by Fay Weldon
Perhaps she should take over the couscous, but it needs to be made fresh. Leave it to keep warm and it goes to stodge: it ought to come from the pan fluffy and white, the tiny grains separated. Ruby won't have the stuff in the house, saying you can do anything you need by way of carbohydrate with old cold potatoes. (This is no doubt why Peter and Doralee eat couscous so often.) But she's hungry. She no longer feels pregnant. It will be all right: she can continue to be the heroine of her own life, not share the position with some brat.
She slips down one of her mother's birth-control pills to be on the safe side. She found a store of them, years old, in the third bathroom of the Rectory, the one no one uses because of the old wasps' nest, and stole them. It's like drinking tap-water, a gesture, an act of defiance, nothing more, to show she's her own mistress: of course a glass of water here, a pill there, won't make any real difference. She's just giving fate a little nudge, to make it work for her rather than against her. If she goes on not getting pregnant she and Peter will have to go to the fertility clinic and really concentrate: that will be the time to take the plunge. Peter should have hurried home or at least called her on her mobile. Men are unreliable, even Peter, always led astray by impulse. How they ever win wars she cannot imagine. They'd be leading a bayonet charge and then come across a fossil on a rock and everything would have to stop while they investigated. What does she need a man for anyway? It's just that that blind, stirring, questing, pursuing, sticking-up horrible phallic thing seems to be not just its own imperative, but hers as well.
Gynaecological dreams
Doralee had an abortion once, I write spitefully, telling tales out of school. She was sixteen, and Ruby took her to the doctor who sent her to the hospital where she had a procedure done and was home that afternoon. They did not mention it to the boyfriend, Ken, who was seventeen. He had started work as trainee electrician, there being no low-paid apprenticeships any more, so he earned more than most boys his age still in school. He had a car, which appealed to Doralee. Ruby would rather her daughter had taken up with a medical student or someone with a more ambitious background, but she had always encouraged her children to believe with Jesus that all men were equal, so she could hardly complain. At the same time she did not want her daughter to marry an electrician.
She was relieved when Doralee took up with Peter, who though hardly the county set was at least well-bred North London, the mother from a Jewish family which had apostatised. The county set themselves viewed Ruby and her children with some suspicion. She lived in a good house and was active in proper country pastimes, and a stalwart of the village fete, but she came from the North, and was too unpredictable in her ways to be considered one of them. Ruby did not particularly want to be one of them, but it is always more pleasant to be accepted than not, and for Doralee to have a baby at sixteen by an artisan apprentice would not have been good. Ken was to be a millionaire by the time he was twenty-five, of course, having gone into electrical contracting for the government, but that was not to be known in advance. Ruby took Doralee down to the clinic with reluctance - her worry, even then, was a scarcity of grandchildren. The more you educate girls, the more worldly ambition you inculcate in them, the more you teach them independence from men, the fewer children they have. And the more babies you have, the more you know what is lost when you refuse to let them come into the world. Still, she did it, for her daughter's sake.
Doralee had not told Peter about the early abortion, or termination, as everyone called it. She dreamt about it sometimes; herself lying in a white bed tied up with electrical cords while a welcome sea of blood, whose source was herself, flowed over her. It was a confusing dream, mixed pleasant and unpleasant, both horrible and a relief. Horrible that she should have it at all, that her unconscious, if such a thing there be, was not within her control; a relief because she always woke from the dream happy. It was like bulimia or cutting - making yourself sick or slitting your own skin, scarring yourself -fashions which would sometimes sweep over girls at school as would an epidemic. Doralee had been prone to both in her time - messy and forbidden deeds which yet had to be done, asserting her rights over her own body. The termination had at least put an end to all that, for some reason.
