Benefits

by Zoë Fairbairns

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I didn’t want to leave you.’

  ‘She seemed surprised. ‘Why?’

  ‘Like this.’

  ‘Why?’

  He sighed. ‘I could have made up lots of reasons, especially as I know why they asked me. It’s one of those year-long gatherings of geriatrics in Rio or some such place, during which time they get someone else to do your job as a tribute to your indispensability. Oh, I’ve seen it coming — pointed remarks about making way for a younger man — but do you know what I said? I said, I don’t want to leave my family at this time. Like newly-weds with a baby.’

  ‘How touching,’ said Lynn.

  ‘Lynn, please stop writing.’

  ‘I’m not writing about you.’

  ‘I know, but ... oh, don’t be angry.’

  She put down her pen and covered her writing with a sheet of blank paper. ‘I’m sad, not angry. I never wanted to be an emotional drain on you.’

  He laughed and put kisses all over her inert shoulders. ‘Some drain.’

  ‘No, really.’ She reached up and took his hand. ‘I used to think any woman who lost her man by expecting him to sort of live for her, deserved it. Maybe that was why I was so scared about having babies, I thought I’d depend on you too much.’

  ‘You? You never depended on me for anything.’

  ‘Did you want me to?’

  He sat down and closed his eyes. If there was one thing that still unnerved and excited him about her it was her insistence that he analyse his feelings. It seemed like second nature to her — to all women maybe, maybe that was why they were saner and madder than men — and he’d tried to leam. ‘I suppose it would have been nice to be able to show you you had nothing to worry about, but that’s a power trip too and no excuse ... poor Lynn. What did you think I was going to do to you when I was your lord?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said crossly, and went to the sink and started swilling round koffee tins to see if she could make him a cup. He went after her and hunted for his voice.

  ‘Anyway, that’s all over now. I’ve lost my job.’

  ‘Derek, don’t be silly. Go to your conference.’

  ‘I told you. It’s just the preamble to firing me. A year here or there ... I prefer it this way.’

  ‘It’s your politics, isn’t it? Your subversive wife. Ah, it’s not even that, I’m not a proper subversive, but some of my best friends —’

  ‘It’s my age.’

  ‘Bullshit. You’ve given your life to that place. Here, do you want this? It’s dregs.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘I’m up to here with it. We will be all right, won’t we Derek?’ She hated her whining, wheedling tone. ‘I mean, of course we will. What will we live on?’

  He struggled for words. ‘That’s the trouble. There’s peanuts in the staff pension fund. And when they halved my salary— we never finished the payments on the house. I mean, I didn’t.’

  ‘You were right the first time.’

  ‘I could hardly hold you responsible for my failure as a breadwinner, could I, not after —’

  ‘I’d prefer it if you did.’

  They sat looking at each other, bright-eyed with disbelief. They talked of little things and Lynn put away her letters to Marsha. They ate and went for a walk. The evening was light and there was a high wind.

  ‘How do you get admitted to Welfare Hostel anyway?’ said Lynn flippantly. Derek must have been thinking the same thing, his answer was automatic. ‘You let the police catch you begging at an airport.’

  ‘Bit undignified for a professor and his lady. There must be a more decorous procedure for the middle class.’

  Without deciding where to walk, they ended up picking their way through the rubble of Seyer Street.

  ‘I wonder what happened to the Hindleys,’ said Lynn. They were both keeping their eyes firmly on the surface of the road to avoid tripping.

  ‘I wonder what happened to our house.’

  ‘Got knocked down.’

  ‘I meant the bricks. D’you think this is one? Oh Lynn, we’re going to have to ask Jane and Martin to help us.’

  ‘I won’t.’ She raised her eyes to the tower. It looked fragile but it always had. The repainting was nearly done, dead, dazzling white. The cracks up the side were almost picturesque. Each line divided and subdivided. Like a family tree. Opaque glass blocked the windows, thick blind eyes. ‘I’ll go there, I don’t care.’

  They stood with their arms round each other and looked at the tower for a long time. It was very still against the racing clouds. A dog trotted round its base, lifted its leg and pissed. ‘I know how you feel, dog,’ said Lynn. Derek laughed. They were about to turn and go when a high window opened and a rope was lowered. For a long horrified moment Lynn thought they were going to hang somebody.

