and energetic, but this year there was an unusually bitter October, with rain, fog, damp, and frost at nights. I did not mind for myself, but I did not know how to keep the baby warm; when I put gloves on her, she chewed them, and then had to ride around in her pram with icy wet hands. She dribbled, too, and her chest was always damp. She resisted for some time, but in the end she caught a cold. At first it did not seem to worry her, but then she started to wake coughing in the night, and when she breathed she wheezed terribly like an old sheep. I did not know what to do with her, as I hated going to the doctor; I had thought to have finished with my dreary, time-wasting association with the Health Service at her birth, though I had already discovered that there was an unending succession of injections, inspections, vaccinations and immunizations yet to be endured. But up to this point, everything had been routine, and not a matter of choice. Now, watching Octavia's nose run unbecomingly, and hearing her heavy spluttering, I knew I would have to decide to take her, and I found myself amazingly resistant to the idea. My reasons, I knew, were an inextricable mass of the selfish and the childishly diffident: I did not want to bother the busy doctor unnecessarily, having a great fear of bothering people, though perhaps more of a fear of being told that I am a nuisance, and I did not want to wait for two hours in a freezing cold waiting room with an active baby bouncing on my frail knee. It was not a simple choice between comfort and duty, and moreover it was not even my own health that was in question, but Octavia's. Had it been my own, I would never have gone.
About twenty-four hours after I had made up my mind that I really ought to go, I consulted Lydia who at first was as perplexed by the problem as I was. She suggested that I should ring up the doctor and ask him to come and see me, instead of going to him; I had never even thought of doing this, which shows how little I had come to terms with the facts of my new life, and immediately thought how very nice it would be if only I dare.
"Of course you dare," said Lydia. "That's what doctors are there for. You can't take the child out in weather like this, in that condition."
"There's probably nothing wrong with her at all," I said mis
erably. "They never give babies anything for colds, anyway."
"I know what," said Lydia with a sudden illumination. "Why don't you take her temperature?"
I stared at her in amazement, for truly the thought of doing such a thing had never even crossed my mind; looking back, after months with the thermometer as necessary as a knife or a saucepan, I can hardly believe this to be possible, but so it was. To do myself justice, I recognized at once the brilliance of her suggestion, and would have acted on it at once had I had a thermometer. Neither of us, however, possessed one and as it was after closing time, I had to go all the way to John Bell and Croydon's all-night department to buy one, and when I got back Octavia had gone to sleep for the night and it didn't seem worth waking her. In the morning, however, I managed to take it and found that it was high, though not very high for a baby, but nevertheless high enough to justify ringing the doctor. To my surprise, the secretary girl did not sound at all put out when I asked if he could call, but seemed to take such a request for granted: I think I had half expected a lecture on my idleness and pretensions.
He arrived in the middle of the morning, and looked at her, and took her pulse, and took her temperature, and told me that it was nothing serious, in fact nothing at all. and then said if I didn't mind he ought to have a listen to her chest, so I pulled up her vest, and she smiled and wriggled with delight as he put the stethoscope on her fat ribs. He listened to her for a long time and I, who was beginning to think that perhaps I ought not to have bothered him after all, though it didn't seem to matter either way, sat there somewhat absently thinking how sweet she looked and that her vest could do with a wash. Had I known, I would have enjoyed that moment more, or perhaps I mean that I did enjoy that moment, and none since. For when he had finished listening to her, he stood up and took a deep breath and said, "Well, I don't think there's anything very much to worry about there."
"Oh, good," I said, already faint, for I could see he had not finished, and did not mean what he had said.
"Just the same," he said, "perhaps I ought to book you an appointment to take her along to the hospital."
"Oh," I said. This time I did not dare to ask, thinking of bad things like bronchial pneumonia, but of nothing bad enough, it seemed, which perhaps shows that even I am not naturally quick to accept ill news.
He was silent for a moment, expecting me to question him, I suppose, but I sat there with the child on my knee and said nothing. So after a while he said, no longer even pretending that there was nothing very much to worry about.
"It may well mean nothing at all, nothing at all. Where was she born? St. Andrew's, wasn't it? I can't believe they can have overlooked it. Perhaps the best thing would be for me to make you an appointment to go back there and see Protheroe, he's the man who would deal with this kind of thing."
"What is it?" I said at last. "What is it? Is it her chest? Is it pneumonia?"
"Oh, no," he said, "oh, no, nothing like that, nothing to do with this cold at all, the cold is nothing at all, every child in the neighbourhood's got that cold. It's just that I happened to hear something else while I was listening for it, that's all. It probably means nothing at all, nothing at all."
I suppose that most people would have asked him what he meant, but I was too frightened. I think that the truth was the last thing I wanted to hear, and I cannot even now think back to it. I wanted him to go on and on telling me that it was nothing, nothing at all. That was all that I wanted to hear, as though on my own deathbed. I did not even want him to tell me when the appointment would be for, as I was afraid it would be urgent, for that evening, for the next day, and when he started to tell me I tried not to listen, but I heard his voice coming to me, saying that it would probably be for the following week, for the following Thursday afternoon, but that he would let me know when he had confirmed it. I was relieved a little; he could not be expecting her to die before next Thursday. I even gathered enough strength to ask what I should do about her cold, and was not dismayed when he said nothing, nothing at all, except for a baby aspirin at night.
