I blushed. I wasn’t used to Londoners then. I’m still not. They talk so much. I always want to smash their jaws shut; I realize the reaction may be excessive.
Guest Night.
Sue, as if magnetized, as if drawn by some invisible force that did not consult her will, went glassy-eyed along the streets to a gynaecologist’s consulting-room. The liberalized abortion law was still in its running-in phase, and nobody ever knew quite how to play it. You had to be prepared, at the least, to swear that if you had the baby you’d go insane; I’d always assumed that you must be ready to loosen your hair, sing, ramble on in verse and scatter some flowers, by way of indication that even after ten weeks you weren’t feeling yourself.
Whatever acting was required, Sue didn’t manage it. ‘I’ll be back at three,’ she’d said that morning. ‘Please, Carmel, you will be here, won’t you?’
‘OK,’ I’d said. I’d have to miss a lecture, but I’d missed a few already, in the shocked dumb days after Niall left me. I worked during the night to catch up; I could do another night. ‘OK.’
Three o’clock came. Somehow, as soon as I heard the lift doors crunching open – for Sue had taken to using the lift – I knew there had been a complication. I opened the door of C3. Sue sailed down the corridor. It seemed to me that the way she walked had altered; God, I thought, soon it will start to show. ‘Come in. What happened?’
There was a wordless, bovine triumph on Sue’s face. ‘He says,’ she told me, ‘that I’m in very good health. He says I’m in fine shape to have a very healthy baby.’
Guest Night.
I said to Julia, as we dressed before the revels, ‘She seems to have talked past the point somehow. She forgot why she went, I suppose.’
Julia snorted. ‘Two months from now, then she’ll remember.’
‘Obviously she wants to have it. So what can you say?’
‘You can tell her not to indulge herself.’
‘She said she wanted to know if she was fertile.’
Julia was pinning on her medal – the one she’d got for A Promising Start in Anatomy. ‘You,’ she said, ‘have you ever felt that need?’
‘No.’ I was startled. ‘Anyway, my experience is academic, now.’
I couldn’t imagine sex. It was something I’d done in a previous life. I felt sealed up again. I was a virgin. My flowerpot sweater slid over my head, stretched over my ribs; its fantastical flowers spilt to my waist, and as I turned to show Julia I am sure that the gold and silver beads caught the light. I cinched it with the broad strong belt; no trouble, as I breathed in, to snag the bar in its new hole. My rib cage was lifted, my diaphragm was constrained, it would be difficult to take a very deep breath . . . but why would I need to? I wasn’t going to drown.
‘Anyway,’ Julia said, ‘she’s messed it up good and proper. She’ll change her mind in a week or two, and then you can bet your life she won’t want to turn up to the Student Health Service again. What will she say? “Oh yes, I saw the man you sent me to, yes, I gave him the letter, no, I’m still pregnant, he said I was doing nicely.” ’ Julia snorted. ‘She’ll have to start again, go private. Where will she get the money?’
An hour before, Claire had caught me in the corridor. ‘Please, Carmel,’ she hissed at me. ‘Just a word.’
I went into C2, closed the door and stood with my back against it. Their decor was not like ours. They had cushions on their beds with buttons in the centre, and a fringed bath mat by the wash-basin. There were soft toys piled on Sue’s bed: a pink-and-white mini-elephant, a monkey with pliable limbs and a face of almost satanic ugliness. On the wall above Claire’s bed was a poster with a prayer on it in fancy script. It said,
‘Everybody has influence with Sue.’
‘Yes, but you have experience.’
I understood. Because I came from the north of England, Claire credited me with an earthy maturity. As if I had experienced many upheavals in life, and an early sexual initiation: incest, possibly, caused by overcrowding in the cellar where I was brought up.
‘Listen,’ she said, ‘you know what she wants, in her heart. And now she’s seen this chap, gynaecologist, he’s put her mind at rest.’
‘Yes. But it wasn’t what she went there for.’
‘None the less – she’s seen sense. So now I want you and Julia and Lynette to rally round and stop her having second thoughts. If she has an abortion it could do her endless damage.’ Claire was solemn, her tone ponderous. ‘Endless,’ she said. ‘Psychological. Damage.’
‘Yes. I can see that. I can see.’ Restless, I deferred to the pieties of the age. My imagination worked; I couldn’t think what damage would be greater than that inflicted by an innocent wailing itself into the world, from between my unprepared thighs. ‘But I don’t think she’s really decided, has she? She’s only interested in her present situation, just how she feels today. It’s a novelty, isn’t it? But soon she might regret – either way, she might regret it.’
‘But a life would be spared,’ Claire pleaded. ‘For heaven’s sake, Carmel, I thought you were a Catholic.’
‘No. Who told you that?’
‘Oh, so you’re not any more?’
‘They’d be different kinds of regrets, wouldn’t they, very different? I mean she’d have to feed and clothe it, worry about it all the time – ’ Her life would be over, I thought. ‘You could argue, you know, that having the baby would be just giving into a whim – and it’s not a baby yet, is it, it’s just cells, and you shouldn’t turn cells into a person just for the sake of a whim?’
Claire was not shrewd, but she was shrewd enough to see that I was in mental turmoil. ‘But what do you think? What do you really think?’
