Especially as Bernard would be back any minute.
“Bernard won’t be back for hours,” she lied glibly, forestalling any idea Marcia might have of waiting around in hopes of a lift.
“He’ll have—”she thought wildly—“He’ll have gone on to see if I’m still at the office …”
He wouldn’t. Not in a thousand years. Never mind.
“I’ll get you a taxi,” she insisted, brushing aside Marcia’s protestations.
Expense was no object. Get her out. Get her out. Get her out.
*
Where was Bernard? An hour had passed since Marcia’s departure, and still he hadn’t returned. He couldn’t still be waiting at the bus-stop. He must, Christine decided, be driving aimlessly around, worried sick, filling in time, not daring to face his wife. And no wonder! Serve him right!
Another hour. Christine could settle to nothing, the confrontation with her husband hanging over her like this. What would he say? What could he say? And what would she reply?
Midnight now … Past midnight … and when the phone finally rang, Christine leapt from her chair almost hysterical. So he didn’t even dare to confront her face-to-face, he had to distance himself at the other end of a telephone wire!
But it wasn’t Bernard. It was a voice strange to her—a woman’s voice. Marcia’s flatmate, apparently, full of apologies for ringing so late, but she was worried about Marcia, she really was. Had Marcia been all right during her visit? The thing was, she’d been taken ill just after getting in—pains, headache, dizziness, ringing in the ears; and she seemed to be getting worse …
“She’s having a miscarriage, that’s all,” interrupted Christine, unable to keep the triumph out of her voice. “She’ll be all right, don’t worry. It happens to lots of women.”
There was a short, stunned pause at the other end. Then: “But she can’t be. The tests were negative. We’ve just heard.”
Negative. The stunned silence was at Christine’s end this time. Negative. Not pregnant at all. After all this! Her head was spinning.
“… all the symptoms of pregnancy,” the voice was continuing. “It’s quite common, the doctor told us, with these highly-strung women …” and in the midst of this recital, Christine heard the sound of the key in the front door.
So Bernard was back! At last! And about time too! She brought the conversation with the unknown flatmate to an end as quickly as she could, but not before Bernard walked right past her and into the sitting-room. That was where she found him, just standing, still in his wet mackintosh and with his hair plastered flat to his head by the rain.
It was for him to speak first. To explain, to apologize, to defend himself; but when he didn’t, there was nothing for it but for Christine to launch the attack.
“In case you’re interested, that call was about your little friend,” she told him icily. “Apparently she’s not pregnant after all.”
She paused, for his reaction, but when none came she continued: “The tests were negative, they’ve just heard … I do think, Bernard, you might at least have …”
But still he stood, blank and silent, and now for the first time Christine really looked at him, saw how white he looked, how strained. He was like a man in shock. It made it difficult to know how to go on.
“So that lets you off the hook, I suppose,” she said, rather feebly. “Much luckier than you deserve, if I may say so …”
“Luckier? Yes. I suppose so. Of course.”—and then, as if speaking to himself: “For a day—for nearly a whole day—I thought I was a father,” he said slowly, and as he spoke the word Christine seemed to hear in his voice something she had never heard before, had given up hope of ever hearing. “Now that I know I’m not, it makes me feel … I feel … Oh, Chris ..!”
*
Don’t push it, Christine! Don’t push it! And in fact there was no need to do so. His capitulation was complete.
*
That night she lay long awake, not, this time, in the familiar state of despondency, but in a state of pulsating joy and hope. She was aware, of course, that she couldn’t have conceived tonight, not possibly, because how could her system yet know that the Pills had been hurled away for ever? It couldn’t be next week … but soon, soon. By the time the summer came, and the roses were heavy in the gardens, she would be carrying Bernard’s child. She would be the one walking tall and proud through the streets, for all the world to see.
Her child. Hers and Bernard’s.
And then the telephone rang.
At three o’clock in the morning? What on earth ..?