  Another window, another rope. Then complex operations trying to join the ropes in the wind. Then a cradle that looked about as sturdy as an orange box was lowered. Two small children, stiff and passive with fear, were put into it. Tins and brushes were handed to them, and as the cradle swayed and bashed against the walls of the building eight storeys up, adults could be seen behind the windows shouting encouragement and instructions on how to paint.

  ‘Beats picking oakum,’ Derek muttered, but Lynn was gone, beating on the door. A bored man in a uniform said, ‘Yes?’

  ‘Don’t you know how dangerous that is?’

  The man looked up. ‘Those kids are light.’

  ‘You mean starved. And terrified.’

  'You their family? Come to take them away?’

  ‘I’m — I’m a journalist —’ Lynn warned.

  The man pantomimed quaking with fear and Derek came up behind her and gently took her away, not letting her look back at the swaying cradles.

  Martin and Jane were brisk and kind.

  ‘Of course you must live with us.’

  All the discussing and arranging went on between the men. The setting was a polite dinner together. Lynn and Jane just nodded silently, avoiding each other’s eyes. Lynn felt an odd indignation. She’d relinquished control of her life on the understanding that Derek would retain it; now she felt betrayed. They were doing sums. Men were so clever at sums. Martin had a good salary. Derek’s pension from the university was small but not to be sneezed at. Jane took in clerical work at home and Lynn could probably help with that. Jane and Martin would give up their place, which was too big anyway for a couple on their own, and move in with the Byers; wasn’t that just the sort of eventuality their home was designed for? The men noticed the women’s silence, tried to fill the air with domestic arrangements, compromises between privacy and co-operation, but their voices became high, fast, inept.

  ‘It isn’t fair,’ said Lynn at last, looking at Jane, ‘on you, I mean. You want your own place.’

  'Only a child,’ said Jane steadily, ‘expects life to be fair.’

  ‘No, but we should have had more children, to sort of share us out.’

  ‘Next time Jim turns up we can get a few quid out of him. He hasn’t got anyone to support.’

  ‘In any case,’ Martin pointed out, ‘You’re my wife’s parents, and how would I feel if you went into a Hostel?’ Lynn stitched on a smile and rebuked the uncharitable thought that what he meant was how would I look?

  Jane said, ‘There’s something I’d like to talk to Lynn about alone.’ Lynn quaked and felt humiliated as Martin drew Derek away. What was this going to be — some pious speech about unbreakable obligations of blood?

  ‘I want you to help me,’ said Jane.

  ‘Help you what?’

  ‘Have a baby.’

  Jane —’

  ‘No, listen, Do I or don’t I have a right to have one?’

  ‘I would have said yes. You would have said no.’

  ‘It’s wrong, they can’t mess about with women’s lives like this.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I always wanted a b
aby. If I can’t have a baby, what am I for?’

  ‘Lots of things.’

  ‘Like punching holes in cards for Europea plastics, or —’

  ‘No. Not that. Finishing your education.’

  Jane turned away. ‘Forget it.’

  ‘Jane, I’ll help you do whatever you want. But you do know the risks?’

  ‘You know where I can go, don’t you?’

  Lynn didn’t. Her mind started ticking off the loose threads of the feminist networks that might still exist: women who had not been imprisoned or rehabilitated or housed in a Hostel. Someone would know someone whose friend ... damn these informal networks! If you were in you were in, but if you were out oh boy were you out ... and yet it was best, for secrecy.

  ‘I’ll find out for you, Janey.’

  Jane sat down suddenly. She looked thin and weak, and her hair, which had got redder as Lynn’s faded, was pale too now, like hay. Lynn wondered if Martin was looking after her properly, if she was getting all the right foods and tablets and having her physiotherapy sessions. She didn’t ask. Jane turned to face her.

  ‘I hope I get a nicer kid than you did,’ she said gruffly. And Lynn, pretending to misunderstand, said, ‘There’s no reason to think Martin’s a CF carrier, is there? And if he isn’t, your child should be okay.’

