A Lovely Day to Die

by Celia Fremlin

  Lying awake in the darkness, with Bernard breathing deeply and peacefully beside her, Christine found herself wondering, wearily, whether it mightn’t somehow have been different? If she had, at some point, handled the situation more tactfully, more wisely, might she perhaps, by now, have changed Bernard in all the ways she had secretly hoped to change him? Changed him, that is, into the sort of man who wants to settle down; a man who welcomes the responsibilities of fatherhood; who accepts willingly the ties, the hazards, the long decades of expense and worry … the sort of man other girls seem to meet and marry so effortlessly?

  Could she have turned Bernard into such a man? If she had nagged him more, perhaps? Or less? If she had raved less ostentatiously over her friends’ babies … become godmother to fewer of them … been altogether less heavy-handed in her hints, her displays of maternal longing ..?

  Or if, on the other hand, she had argued openly with him right from the start, standing up squarely for her point of view? If she had never allowed herself to be brainwashed by the magic of a summer night into making promises impossible to honour ..? But then, of course, she would have lost him.

  Or would she? Turning her head restlessly on the pillow, Christine tried to recall something of the abortive, inconclusive discussions which were all she had dared to embark on during the early days of their marriage, when she could still hardly believe in her good fortune, and her only fear was lest something should come along to spoil the blissful harmony of their days.

  Like a row, for instance.

  So she moved warily, approaching the subject of parenthood deviously, and with infinite cunning, saying things like: “Now that you’ve got that marvellous rise, darling, I suppose we could manage without my salary, if we absolutely had to ..?

  Usually, he countered this sort of thing with a blank, masculine obtuseness impossible to penetrate. He simply didn’t see what she was getting at, and would work out on the back of an envelope the hard financial facts which her pretty little feminine head evidently hadn’t been able to grasp. “So you see, darling, there’s no way we could manage. It’d be crazy. Besides, you like your job, you’re super at it, the brightest little copywriter in town, so they tell me—” and with a big kiss and a flow of sweet compliments he would bring the unsatisfactory and inconclusive argument to an end.

  And if—as now and again happened—her real meaning did somehow get through to him, he would instantly bring up his sister Rose.

  “Just look at the life she leads!” he would exhort her. “No, darling, I know you haven’t met her, not since the wedding, but don’t you see, that’s the whole point. That’s why you haven’t met her. She never meets anybody, she’s always tied up with the baby’s feed, or Charlie’s asthma, or Trudi’s school play, or something. On top of which she’s always too tired, or the house is too much of a mess, that sort of thing … No, sweetheart, my wife’s not going to be condemned to a life like that! My wife is going to have fun! We’re going to enjoy ourselves, darling! We’ll travel … we’ll have a super flat … we’ll give marvellous parties … we’ll meet lots of interesting, exciting people …”

  *

  And as the years went by, that is exactly what happened. They’d travelled: with their two good incomes from their two good jobs they’d secured a lovely flat, and they’d given marvellous parties in it; and as for the interesting, exciting people … now, in the dark small-hours, Christine buried her face in the pillow and tried not to think about them. Not about the interesting, exciting women, anyway; glossy, beautiful women with marvellous careers as well as marvellous sex-lives; women who were witty and knowledgeable and self-assured; women who had no intention of having babies, ever, and could have given Bernard, quite effortlessly, the kind of life he wanted.

  *

  “… And jealous as any narrow-minded suburban shrew!” Bernard had hurled at her during one of the hurtful and increasingly bitter quarrels that had been flaring more and more of late. “Just because I gave Marcia a lift home, and then stopped for a quick drink with her! Hell, what else could I have done? I was the host, after all, and here she was, stranded, all the buses and tubes finished. Don’t you realize she hasn’t got a car any more?—simply hasn’t got one? Her rotten swine of a husband claimed the family car as well as half the house when he divorced her, she’s been telling me all about it. She’s had a pretty rough time, you know, I don’t see why you have to be so catty about her. What she needs is a bit of sympathy … a bit of understanding …”

  A bit of sympathy! A bit of understanding! The tears of rage, of long pent-up frustration, poured down Christine’s cheeks, uncontrollable. “And what about my need for sympathy and understanding? How about trying to understand what it feels like to have a husband who first refuses to give you a baby on the grounds that he wants you to share his exciting life, and then goes off with other women night after night, and stays out till two in the morning ..?”

