by Paul Ableman
Weedon clearly moved easily in a milieu I had never entered, had met and even knew familiarly, people, scholars, writers, thinkers, I had only read about. I felt bitterly envious and insignificant. It seemed to me that Weedon had already thought, had already effortlessly explored, all the realms of knowledge that I penetrated only with such effort. Increasingly surly, I drank glass after glass of the crude, sour wine of Algeria.
‘What about me?’ asked Nelly plaintively, causing Weedon to turn his calm, bovine eyes upon her and murmur:
‘Oh, yes.’
‘Are you going to do it?’ she asked.
‘No, I’m not. I’m merely providing the room.’
‘Incidentally,’ asked Otterley, recalling a point that had been much debated before we set off. He leaned forward and murmured something to Weedon.
‘Well,’ began Weedon, prolonging the introductory term in, as I began to realize, a characteristic way, doubtless to provide cover for further consideration, ‘she usually asks for ten pounds.’
It was no more than we had anticipated. Weedon, clearly as well-informed on this relatively recherché subject as he had already shown himself to be on more conventional ones, gave us a brief disquisition on the economics of abortion, how a first-rate Harley Street man thought nothing, if you could induce him to undertake the illicit operation, of charging three to five-hundred pounds. How even renegade doctors, whose chief source of income it was, might charge one to two hundred pounds. Old ladies, under hideously insanitary conditions, who had formerly been midwives, claimed from five to fifteen pounds for the service. He explained that the nurse who was coming, a friend of his, was skilled and would ensure antiseptic conditions.
‘I know she’s good,’ he concluded mischievously, ‘because I’ve seen her do four.’
‘Are you going to be present?’ asked Nelly.
‘Well—if it meets with your approval. She really needs a qualified assistant.’
‘Such as you?’
‘I have had a good deal of experience.’
Nelly glanced dubiously at me, but I had neither practical nor moral grounds for protesting. I began to feel slightly excited, and aware that the excitement was strangely fomented by Weedon’s dispassionate calm. It was to be an illegal operation. The prospect suddenly became more real and at the same time more theatrical than it had seemed before. It involved a number of people. There was danger.
How much courage was required of Nelly that evening, I wonder? Hard for a man, who can never experience it, to imagine. Might it be that the natural state of man is nudity, mere surface nakedness, whereas that of a woman is an oscillation between provocative and dainty concealment and utter exposure reaching into the very depths of her body. For man, coitus, the superficial spasm, is all, whereas for woman it is simply the transition stage between the emotional and physical phases of her consuming sexuality.
From the little kitchen next door, into which Otterly and I were ultimately banished, we heard, through the half-opened door, the sounds and silences of surgery. Frequently the shrill, authoritative voice of Janine, with its pronounced and inevitably fetching French accent, ordered Weedon to attend to something or Nelly to ‘relax non, non, non you must not be tight—ze muscles’ as the plump, sweet-faced, dynamic and middle-aged little French nursing sister attempted to procure the ejection of unwanted life. How much courage was required of Nelly, how much pain the unaesthetized procedure caused her, I cannot tell, but she never exclaimed. The few acknowledgements she made to Janine’s continual exhortations and reassurances were in a low, strained but firmly-controlled voice.
Otterley and I drank red wine and smoked but talked little. He drifted to the half-opened door occasionally to peer out but on the one occasion that I did likewise I saw that a rough sort of screen had been erected with a blanket and there was little to see.
‘Well— I’m afraid she’ll have to stay here,’ Weedon, materializing at the door, calmly informed us.
And a moment or two later Janine, pausing in one of her avian darts about the room, amplified rapidly.
‘Eet is nossing to worry—eet is just—sree munce—she ’as leetle contractions—eet ees better if she stay ’ear—I will slip ’ear.’