  Weeks of guarded chats with strange women outside hypermarkets or rummaging in the dustbins of the rich finally won Lynn the address of a woman who would remove contraceptive pellets with hygiene and secrecy. The women who told her would not give their own names. Lynn said, ‘Who are you all?’

  ‘Just say the women sent you.’

  ‘With capital letters?’

  ‘Who’s writing?’

  ‘But is there something organised? I’d like to be part of it.’

  ‘It looks as if you’re part of it already.’

  And Lynn had to be content with that. Sometimes she felt exhilarated, excited. At others she chided herself for being romantic and childish. All that was going on was that a lot of individual women were taking individual stands. There was no organization. It was demeaning rubbish to use words like revolution or resistance.

  The woman who had agreed to operate on Jane turned out to be the ex-nurse wife of one of the Europop doctors. Under cover of sex therapy classes she helped up to a dozen women a week begin unauthorised pregnancies. Lynn went with Jane, but Jane didn’t want her there while the operation was being done. Lynn was given a room to sit in, and some women came and sat with her and played music and chatted in ways that were soothing and communicative but steered off specific identities or information. She felt glad; if they were looking after her this well, Jane need have no worries. She couldn’t resist asking, ‘Are you The Women too?’ and they smiled deprecatingly and said, ‘Aren’t we all?’

  Lynn shrugged. ‘Maybe.’

  Jane was pale and wobbly-legged for a day after the operation, but she kept insisting it was nothing. ‘There’s nothing to it, Mum. It didn’t hurt and it hardly bled. It was just fear. As long as I relaxed, it was okay. That was why it took so long, they were talking away all the things I’d read about pain and dangers. It was nothing, nothing at all.' And as if in proof she missed her next period, and within a few more weeks was boasting sore breasts, morning sickness and half-hourly visits to the loo.

  They had a party to celebrate the pregnancy once it was established beyond doubt. Martin dropped an earlier pose of righteous anxiety and was frankly delighted. Lynn thought she had never seen Jane so affectionate and cheerful, which was a pleasure in itself. She tried to look forward to the bewildering idea of being a grandmother when she wasn’t used to being a mother yet. She focused on her daughter, who for all her smiles was still unwell and was going to have to get through her pregnancy with the minimum of medical help, and on the tiny foetus, the growing child that was a little licit, an outcast before it was born.

  Lynn never came nearer to believing in a goddess than she did a week later when the Department for Family Welfare dropped its latest bombshell.

  No further contraceptive pellets would be inserted in women, and any woman who wished to have hers removed could do so. They were a primitive method of birth control, not wholly reliable, and caused unpleasant side-effects. Furthermore, the DFW was concerned to reduce casualties among women who had sought illegally to remove them and had been admitted to hospitals in their thousands with lacerated wombs.

  Besides, pellets were no longer necessary. The ultimate in trouble-free contraception had arrived. A small amount of contraceptive chemical had been placed in all the nation's reservoirs. The chemical had been tested for one hundred per cent effectiveness and freedom from side-effects. The outward manifestations of women’s menstrual cycles would remain unchanged, as would their ability to become pregnant after a short course of antidote tablets obtainable from government Women’s Centres.

  Lynn and Jane were together when they heard the news. They were sewing a shiny new textile into baby-garments for a Europea combine; it was slightly better paid work than punching cards. As it should be. The unpleasant material was so slippery that it seemed alive, squirming from the needle and resisting scissors. It also gave off a mist of fibre which irritated Jane’s throat. A battle with Lynn to stop her doing it altogether ended in a compromise, Jane would do half an hour with a mask on and then sit before an open window deep-breathing.

  ‘It looks as if I was just in time,’ she said, ‘they’d never have let me. How could such a thing have happened?’

  ‘It’s Peel,’ said Lynn, ‘he’s mad.’

  ‘Maybe if David Laing hadn’t —’

  ‘Be quiet. Individuals aren’t important.’

  ‘But why did no one hear of it? Don’t things go through parliament any more?’

  ‘I’ll find out.’ Lynn spent a day in a library with parliamentary reports. When she came home her voice was steely. ‘Yes, it’s been through parliament.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Twice. Once in a debate on the water supply. They were rubber-stamping procedures for putting in purifiers and vitamins.