Doralee took the pro-abortion line, the woman's right to choose, as everybody did she had ever met, from her teachers to her colleagues to her partner, but sometimes she resented her mother for making her go to the doctor. It was indeed the slaughter of the innocents, the land was awash with blood; if she'd had a baby then it would be fifteen by now, and a credit to her, and the trouble and fear of raising a child would be in the past, not in the future, and what's more she would probably be married to a millionaire instead of waiting to get some shitty dress back from the cleaners with a partner who couldn't even be bothered to get back to finish the cooking. Where was he}
She had told no one about the termination and hoped her mother had forgotten, and that it was so far back in her medical notes it would never be thought of again, but I know. Her writer knows.
A gynaecological history
Lord, what women will do to avoid such a history. All this fecundity and bleeding and womb-centrist behaviour! It's a thing of the past, thank God. I wrote a short story about it once, back in the early-Nineties, called A Libation of Blood. Those were the days, when a woman's love life was dictated by her physiology. No longer. You don't have period pains, you carry Nurofen. You don't have premenstrual symptoms, depression, anxiety and black violent rage unless you're up for murder and the defence wants to enter it as a plea - you have counselling and decline to believe it emanates from you. That the pre-menstrual you is the real you, and the sweet syrupy non-menstrual you just an overlay to help you get and keep your man and keep your children cosy is not easy to accept. Then the real you is too like the cat that kills the bird for comfort, and so best not incorporated into the scheme of things.
Surely, surely, thinks Doralee, in the last week of her hormonal cycle, my own cycle of self-assessment is nothing to do with the time of the month. High self-esteem three weeks of a monthly, moon-dictated cycle? Savage, vengeful, low self-esteem the last? How can it be? Just coincidence. The sanitary pad in the TV ads has wings and seems to fly elegantly through air.
Yet I'll swear that Doralee's basic self, what continues to link us to one another over decades, is not Heather's baby shower, not the baby moving beneath the skin, it is the dream of blood. I am no one to talk - having had an abortion once, between the third and fourth child, wedged between natural miscarriages. I think about the lost child murdered and thrown away - from time to time, not too often. A girl, perhaps, an ally in a family overwhelmed by males? I will never know. There seemed no other option at the time, nor was there. You destroy another or are yourself destroyed. Nature's way. Cats kill birds, so don't keep a cat, or don't look. We love the cat, we stroke the cat, we feed the cat on anonymous chunks of boiled-up, all-purpose animal flesh from a can with a pretty kitten on it. I know someone who has a vegetarian dog but if you deprive cats they just go and live next door. And you don't want that.
What else could I do? Well? The year, 1971, high summer, pregnant, six months after the last birth, an immediate family of six largely dependent upon my earnings, the new baby due to be born on my sister's birthday, her death still new in my head, her three orphaned children also my responsibility - my mother as well now, she now in her sixties and having no income of her own? As Doralee would say, 'It just wouldn't have worked.'' Sixteen years earlier the first baby had brought its own strength, will, energy and faith with it. This, the fourth, brought doubt and panic. What now would become of me and mine? Ron had already run off once, albeit only temporarily - never one for any reality he found embarrassing, conveniently missing my sister's death and its attendant traumas - and a new baby might drive him away altogether. How was I to keep this family together? I lacked faith in the future. I was no longer convinced there was one rule for me - everything will be all right in the end - and anoth
er for the rest of creation. So off I went in the taxi to the abortion clinic - it was in Ealing, where I married my first husband, the eccentric schoolmaster. It was a seedy place, a converted suburban house in a genteel district. A stream of depressed girls and women came up its path, a kindly Asian businessman down from the North, bringing with him in his van a little group of eight veiled, terrified and disgraced girls. He paid a single cheque for all of them. How did they get to be in his van, what happened to them next? I will never know. Sometimes I think I write fiction only in order to ensure that I am kept informed as to what happens next.
Here in Ealing I got my certificate of legitimisation from the doctor (on the grounds, in those days, that if I didn't I risked losing my wits altogether, which might have been true enough) and paid over my cheque for £500, and the inconvenient tissue was rooted out. I salute you, baby. I'm sorry. If the doctor hadn't told me you were likely to be born on February 19th, my dear deceased sister Jane's birthday, you might be alive today. I didn't want you to have her fate.
