The Fall

by Simon Mawer

  “Harley Street? But I thought this kind of thing was, well, illegal.”

  Meg patted her hand. “There are,” she explained in her knowing manner, “ways and means.”

  They had to wait a few days for the appointment. It was in the early afternoon, so it wasn’t difficult to get there as long as she was back on watch by six. Apparently there would be an examination. Meg came up from Croydon, and they met at the station and then took the Tube to Bond Street and walked from there. It was a cold and leaden day, the clouds lying low over the city and a thin drizzle brushing the air. Meg had her issue greatcoat, so she was all right, but Diana’s coat was threadbare and did little to keep her warm. And there was something else: the chill of expectation. That was internal, not external—the icy anticipation of what was to happen to her, of how she would lie on her back with her legs up in stirrups while some strange man poked around inside her. No amount of outside insulation could dispel that cold.

  Harley Street was forbidding in its restrained splendor, the impassive frontages in dark brick, the doors and windows and railings picked out in white, the brass plaques announcing arcane specializations and recondite qualifications.

  Mr. Humphrey Mandeville,

  FRCS, FRCOG

  There was a nurse in starched white and a receptionist whose disapproving expression suggested that she understood the purpose of their visit all too well. They waited in a drawing room, with copies of the Tatler for diversion. The pictures on the wall were reproductions of paintings by Stubbs: horses—stud mares, no doubt—with their grooms.

  Mandeville himself was a tall man with a stiff collar and pince-nez hanging from a chain around his neck. He had the aspect of a bird: part owl, part eagle, wholly predatory. He sat behind his expansive desk and glared at the two women with a look of barely concealed ferocity. “Which of you ladies is Miss Sheringham?”

  “It’s Sheridan,” said Diana. “Diana Sheridan. A bit like the actress.”

  “You are an actress?”

  She blushed. “No, not me. My name’s a bit like the actress’s. Dinah Sheridan. Diana Sheridan.”

  The man frowned. In his stiff collar and pince-nez he seemed to be glaring at them as if from another century, an era when even an actress was something disreputable, never mind a pregnant and unmarried woman. “What actress? Why are we talking about an actress if you are not one?”

  Diana felt an unnerving mixture of emotion: part shame, part anger, part the embarrassment of a child made an object of ridicule by an adult. Sweat crawled like an insect down from her armpit into the fabric of her slip. “It doesn’t matter,” she mumbled. “It really doesn’t matter.”

  “So if you are not an actress, what are you?”

  “A nurse.”

  “A nurse, indeed?”

  “An auxiliary. I work with an ambulance unit in Clerkenwell.”

  “An auxiliary. Is that so?” He rested his elbows on the arms of his chair and placed his fingers tip to tip and bounced them gently against each other. “May I ask, Nurse Sheringham, how you came to be in your…ah…present circumstances?”

  “Well, I wanted to do something for the war effort, and nurses seemed likely to be needed, so I did a course —”

  Mandeville’s expression contracted as though with pain. “I think you misunderstand me. I do not wish to hear reasons for your commendable efforts toward the defeat of Nazi Germany; I mean your being with child. How did your pregnancy come about, girl?”

  Perhaps it was the use of the word girl that annoyed Meg so. She interrupted angrily: “I’d have thought you’d have known that, seeing as pregnancy is your line. Di slept with a man. They made love. How else do you do it, Doctor?”

  Mandeville turned the weapon of his eyes away from the blushing Diana and onto Meg. “Thank you for that. You see, that is precisely the point, Miss…?”

  “York. Like the city. And I’m a lady, not a girl.”

  “I’m delighted to hear it, Miss York. Well, you must understand…both of you must understand, that the circumstances surrounding the conception of this child are of immense importance. If Miss Sheridan did, as you have just suggested, make love, then it is difficult to see how one can justify the destruction of the child.”

  The phrase hung in the air, reverberated from the window-panes with their crisscross of adhesive tape, echoed through Diana’s skull. Destruction of a child.

  “Do you have to put it so bluntly?” Meg demanded.

