‘I’ll see if I can get her into a room at St Mary’s,’ Geoffrey Lombard said. ‘How is she?’
‘Not seriously ill, as I’ve said – but upset, as you’d expect,’ Dermot said. He was not happy himself. He had wanted to spend his few remaining hours in England with Kate. They had been in bed when Polly rang, about to get up since an unknown number of Mulvaneys and friends had, to judge from the noise, just come in, and cries of ‘Mum’ were coming up the stairs. Now here he was, and it seemed to him the woman, Anna Lombard, might be keeping some secret. Perhaps the child was not, and could not have been, her husband’s and her plans for a secret abortion or flight before the discovery had been foiled by the miscarriage, or perhaps the miscarriage had been no accident and she had thought she would be able to handle it alone, without anyone’s finding out. He was sorry for the poor creature, whatever the story was, and he had seen and heard many such stories, but he was sorrier for poor Kate, facing the prospect of Rosalie’s joining him in Africa. He was also very confused himself. He had no desire to re-establish his marriage; he could not make himself want it, common sense told him only a miracle would change his mind about Rosalie or Rosalie’s about him, but he had instructions not merely to await the miracle, but to give it active assistance when it began. Meanwhile he was making Kate, who could not quite believe the boring truth of his position, very miserable. He had to conclude he had been forced by obedience to his church into the equivocal position occupied by the sort of men he despised, those who said their wives did not mean anything to them but claimed they had to maintain their marriages for various reasons and therefore could not go to the woman they really loved. ‘I’d do it like a shot, if only –’, they say, and Dermot knew that, for better motives, but with a similar effect, he was saying exactly the same. What made him feel more guilty was that Kate was an uncomplaining victim. Moreover, she had taken a tougher stand than he had when her priest suggested she, in turn, should try to restore her marriage. ‘Nothing on earth would persuade me,’ she’d told him. ‘If Julian came to me on bended knees, swearing he’d return to me and the Catholic faith, I’d send him packing. The Pope himself couldn’t tell me otherwise.’ On the other hand, Dermot reflected, Julian Mulvaney, who had remarried in a register office and was living with his wife and small child in Banbury, wasn’t likely to arrive immediately on bended knees in North Kensington, seeking a reconciliation. But his, Dermot’s, wife, Rosalie, was even now packing for Africa and making telephone calls from Ireland about injections and insecticides. She pretended when she rang that Dermot was staying with friends. Dermot himself felt miserable and ashamed, knowing in his heart of hearts that he was going through with the affair in order to say, when the effort failed, that he’d tried. And this way, he thought, he was in a fair way to joining the ranks of the men who make two women miserable. The fact that he was miserable himself did not make anything any better, just more stupid. Meanwhile he sat with Anna Lombard, waiting for the ambulance and Geoffrey’s call about the private room. Anna Lombard was silent for some time, obviously in pain.
‘I’m afraid I can’t give you anything for the pain,’ he told her. ‘The doctor will need to see you when you arrive and decide.’
She nodded. ‘I suppose this is the end of the baby.’
‘It might be possible to save it,’ he said. ‘Don’t get your hopes up, but sometimes they can stop the bleeding,’ he added. ‘But in your case, from what you’ve told me, a lot’s happened in a short time. Have you been trying for long?’
She shook her head. ‘Well, you’re lucky there, then. At least that’s not a problem.’
She began to breathe sharply. ‘Try to relax,’ said Dermot, taking back the sheet, witnessing haemorrhage, a pint of blood spreading in a huge circle on the sheet, Anna’s nightdress bloodied, vast clots of black blood clinging to her white legs.
The doorbell rang. He replaced the sheet quickly, to spare her, and ran downstairs. ‘I’m the doctor,’ he said. ‘You’ll need a stretcher.’
The men went upstairs quickly. Anna, now in a near-faint, was bundled up and carried down her own stairs on a stretcher.
