Alive, Alive Oh!

by Diana Athill

  The longing to tell everyone else was strong. I scolded myself, arguing that when I began to bulge would be soon enough; people did have miscarriages, and no discreet woman would announce a pregnancy before the fourth month. But with every day discretion became less important, jubilation grew stronger, and I had soon told everyone with whom I was intimate and some with whom I was not. Almost all my friends appeared to be delighted for me, and their support gave me great pleasure. Sometimes they said I was brave, and I enjoyed that too, in spite of knowing that courage did not come into it; it was just that the tortoise had won. The interest and sympathy that seemed to surround me was like a good wine added to a delicious dinner.

  Barry was, in a detached way, pleased. The pregnancy made no difference to the form of our relationship, but it did deepen it: his tenderness and attention were a comfort and a pleasure. I wondered, sometimes, what would happen about that once the child was born: would an ‘uncle’ in its life instead of a father be a good thing or a bad one? We would have to see. I knew that if it proved a bad thing I would have to lose Barry – would lose him without hesitation however great the pain – but for the present having him there was a large, warm part of the happiness which carried the anxieties like driftwood on its broad tide.

  I felt gloriously well, hungry, lively and pretty, without a single qualm of sickness and with only a shadow of extra fatigue at the end of a long day, from time to time. ‘Well, you seem to be all right,’ they said to me at the hospital clinic which I began to attend. During the long waits at this clinic I watched the other women and thought that none of them looked so well or so pleased as I did. At my first visit I kept quiet, half anxious and half amused by doubts as to how my spinsterhood would be treated by the nurses and doctors, but once I discovered that it was taken not only calmly but with extra kindness, I relaxed. One of the other expectant mothers, very young, was like myself in having suffered nothing in the way of sickness or discomfort, and the two of us made an almost guilty smug corner together. I contrived to read details about myself over the shoulder of a nurse who was filling in a form about me, and glowed with ridiculous pride at all the ‘satisfactories’ and at ‘nipples: good’.

  However simple and quick the examination itself, the clinic proved always to take between two and three hours, so I arranged to see my own doctor regularly instead. As I left the clinic for the last time I happened to be thinking – worrying – about the problem of the child’s care while I was at the office, when a man leant out of the cab of a passing truck and shouted at me: ‘That’s right, love – keep smiling!’ Worrying I may have been, but I was also grinning all over my face.

  Those weeks of April and May were the only ones in my life when spring was wholly, fully beautiful. All other springs carried with them regret at their passing. If I thought, ‘Today the white double cherries are at their most perfect,’ it summoned up the simultaneous awareness: ‘Tomorrow the edges of their petals will begin to turn brown.’ This time a particularly ebullient, sundrenched spring simply existed for me. It was as though, instead of being a stationary object past which a current was flowing, I was flowing with it, in it, at the same rate. It was a happiness new to me, but it felt very ancient, and complete.

  One Saturday, soon after my last clinic, Barry came to see me at lunchtime. I had got up early and done a big shop, but not a heavy one, because a short time before I became pregnant I had bought a basket on wheels (was it coincidence that several of my purchases just before the condition were of things suited to it: that basket, the slacks which were rather too loose round the waist, with the matching loose top?). I left the basket at the bottom of the stairs for him to bring up, because, strong and well though I felt, I was taking no foolish risks. We ate a good lunch, both of us cheerful and relaxed. After it he was telling me a funny story when I interrupted with, ‘Wait a minute, I must go to the loo – tell me when I get back,’ and hurried out to have a pee, wanting to get back quickly for the end of the story. When I saw blood on the toilet paper my mind went, for a moment, quite literally blank.

  So I got up and went slowly back into the sitting room, thinking, ‘To press my fingers against my cheek like this must look absurdly overdramatic.’

  ‘I’m bleeding,’ I said in a small voice.

  He scrambled up from the floor, where he’d been lying, and said, ‘What do you mean? Come and sit down. How badly?’

  ‘Only a very little,’ I said, and began to tremble.

