‘No thanks,’ said Jane.
‘Well you should be having lots of milk. Would you like some milk?’
‘That would be kind, Astrid,’ said Lynn firmly. Jane glared.
‘Let me look at your teeth at least,’ said Astrid, and Jane sighed and opened her mouth. ‘And I know this sounds silly — but are you reading to him yet?’
‘Yes, I’ve started him on the theory of relativity.’
Astrid flushed. ‘I know when I’m not wanted.’ And after a few more snubs, no amount of apologising from Lynn would bring her back.
As the time for the birth drew near, Jane found she had only one fear and that a shameful one. She didn’t want her mother with her. She appreciated that Lynn was trying to be helpful, indeed was being helpful. She felt guilty about how she had treated her in the past, and the enormity of maternal responsibility was beginning to weigh her down in mind and body; nevertheless, she didn’t want Lynn being kind and useful when she was open and vulnerable. The idea was embarrassing. She felt like crawling away to have a child in a forest.
And as for Lynn’s wanting to rush off and find hordes of her old feminist buddies — well! Didn’t they realise, damn it, that birth was a natural event?
As it happened, she was alone in the house with Derek when the first contractions came.The first he knew was when she looked at him rather vaguely and remarked, as if to herself, ‘It doesn’t hurt. It isn’t pain. It’s a strong female muscle limbering up for use.’
‘Have you started?’
‘I think so.’
Derek dropped the book he was reading and started flapping around.
‘Dad, for heaven’s sake, you’ve done it before!’
‘Yes, but —’
Somehow it had been different when it had been his own. He remembered, of course he remembered everything, that sense of crushing responsibility to be strong for Lynn, to protect her from doctors. He hadn’t been in the least bit frightened of the baby or the birth — he’d been much too busy quaking about taking stands against hospital officialdom. How could you argue with a doctor who had all that knowledge? It had been all right of course, and the baby had come right there on the hospital bed with doctors and nurses only rushing in to take their bow, as it were, after the final curtain-call; but now he longed for a doctor and knew he wouldn’t argue.
‘I expect Lynn’ll be back soon.’
‘Dad, you’re the only person in this family who’s ever delivered a baby.’
‘Yes, but —’
‘I don’t want her here.’
‘Oh, now Jane —’
‘When it gets near please send her out to get those women of hers.’
‘That’s only for emergencies.’
‘It will be if she’s here.’Jane winced. 'Please, Dad.’
He sighed. He felt like whipping her murderously as a spoilt ungrateful brat. And whoever heard of a man delivering his own grandchild? Grandchildl Absurd! A grandchild was a fluffy clean creature pawing your white beard, not a squirming animal counting on you to get it into the world!
By the time Martin came home, Jane was well into the first stage of her labour. Everything was fine as far as Derek could tell. He’d re-read all the childbirth books but it wasn’t necessary. He’d found he knew them by heart.
Jane gave off calm energy. She might have been a veteran. She sat, lay, squatted or walked around. She chatted, concentrated or let out complex moans which would have been alarming had they not ended in beatific smiles.
Her optimism affected Derek. He reminded himself how natural it all was, felt sure it would soon be over, guiltily hoped Lynn would not arrive. He felt almost professional in his competence, understood how doctors just let it happen and then took the credit.
Martin’s faced appeared round the door and panicked. Jane’s contractions slowed and she seemed to feel pain. ‘Be calm, be calm,’ she scolded her husband, ‘You know what to do.’
He remembered that his planned role was to keep her relaxed. He kissed her and rubbed her shoulders, sometimes letting his hands creep shyly to her breasts. He told her stories. Jane winked at her father. They both knew who needed relaxing.
But as the contractions grew stronger she tried to hide her mounting agitation. Derek held her hand and told her it had been the same at her own birth. It was getting late; the room was darkening. Martin reached out for the lights but Jane was furious.
‘Have some respect for my eyes, damn it!’ And her eyes seemed to blaze.
Derek said calmly, ‘Lynn was the same.’
‘Is someone taking my name in vain?’
Lynn couldn’t have picked a worse moment to arrive. Jane shrieked, ‘Get help, get helpl’
Derek whispered to Lynn, ‘I think you’d better fetch those women.’
She looked at him. ‘Is it an emergency, then?’
He gave up. ‘Of course not. She’s in transition and she’s scared. And she wants you out.’
‘Well,’ Lynn took a deep breath, ‘fuck that.’ And she walked softly and deliberately to the far end of the room and sat in a chair facing away from Jane.
‘I’m here,’ she said, ‘if you want me.’ Then she started to read.
‘I think you should get ready to push now,’ said Derek.
‘Oh I can’t,’ said Jane, ‘I’m so tired.’
‘You’ll have the baby soon, don’t forget,’ said Martin, ‘I can see her pretty head.’
‘You do it, I can’t,’Jane moaned.
‘Come on now,’ Lynn heard Derek coax, ‘Lynn, come over.’ Lynn fought with the pride that wanted Jane to ask her but there was nothing, only tetchy little moans. She stood up. Jane was half sitting, half lying, her husband cuddling her. Derek was bracing himself against the wall for one of her feet to push against. The other foot hung in the air.
