The Decision (50 page)

‘Oh, Eliza—’

‘No, I’m serious. Anyway this girl is called Heather and …’

‘Heather! That’s a pretty name.’

‘Do you think so? Thanks.’

‘Yes. And little Coral, how is she getting on?’

Coral was exactly the same age as Emmie; Eliza and Heather had eyed one another up for several afternoons at the clinic, and with the small class-crossing miracle that only babies can wreak had each recognised something in the other they liked and had smiled at each other and said hello occasionally, but this was the first time they had exchanged more than a few words.

‘Oh – bit slow. She hasn’t gained much this week. She’s been poorly, had a bad cold, and they can’t eat, can they, when they’re all bunged up.’

‘No. Emmie had a cold last month, that spell when it was really windy, you know, and I was so fed up with being indoors, I took her out anyway, and she got worse, in fact she had a temperature, I felt so guilty—’

‘Oh, I know, the guilt’s awful, isn’t it? I put Coral in the bath without testing it properly and it was—’

‘Not scalding?’ said Eliza in horror.

‘No, no, almost cold. Poor little thing, I felt so ashamed but I’d boiled it in the kettle because we’ve got no hot water, you see, and it wasn’t enough.’

‘You’ve got no hot water?’

This was so unimaginable to Eliza she forgot to be tactful.

‘Not running, no.’ Heather gave Eliza a slightly cool look. ‘None of the flats in our house have. We’ve got the toilet on our floor though, so we’re lucky. Girl in the basement, she has to come up three flights every night, she’s pregnant, how she’ll manage when she’s got the baby, I don’t know.’

‘Poor girl.’ Eliza struggled to sound concerned rather than horrified; but horrified was how she felt half the time talking to Heather, who lived in two rooms and a kitchenette and a shared bathroom in one of a row of old houses just off Clapham Common. Heather, whose husband Alan worked in an engineering factory, who had lost two babies before she had Coral and considered herself most wonderfully fortunate; Heather, who had less money for everything, food, rent, and the electric and gas meters each week than Eliza spent on food and petrol for her car; Heather, who was so terrified of Coral crying and the other tenants complaining (Coral was a colicky baby) that she spent half her days pushing her round the streets and some of her nights or certainly her dawns as well. ‘Also, Alan works nights quite a lot, and he can’t cope with the crying either, he has to get some sleep. It’s not so bad now the weather’s warming up, but it was awful in the winter and especially when she was really tiny.’

Heather wasn’t seeing much of Swinging London, that was for sure.

She was small and pale, with long straight light brown hair and enormous grey eyes, and Eliza found her much better company than her old friends; they chatted a couple of times over a cup of tea served from the antique urn in the clinic, and then one day had walked up the road together towards where Eliza had parked her car and Heather caught her bus.

‘Blimey,’ Heather had said, eyeing the white Ford Cortina that Eliza loathed and that Matt had insisted on, ‘that yours?’

‘Um – yes. Yes, it is. Now, why don’t I give you a lift, then you won’t have to wait for the bus. We can put both the carrycots on the back seat, look, side by side, it’s fine, and both sets of wheels in the boot. Come on, hop in.’

She always took Emmie to the clinic in a carrycot because it could be lifted from its wheels and put in the car; the large Silver Cross pram that her mother had bought her didn’t actually get many outings. She felt pretty sure that Heather’s shabby pale blue carrycot was probably all she had to cart Coral about in. And lifting it off the wheels to get it onto the bus – well, it was hard to imagine how she managed. It was hard to imagine how she managed at all.

Heather never complained, she was quite funny about it all. ‘Last night Alan and I went to bed at seven, the meter ran out of electricity and we didn’t have any more money, and it’s quite cold so it seemed the best thing to do, Coral was quiet, and it was all right till it got dark, and we couldn’t even read so – well, yeah. We quite often do that; I expect people think we’re having a high old time, but nothing of the sort, haven’t got the energy.’ She grinned at Eliza. ‘Just as well, probably, we couldn’t afford another one, Alan’s scared to look at me half the time.’

‘Aren’t you – I mean, couldn’t you – well, you know, take the pill?’

‘No, I get these headaches and they suggested one of those coil things at the family planning clinic, but it hurt so much when they tried to put it in, I couldn’t stand it, so – well, yeah.’ She stopped, looked slightly bashfully at Eliza. ‘Sorry, you don’t want to hear all that.’

‘Yes, I do,’ said Eliza.

She was shocked by the house Heather lived in; she helped her up the stairs to the second floor, with the carrycot wheels: the dark, dingy stairs covered with linoleum, the light green paint peeling off the walls and the time-switch light going off repeatedly. It was cold, in spite of the sunshine outside, and the stairs smelt bad, a nasty mixture of cabbage and urine.

