Scold's Bridle

He stopped her with a chuckle and released her back on to her chair. 'Let me hang on to my illusions. Let me believe just once that someone thought I could be as easy to confide in as Sarah. It's not true, of course. There is no one in the world who can listen as well as my wife, or who can impart such sound advice. She'll look after you, I promise.'

Ruth blew her nose. 'She'll be angry with me.'

'Do you think so?'

'You said she's irascible.'

'She is. It's not so frightening. You just keep your head down till the saucepans stop flying.'

She dabbed frantically at her eyes. 'Saucepans? Does she-'

'No,' he said firmly. 'It was a figure of speech. Sarah's a nice person. She brings home wounded pigeons, splints their wings, and watches them die in slow and terrible agony with an expression of enormous sympathy on her face. It's one of the things they teach them at medical school.'

She looked alarmed. 'That's awful.'

'It was a joke,' he said ruefully. 'Sarah is the most sensible doctor I know. She will help you reach a decision about what you want to do and then take it from there. She won't force you to have the baby, and she won't force you not to have it.'

The tears welled again. 'I don't want it.' She clenched her hands in her lap. 'Is that wrong, do you think?'

'No,' he said honestly. 'If I were in your shoes, I wouldn't want it either.'

'But I made it. It was my fault.'

'It takes two to make babies, Ruth, and I can't see your boyfriend showing much enthusiasm when it's fully- fledged and bawling its head off. It's your choice, not his. Sperm comes two-a-penny and most of it gets washed down the sink. Wombs and their foetuses come extremely expensive. Sarah's right when she says it's a life sentence.'

'But isn't it alive? Won't I be murdering it?'

He was a man. How could he begin to understand the agony that women suffered because a biological accident has given them power over life and death? He could only be honest with her. 'I don't know, but I'd say it's only alive at the moment because you're alive. It has no existence as an individual in its own right.'

'But it could have-if I let it.'

'Of course. But on that basis every egg that any woman produces and every sperm that any man produces has the potential for life, and no one accuses young men of being murderers every time they spill their seed on the ground behind the bike sheds. I think for each of us our own life has priority over the potential life that exists inside us. I don't for a moment pretend that it's an easy decision, or even a black and white one, but I do believe that you are more important at this moment than a life that can only come into being if you are prepared to pay for it, emotionally, physically, socially and financially. And you'll bear that cost alone, Ruth, because the likelihood of Hughes paying anything is virtually nil.'

'He'll say it isn't his anyway.'

Jack nodded. 'Some men do, I'm afraid. It's so easy for them. It's not their body that's been caught.'

She hid her face in her hands. 'You don't understand.' She wrapped her arms around her head. To protect herself? To hide herself? 'It might be one of the others'. You see I had to-he made me-Oh, God-I wish-' She didn't go on, only curled herself into a tight ball and sobbed.

Jack felt completely helpless. Her anguish was so strong that it washed over him in swamping waves. He could think only in platitudes-there's nothing so bad that it might not be worse ... it's always darkest before the dawn-but what use were platitudes to a girl whose life lay in tatters before her? He put out an awkward hand and placed it on her head. It was an instinctive gesture of comfort, an echo of a priestly benediction, 'tell me what happened,' he said. 'Perhaps it's not as bad as you think.'

But it was. What she told him in tones of abject terror rocked the foundations of his own humanity. So shocked was he that he felt physically sick.

Sarah found him in the garden when she came home at three thirty after helping to deliver Polly Graham of a healthy baby daughter. He was forking industriously round some roses and scattering handfuls of fertilizer about the roots. 'It's almost December,' she said. 'Everything's dormant. You're wasting your time.'

'I know.' He looked up and she thought she saw traces of tears in his eyes. 'I just needed to do something active.'

'Where's Ruth?'

'Asleep. She had a headache so I gave her some codeine and packed her off to bed.' He brushed the hair from his forehead with the back of a muddy hand, 'Have you finished for the day?'

She nodded. 'What's happened?'

He leant on the fork and stared across the fields. The slowly fading light gave a misty quality to a landscape in which cows grazed and trees, shorn of their leaves, fingered the sky with dark filigree lacework. 'That's the England men and women die for,' he said gruffly.

She followed his gaze with a small frown creasing her forehead.

Tears glistened on his lashes. 'Do you know that poem by Rupert Brooke? 'The Soldier.' The one that goes:

' 'If I should die, think only this of me:

That there's some corner of a foreign field

That is forever England. There shall be

In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;

A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware...' '

He fell silent. When he spoke again, his voice shook. 'It's beautiful, isn't it, Sarah? England is beautiful.'

She wiped the tears from his face. 'You're crying,' she said, her heart aching for him. 'I've never seen you cry before. What's happened, Jack?'