  “But that is precisely what it is, Miss York. The abortion of a fetus is the destruction of a child, specifically outlawed under the Offenses Against the Person Act of 1861. For carrying out an abortion, under the terms of paragraph 58 of this act, both Miss Sheridan and I might be liable to penal servitude for life.” He looked from one to the other of the two young women seated on the far side of his desk. “Life,” he repeated, as though he were saying death. “Even you, Miss York, for aiding and abetting, might be liable to up to three years in prison.”

  There was a silence, like the silence of a courtroom. Outside, a car drove past. You could hear the tires cutting through the wet. Inside Mandeville’s office, Diana sat with her knees primly together and her hands clasped tight in her lap and her mind ringing with words: the word life, the word destruction.

  “On the other hand,” Mandeville continued, “the Infant Preservation Act of 1929 provides for the possibility of performing a lawful termination. But to be lawful, I would have to be satisfied that by ending the life of the child I was preserving the life of the mother.” He looked over his pince-nez at Diana. She appeared eminently healthy, bursting with health, and guilty, crawling with guilt. As though tasting her, tasting both health and guilt, the man passed his tongue over his lips. Then he sniffed, glanced down at his desk, and went on with his legal dissertation: “The Bourne ruling of 1939 defines the life of the mother in rather broad terms.” He held up a sheet of paper as though reading it to a jury. “Termination may be allowable if—and I quote—‘the doctor is of the opinion on reasonable grounds and with adequate knowledge of the probable consequences, that continuing the pregnancy would be to make the woman a physical or mental wreck.’”

  He looked up from the page. “Strong language, is it not? ‘a physical or mental wreck.’ In the Bourne case, the mother in question was a fourteen-year-old girl who had been raped. Doctor Bourne performed the abortion and was acquitted at the subsequent trial. The question is this: can I be convinced that Miss Sheringham —”

  “Sheridan.”

  “Miss Sheridan would be left a physical or mental wreck by proceeding with her pregnancy? If she too had suffered the misfortune of rape, then perhaps I could do so, even though she is clearly not fourteen. But Miss York has suggested that Miss Sheridan and her partner made love. And I see before me a perfectly healthy young woman who gives every indication of being able to bring an equally healthy child into the world. Of course, I haven’t yet examined you, Miss Sheridan, but unless you have any marked physical problem, then all I can say is that you are asking me to perform an illegal act. An illegal act of the gravest kind. And, I might add, an immoral act. Which is not necessarily the same thing.”

  Mandeville stood. His pince-nez fell from his aquiline nose and hung down his front like a dead mouse. “I assume that any medical examination is superfluous—it would, in any case, incur costs for you—and I suggest that we bring this whole unpleasant meeting to a close. I further suggest that you go away and bring your child into the world and turn yourself into a decent mother. There is enough death and destruction at the moment. Why not take part in the creation of life, Miss Sheringham?”

  They went out into the rain. Just down the terrace from Mandeville’s consulting rooms, a house had been bombed. There was only the shell left, looking like a tragic mask—empty sockets, vacant mouth, frowning brow, and hollow cheeks. At the back there were charred wooden beams like ruined bits of a theater set. Outside this place, in the drizzle, Diana sat down on a low wall and wept. Sh
e wept for many things: for herself, for her child that would never be, for her fleeting, fractured love for Guy, but also for those nameless people she had seen broken by the bombs—the baby she had seen exploded on a sidewalk in Stepney, the pregnant woman she had helped extract from rubble in Clerkenwell and subsequently had watched die, the bewildered, ragged East Enders who sifted through the rubble to find what remained of their lives. She wept also out of pure, unmitigated tiredness, for she was tired: exhaustion was a cancer that ate away at her mind and her limbs, that eroded the arteries and dissolved the nerves. She sat and wept, and Meg stood over her and the drizzle came down like tears out of a cold gray sky so that the wet on her cheeks and the smudged mascara might have been the one thing or the other, a mere meteorological phenomenon or a personal disaster.