‘Come on love, push against me,’ said Lynn, taking hold of the foot. Jane opened her eyes. ‘I’m good at that.’
Then there was nothing but energy between them and in the room; Lynn and Derek held hands and looked down into the dark straining tunnel of their daughter’s body. Beneath the stretching opening and the wet black head Jane’s skin looked white and ready to rip.
Derek whispered, ‘Should we cut?’
Lynn wanted to laugh. ‘We?’
‘You.’
‘I don’t want to do that.’ Instead Lynn reached down and touched the taut flesh, caressing and willing it to soften and stretch. Just as it seemed impossible, just as it seemed that a ragged tear would reward Lynn’s reluctance to cut, the head was bom with a little gush of blood and fluid and after that it was easy — a couple more pushes and the baby fell plop like a fish into Lynn’s hands.
With the cord still pulsating they laid the baby on Jane’s flat soft stomach. It was a little girl — Lynn thought — the genitals were rather an odd shape — huge confused labia — what an irony if — but no, this was normal, she remembered reading it was normal for a baby’s genitals to look odd. Life and growth would determine sex. This was a baby girl all right.
Jane let out a long groan as her body relaxed.
‘Cry, why doesn’t she cry?’
‘Stupid, she’s okay. What’s she got to cry about?’ The baby was making little speaking noises as if she scorned to cry, and looking round with wide-awake eyes.
Derek and Lynn and Martin stood round Jane’s belly and admired, counting the baby’s fingers, admiring her shell-like ears and the tone of the cries that she was deigning to give as if she realised it was expected of her. Jane’s flesh quivered and shifted as she hoisted herself on to her elbows.
‘Is this a private birth,’ she said, ‘or can anyone join in?’
She was all smiles.
A month later, Astrid went into the shiny new maternity unit annexed to the Women’s Centre.
She was pleased that things had gone well for Jane and that the baby seemed fit. Still — none of this earth-mother stuff, dining-room obstetrics for her! The most sophisticate
d machinery in the world would help her, and the baby’s engineer-brain would receive stimulation from the moment his head popped between her legs.
Her labour was going well. She was sedated. Wires from machines sent her body into spasms at intervals. She tried to count them but her head kept going woozy.
Foreign doctors stood over her.
‘Astrid is a model mother having a model birth.’
‘Is Astrid going to have a big family?’
‘She’ll see how she gets on with this one ...’
Fluids dripped into tubes, cylinders disgorged their contents into Astrid’s supine body, she was floating beneath the surface of thick music.
‘... excited to be chosen ...’
‘... professionally qualified at fifteen ...’
‘... what is more wasteful than childhood ...’
‘... curtailment ...’
Astrid’s eyes glowed with drowsy pride. Then she felt something stop.
It was an unpleasant sensation, like swimming under water and unexpectedly hitting the bottom. She sent a message to her face to plead with the doctors, but they seemed quite satisfied with their machines, which continued to drip and tick.
‘Astrid looks unhappy about something.’
‘He’ll soon be here, Astrid, and saying his ten times table as like as not.’
Astrid never saw the baby. The look of horror on the face of the young medical student at the end of the table was enough, as he hauled something out of her. She struggled to shout the message her body gave her that something had gone terribly wrong, but a black gas mask came down over her face, and its enveloping circle became her world.
She woke in a silent room, whimpering for her baby. The medical student was by her bed, his face as white as his coat.
‘Where’s my baby?’
‘He’s in intensive care, dear, please don’t worry.’
‘Don’t lie to me, you know he’s dead.’
The medical student covered his face. That's what they told me to say.’
‘What do you want?’ she screamed as she saw his tears and his pleading eyes, ‘Me to comfort you?'
‘He never lived.’
‘How can you say that? He had a job!’
They kept her in a room by herself, to spare her, they said, the sight of happy mothers with healthy babies. They told her she was too ill for visitors. She knew she was not ill, and she wanted nothing so much as to see a happy mother with a healthy baby. It might hurt, but it would disperse the sense of cold death that weighed like a stone in her womb. She slipped out of her room and walked corridors in the moonlight, and from every locked room came the sleepless sobs and pacing of women. There was no sign of any babies.
A doctor chased her back to bed, locked the door. An hour passed. She heard a scrabbling sound and a woman’s voice whispered: ‘You in there, love?’
‘Who is it?’
‘Just one of the women. What happened to yours?’
Dead.’
‘It’s a blessing.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Some of them are living. Did you see yours?’
‘No.’
‘It’s a blessing.’
It was happening everywhere. Throughout the country, babies were being bom with deformities so gross as to make some of them unrecognisable as human. The best of them lived eight hours.
Explanations poured in from Europop. Undetected factors in the women’s history. Infectious bug, something in the air. The high quality of ante-natal care that had ensured the birth of babies who might otherwise have been aborted spontaneously as damaged foetuses. Each story sounded thinner than the last to the nation in panic. Panic turned to fury with the realisation: it must be that stuff they put in the water.