  Wildly exaggerated, as words spoken in anger are apt to be: on top of which, a more tactless moment for bringing up the delicate and long-standing argument between them could hardly be imagined.

  Bernard stopped shouting. His voice became very quiet.

  “A baby! That’s the only thing you ever think about, isn’t it, Christine! You’re obsessed! It’s the only thing you care about, at all! If you’d ever, for one moment, cared about me … about my feelings! Cared about them, I mean, instead of eternally trying to change them ..!” and before Christine could voice any protest, take back any of her damaging words, he had slammed out of the flat and was off into the wintry night. She heard the swing of the outer door downstairs … and then the car starting up … and at this last sound, still fully dressed in her new, glittering party-dress, she flung herself on the bed and cried till morning.

  And in the morning, of course, Bernard came back. Well, he could hardly go to work unshaven and in his rumpled evening suit, could he?—and so Christine regarded his return warily, and as no great gesture of reconciliation. He did not speak; and neither did she; and presently, still without a word, they both went off thankfully to work.

  It didn’t last, of course. They’d had quarrels as bad as this before—well, nearly—and always within a few days—a week at most—they’d be over them. Their technique—and all married couples have their own quarrelling technique, perfected over the years—Christine and Bernard’s technique was simply to pretend that the whole thing hadn’t happened. They’d give themselves a few hours—a day or so perhaps—of silent hostility, neither of them speaking a word; and then, in response to some invisible time-switch, perceptible only to themselves, they would suddenly resume conversation. Rather stilted conversation to start with—small-talk and carefully-innocuous platitudes; but gradually—and it never took longer than a week—this would merge into ordinary, normal conversation, and the whole thing would be over. A good technique in its way. It worked.

  The only trouble about it, Christine used sometimes to reflect during the uneasy days of emotional convalescence—the only trouble was that this way nothing was ever actually resolved. They never discussed the quarrel: there it lay, like a neglected houseplant, unfed and unwatered, until it finally died of lack of attention and could be thrown out with the rubbish, unlamented.

  But not forgotten. Not by Christine, anyway; and it began to dawn on her, this time, that there were getting to be rather too many of these rows stored away in the dark recesses of her mind. It wasn’t as if anything was being achieved by this secret pile-up. She no longer believed—as she had once done—that the sheer cumulative weight of so much reiterated argument, such mounting intensity of need, over so many years, must, in the end, drag down the scales on her side.

  Not so. Indeed, the contrary seemed to be happening. With every successive row—and this one triggered off by Marcia was only the most recent of many—Bernard’s entrenched attitude would harden, his resistance to the idea of a family become yet more unassailable. She was making things worse for herself—and
knew she was—every time she even hinted at the forbidden subject.

  She must stop it. Stop it forthwith. There must be some other way.

  Suppose, for instance, she were to declare (silently, of course, in her own heart) a complete amnesty? Suppose that from now on she were never to let the word “baby” pass her lips again? Not, anyway, for months and months and months?

  Actually it was three months, almost to the day, when this resolution was broken; and the circumstances of its breaking were such as even her most sombre imaginings could not possibly have prepared her for.

  *

  It had been a bad day right from the start, a grey, relentless February morning, with rain lashing against the windows. After a night of uneasy dreams and sudden, anxious awakenings as the wind hurled itself in great gusts against the fabric of their building, Christine had fallen into a heavy sleep just before morning, had failed to hear the alarm clock, and so now here she was, rushing around the kitchen, throwing an apology of a breakfast together, and dabbing make-up on her face as she ran. When the telephone rang, it was the last straw: she simply snatched up the receiver and slammed it straight back again. Serve them right!

