by Josa Young
She began to search her mind, conjuring pictures she’d seen of Melissa. Standing with Granny, both dressed for a ball. They were holding hands. Another one, a white-bordered snap of Melissa, in the garden of her grandparents’ house, wearing a stiff yellow mini-dress and displaying pretty legs. Melissa, as a little girl in the Fifties in a party frock, skirt sticking out, strap shoes and knee socks, holding her mother’s hand. Always holding her mother’s hand.
‘Can I hold your hand?’ Then: ‘Mummy?’ Her tongue was clumsy saying the word. Conscious that she had never said it before out loud.
She sat down again and shut her eyes, reaching out with her right hand. What? What? She had no physical memory of her mother at all. Her eyes snapped open. She looked down at her bitten nails and long strong fingers. Any hand Melissa knew had been something else. Something tiny and soft. She shied away from the idea of a soft new-born hand. Into her mind flew a poster she had seen in the women’s toilets downstairs.
Pregnant? Worried? Call Gate Advisory for confidential 24-hour service. Don’t delay.
OK, abortion. And quickly, before she could think any more about hands. She jumped to her feet, reaching for pen, paper and some change. A few minutes later she was in one of the row of scribbled fibreboard phone boxes by the Porters’ Lodge, armed with the number. It was horribly exposed and public, but she knew the walls were soundproofed, which immured whiffs of spit, sweat, breath and desperation.
The receiver was warm when she put it to her ear. She dialled the number, the line rang and a woman’s voice answered.
‘Hello?’ she whispered.
‘Hello, Gate Advisory here, how can I help you?’
Damson paused. She was nauseous and hungry at the same time, and tearful. Then she said quietly, ‘I think I’m pregnant.’
‘OK, have you done a test?’
‘Yes, and it’s positive.’
‘Right, how are you feeling about that?’ The voice was impersonally gentle, annoyingly so.
‘Terrible.’ Damson couldn’t say it out loud. She’d never said it out loud and she wasn’t even sure if it was true. Saying she’d been raped might just be a comforting excuse for stupidity. She paused.
‘Do you want to talk about it?’
Using that word was weak and wrong. Carelessness seemed like a better word for what had happened.
‘I want an abortion.’ Abhor. Abhorrent. Abortion. Horrible words. It came out like vomit.
‘Right, you have three options and abortion is one of them. I can give you some information now, but it would be better if you could come into the Centre tomorrow to talk to one of the nurses in person. Are you in Cambridge?’
‘Yes. But can you tell me what would happen if I did have an abortion?’
‘How many weeks along do you think you are?’
‘About eight.’
‘You’ll need to get consent from two doctors, but we can help you with that. Do you have any children already?’
‘No, I’m not married. You see, I’ve only just started my course. I’m a medical student, and I can’t have a baby. Not now.’ She was trying so hard not to cry.
‘Right, you’ll need to explain to the doctors that having a baby would upset your mental or physical health more than having an abortion. That means you need to tell them how the pregnancy would affect you. I think from the sounds of it, they would be sympathetic.’
‘So I can just tell them I don’t want a baby as I want to be a doctor?’
‘Yes, you’ll need to tell them that it will upset your mental health if you can’t study to be a doctor.’
I want to be a doctor, so I’m going to try and convince two doctors that I’ll go mad if I have a baby and I’m prevented from becoming a doctor. Like them, she thought desperately.
Her forehead creased into painful folds as she tried not to cry. It gave her a headache. She shuddered.
‘As it’s very early on in the pregnancy, the procedure is very straightforward, nothing to worry about. You’re in and out as a day case. And there’s plenty of counselling available before and afterwards. Our clinic is a little way outside Cambridge but we don’t advise cycling. There’s a bus, and we recommend a taxi home and rest for a day or two. But most of our patients are up the next day and absolutely fine.’
‘Fine?’
‘Yes, fine. As I say, it’s a simple, straightforward, safe procedure. The clinic is on Lawrence Road, Gate House, at number 135. Can you get there easily? We open at ten o’clock. If you like, I can take your name and you can make an appointment, but you can also just drop in for advice and support. In the end, it’s your decision, but we can give you all the information you need to make an informed one.’
Damson paused again. The nurse stayed on the line.
‘I want to know what they do.’
‘You want to know how the abortion is carried out?’
‘Yes, but what do they do? How do they get the baby out?’
‘Well, it isn’t a baby at this stage. Just a cluster of cells. There’s very little bleeding and usually you can go home after about an hour. But it would be much better to see you in person, Miss?’
Damson rang off. She sat in the box, breathing the spitty air in and out slowly to calm herself. Then she got up but had to sit down again because silver swirls appeared in her vision. She just had time to bend over, putting her head between her knees, grateful as full consciousness returned.
Back in her room, she made herself a cup of tea, wanting sugar in it which was not her usual taste at all. Damson had always been instinctively against abortion. She held the lofty view that people should do all they could to avoid an unwanted pregnancy, but if they did fall pregnant then to take the consequences of their actions. Why punish the innocent? But that was before she had any real experience. She was ashamed now to have been so judgmental.