When he had gone, I went back and picked Octavia up and sat her on my knee and gazed at her, possessed by the most fearful anguish, aware, as all must be on such occasions, that my state had changed in ten minutes from unknown bliss to known though undefined sorrow. I wept, naturally, for I weep daily for some cause or other, and Octavia smiled at my tears and put her finger in them as they rolled down my cheek, as though they were raindrops on a window pane. It seemed that in comparison with this moment, the whole of my former life had been a summer afternoon. And yet, presumably, nothing was changed; in that instant of listening nothing had happened, except that ignorance had changed into knowledge. Often enough, over the next few weeks, I wished that I had remained ignorant, that I had never sent for the doctor and never found out. Peace of mind, fool's paradise, seemed to me at times to be better than profitable and useful misery, and it had never seemed that way to me before. They assure me I would have found out in the end, but I might have had a month more at least of ignorant delight. Though what difference would it have made? A month, a week, a day, an hour. It made quite a good deal of difference, in the event, but then I was not to know.
I really cannot look back upon that week. I had thought myself unhappy as a child, obsessed by unreal terrors, guilts and alarms, and as an adolescent, obsessed by myself, and as a woman, obsessed by the fear that my whole life and career were to be thrown into endless gloom by an evening's affection. But now for the first time I felt dread on another's behalf, and I found it insupportable. From time to time, stirring her soup in the pan, or clattering away at my typewriter in the BM typing room, I thought I would drop dead from the strain on my spirits. As I emerged from each fit of grief, I felt bitter resentment against Octavia and against the fate that had thus exposed me; up to this point, I had been thoroughly defended and protected against such onslaughts, but now I knew myself to be vulnerable, tender, naked, an easy target for the malice of chance. The fact that I was on my own, with no one to tell, made my anxiety both greater and more endurable; for in the same instant in which I wished that I had someone, anyone, George, to weep at, I found myself glad that George had been spared this quite unnecessary sorrow.
I cannot bear to write about my first visit to hospital, that following week, though I feel some need to exorcise it. However, I cannot do so. It was intolerable. I waited, in a queue, with other small children and a sordid array of teddy bears and other rubbish, for an hour and a half; it was the time for her afternoon sleep, but she would never sleep on my knee, and she moaned and fretted and sucked her thumb and thrashed around till I was worn out from the effort of holding her. Then we saw the surgeon, and I did not dare to ask what he did not tell me, and then I had to trail her off to the X-ray department, a good mile away, it seemed, through dark corridors, and then back again to see the surgeon, who said something about the advisability of operating. This time I was in a trance, hardly listening to a word he was saying. Think about it, he said, and come back again the day after tomorrow. So we left, finally, two and a half hours after we had entered, and when we emerged from the hospital doors we were both crying bitterly, she from fatigue, and I from fatigue and fear.
We went home and I thought about it, and two days later I went back again and this time was not kept waiting more than twenty minutes, and was offered a cup of coffee by the surgeon when I got there. It seemed like charity to the condemned, but may not have been; it may just have been time for his coffee break. This time I was sufficiently hardened to notice his features, which before had been nothing but a dazzling blur, and to listen to what he was saying. He was murmuring gently on about the pulmonary artery; the very words were enough to throw me into a panic, so I stopped listening, for I could see that he was not really attempting to explain. When he had finished, and I had finished my burned institution coffee, he said, "So I think it would be advisable to operate as soon as possible."
"But you said," I said, rem
embering as though in a dream some other part of his conversation, "that it wasn't advisable to operate before the age of five or six."
"I was trying to explain to you," he said, "that we have really no choice. The severity of the condition varies so..."
"But there has been no sign of anything," I cried, suddenly coming round. "No sign. No symptoms. Nothing. She's always been so well."
"As I was saying," he said, "certain symptoms are not in any case likely to become manifest until the child becomes more active. It was really a stroke of extraordinary luck that we discovered it at this stage, in view of the fact that there have been so few indications..."
"Luck, you call it, luck," I said, unable not to speak. "Luck, is it?" It has never ceased to amaze me that they showed, at this stage, so little professional sympathy; I see now, and suspected then, that his only emotion was professional curiosity. She was an odd case, my baby, a freak.
"Perhaps you could tell me," I said finally, when this retort received no response, and in a voice of renewed humility, "what the chances are. What per cent success you have."
"You must remember," he said, "that this kind of surgery is still in its very early stages, though we have been making great progress in the last few years. As little as five years ago, in an infant of this age, I should have said that the chance of survival was about five to one. Now we would put it at four to one, I think."
I almost think he expected me to congratulate him, but instead I burst into tears. It was the first time anyone had used the word survival to me, so bluntly.
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