So the long struggle with Nelly’s sturdy and retentive little body began. Janine was a Communist, a hopeless, passionate, non-ideological Communist who would have effortlessly annexed the party line if it had suddenly proclaimed the treachery and deviationism of the global working class, to her own maternal indignation that some of mother earth’s children should be poor and hungry. ‘Zat is nossing—zat is just tactics—you will see—it is zee capitalists—I know—I ’ave seen….’ Her Communism had little to do with politics, nothing to do with world realities. She called herself a Communist as, in any age, she would have enrolled herself under that banner which seemed to her to be on the side of the weakest and most needy. And having decided that she was a Communist, having provided herself with a verbal rallying point, she was relatively indifferent to what Russia was up to, so long as she could go on helping people when she had the chance. Thus with the abortions. It was clearly monstrous, intolerable, for the girls, for the unwanted babies, that this simple, medical matter should be illegal. It wasn’t in Russia. Oh, it was now? ‘Zat does not matter—it will change.’ But the illegal operation—‘what zey do to zemselves—some of ziss girls….’ She asked ten pounds but took whatever could be managed. She did ultimately get ten pounds from us, five from me and five from Nelly, but she devoted four days of skilled and specialized attention to poor old Nell. She was, in fact, a gynaecological nursing sister and so completely competent.
Three times, the cervix (I believe it is) of Nelly’s womb was dilated and three times, after the various painful and protracted physiological reactions thus initiated had run their course, the stubborn foetus remained emplaced. On the fourth occasion, Janine employed a different and ultimately effective technique.
I remember gazing in fascinated horror, having emerged from the lavatory to find that Janine had deposited a bowl covered with a cloth outside the door, and having guiltily raised the cloth for a peek, at what seemed more like the products of the almost total demolition of a human body rather than the mere premature expulsion of a child. The foot-long, liver-like, glistening clots of blood that lay there bore no obvious relation to something that should have been as structurally complex as a human foetus and for some time after my illicit glance awful conjectures crowded into my mind. I ultimately gathered, however, from Janine’s ordinary flow of talk, which I once or twice prompted, that everything was going normally, that so far the actual abortion had not taken place and that what had so far emerged were simply the usual products of the breakdown of the womb.
Nelly, strained and grim and pale, her oval, childish face frowning over the rim of the blankets, smoked while I sat on the bed holding an ash-tray for her and Weedon, at the other side of the room, constructed clean elevations with pencil and drawing instruments on a large drawing-board, completing (he was an architect) a competition design for the reconstruction of a square mile of a bombed city. Janine energetically made tea in the kitchen. Once, Otterley blew in with a bottle of wine to see how things were going but only stayed for half an hour, ‘taking its normal course, I suppose—what?’
However, the course didn’t remain normal, became, in fact, sufficiently abnormal for it ultimately to become necessary for Nelly to be removed to a woman’s hospital.
‘It is over—it is over,’ Janine insisted, ‘search a taxi—I will come—it will be all right.’
It seemed that Nelly needed a curettage to make sure that all the remnants of the decomposition products were removed and to guarantee subsequent perfect functioning of her generative apparatus. The word, ‘scraping’, conjuring up images as sinister as any associated with the torture chamber, was used. So we took Nelly off to be scraped. In the dead of night, in a taxi, bundled up against the raw winter night until she looked like a child’s ama
teurishly-stuffed toy, Nelly and Janine and I, past Weedon’s composed, friendly face and hand raised in parting salute, churned off to the hospital.
Janine escorted Nelly in and I dismissed the taxi and paced up and down, across the road, beside the railings of a little park or square, now shadow-steeped, barred and silent. I began to think of films and particularly of comic films and I delightedly traced in my memory the droll exploits in a city street of a great screen comedian. I was laughing aloud when a large, yellow car swept by so close that the woman passenger and I gazed at each other for an instant. After that I felt caught and undignified, laughing and grimacing alone at night in a London street, little better than a gibbering idiot, and my resentment by degrees transferred itself to the woman, a smart woman, seated beside a smart man in a smart car. Tough and ruthless, damn them, the smart ones of the world.
‘Still,’ I thought, with a small resurgence of, this time, rather malicious pleasure, ‘they get each other, don’t they?’
‘Now zat is all right—you must leave hair….’