  Bernard was in no amiable mood, either. “It might be important!” he scolded her, shoving the morning’s mail into his briefcase; and, “Yes, it might, that’s just why I won’t answer it!” she snapped back. “Important things take time, and I just haven’t got any time! You answer it if you’re so worried!”

  But by the time it went again, he had already gone, and a minute later she was gone, too, racing through the downpour to try and catch her usual train.

  She missed it, of course; and there was some kind of a go-slow on the buses, so that she arrived at the office chilled, wet, and very, very late. Yet another typist was down with flu, so that Christine had to do a lot of the letters herself. By mid-afternoon, it was clear to her that she would have to stay on after five o’clock, and so she rang Bernard to tell him that she’d be late home, and that he had better get on and eat the ready-prepared casserole by himself, without waiting for her.

  His reception of the news chilled her a little. He was so cool, so unconcerned, as if he didn’t care whether she got home in time to have dinner with him or not. In the old days, he’d have made quite a little fuss about it.

  Oh, well.

  It was past eight o’clock when Christine finally locked up the office and went out into the February dark; and by this time her usual bus (as she discovered after a long and icy wait at the bus-stop) had stopped running. There was nothing for it but to take the tube—an awkward, roundabout route, ending with a long and uphill walk from the station—so that by the time she reached home she was too weary to think about anything but a hot bath and an early night. She hardly even noticed, as she fitted her key into the lock and opened the door, that there was no sound or movement from within. You’d have thought he’d at least have called out to her when he heard her come in—he must be there, because the lights were on in both kitchen and sitting-room.

  “Bernard?” she called out tentatively, but there was no reply. She took off her coat, hung it up, and then went into the lighted sitting-room.

  There, in one of the big chairs—her chair—sat a strange woman. No, not quite strange—that bleached built-up hairdo, those huge, self-pitying eyes, were all too recognizable, even after so many weeks.

  Yes, it was Marcia. The woman at the party that night. The divorcée who had manoeuvred Bernard into driving her home, and thus caused that appalling row … and now here she was, reclining in Christine’s own special chair, a straw shopping-bag lolling on the floor beside her, for all the world as if she lived here.

  The sheer cheek of it left Christine absolutely stunned. She could not even feel anger, so outrageous was the whole situation. So this was why Bernard hadn’t minded her being late. He’d been delighted by it, seeing it as a heaven-sent opportunity to invite this … this ..!

  And it was only now, looking at the visitor closely for the first time, that Christine realised that the woman was crying. Crying helplessly, hopelessly, the tears running down her cheeks without any attempt at control.

  What does one say to one’s husband’s mistress (for such Christine assumed her to be) when one finds her crying her eyes out in one’s sitting-room? The etiquette books haven’t got around to this one yet.

  “What’s the matter?” was the best she could do. She felt neither anger not pity, only a sort of stupefied embarrassment: “What ..?”

  The young woman looked older than she had at the party. Right now, with her make-up all washed away by tears and her face haggard with anxiety, you could see clearly that she must be well into her thirties. She looked up at Christine with a sort of shamefaced appeal.

  “I—I’m sorry!” she mumbled, “I really am sorry. I don’t know what to say.”

  Christine didn’t know what to say either, though in fact the story was a simple one, and as old as time. Yes, Marcia was pregnant. Yes, Bernard was the father. Yes, she’d tried to tell him earlier, but he’d been kind of funny—put the phone down when she rang him this morning—that kind of thing.