The same voice. The flatmate’s voice. Marcia was worse. Terribly much worse. No, of course it couldn’t be psychosomatic like the pregnancy … She was already in a coma, an ambulance was on its way … The doctor said she must have taken something … Was Christine sure … absolutely sure ..?
*
Quietly, Christine cut the call off; then sat, crouched over the telephone, the receiver still to her ear, listening to its dead humming.
If Marcia died, she, Christine, would be a murderess. She wasn’t one yet, of course, because Marcia was still alive, being lifted in and out of ambulances, being stomach-pumped and so forth; but if she did die, then Christine would change, between one moment and the next, from being an ordinary jealous woman into being a murderess.
Would she feel the change? Would she feel it as a sort of shudder through all her being? If she was looking into the mirror at the time, would she see her face change under her very eyes into a murderess’s face ..?
For a moment, she thought that the pounding in her ears was the police already, pounding on the door … but no, it was all right, it was only the thundering of her heart …
*
They would trace her, all right. How could they not, what with the interfering flatmate knowing her telephone number and everything, not to mention the fatal bottle which they would find in Marcia’s bag? With all their computers and things, they’d probably be able to trace it to the exact chemist it was bought from all those years ago.
They would come for her. The police … The reporters. Her face would be plastered on the front page of every newspaper in the land … her likeness, finally, would find its place in the Chamber of Horrors …
*
But not yet! Suddenly a peculiar strength came to her, a stillness, and all her panic drained away.
They wouldn’t arrest her yet. It would take them days, maybe weeks, to assemble the evidence, and then more weeks—months, even—before the case came to Court. And meantime … meantime …
But her child would have a murderess for a mother. A murderess.
Is not the womb of a murderess as soft and warm as any other? Is not her milk as sweet?
Wickedness cannot penetrate the barrier of the placenta, as thalidomide and all those dreadful drugs can. Deep inside her, unharmed, sealed off from all evil, her baby would grow and grow, innocent, perfect, like any other baby.
Wicked women have borne babies before now, and will again. Often, the babies have thrived. Always, they have had their moment under the sun, their strip of blue sky above them.
Half dozing over the dead telephone, Christine dreamed the night away. She no longer feared the police, nor the thunder of knocks upon the outer door, for in her dreams she was already inviolate, unassailable, the custodian of a process far greater and more ancient than any process of the law.
THE MIRACLE
QUITE A FEW of the children were joining in, or trying to join in, with the voice that blared from the microphone on the fore-deck; and the resultant din, together with the rapt, angelic expressions which seemed so often to belong with the most raucous and tuneless of the childish voices, made Patricia smile.
“Jee-sus, you jus’ won’t believe
The ’it you’ve made round ’ere ..!”
Some of the youngsters, of course, were openly guying the song, with cheeky gestures and ribald honkings—for after all, it wasn’t a new record
any longer, it had been around for ages. But most of them—especially the younger ones—seemed earnest enough, standing wedged up against the boat rails or kneeling up on the slatted benches, solemnly belting out such of the words as they happened to remember across the expanse of brown, restless water through which the vessel was chugging languidly, carrying its load of Easter holiday-makers upstream towards Richmond and Hampton Court.
“Prove to me that you’re no fool!
Walk across my swimming-pool!”
carolled the seven-year-old Lennie with all his might, his voice, it seemed to Patricia, soaring above those of the other children like a lark, like a nightingale: perfect pitch, perfect diction, and an indescribable purity of tone that brought tears to her eyes.
*
Or did all the mothers feel like this about their own particular child’s unique, incomparable screeching? That fat woman opposite, for instance, impatiently sloshing some sort of bright pink liquid into a cardboard beaker protruding from among a welter of half-eaten crisps and melting chocolate—was she hearing in the strident bellowings of her overweight small daughter the same sort of heart-stopping poignancy as Patricia was aware of as she listened to Lennie?
Apparently not.