Geoffrey Lombard’s car passed the ambulance at the corner. As its bell started to ring he parked, got out and looked at his open front door. Dermot said, ‘I’m Dr O’Brien. Are you Geoffrey Lombard?’
‘Yes,’ he said, still looking at his doorway. ‘I didn’t know she was pregnant.’
‘It hasn’t been for long,’ Dermot said.
‘I’d better go to the hospital,’ Geoffrey said. ‘I’m still trying to find out about the room.’
‘Take some things with you,’ Dermot said. ‘She’s gone off without a nightdress or a toothbrush. I’m afraid there’s a lot of blood about up there,’ he added, as Geoffrey moved off. Geoffrey Lombard looked at him in a startled way. ‘Oh, of course,’ he said. ‘I haven’t thanked you –’
‘No need,’ said Dermot. ‘Far from it. I’m sure you won’t need me again. Your wife’s in very good hands.’
‘Thanks again,’ called Geoffrey and went quickly back into his own house, to be appalled by the state of the bed in the immaculate bedroom. His first wife had got fatter, left for the hospital and come back with the baby. On her return she had been saggy and leaking blood and milk, while the baby had leaked pee and shit. It had been messy, but not like this. He stripped the bed of its stained and clotted sheet. The duvet had not escaped. He threw the whole lot in a corner, took a nightdress from the drawer, Anna’s dressing-gown from the hook, packed a toothbrush and soap, a brush and comb into a washing bag, walked past the bed, not looking at the big oval stain on the mattress. He went downstairs, got into the car and started up. Poor Anna, he thought, but there was some limit to his pity. It was not the feeling he might have had for a run-over dog, or when his children had been small and ill, lying flushed on their pillows. As he drove to the hospital he said to himself, ‘It would have been my child,’ but felt nothing. It seemed impossible to him that Anna could have a child. It seemed to him less possible, he had to realise, now that his desire for her seemed to have gone, for how, somehow, could she be having his child when he no longer wanted to sleep with her? What a mess, he said to himself. The truth was that over the years he had had lunch occasionally with his ex-wife Pauline when she was in town and not told Anna about these innocent encounters, in case she took them too seriously. She had never quite been able to accept the fact of his previous marriage, or the children of that marriage, and although at first he had been deceived by her assurances that it made no difference, that she had no doubts or fears caused by his past, when he began to know her more profoundly, he recognised that what she said was not always the complete truth; just what she wished to believe or perhaps what she wished him to believe. He realised the mere thought of Pauline and the children disturbed her. What upset her was mysterious to him. He himself assumed she must know his relationship with Pauline had deteriorated to the point of becoming savage. She, Anna, had saved him from despair. He assumed that her intense dislike of his ex-wife and children was a mixture of fear that one day he might want to return to them and sheer jealousy of a woman he had once loved. That was why he automatically concealed his meetings with Pauline, though to him it was the same as telling Anna lies. Pauline had pointed out that the children were getting more expensive, and she did not want to spoil their chances by making it look as if they ought to go out to work, or giving them so little they abandoned their educations to get low-paid jobs and buy Sony Walkmans, better clothes, and have a bit of cash in their pockets, or even just to get their hands on the dole money. Geoffrey saw the truth of this and increased the sum he and Anna gave her. She and the social worker she lived with were jointly earning less than half his and Anna’s combined income and there was no logical reason why the social worker should feel called upon to pay half the expenses of a household containing three children, none of them his. He appeared to be attempting to do this at the moment, without much complaint, a situa
tion which cheered and annoyed Geoffrey in equal measure. He wasn’t too sure he wanted that smug left-wing idiot sacrificing his income on his, Geoffrey’s behalf, and probably using the situation to score cheap political and personal points. ‘No more than you’d expect from an official of this present government’s Treasury,’ he could hear him saying. ‘They’re making cuts everywhere.’ Well, it had been weak, perhaps, not to tell Anna about the money, but he had learned, like a dog, that if he told his wife anything about Pauline or the children, the results made him uncomfortable. When Anna got upset she didn’t respond normally to him, things went wrong about the house because she was rattled and upset. It was better to keep quiet, so he’d raised the standing order to Pauline without telling her. The bank hadn’t asked for her agreement any more than they had when he increased the insurance on the house.