I describe the moment of decision - baby or not - in the short story Subject to Diary, set in just such a clinic, when the young career woman, who is complaining in reception that she can never find a window in her diary for giving birth, only for her terminations, is persuaded by the receptionist to just go home and find the window. There was no such person present in real life. The wicked abortionist featured in The Hearts and Lives of Men, a novel written in 1987, surfaced fifteen years later. This time his name is Dr Runcorn. Clifford the trendy art-dealer breaks into the abortion clinic and snatches his beloved Helen from the operating table, thus allowing her to give birth to my heroine little Nell. Now there's a fantasy: the damsel rescued! Yet I am so often accused of being mean to men: truly, even in real life they can be heroes.
And there was no discussion with Ron, let alone a daring rescue - other than that I told him I was pregnant, and he said 'You're not going to go through with it, are you!' and I replied to his unvoiced shock, horror and alarm, 'Probably not,' and he nodded. It was before the days when couples 'talked things through'. It was considered a fine thing to conduct a marriage in silence. Now it seems quite outrageous. The question 'Have you been unfaithful to me?' was seldom asked outright, or answered, if it was, by other than by a brief yes or no. Fisticuffs might break out, but not discussion.
Today's Doralee, faced by a termination, would talk the matter over with husband or partner for at least three hours. The decision would only be reached after obligatory counselling for both parties. Then the papers could be signed. It is assumed the father will be present, if not in the room - that's only for living births - at least within call. I do remember my self-pity, waiting for the lonely taxi home -it was not even mooted that I would be collected: Ealing was a long way and Ron had a shop to run - as I watched the girls being herded back into their van, those little silent veiled figures. They at least had each other, and the businessman had enough humanity to help them in tenderly, one by one, murderesses that we all were.
Still waiting
Peter's absence stirs up memories: ghost babies stir in the air. Doralee shivers a little and looks for her pashmina. She shuts the window to keep out the drifting scent of Indian sweetmeats bubbling in the vat. But this was once an orphanage, once a confectionery factory. Time cannot always be kept in its place. The present contains the past. Doralee takes microwave rice and stirs in chopped coriander and prawns and bungs it in the oven. She eats in front of the television, pashmina carefully arranged so she drops nothing on it. Celebrities emote on an island somewhere in a distant ocean. She pretends to despise such programmes but watches when she gets half a chance. Still no Peterloo. She does love him. If he wants a baby she will have one, of course she will. She's just been in a bad mood. She calls him on his mobile. But the thing rings and buzzes and groans on the draining board. He has forgotten to take it with him. He left his front-door key too. He expected to be back.
She calls Kleene Machine. She gets an answerphone. Closed until eight tomorrow morning. Then where is Peter with the cleaning? She feels bad. She didn't really need it in such a hurry. It was mean of her to want to put Heather's nose out of joint by looking terrific while Heather looks bad. It was mean of her to want the shop person to be punished for putting her, a professional woman, to inconvenience.
She nibbles a prawn and worries about Heaven Arkwright. Heaven Arkwright is Doralee's colleague, her career companion; they started a year ago on the same salary on the same day. Now she discovers that Heaven is getting paid two thousand a year more than she is. What a ridiculous name! Heaven is American and was once a cheerleader. She writes little pieces about face-lifts and lipstick, nothing serious, unlike Doralee, and snippets of gossip about celebrities. The freebies which come Doralee's way, though plentiful, are nothing to those that get left at the office for Heaven, or come through the post, in the shape of jars and sachets of face creams and perfumes, little gold slippers, handbags and so on. Heaven has the advantage of not being in a relationship and is happy to person the office on Christmas Day and bank holidays and focus on her work: she doesn't get cystitis - the blight of the sexually active -and is anorexic so doesn't have to worry about period pains or have some man feeding her couscous all the time, or rather failing to - but on the other hand it's hardly a well-rounded life Heaven leads and that's bad for the career in the long run.