“Here y’are!” the woman scolded, thrusting the too-full beaker almost into the little girl’s face, right in the middle of a musical line. “Shut that row and drink up, we haven’t got all day … Eee—watch out what yer doin’, yer clumsy little cow!” she added sharply as the beaker, changing hands, slopped pink sticky liquid this way and that, spattering the child’s white socks and shiny best shoes. “There! Now look what you done! Din’ I say watch what yer doin’?”
At this point Father joined in, a taut, defeated-looking man in his forties, slumped on the bench, his eyes half-closed against the sun.
“You do what yer Mum tells you,” he ordered, barely turning his head. “Or I’ll bash yer!”—and then, turning on his wife with a tiny little spurt of spiteful energy:
“Cantcher leave the kid alone ever, nag, nag, nag?”
Reproof could hardly be distributed more equitably between two warring parties. He cuffed the child absent-mindedly, just for good measure, and then, family duty accomplished, he tilted his tired face towards the warmth of the spring sunshine once more, and closed his eyes.
“You just be’ave yerself!” he summed up.
*
But at least he’s saying something to the child, thought Patricia, with a sort of despairing envy. At least he’s being a father—he’s involving himself!—and she stole a furtive glance at Arnold who was sitting, as always on these family outings, a little way away from them. He was slewed round, almost with his back to them, and staring intently down, as she had known he would be, at the churning water. It was swirling past his field of vision so painlessly, so anonymously, stirring up no guilt in him, demanding nothing of him, neither attention, nor understanding, nor love.
*
Oh, but she was being unfair! It wasn’t that Arnold didn’t love Lennie—he loved his son deeply, painfully; but, alas, with a total inability to relate to him, either as father to son, or simply as adult to child.
It wasn’t anyone’s fault. It was just one of those things. Arnold should have had a quite different kind of a son, Patricia often reflected; a real little toughie, crazy about football; athletic in build, a right little dare-devil, such as Arnold himself had been. To a seven-year-old like that, Arnold could have been a marvellous father, helping him, encouraging him, coaching him at ball games on Sunday afternoons, and Oh, so proud of his every small achievement in field or playground. It wasn’t his fault that Lennie wasn’t that sort of a boy—but then, it wasn’t Lennie’s, either.
Arnold knew this perfectly well, of course. He realized just as clearly as Patricia did that you can’t alter a child, not in any fundamental way. You have to take his talents and abilities just as they are, and nurture them as best you can. It’s no good wishing he’d got another lot, quite different ones, of a kind that you’d maybe have been better at cultivating … Arnold understood all this, of course he did. He was no fool. And, to do him justice, he never voiced his disappointment, or took it out on the child. Not even to Patricia did he ever confess how much he sometimes longed for a different kind of a son.
*
But he did love Lennie, Patricia assured herself. He really did. He’d have done anything for him. It was just that he had no idea what to talk to him about, how to play with him; how to make contact with a child so different from what he himself had been. The imaginative pretend-games that Lennie delighted in were a closed book to his father: they were not only beyond him, but they filled him with unease, and even a sort of distaste. He was quite unable to feel the sort of pride that Patricia felt at the vividness of their child’s imagination, at his quite remarkable power of amusing himself for hours on end with make-believe adventures and imaginary companions. To Patricia, her son’s unusual gifts were something to be cherished, and she encouraged him in every way she could, often herself joining in the imaginary games and fantasies with gusto, whenever Arnold wasn’t around to be upset by it.
Surely encouragement was the right response to early signs of talent in whatever field? Might not Lennie one day be a great writer, a great poet ..?
“Mummy!”
Patricia roused herself from her reverie, and glanced down towards the earnest little figure at her side.
“Mummy, that song about Walking on the Water—the Jesus song they’ve just been playing—Did Jesus really walk on the water, Mummy? Really truly?”