  He took me by the shoulders and pulled me against him, saying quieting things, saying, ‘It’s all right, we’ll ring the doctor, it’s probably nothing,’ and although I didn’t know I was going to start crying, I felt myself doing it. I had not yet been able to tell what I was feeling, but suddenly I was having to control myself hard in order not to scream. ‘The important thing,’ he said, ‘is to find out.’ He went to fetch the telephone directory and said: ‘Come on, now, ring the doctor.’

  The telephone was near my chair, so I didn’t have to move, which I felt was important. The doctor was off duty for the weekend, but a stand-in answered. Any pain? No. How much bleeding? I explained how little. Then there was nothing to be done but to go to bed at once and stay there for forty-eight hours. ‘Does this necessarily mean a miscarriage?’ I asked. No, certainly not. How would I know if it turned into one? It would seem like an exceptionally heavy period, with the passing of clots. If that happened I must telephone again, but otherwise just stay lying down.

  Barry ran out to buy me sanitary towels. During the few minutes I was alone I found myself crying again, flopped over the arm of my chair, tears streaming down my face, saying over and over again in a sort of whispered scream, ‘I don’t want to have a miscarriage, I don’t want to have a miscarriage.’ I knew it was a silly thing to be doing, and when my cousin, alerted by Barry, came, I was relieved to find that I could pull myself together, sit up and talk.

  They put me to bed, and we talked about other women we knew of who had bled during pregnancy with no ill effect, and I soon became calm. During the next two days the bleeding became even less, but it did not quite stop, and over the phone my doctor repeated his colleague’s words: no one could do anything, it was not necessarily going to be a miscarriage, I would know all right if it became one, and I must stay in bed until it stopped. I was comfortable in my pretty bedroom, reading Jane Austen almost non-stop for her calming quality (I reread the whole of Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey, Persuasion and The Watsons in four days), listening to the radio and doing a little office work. By the fourth day my chief anxiety had become not the possibility of a miscarriage, but the fear that this slight bleeding might tie me to my bed not for days but for weeks. A bedridden pregnancy would be bad enough for anyone, but for me, entirely dependent as I was on friends who all had jobs or families . . . How could they possibly go on doing as much as they were doing now for much longer?

  I was lucky in one way: anxiety, fear and certain kinds of misery always had an almost anaesthetic effect on me, making my mind and feelings sluggish. Under such stresses I shrank into the moment, just doing the next thing to be done, and sleeping a lot. So those four days passed in a state of suspended emotion rather than in unhappiness – suspended emotion stabbed every now and then with irritation at the absurdity of having to fear disaster when I was feeling as well as ever. It was ridiculous!

  During the night of the fourth day I came slowly out of sleep at three in the morning to a vague feeling that something was amiss. It took me a minute or two of sleepy wondering before I identified it more exactly. Not since I was a girl had I suffered any pain during my period – I had almost forgotten what kind of pain it was – but now . . . yes. In a dim, shadowy way it was that old pain that was ebbing and flowing in my belly. When it ebbed I thought, ‘Quick, go to sleep again, you were imagining it.’ But it came back, its fluctuations confirming its nature. More anaesthetized than ever, barely awake, I got up, fetched a bucket from the kitchen and a newspaper to fold and use as a li
d, and a big towel from the linen cupboard. I arranged all this beside my bed and went to sleep again.

  When I woke an hour and a half later it was because blood was trickling over my thigh. ‘This is it’: dull resentment was what I felt. I hitched myself out of bed and over the bucket – and woke with a cold shock at the thudding gush, the sensation that a cork had blown. ‘Oh God, oh God,’ I thought, ‘I didn’t know it would be like this.’ Blood ran fast for about half a minute, then dwindled to a trickle. Swaddling myself in the towel, I lay back on the bed, telling myself that no doubt it had to be fairly gruesome to start with.