  That night they bombed Bethnal Green. A high-explosive bomb hit the cemetery and threw old coffins and tombstones around the place in unthinking irony. Bombs also hit residential streets, rows of houses that were little more than slums, two-up two-down terraces with outside privies and inside squalor. High explosive swept the houses into rubble, and one bomb scored a direct hit on a surface shelter, one of those death traps that the borough councils had erected in unseemly haste at the start of the war. Twenty-five people were killed in the shelter. Incendiaries clattered across the wreckage of the houses and started fires. They called in ambulances from other sectors, from Hackney and Holborn and Stepney, and firefighters from all over the City. Hoses snaked across the tarmac and the sidewalks. Ladders slanted upward against the smoke, exclamation marks and oblique strokes punctuating the flames.

  The ambulance was called from Diana’s post at three in the morning. A doctor climbed on board at the last minute; they didn’t usually carry a medic. “Thought I might be more use in the front line,” he said. He was a Scotsman called Dewar. He had pale ginger hair and freckles, and eyelashes so light they were almost transparent. Behind them, red-rimmed and innocent, were childlike blue eyes.

  “You can drive the bloody thing if you’re so keen,” Bert suggested.

  “I’m sure we’re safer with you.”

  Antiaircraft guns were firing from near Spitalfields Market, their reports dull and flat against the heavy concussion of bombs. You could see the explosions up there in the sky, the smudged flash of the shells going off in the cloud, uselessly probably, probably quite without effect.

  They drove through the black streets and the orange light of conflagration, Diana in the front between Bert and the doctor. It was strange, Diana thought, how the wreckage of an affluent middle-class home or a squalid working-class slum looked much the same: beams and joists and bricks and plaster and the thick fog of dust together achieving a kind of democracy. Like the way that a laid-out corpse is classless. We bring nothing into the world, and we take nothing away from it. Where were those words from? They rang in her mind as they drove. And another line: Man, thou art dust and to dust thou shalt return. Bethnal Green was returning to dust that night.

  Shrapnel rattled down onto the roadway. High above the clouds, the bombers droned. There was that curious rise and fall to the sound of their engines, like an old car straining at a hill. “Beats,” Bert told her as they drove. “Technical term, darling. They desynchronize their engines, and that makes the sound go up and down. Interference. Know what I mean?”

  She didn’t. She didn’t know what anything meant, really. She just thought of the babies dead within the rubble and the baby alive within her womb.

  “I’ll bet you fought that interference meant something else, didn’t you?”

  “Thought,” she corrected him.

  “There you go again. Just ’cos I don’t speak la-di-da. I’ll bet yours is all put on, in’ it? I’ll bet if I woke you up in the middle of the night, you’d speak natural, like me.”

  “You’ll never get an opportunity to wake me in the middle of the night,” she said tartly.

  “I can hope though.”

  The doctor looked away from them, out into the lurid night. There was a sound above the noise of the engine—a noise like coal being dropped down a chute—and he flinched against Diana. “Incendiaries,” said Bert, peering through the windshield. He prided himself on deciphering the noises of the Blitz, the oil bombs, the high explosive, the incendiaries, just as Diana had learned to decipher the injuries.

  A yellow diversion sign pointed them toward Commercial Road. “We don’t want to go that fucking way,” Bert protested. “If we can get a bit farther down Brick Lane we’ll be all right.” He leaned forward over the steering wheel, looking for one of his shortcuts. The end of Brick Lane was obscured by a dense cloud of yellow fog. There were figures in the fog, vague shapes shifting through the murk like shadows dimly perceived in a nightmare. “Someone else’s fucking problem,” he said, pulling the ambulance down a side street. They passed a pub with its windows boarded up. There were vacant windows and open, empty doorways. Narrow, mean streets shuttered against the world. Where had all the people gone? Diana wondered.

  “Jack the Ripper country this,” Bert said. “D’you know that, Doc? Of course, the Ripper was a doctor like you, wasn’t he?”

  The doctor laughed at Bert’s words. “Was he indeed? Like me?”

  “Well, he must have been a doctor, you see. Because he had an intimate knowledge of a woman’s innards.” Bert gave the word emphasis, making it sound like something inside a chicken: giblets or gizzards.