'We are looking for well-rounded individuals' say the ads -by which they mean skinny people with big smiles. It's the balancing of all the different requirements that is so difficult. It's quite nice being at home without Peter - if you can stay off the chocolates and stick to the prawns, which are tough, being frozen not fresh, all she could find in the freezer. You just let your thoughts roam. You could end up quite a serious person if you were single. Not that Heaven comes over as all that serious.
She is beginning to get really worried. If Peter doesn't have his cell phone with him what's wrong with a telephone box? But are there telephone boxes any more? She hasn't seen one for ages, come to think of it. Everyone has cell phones. Surely he could borrow one. Or is there something sinister in his absence? He might have left her. Men do that sometimes - walk out of the home and disappear and leave some little fake pile of clothes on the beach so everyone thinks they have committed suicide.
But she's happy with Peter and he's happy with her or there wouldn't be so much sex. Surely? An accident? No, that is not the kind of thing that happens to her and Peter.
She looks out of the window to make sure there are no ambulances or police cars on the corner. There are not. She slips on a coat, all the same, and goes down in the elevator and through the lobby and into the street and looks around. Nothing untoward. She doesn't want to be out here on her own after dark. The muggers will be coming out soon for their drug money. But you mustn't think about that kind of thing or you'd never step out of your home at all and that would be absurd. Heather's mother was run over and killed by a police car answering a call but that was the other side of London. A police car in this densely built up district would have trouble getting up speed enough to kill. She doesn't suppose Heaven had a mother. She leapt into the world fully formed and perfect, like Athena out of Zeus's head or has Doralee got that muddled? That is how she would like any child of hers to be born. 'If Peter comes back before me,' says Doralee to George the doorman, 'tell him he'll just have to wait. I've got the only key. I suppose you could let him in, but I'd rather you didn't. It won't do him any harm to wait around a bit. He really must remember always to take a key.'
She goes down to Kleene Machine but there is no sign of Peter and there are steel bars over the windows. There is a group of murky young men sauntering towards her so she does not stay for long. There is a light on in the window above, but that seems to have nothing to do with the shop.
There is a dark green dirty side door firmly closed which looks as if it is rarely opened. She goes home.
'No sign of hubby?' asks George.
> 'He is my partner,' says Doralee. 'I don't believe in marriage.'
'I've had four wives,' says George. 'They were all good housekeepers. They all got to keep the house. That's why I work here.'
'Ha-ha,' says Doralee.
'It's not funny,' says George.
An hour-and-a-half has gone by. She calls her father Graham, and Eve answers the phone. Eve is five years older than Doralee. She has a quiet voice and never eats meat. She wears black leggings and cheap High Street tops. She is too fat. She teaches yoga. Doralee hates her. 'Hello, Dora,' says Evelyn.
'Hello Evelyn,' says Doralee. They really don't get on, these two. 'Can I speak to my father?'
'Of course,' says Eve. 'It's very important that Graham keeps in contact with his previous family. It's good for karma.' 'Who's Karma?' asked Doralee. 'Don't tell me you and Daddy have had a secret baby!' Seventeen years since Graham left home but his eldest daughter doesn't give up her resentments easily.
'Graham,' says Eve, coolly, hand ineptly over the mouthpiece, 'It's Dora. One of your daughters.' And she hands the phone to her husband.
'Dora!' says Graham, trying to sound pleased. He has behaved as well as he can to his many children but it is not good enough. He left their mother and only the twins, the boys, the youngest, the males, will ever forgive him. He had hoped that as they reached maturity the girls would opt to rename themselves, as their mother had in her time. But no. As Eve puts it, 'It is more important for them to spite you, I'm sorry to say, than to live good and useful lives.'