  “And so I had to come,” she sniffed. “I know it’s awful, in your own flat and everything, but you see I didn’t know where else to find him. I tried to ring him at the office, but … well … with all those people around … telling him a thing like that! I felt … well … you know …”

  Christine didn’t know. How could she? How could she, of all people, know what it would feel like to tell Bernard, Darling, I’m pregnant. Darling, I’m having your baby. Words which had ached inside her all these years, clamouring, shrieking to be spoken. And now this woman … this Marcia …

  In a searing, instantaneous flash she saw it all. Saw Marcia walking tall in the glory of a bright maternity smock—the maternity smock that Christine should have been wearing. Saw her walking like a goddess through the streets, carrying Bernard’s baby. Saw her cradling the little creature in her arms, Bernard’s eyes blinking up at her from the tiny face, the hair on the crown of the small head already standing up in a little quiff, just as Bernard’s did. And she saw Bernard, too …

  “Where is Bernard?” she heard herself asking, in a strange, choked voice; and Marcia raised her big, tear-filled eyes with a look of puzzlement that must surely have been contrived.

  “Bernard? Oh. Didn’t you meet him then? He was going to drive me home first, but I was feeling sick, you see, and then it was getting late, and so then he said he was going to meet you off your bus. He said he must see you—talk to you—before you came in and found me here. He said he wanted to explain …”

  He did, did he? Explain that after all these years, after all the soul-searchings and the heartbreak and the tears—after all this it was to be another woman, not Christine, who was to bear his child? A woman who didn’t even want it particularly—a woman to whom the whole miracle was merely a sordid bit of bad luck? All this to be explained during a three-minute drive from the bus-stop—and Christine’s forgiveness to be obtained as well, and her support enlisted for whatever dreary solution to their “problem” he and this woman were to decide on?

  He would be at the bus-stop right now. How long would he hang about there, in the icy wind, composing pretty speeches out of the ugly facts? Twenty minutes, perhaps? Half an hour?

  There was no time to lose.

  “Did you say you were feeling sick?” she asked solicitously; and Marcia nodded, darting Christine a swift, watery glance. Pale, tear-stained and distraught she might be, but behind it all lurked an intolerable smugness, a secret, gloating triumph that you could not miss.

  “I’m the one who’s pregnant!” the glance seemed to say: “Not you; you’re barren! I’m the one with the pregnancy! I’m the one with the sickness, the problems, the power and the glory …”

  “Yes,” she said aloud, in a weak little voice, “Yes, actually, I do feel a bit sick …”

  Right, my girl. You’re going to f
eel sicker.

  Aloud, Christine said. “I’ll get you something. Just sit there, I won’t be long,” and she hurried away into the bathroom.

  Quinine: that was the stuff. That’s what women had used in the old days, creeping after dark into dubious chemists’ shops, in the bad old days before the age of easy, hygienic abortions on the National Health. If it had worked then, it would work now. Despite all the Yoga and the Consciousness-Raising and the rest, female organs themselves hadn’t changed. They would still react in the same old way to the same old-fashioned chemical onslaught.

  Ah, here it was. It was donkey’s years since it had been used, though; her father must have left it here after one of his visits in the days when he was still liable to the odd touch of malaria. Would the stuff still be potent, after all this time? She uncorked the heavy, old-fashioned glass bottle, dusty and slightly sticky with long disuse, and sniffed at it.

  It certainly smelt strong enough. Through the dust and the stickiness on the label, she could just read “40 Grains”.

  How the hell much was 40 Grains?

  *

  “Here,” she said to Marcia, handing her the glass. “Drink it down all at one go, and you won’t notice the bitterness … It’s awfully good for you,” she babbled on, as Marcia, having obeyed the instructions, did indeed notice the bitterness, almost choked on it. “And for the baby, too. It’s full of iron, you see,” she improvised wildly. “That’s what does you so much good. You should take some more when you get home … Here, take the bottle, you can keep it,” and she shoved it into Marcia’s shopping-bag, her hands shaking in her haste. She had no idea how long it took for the drug to take effect, and no way was she going to risk Marcia’s having her miscarriage here.