  After that the warning trickle came every ten or fifteen minutes, out over the bucket I went, terrified that I might overturn it with a clumsy gesture as I removed and restored the newspaper lid. The gush was never as violent as the first one, but each time it was violent and it did not diminish. I tried not to see the dark, clotted contents of the bucket – it was only when I saw it that I almost began to cry. There was a peppery smell of blood, but if I turned my head in a certain way I could catch a whiff of fresh air from the window, which lessened it. It was already light when I woke the second time, and soon after that the first blackbird began to sing. I lay still between the crises, watching the sun’s first rays coming into the room and trying to make out how many blackbirds were singing behind the one in our own garden.

  My cousin would be coming up to give me breakfast. She usually came at eight – but it might be later. ‘If she doesn’t come till late . . .’ I thought, and became tearful. Then I decided to wait until seven-thirty, by which time the bleeding would surely be diminished, and telephone her – with the towel between my legs I would be able to get to the sitting room, where the phone was. The thought of telephoning the doctor myself was too much, because if his number were engaged or he were out I couldn’t bear it; my cousin must do it. Time was going very fast, I noticed, looking at the alarm clock on the corner of my chest of drawers. That was something, anyway.

  I had come out in a heavy sweat after the first flow, but it was not until about six-thirty that it happened again. Then sweat streamed off me and I was icy cold, and – worse – I began to feel sick. The thought of having to complicate the horror by vomiting into that dreadful bucket put me in a panic, so when the sweating was over and the nausea had died away, immediately after another violent flow, I knew I must get to the telephone now. I huddled the towel between my legs, stood up, took two steps towards the door, felt myself swaying, thought quite clearly, ‘They are wrong when they say everything goes black; it’s not going black, it’s disappearing. I must fall onto the bed.’ Which I did.

  The next hour was vague, but I managed to follow my routine: bucket, paper back, flat on bed, wrap dressing gown over belly. I began to feel much iller, with more sweating, more cold, more nausea. When I heard my lodger moving about in his room next door I knew I had to call him. He knew nothing of my pregnancy – thought I had been in bed with an upset stomach. We were so far from being intimate that even if I had thought of him I might have felt unable to call him. Now I tapped on the wall and called his name, but he didn’t hear. A little more time passed, and I heard him in the passage outside my door and called again. This time he heard, and answered, and I told him to go downstairs and fetch my cousin. ‘You mean now?’ came his startled voice through the door. ‘Yes, quickly.’ Oh, that was wonderful, the sound of his feet hurrying away, and only a minute or two later my door opened and in came my cousin.

  One look and she ran for the telephone without saying a word. She caught the doctor in his surgery, two minutes before he went out on a call. He arrived so soon that it seemed almost at once, looked into the bucket, felt my pulse, pulled down my eyelid and left the room quickly to call an ambulance and alert the hospital. I felt hurt that neither he nor my cousin had spoken to me, but now my cousin said could I drink a cup of tea and I felt it would be wonderful – but couldn’t drink it when it appeared. The relief of not having to worry any more would have been exquisite, if it had not given me more time to realize how ill I was feeling. The ambulance men wrapped me in a beautiful big red blanket and said not to worry about bleeding all over it (so that’s why ambulance blankets are usually red). The breath of fresh air as I was carried across the pavement made me feel splendidly alert after the dreadful dizziness of being carried downstairs, so I asked for a cigarette and they said it wasn’t allowed in the ambulance but I could have one all the same, and to put the ash in the sick bowl. One puff, and I felt much worse than ever; my cousin had to wipe the sweat off my forehead with a paper handkerchief. There was a pattern by then: a slowly mounting pain, a gush of blood, the sweating and nausea following at once and getting worse every time, accompanied by a terrible feeling that was not identifiable as pain but simply as illness. It made me turn my head from side to side and moan, although it seemed wrong to moan without intolerable pain.

  The men carried me into a cubicle in the casualty department, and I didn’t want them to leave because they were so kind. As soon as I was there the nausea came again, worse than ever so that this time I vomited, and was comforted because one of the men held my head and said, ‘Never mind, dear.’ A nurse said brusquely, while I was vomiting (trying to catch me unawares, I supposed), ‘Did you have an injection to bring this on?’ My ‘no’ came out like a raucous scream, which made me feel apologetic, so I had to gasp laboriously, ‘I wanted most terribly to have this baby.’ The man holding my head put his other hand on my arm and gave it a great squeeze, and that was the only time anyone questioned me.