He hadn’t told her because if he did he’d be made uncomfortable, but, why, Geoffrey thought, why hadn’t she told him about the baby? A bloody mess – the murderous mattress seemed an apt comment on the situation. After that thought, he was at the hospital.
Anna, stretched out in the BUPA private room, a double, in fact, but with one empty bed, was an alarming and touching sight. Her slender body made no bump under flat white counterpane – ‘She’s too thin,’ he thought, ‘how could she carry a child?’ – her pale hair was spread on the pillow, her face nearly as white as the hospital sheet.
‘Are you all right?’ he burst out. ‘Anna, darling. What’s happening?’
‘I was expecting a baby. Now I think I’m losing it. The nurse says I’ll probably have an operation tomorrow – the doctor’ll say but he hasn’t been here yet. I’m so sorry, Geoffrey. The doctor was very nice. Can you ask Mrs Adams to come every day from now on? You’ll need her while I’m in here. Then I expect I’ll be weak –’
‘Yes, yes. You mustn’t worry about it. Of course I’ll ask her. I’m sure she’ll say yes. How are you now? Are you in any pain?’
‘A bit. Not as bad as it was. I fainted in the street, while I was getting out of the car. Polly Kops picked me up and helped me in. She rang her friend Kate Mulvaney, who had a doctor staying with her. Otherwise I don’t know what I’d have done. Please thank her, or send her some flowers – I don’t like her, but she didn’t panic. Geoffrey,’ she said, looking round the bare, white room. ‘Could you bring me some flowers? Did you bring a nightdress? This one’s theirs and it’s horrible.’
‘I did. Do you want to put it on now?’ he said, opening the hold-all, glad of something to do to help, but ‘No,’ she said. ‘After the operation.’
His heart sank. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ he said.
‘I did go to the doctor, but he told me you were on tranquillisers. What’s the matter, Geoffrey?’
‘I just felt a bit tense. He recommended them, just for a while.’
‘Well, what’s the matter Geoffrey? Is it me? I felt so worried –’
‘Work,’ he said. ‘Problems at the Treasury.’
‘What problems?’
He sighed, not knowing if his explanation would make sense to her. ‘I told you I was working mostly for the DHSS –’ The letter from Julie Thompson’s father came into both their minds. Geoffrey hurried on, ‘So – for eighteen months or so, that’s what I’ve been doing. Costing the cuts in social security, supplementary benefit, free school meals, death grants, you name a Department of Health and Social Security cut, I’ve costed it.’ She stared at him, alarmed. ‘That’s what I’ve done,’ he said weakly.
Still she said nothing. He said, ‘Anna. I’m a professional civil servant, it’s my duty to carry out the requests or orders of the government of the day, but at present the orders are uninspiring. I spend whole days in committee deciding how to cut back on what people need, from education to coffins. It’s my job, but I don’t like it.’
‘How does Bob Montague feel about it?’
‘Bob Montague feels great. He loves cuts. Sir Jack, as it happens, feels awful, but he can’t say so directly. He simply takes more sick leave than he’s ever done, and I believe he plans to retire early.’
‘I’m sorry you’ve been feeling so unhappy, Geoffrey,’ she said taking his hand. She gazed at him, searching his face and he had an idea she was not quite convinced.
‘That’s it, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘My work’s tired me more than it ought to. I’ve not been a very good husband recently, I know it.’
‘I wish you’d told me this,’ she said. ‘Why didn’t you? I’ve been thinking, oh, all sorts of things –’
‘I ought to have known – still, it’s out now, even if it took all this to bring it out. I’ve been so bottled up. I should have realised. I just wanted to spare you my grumbles about something at the time I could do nothing about. Here,’ he said, ‘I’ll get you those flowers, from the hospital shop –’
‘No,’ she said. ‘You needn’t –’
‘It’ll cheer you up a little,’ he said, disappearing.