Try as she might, she could not get her head around the idea that what was growing in her belly was just a random mass of cells. The trouble with the way she had conceived was that she had been unable to choose to use any contraception. So she couldn’t make a decision to be sensible, could she?
The memory of that night was crystal clear now. All denial was ripped away by the consequences. She knew with shame that she had been excited by Ronny’s attentions. She also realised that she had ridden into the milky Indian moonlight completely conscious of the sexiness of the situation. The horse’s body had been hot and vigorous between her thighs. Ronny’s frequent glances sent shivers down her spine – never mind his kisses, which made her burn with longing more than any of the soft boys who had kissed her before. What if it had been just a shade different, that episode in the stable? What if she had given in to what was happening instead of struggling against it, enjoyed it even? She might have been eager for more. But, as it was, she went out that night one kind of girl, and came back to her room in the morning a completely different person.
She tried to remember her last period. It must have been just after she arrived in India, because she remembered being glad to have packed so many tampons and the tiresome business of disposing of them properly. She had arrived in New Delhi around the twentieth of July? It was now the fifteenth of October.
The scientist in her kicking in, she took down her Obstetrics and Gynaecology textbook and looked up ‘gestational age eight weeks’.
‘Zygote, morula, blastocyst, embryo,’ she muttered to herself. ‘All clumps of cells, nothing very human there. Sounds like a spell.’
There was nothing magic about it though, just the rapid march of a biological process. She started to sob as she read, hardly able to see the words through her tears: It is at the end of the ‘embryonic’ stage and moving to the ‘foetal’ stage. ‘You bet,’ she hiccupped, examining the medical drawing of a tiny human with bird-like ribs and an enormous, serious forehead. In the normal foetus, everything needed for human development is already present. Ears continue to form, facial features take shape.
It has a blood
y face, how can a bunch of cells have a face?
The embryo is one inch long.
She flicked to a pregnancy calculator and worked out when the baby was due. June. By then she was completely lost and trying to suppress her yelps of grief and rage at this stupid thing she’d done.
The easy way would be to slip off to Lawrence Road tomorrow just after ten o’clock and get on the roller coaster to finishing the thing before it had started. Then she wouldn’t have to tell anyone at all. Ever. Simple, quick, virtually painless. Get-out-of-jail-free card. Lying to the doctor about going mad if she couldn’t be a doctor. The whole idea made her want to scream. Because it had started, however mistakenly, there was no denying its humanity, however tiny.
The other option was filled with terror, confusion and confrontation, but came without the guilt. What would Margaret’s reaction be? She’d spent a whole lot of money ‘bringing Damson out’ with the twins, and Damson knew she’d never expressed proper gratitude for that, or even for making Munty so much happier and more comfortable. In fact she resented it all, another source of guilt. The transformation of her scruffy old childhood home was not to her taste, but she could at least recognise that Castle Hey had woken up from its long sad sleep. Munty didn’t look defeated any more. Margaret took him to Trumpers to have his hair cut properly, bought him hand-made suits in Savile Row and stocked the cellar with excellent claret. She realised she was glad he had someone to look after him. Damson couldn’t look after him. She had wanted him to look after her
Margaret would be so furious when she found out Damson had ‘got herself knocked up’ as she would call it. If she carried it to term, what would happen to the baby? Should she just go home to Castle Hey and bring it up, forgetting about Cambridge and a career? She couldn’t imagine Margaret allowing that. A child messing up her lovely pristine rooms, full of chintz, swags, tails and draped tables, good china ornaments to break, fringes, tassels and cream-coloured carpets. One bright spot – if she decided to dodge the slippery temptation of abortion, she would at least attract Margaret’s approval as a Christian.
Easy way out. A little visit to the clinic, the rapid application of a vacuum to her cervix and all would be over. Damson lay back on her bed, squirming with discomfort. The rape would be compounded and she would be violated all over again, with a plastic tube this time. Sickened with herself and what she had done. Baby bird thing inside her didn’t have to suffer too, she was folded around it, layers of blood and water, fat and skin, padding it against the wicked world. If she went through with the abortion, there would be something like those smashed pink naked nestlings she used to find in the garden, but in a kidney dish.
Then there was adoption which meant her shame would be exposed, particularly to her shy, prudish father. As far as Munty was concerned, women married and had babies rather strictly in that order. Abortion, sex before marriage, the Pill and all the rest of Sixties sexual liberation seemed to have passed him by. Perhaps the Sixties was optional, you could stay in the Fifties if you didn't like it and hop straight on to the boring Seventies. By the time she was conscious, he was living a monkish life.
She shuddered at the idea of her father thinking poorly of her, but if she let it grow until it was big enough to be free of her body safely, then it could go to a family who could love it. You didn’t love a baby conceived like that, did you, so it wouldn’t hurt to give it up. And she would be free to defer, go back to Cambridge and grow into a doctor like Grandpa when it was all over.
Instinctively she knew that the last person on earth in whom she would confide might hold the answers. She grasped at Margaret’s efficiency and organisational skills. Damson didn’t know much about her background, except that her father had been a sailor and her mother a seamstress and that she came from somewhere very different from Castle Hey. Margaret didn’t love her so she wouldn’t be hurt. Her grandmother did not deserve the pain of this knowledge. She had suffered enough.