And Janine was back. And that was that. Bad business. Nelly was nearly a week in hospital and how did Janine arrange for her admission? Without implicating herself? Anyway she did. I can’t remember—she must have told them that she’d been called in after Nelly had visited an abortionist. They treated Nelly very well in hospital and when I went to see her the following day, she beckoned me down close to her mouth and whispered ‘it was a boy’.
During the following days, Nelly spoke so often and so reverently of Janine that I finally asked her what she particularly admired about the animated little nurse, but Nelly just said, ‘Well,’ and shrugged her shoulders as if it were self-evident. I don’t know why but I didn’t share her esteem at the time although later, when I recollected the business, Janine grew in strength and stature in my memory.
Nevertheless, in spite of Janine’s skill and devotion, it had been a makeshift business, menaced at every stage by the microscopic hordes we have learned to wage successful war against.
I thought of Nelly’s ordeal and of the larval son that might have been ours (of what Nelly had had to go through to ‘thwart biology’), when, years later, I learned of Edna’s abortion.
Doubtless, I used the contrast to nourish my, by then mature, dislike for the younger sister I had once thought of as my natural comrade and ally. Edna’s was a large-scale affair, with anaesthetist and consultant gynaecologist, performed in an operating theatre and with the full complement of the opulent, but doubtless somewhat clandestine, nursing home in which it took place to nurse her briefly through the after-effects. One of Weedon’s de luxe, five-hundred pound abortions undoubtedly.
I learned about it some eighteen months after the gritty afternoon on which I bumped into Edna in the station. Mary, my other sister was married by then and was, in fact, pregnant, and I was working—where?—the engraving works? I forget and I forget how Mary got hold of me—oh yes, I met her accidentally in a tea-shop one day after she’d been buying curtains and she took my address. Anyway, she and Robert, her accountant husband, had found ‘a marvellous flat overlooking the river’ and were having a small, house-warming party. She wrote and invited me, thoughtfully appending ‘there’ll be lots to drink’ and, lured, I admitted to myself, as much by resentful curiosity as to how my elder sister had arranged her life, as by this somewhat equivocal assurance, I had gone to the party. There I behaved pretty badly, and still squirm sometimes to recall it, feeling altogether superior, (oh, inhabiting a different cultural universe!) to the five or six pleasant young married couples who were genuinely enjoying themselves, dancing to the gramophone and drinking a few glasses of beer or a couple of cocktails. Every so often their pleasure was marred by a surly and seemingly immature youth, myself, who had been half-drunk on arrival and who quashed any possibility of conversation whenever a civil remark was addressed to him by a contemptuous retort, and tried to fondle the wives.
Actually, I began to feel a little ashamed of myself about half-way through the evening when, through the haze of prejudice and alcohol, I discerned that one bright-faced, bespectacled and rather hump-backed little clerk was not only nearly, if not quite, as well-read as I was, but, as a university graduate, ex-combatant army officer and father of three children, incomparably more experienced and moreover had grown by what he had experienced. He remained friendly, but I suddenly appropriated his eyes and saw what a sorry spectacle I had been presenting.
I went and looked out of the window, now feeling forlorn and sorry for myself, and looked down from the fifth floor on which the brand-new, smart little flat was situated onto a fine spectacle: the full, dusky flood of the ebbing river, with, against still faintly luminous cloud masses, the heavy, classical bulks of a palace and civic buildings and the lights of cars winding along the embankment. Big city, night….
Mary came up and started talking about Edna, and I, glad of a chance to convert my resentment at the hostility which, although not offered, I now felt that I had merited, into an attack, replied viciously.
As I fed my rancour, attacking Edna as vulgar and shallow and egotistical, I realized with slight alarm that I was, in fact, in earnest, that a lesion of animosity must have been festering inside me for a long time. Mary, very properly, interjected that I had no, and could have no, grounds for anything I was saying since I hadn’t seen Edna for years. And this made me even more angry, for I realized that the ulcer had been developing ever since that chance meeting on the platform. But how could I explain this to Mary? Nothing had happened. Nothing had been said. How could I explain to her, since I was still, with partial success, striving to conceal it from myself, that I had been upset because Edna hadn’t been as solicitously concerned with me and my affairs as I felt she should have been, that I was heaping my whole edifice of slander on the fact that she had seemed a little absent and preoccupied? Finally I admitted that I had met Edna and compensated for my inability to supply any precise evidence, in reply to Mary’s questioning, by a series of sinister but vague allegations.