  No argument of course. Then just after midnight, Peel put in an amendment. “Or other therapeutic substances.” No argument.’

  ‘And the other time?’

  It came up in a debate last week. There were about six members in the chamber, and to judge from the report they spent most of the time cracking jokes.’

  ‘What was the debate?’

  ‘Women’s role in the modem world.’

  The Byers and the Carmichaels divided up the house equitably, adjusting the walls upstairs and sharing the downstairs. Martin was out at work all day and so was not expected to do housework. Derek said he would do his share, and help with Lynn and Jane’s sewing or card-punching, but Jane argued that he should not have to.

  ‘You’re retired now, dad. Write a book or something.’

  Lynn scowled into her mirror. ‘I will not be a mother-in-law.’ Derek sat miserably making notes and in the end Martin found him a job answering a man’s telephone. ‘It’s not much,’ Martin said confidentially, ‘but it’ll get you out of the house.’

  Lynn and Jane were getting on quite well; the only friction was over what Jane called Lynn’s fussing. Pregnancy had wrought wonders with Jane’s health, she had never been so symptom-free, and she was furious when Lynn went behind her back and persuaded Astrid to overcome her embarrassment at an illicit pregnancy in the family and pass on to Jane the advice and information she herself obtained at her ante-natal classes. For Astrid was very excited and proud to have been chosen as one of the first women to be given a set of green translucent capsules to swallow to overcome the sterilising agent in the drinking water and enable her to produce a baby engineer.

  ‘Astrid’s so damn smug,’Jane would grumble, and Lynn had to agree. And in a way it did seem foolish to introduce anxiety where none existed before. After all, Lynn remembered, she herself had given birth to Jane with only Derek in attendance.
Hospitals were being run down then with the spending cuts, and mothers-to-be had faced two choices: either to go it alone or to face a highly technological, heartless, cost-cutting baby-production line.

  She remembered as if it were yesterday. There'd been no classes of course, but she’d read books and made sure Derek read them too. He’d shaped up honourably to his duties and permitted himself to be lectured: ‘I know what they’re like, these hospitals. They want you in and out between nine and five, tubes in all your orifices and no husbands getting in the way. Well I want you there. I’ll need an ally so I’m telling you now. There are to be no anaesthetics that I do not specifically ask for. I will not be induced unless a doctor looks me in the eye and tells me it is medically necessary. When the baby is born it goes to me or you first for a cuddle and a chat before it gets whisked away to be disinfected and put in a box, and it’s not going out of my sight till it’s got its little name-tag on.’

  How naive they’d beenl Doctors forcing attentions on them had been the least of their worries. They’d accepted the rather insulting advice that as an ‘elderly primagravida’ Lynn should come into hospital as soon as labour started, but it had been dark and deserted when they arrived at four in the morning, and they’d found a spare room with a bed and Lynn had got into it, hoping some official wouldn’t bustle along and be angry. On the contrary; the exhausted nurse who did eventually look in seemed relieved and grateful that they were coping.

  Derek had gone exploring and reported vacant rooms, nurseless wards with mattresses folded on unused beds; and occasional, ill-looking mothers labouring alone with moonlight on them.

  Now all that seemed like the good old days. As an illicit mother-to-be, Jane was entitled to nothing: no advice, no care, no labour wards, no Benefit. Lynn and Derek and Martin had conferred about it late one night, and Lynn had gone off hunting again for women who could help in an emergency. Women washing clothes in one of the commercial laundries gave her a name but stressed that for security reasons it was only for emergency use. This time Lynn asked no questions about The Women.

  Meanwhile Astrid visited relentlessly. It was not for her to comment on the risks her brother was allowing Jane to take, so she didn’t. She tried to keep conversation as light and optimistic as possible, concentrating on plans for her own baby. What an honour to be chosen for Accelerated Rearing! She was having special oxygen treatments to develop her unborn son’s brain, and a regime of exercises. And the pills she had to take! Vitamins and proteins and — well, she was sure she rattled when she walkedl Did she rattle? She was sure she could get away with asking for a spare bottle if Jane would like —