Then Damson would come back to Cambridge, rewind her life, crunch through another autumn’s worth of golden leaves on her way to the labs. There would be different Georges and Maries to make friends with, and it would all be as if it had never happened. And no one at Cambridge would be any the wiser.
Munty hadn’t had much time or space in his life for his small daughter. He was as good a father as he could manage to be and loved her in his own way. It would be frightening to expose her shameful pregnancy to him. He couldn’t love her any more after that, could he?
She knew Pauline would be fine whatever decision she made. Pauline was earthy and realistic, brought up on a farm. She let her mind rest on Pauline. She would be a refuge, she would not judge.
Coming home from Cambridge two weeks after going up was excruciating, but there was also relief when Margaret took charge. After a pause in the usual rush of words, her stepmother was briskly kind and made no attempt to ask probing questions or scold once she understood that Damson had turned down an abortion. Margaret would sort it all out.
In her usual way, Margaret had hired a proper old-fashioned trained nanny when the twins were born. Nanny had been a wise choice, sensible and kind. She was now retired to Balham, living in a little house belonging to Margaret which she shared with her sister. Damson was to go and stay there out of sight until the baby was born, after which it was to be handed over to a suitable adoption agency. She went along with this sensible plan without arguing. Her father never said a word. As soon as she had told them both, he’d quietly left the room.
Pauline, when Damson visited her in her house in the village, said simply, ‘Is this what you want?’
Damson nodded. If she said anything she knew she would start howling, so she kept quiet.
Twenty-six
Damson
June 1988
Damson did not visit her grandparents. They had written to her as usual, the letters forwarded from St Bennet’s or home, but between the cheerful words about ‘being so pleased that you are so independent now’ she could detect that they missed her. Trying to reassure them, hating to deceive them and wanting nothing more than a proper cuddle with her grandmother, she’d sent upbeat letters saying that she was so busy with her studies she couldn’t get away. That she’d taken an extension course (unspecified) which meant her studies went on for longer.
It was only a few months. Infinitely better for them never to know they had a great-grandchild.
Pregnancy in Balham was dull. Nanny and her sister were not sure how to treat her so they led very separate lives in the tall thin house. Damson had an attic bedroom to herself with a fridge, a gas ring and a microwave. There was a small bathroom on the landing. She had nothing to do but read her textbooks, go for lonely walks on Clapham Common and devour detective stories that she found in the library. Sherlock Holmes was perfect, as were early Dorothy Sayers and some of the drier Agatha Christies. Anything with a hint of romance was taken straight back. She cried much too easily over wars and disasters in the papers. The birth came as a relief.
The midwives’ attitude had been peculiar and daunting as if they didn’t approve of her choice to have her baby adopted. She slowly paced the wards for hours and hours until she was exhausted and lay gasping at the Entonox.
The pain became so agonising that she requested an epidural. The sensation of pain disappearing out of her body was one she thought she would never forget but of course she did immediately.
Every now and then a midwife would come and examine her.
‘How’s it going?’ They knew she was a medical student by this time. One shift of midwives told the next. They didn’t bother even to speak quietly around her.
Just outside her cubicle: ‘She wants to go back to her medical studies. The baby’ll be adopted.’
‘Oh,’ accompanied by sideways glances. Her social worker Eva Williams had looked in to see how she was getting on. She wouldn’t normally have done this as Damson presented no challenges at all but she had a problem case in the maternity ward a
t the same time.
‘All right there, Damson? I’m just down the corridor this evening,’ she’d said in her cheerful Australian way, the ‘ning’ swinging upwards in an eternal Antipodean question that could never be answered. Damson nodded, too tired to speak and Eva went away to deal with the heroin-addicted mother of eight all in care who was having number nine tonight and sadly could not be allowed to keep it.
Her stepmother had dealt with the private adoption charity Elgin Robbins which specialised in baby adoptions. It had been quite difficult to find the right people to help as they didn’t advertise. There were so few babies up for adoption in England that if Elgin Robbins had put themselves in the Yellow Pages they would have been swamped by desperate prospective parents. In the end Margaret had confided in the priest at St Anthony’s about Damson’s predicament. He had been very kind and helpful about the whole thing and suggested a number of small private agencies that he knew about through his own counselling.
Damson had had a series of interviews and also some counselling herself. This didn’t make her feel any better as she never told anyone anything, just that the father was from India and they had had a brief affair. No she didn’t want to disclose his name. No he knew nothing about the baby and never would.
Margaret reminded Damson repeatedly that she must not damage her chance to be a doctor, as if she was afraid her stepdaughter might backslide. Damson didn’t have the space to be surprised by her stepmother’s sudden interest in her career prospects.
They chose Elgin Robbins because on enquiry it turned out that they had some Indian couples on their books which was unusual. This was because a childless Maharaja and his wife had adopted a son in England through their agency and this had become known in the Indian community. Elgin Robbins were sensitive to the cultural and spiritual status of children within traditional Hindu beliefs. In England babies born out of wedlock to Indian girls were rare so the options for Indian couples were few.