‘Exactly when did you meet her?’ probed Mary calmly, and, causing me premonitory foreboding, urged that the precise date might be significant.
Well, it ultimately appeared that I had probably met Edna on the very day that she had been informed by a hospital clinic that she was pregnant. Since the responsible man was married, there had been, it seemed, ample reason for her to have been a little abstracted. But it was too late for me to hesitate. Although aware that at bottom my untenable case had been dealt a mortal blow, or probably because of this, I urged the attack with even greater vigour.
‘Pregnant? Edna? Good God, how did that happen? If she wasn’t so damned secretive, she might have told me, mightn’t she? I am her brother, damn it. Are you suggesting that Edna is now tending a fatherless child?’
‘No——’
‘No, I’ll bet she isn’t. I’ll bet she found a way out. She’s no Victorian heroine. What happened?’
Mary tranquilly explained to me what had happened. When she had finished I stared at her intently but not because of anything striking or startling in her explanation. Indeed, although I was able, a few minutes later, to reassemble what she had said (the impress, as it were, of her words still being sufficiently fresh), while she spoke I hardly heard her. I had been suddenly struck by her manner, by nervous timid, prudish Mary calmly and objectively talking to me about pregnancies and abortions. And now I would have to answer her in the same responsible way. This was new. It was not ‘Mary, Mary quite contrary’ being teased by, or furiously rebuking, her mischievous younger brother, but two adults discussing an adult situation. And having become aware of this, I lost my moorings, found waves of inadequacy and self-consciousness suffusing me, as if her objective air effortlessly transcended, and so implicitly dismissed, all our past relationship.
I wondered about it as I walked, a little later, along beside the river, or rather between the two rivers, that of the polluted Thames, rich in t
yphoid, sluggish with flotsam and sewage, and the other river of cars and motor-bikes and lorries, flowing just as remorselessly, as much a product of nature, drumming and swishing on the other side of me. How?—a few months of married life, being pregnant, having now had sexual intercourse? Does all that maturity lurk in every pigtailed, squeamish country girl? Yes, yes, perhaps, of course, it does. I suddenly thought: ‘I knew Mary and then I went away and read a lot, and experienced a little, about the world and I imagined the two were different. And now it seems that Mary is the world. Why don’t things stay the same, so that one can finally grasp them? Why is everything, always, changing?’
She had told me that Edna had had an abortion, financed by the restaurateur with a villain’s name, a name of classical villainy, Roger Slatterley, who ran a swank restaurant near a sea-bathing, resort town on the South coast where Edna was employed as an assistant in a research laboratory.
I didn’t question Mary. I haven’t learned much about it and how they manage these things in South Coast resorts. I imagine it as in the films: the sophisticated décor (glossy oils of naked, but defective, girls) in the expensive restaurant overlooking the bay. The view is picturesque at this remove with the souvenir and fish-and-chip shops and the shooting arcades and other feeble diversions of the people dwindled by distance and only the intelligible swerve of shore and bend of bay to languidly divert the pampered glance of the Very Rich who dine there. And Slatterley, unable to achieve total dedication to his collection of carved ivory, long-wearied of the featureless little wife who was loyal to him when, down in the town, with a snack-bar and ambition, he started up, meets Edna, at a dance in a sea-side hotel, which he illicitly visits sometimes in the hope of meeting someone like Edna. He and the young laboratory assistant drive around in his big, gleaming car and get to necking amidst the gorse at the end of bumpy lanes petering out on the cliffs. Ultimately they slip up and there’s Edna pregnant, having just been formally told so by the clinic, standing brooding and waiting for her train back to Cliffbourne (fictitious name) when her almost-forgotten, not particularly welcome, elder brother, dressed as a porter, breezes up beside her.