‘Impossible, impossible,’ soothed the professor, ‘it was thoroughly tested. Sometimes the eating habits of expectant mothers —’
‘You can’t blame them now, man!’ Peel screamed, ‘What have you done?’
‘Is there some additive or pollutant in your water that I was not told about?’
‘You’re passing the buck, professor! It was up to you to check!’
Some hastily-conceived experiments with female rats provided the answer. The contraceptive chemical alone could not be blamed, and neither could the water. But the third arm of the lethal triangle was the drug in the antidote. Harmless by themselves, the three had come together in women, rendering them unsuitable as vehicles for the carrying of unborn children.
Chapter 11: The Women's Day
‘For all of us,’ wrote the professor, ‘our potential to do good is matched by our potential for disaster if we err. So when you judge me (I seek to evade nothing) I plead that you be no harsher than you would be on a professional mistake in yourselves — even though, in your case, the consequences may be slight, your mistake never found.’ After writing that he hanged himself, and his body was secretly disposed of.
The Europop project was disbanded. Participating scientists raced into print to declare the suspicions they had had all along. The project’s funding was transferred, as compensation, to the British government, and international charities sent parcels of clothes and cosmetics and messages of condolence to the bereft mothers. Educational trusts offered bursaries to enable those who were suitably qualified to bury their grief in a new career. The suggestion was made that babies might be imported from underfed parts of the world to benefit from the dammed-up maternal love and breast-milk of the British; but the mothers in the underfed parts of the world were reluctant. ‘Let our infants starve with us!’ seemed to be their mood, (anthropologists noted with interest the primitive suspicion of a nation of barren women) ‘— even if they are what the British mothers want, which we doubt!’
The British mothers looked as if they wanted blood. Women’s Centres were ransacked, sometimes burned. The mobs seemed unled, spontaneous, disorganised and wild, but they were thousands strong and the police had little heart to resist. The Europop workers, for the most part, escaped; native or foreign, they were lifted out in special planes.
The government considered using sections of the Protection of Women Act to restore order, but psychologists advised that it would be better to allow the women to work through their sorrow in whatever way they chose.
Mornings found streets dug up and rows of sticks with discs on top driven into the mud; each disc bore a child’s name. The police simply diverted traffic. Women in red robes were spotted holding ceremonies of memorial over these makeshift graves in the middle of the night; and ministers of many religions began to find their places of worship desecrated with blood and mud and plants, and tiny twin pools of water, as far apart as eyes in a woman’s face.
Every woman affected got a tasteful card from the royal family, ‘to let you know we are thinking of you at this difficult time.’
Abortions were offered to women still pregnant. Some refused, never wanting another doctor or instrument within miles of them, or feeling the infant moving inside them and knowing that it was safe, had been miraculously spared. The doctors noted sadly that it was always the softer, more unstable women who thus refused to accept the evidence of science, the ones who took it most hard when the birth came and they found there had been no miracles, no one was spared. There were some anxious moments when a few of the monster babies looked like surviving, but none lasted longer than a day.
Mr Peel resigned and left the country in a Europop airlift. No one would touch his job, and indeed the name of the Department for Family Welfare could not be uttered by anyone who hoped to remain in politics. The Social Security Party was guiltily glad to find its ranks swelling: the consensus was that an entirely new approach to social and family policy was long overdue. The disaster had been an inevitable consequence of placing human affairs too low on the national agenda. Besides, the nation’s children were now especially precious — no one could say how long it would be before more could be born, and the behaviour of their mothers over the next f
ew years was likely to be — well — unpredictable. An old-style social security system also seemed attractive in view of the waves of revulsion now conjured up by the Welfare Hostels. In a booming newcomer to a supercontinent, they could be seen as a triumph of sense over sentiment. To a nation in mourning, they were an outrage.
Jim Matthews had been a founder member of the Party, and his star was rising fast. He discussed the new ideas with Lynn.
‘It’s almost the old Beveridge idea, Mum. People pay contributions and then they’re covered for unemployment, sickness, old age — and — and don’t interrupt. Er, please. And motherhood. It’ll be an insurable risk like any other. Women’ll be treated fairly, in their own right, not as appendages to some man. What’s wrong with that?’
‘Nothing.’
‘There’ll be none of this conditional nonsense. All mothers will have money of their own. And if it’s expensive, that’s too bad, the government must find the money. If the nation wants children it can damn well pay for them.’
Lynn raised dull eyes. ‘“The nation” can’t have children,’ she said, ‘whether she wants them or not.’
‘No, but I mean after all this chemical business has been sorted out. We must look to the future. We must plan.’
‘Population is the louse in the ointment of planning.’
‘Pardon?’
‘Oh, nothing. Who wants children anyway?’
Jim said, ‘You’d be surprised. You should hear some of the men. I think they’re worried about their classic bone structures being lost to posterity. But seriously, there is talk that twenty years from now we could be in a bit of trouble if we’re sort of missing a generation of workers. Hardly the point, I say —’ he added stoutly, ‘but —’
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