Anna sighed when he had gone. She felt physically somewhat worse and uncomfortable in her coarse hospital nightgown, yet consoled that he was with her. She thought about his explanation of why he was taking tranquillizers, why he had been so distant, so unhappy, she supposed, for so long, why she had been driving herself mad to please him, and realised she could hardly believe the whole answer lay just in doing work which upset him. It could not be the whole reason, even if he thought it was. If Bob Montague didn’t mind, why did Geoffrey? The truth was he did not love her as much as he had once, when they first met, and after they were married, and the DHSS had nothing to do with that. And the old precept handed down over the generations from woman to woman stayed firmly in her head: ‘Give him a child.’
He came back with many roses. ‘Put them in the basin,’ she said. ‘The nurse can bring some vases later.’
Struck again by her fragility, he took one of her thin, pale hands, which lay weakly on the white counterpane, and said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were pregnant?’
Suddenly they both realised they had lost something which might have become a real child. Anna began to cry.
‘It was an accident. I thought you’d be angry,’ she said, looking at him with tears in her eyes. There was a long silence.
‘Never mind. We can try again,’ said Geoffrey Lombard. It was the only thing to say at that moment. What else could he say? He did not acknowledge consciously that he had been outmanoeuvred, but at a deeper level he knew it, and as he knew it, his shoulders dipped a little, never to straighten again. He accepted immediately that a woman who wanted a child, when her husband did not, had as much right to her own way as the man, perhaps more, since she was more closely concerned in the matter. There could be no compromise. There would either be a baby or there would not. Usually, he knew, life being what it is, there would be a baby. He supposed he would love his, when it came, and that afterwards he would love his wife, more or less. If more, it would be better. If less, then he would have to put up with it somehow. This baby, when it came, would cut off his escape from the Treasury. Anna could not go on working or, if she could, would not want to. Babies cost money, children more and teenagers even more still. He had half-planned a new life but now resignation from the Treasury was impossible; another career looked even further off now he was facing the responsibilities of a new family.
The nurse came in and said he must leave Anna, as he recognised all this, in one leap. Now he sat in his living-room alone. He knew now he loved his wife with mistrust, that he would be a father again, a rather old, tired father, but a father probably more loving to his child than he had been before. He would probably get promotion when Sir Jack went, probably in many years he would be in charge of re-costing the coffins and the dinners, this time upwards, for a new government keener on social welfare.
‘But she did do it,’ he thought. Julie Thompson had been betrayed to the DHSS for taking money in hand, claiming benefit and defrauding the DHSS to the tune of a full £12 a week �
�� what he and Montague might easily spend jointly on a normal lunch. ‘She did it all right, to get her out,’ he told himself. And she, Anna, had won, too, because now Julie would have to go to make room for the pram. He, Geoffrey, would have to give her enough money to go. The new job, the half plan he’d discussed with Roger that he should take over from the retiring estate manager and live down in the country, seemed feeble and impossible now. His fate had been decided. And that, thought Geoffrey Lombard in a darkening room, was that.
‘Course she can,’ declared Polly Kops, under the influence of champagne.
‘Really?’ cried Harriet Lombard, unaware that her father was sitting unhappily next door in darkness.
‘Why not?’ cried Polly back.
Harriet was moving into the little room upstairs. Polly, after her afternoon at the Lombards, had suddenly seen the strength of her position with Jay Honeycutt and taken the house off the market. She needed it, even if it was not for much longer. She didn’t feel happy about life, but, not a bad equivalent for a middle-aged woman in her position, she felt relieved.
‘I don’t think Anna Lombard’s going to like this,’ Pam remarked. Harriet sniggered.
‘I’ll need plenty of help on the stall from all of you, in exchange for the favour,’ declared Polly repressively. She wasn’t going to give up her steady job as a trader in junk and dubious antiques on the promise of evanescent fame as a Hollywood scriptwriter.
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