Patricia hesitated. Lennie was always landing her with difficult philosophical questions like this, and it made her feel so inadequate. He was so precocious in some ways, and thoughtful far beyond his years. You couldn’t put him off with just any old answer, thought up on the spur of the moment, as you could with some children.
“Well,” she began carefully, “Perhaps not quite really. It’s more a beautiful kind of a story—a thinking-story, if you know what I mean, to remind us of what a very special, unusual sort of a person Jesus must have been. And to remind us too, I suppose, of what wonderful things a person can do if he really tries—the wonderful things he can achieve—if only he doesn’t let himself get discouraged. If he has ‘faith’, the Bible says, but I suppose nowadays we’d call it ‘self-confidence’ …”
*
Usually, Lennie would have been only too delighted to engage in philosophical disputation on this sort of level: but this time he only frowned impatiently.
“You mean he didn’t walk on the water!” he interrupted scornfully, “Didn’t really do it at all!”
He paused, and then added witheringly: “How silly of him! I could walk on the water, easily! I know I could, Mummy! It’s easy!”
Patricia tried to keep her expression bland and cheerful. He wasn’t really trying to make mock of her, or of the parable; it was simply another of these pretend-games coming up, a new addition to their repertoire, and one in which she, as always, would be expected to play a part. She glanced up to make sure that Arnold was out of hearing—he did hate this sort of thing so much—and then as she always tried to do, she threw herself whole-heartedly into the boy’s fantasy:
“All right, darling,” she said brightly, “that sounds a lovely game. I’ll be the disciple Peter, and you can be—”
“NO!”
The word exploded from the small, intent face with such violence that Patricia was completely taken aback. “No, Mummy, not a game! Not a silly, rotten Pretend! I mean really. Real walking, on real water”—and before Patricia could see how it was happening, he was gone, away from her side and slipping through the rails only a foot or two from his father—who stood, as if paralysed, while his son plunged towards the water.
*
Patricia never knew whether it was she, or some stranger, who gave the alarm. Anyway, within seconds, people from all over the boat were surging to the side … there were screams
, shouts, exclamations of horror … two or three bystanders were already stripping-off, ready to dive. Orders were barked, the boat shuddered and the water churned wildly as the engines were put into reverse; and rising above all the mechanical turmoil came the massed shouts and cries from hundreds of throats:
“Look ..!” “There ..!” “No, it isn’t ..!” “My God, look at that, they’ll never ..!”—and then, suddenly, silence.
Faces whitened. Mouths gaped open. No words were spoken: only a sort of sigh, like the rising of wind very far off, came from all that vast, watching crowd.
*
His first steps were hesitant, uncertain, as if walking was an exercise quite unfamiliar to him. He stumbled a little on the dancing, uneven water, then recovered himself, moving his feet delicately, cautiously as he picked his way among the ever-shifting dips and hummocks, his eyes downcast, anxiously measuring every step.
But then, surprisingly quickly, he seemed to gain confidence, and skill. Soon he was skipping from crest to crest of the small, choppy waves, leaping and cavorting among them.
“Look, Mummy, look! I’m doing it!” he shrieked in triumph, hopping and jumping, higher and higher, faster and faster, whirling, pirouetting on his spindly little legs. “Look, Mummy, look!”
*
Of course, everyone was looking. Naturally. Hundreds and hundreds of them, all pushing, struggling, almost fighting to get a better view. The moment of the initial shock was over. Cameras were whipped out, cries of excitement once again filled the air, the tumult of wonder and incredulity echoing far up and down the river and reverberating from shore to shore.
*
And already, from goodness knows where, the reporters were gathering, clambering over obstacles, pushing their way through tight-packed crowds, all vying with each other for the scoop of the century. The parents, of course, were a prime target, the parents of the miracle-child. Around Patricia and Arnold questions flew like shrapnel.
When did you first realise he was different from other kids? Any other miracles—loaves-and-fishes, all that bit?
A Lovely Day to Die Page 16