  My head cleared a bit after I had been sick. I noticed that the nurse couldn’t find my pulse, and that when the doctor who soon came was listening to my heart through his stethoscope, he raised his eyebrows a fraction and pursed his lips, and then turned to look at my face, not as one looks at a face to communicate, but with close attention. I also noticed that they could never hear my answers to their questions, although I thought I was speaking normally. ‘They think I’m really bad,’ I said to myself, but I didn’t feel afraid. They would do whatever had to be done to make me better.

  It went on being like that up on the ward, when they began to give me blood transfusions. My consciousness was limited to the narrow oblong of my body on the stretcher, trolley or bed, and to the people doing things to it. Within those limits it was sharp, except during the recurring waves of horribleness, but it did not extend to speculation. When a nurse, being kind, said, ‘You may not have lost the baby – one can lose a great deal of blood and the baby can still be all right,’ I knew that was nonsense but felt nothing about it. When a doctor said to someone, ‘Call them and tell him he must hurry with that blood – say that he must run,’ I saw that things had gone further than I supposed but did not wonder whether he would run fast enough. When, a little later, they were discussing an injection and the same doctor said, ‘She’s very near collapse,’ I thought perfectly clearly, ‘Near collapse, indeed! If what I’m in now isn’t collapse, it must be their euphemism for dying.’ It did, then, swim dimly through my mind that I ought to think or feel something about this, but I hadn’t the strength to produce any more than: ‘Oh, well, if I die, I die,’ and that thought, once registered, did not set up any echoes. The things which were real were the sordidness of lying in a puddle of blood, and the oddness of not minding when they pushed needles into me.

  I also wanted to impress the nurses and doctors. Not till afterwards did I understand that I had slipped back into childhood; that the total trust in these powerful people, and the wish to make them think, ‘There’s a good, clever girl,’ belonged in the nursery. I wanted to ask them intelligent questions about what they were doing, and to make little jokes – provided I could do so in not more than four or five words, because more would be beyond me. It was annoying that they seemed not to hear my little mumblings, or else just said, ‘Yes, dear,’ looking at my face as they said it with that same odd, examining expression. I made a brief contact with one of the doctors when h
e told them to do something ‘to stop me being agitated’. What I wanted to say was, ‘Don’t be silly, I can’t wait for you to get me down to the theatre and start scraping,’ but all that came out was a peevish, ‘Not agitated!’ to which he replied politely, ‘I’m sorry, of course you’re not.’ The only words I spoke from a deeper level than these feeble attempts at exhibitionism were when someone who was manipulating the blood bottle asked me if I was beginning to feel sleepy. It was during a wave of badness, and I heard my own voice replying hoarsely: ‘I’m feeling very ill.’

  I had always dreaded the kind of anaesthetic one breathes, because of a bad experience when I was having my appendix out, but when I understood that they were about to give me that kind and began to attempt a protest, I suddenly realized that I didn’t give a damn: let them hurry up, let them get that mask over my face and I would go with it willingly. This had been going on much, much too long and all I wanted was the end of it.

  The operation must have been a quick one, under a light anaesthetic, because when I woke up to an awareness of hands manipulating me back into bed, I was confused only for an instant, and only as to whether this was happening before or after the operation. That question was answered at once by the feeling in my belly: it was calm, I was no longer bleeding. I tried to move my hand down to touch myself in confirmation, and a nurse caught it and held it still – I hadn’t realized that there was still a transfusion needle taped into the back of it. Having moved, I began to vomit. I had a deep-seated neurotic queasiness about vomiting, a horror of it, and until that moment I would never have believed that I could have been sick while lying flat on my back with the bowl so awkwardly placed under my chin that the sick went into my hair, and been happy while doing it. But that was what was happening. An amazing glow of relief and joy was flowing up from my healed belly.