  “Perhaps he was just an enthusiastic amateur.”

  Bert shook his head. “All the indications are that he knew what he was looking for.” The ambulance trundled along, crunching over broken glass. There were railway arches on their left, with figures huddled against the cold and the bombs. “How are you on women’s innards, Doc?”

  “Is this the kind of conversation one should have with Nurse Sheridan present?”

  “Oh, she’s used to it.”

  “I’m not sure that I am. And I’m an orthopedic man not a gynecologist.”

  “That children is it? Orthopedics?”

  The doctor laughed again. “Rugby injuries more like.”

  “Rugby.” Bert’s voice was laden with despite. “Bloody typical. Rugby. Come the revolution we’ll ban bloody rugby.” He peered ahead. “Here we are. Just round the Jack Horner and we should be there.”

  “Do you really say that?” Diana asked.

  “What?”

  “Jack Horner.”

  Bert sniffed and glanced across at his passengers. “Just for Scottish tourists,” he said. He turned the ambulance into a residential street and brought it to a halt beside a group of helmeted figures. On the other side of the road, rubble had spilled out across the tarmac like the spoil from mine workings. A heavy-rescue squad was at work by the light of a burning warehouse in the street behind. Men clambered up and down the rubble, teetering on planks, lifting beams, pulling bricks away with their hands, and passing baskets of debris down the line to the street. The scene was like something on a stage, complete with backdrop and curtain and lighting. Despite the efforts of the wardens to get them away to the shelters, there was even an audience of ragged extras watching from the other side of the street—half-a-dozen wide-hipped women, a few anemic-looking children, a couple of old men.

  Diana, Bert, and the doctor climbed down from the ambulance. Pompous and puffing, an air-raid warden came over. He wore a blue cover over his helmet. “It’s my incident,” he said, as though the fact had been disputed. “Where the hell have you been?”

  “I had a fare for the Café de Paris,” Bert said.

  “We don’t need your lip, mate. We’ve got people trapped, about half-a-dozen by all accounts. And there are some walking wounded.”

  At that moment someone shouted down from the pile of rubble: “Silence!”

  In view of the racket all around, the drone of bombers overhead, the concussion of the antiaircraft fire, the roaring conflagration behind, the throb of the firefighters’ pumps, it was a ridiculous co
mmand. Nevertheless, everyone on the heap of rubble stopped. They seemed like puppets whose strings had been abruptly cut. They didn’t merely stop; they became inert, almost lifeless, their arms hanging. At the top of the heap, a hel-meted man was kneeling down and talking to someone out of sight below him. He looked back. “Is that a doctor?”

  “I’m right here. What’s the problem?” The doctor’s Scottish accent sounded incongruous among the sounds of London. As he scrambled up the narrow walkway that the rescue squad had constructed, Diana had a sudden, absurd image of him in a kilt, scrambling up some Scottish hillside.

  The debris formed a kind of cone, like a volcano. Standing on the lip, they could see down into the shallow crater. From the depths came a smell that was like the stink of a volcano, a smell of gas and drains and the sulfurous stench of explosive. “We’ve got someone trapped down there,” the rescue man said. “She’s conscious, just about. Looks like we’ll have her out soon. She’s in a lot of pain. Something broken probably.”

  There was a stir of interest among the onlookers behind them. “It’s Ma Philips,” a child’s voice called. “That’s who it is.”

  It was impossible to relate the mess to the house that it had once been, impossible to resolve the chaos of joists and pipes and bricks into walls and floors and window frames, but down at the bottom of the crater was a leg. Diana recognized it with a start of surprise. It was the color, exactly, of the dust that coated everything, but it was, nevertheless, a leg, with a slipper still on it. There was a wooden beam with a dark slot beneath it, and the leg emerged from one end of this slot. One of the rescuers was crouched down beside the leg, talking into the darkness. You couldn’t hear his words but could make out the tone of them—a low murmuring, a comforting crooning such as a mother might use with her baby. And behind this sound was another one, a moaning, inarticulate animal sound that was the sound of pain.