When they reached Heather’s door she looked at Eliza slightly apologetically and said, ‘I can’t ask you in, sorry, it’s all a bit of a mess.’

‘That’s fine,’ said Eliza, ‘I haven’t got time anyway. Bye Heather, see you next week.’

As she walked back down the stairs, two teenage boys passed her; one of them was carrying a transistor radio, playing some pop music very loudly. She heard them laughing and shouting something as she shut the front door. If they were allowed to make that sort of noise, how could the neighbours complain about little Coral crying?

‘It’s exactly that, because she’s a baby,’ said Matt when she told him about it. ‘Lot of these landlords don’t allow children, any more than they allowed coloureds, she’s lucky to have a place at all. That place we’re knocking down in Camden Town, no kids allowed there at all.’

‘Lucky! Matt Shaw, how can you possibly think someone living like that, sharing a lavatory, no running hot water, is lucky?’

‘Because she is,’ he said calmly, ‘people like her, they have to take what they can get. At least the toilet’s on her floor.’

‘Matt Shaw, you are such a foul, bloody hypocrite. Going on and on about your working-class credentials, and you sit there calmly telling me Heather’s lucky to have a toilet on her floor. How would you feel if that was us, with Emmie living there?’

‘We wouldn’t be there for more than five minutes,’ said Matt.

‘Oh, is that right? And how would we get out of it?’

‘Listen, Eliza, when my mum and dad got married they didn’t have a toilet at all, not in the house. For years I had my bath down the municipal baths twice a week. I survived, as you know. My dad worked his arse off to get that house sorted.’

‘Yeah, yeah, I know, and your mum went cleaning. I don’t see how that makes Heather lucky.’

‘She’s got a roof over her head, that’s why. It’s a starting point, OK? Mind you, she could lose it any time now. Lot of big terraces in Clapham are being knocked down. Getting the tenants out is a nightmare. I feel for the landlords, I really do. All right, all right, only joking.’

‘You are disgusting, you know that? And I just hope for your sake you don’t have any of those houses, with signs up saying “No children”. God, you’re a nasty lot, you developers.’

‘And what would you do if I did?’

‘I’d leave you,’ said Eliza.

It was of course completely ridiculous: to be so completely – well, nearly – defeated by someone else. To be forced to do what that someone else wanted, often in the full knowledge that it was wrong: to hear herself giving in to entirely unreasonable demands: to find herself lacking in all the qualities – like common sense, willpower and even humour – that she had thought she possessed in abundance: to become, quite simply, the sort of person she disapproved of and even despised. But, confronted by this tyrant, this self-opinionated, hyper-confident creature whose wishes were forced upon her by a confusing mixture of icy determination and noisy aggression, she was lost. Defeated. She had no idea what to do.

And every day, it got worse: and Emmie was not quite two.

‘No no no no no,’ the familiar, almost daily tantrum would begin.

‘I’m sorry, but yes yes yes yes yes. Now, do what I say.’

‘No!’ The blue eyes blazed; a small foot stamped, hard, on the ground.

‘Emmie, stop it. At once. If you won’t wear your coat, you’re not going.’

‘I don’t want to go.’

‘I don’t care. You’re going.’

‘I’m not.’ And she drew in her breath and held it, her eyes fixed on her mother in defiance, her face slowly turning bright red.

It was the stuff of nightmares.

Heather’s little girl, Coral, was naughty, had the odd tantrum, but Heather could control her quite easily with a mixture of coaxing and threats; she never slapped her.

Emmie could be neither coaxed nor threatened; she did what she wanted, and if anyone tried to stop her, she seemed prepared to die in the attempt. She had twice made herself lose consciousness by holding her breath; she was equally capable of going on hunger strike and not eating for as long as it took. The longest she had managed was two and a half days, after which, of course, it had been Eliza who had cracked, afraid Emmie would become ill from lack of nourishment. Matt, who found the whole thing rather annoyingly amusing, said there was no danger of that, and that Emmie was far too greedy to go seriously hungry; but then he didn’t have to see her growing if not faint, certainly a bit listless.

On the other hand, she was an enchanting child when things were to her liking: she was affectionate, interesting, and lively, her speech advanced and her manners charming – all the other mothers remarked on how nicely she said ‘thank you’ long before her peers did – and she shared her toys with a generous maturity that surprised Eliza, given that she was an only child. She just liked to do things her way.

The doctor at the clinic, where she still went regularly, mostly because they had a mother and baby group once a week, and she met Heather there, talked like the baby books, urging cooperation and reasoning. Sandra advised depriving her of things she did want to do.

‘Sandra,’ said Eliza, ‘she doesn’t want to do anything as much as getting her own way.’

She wondered if having another baby would help. She had decided she would like one as soon as possible, she was at home anyway, and it made every sort of sense and Matt was very keen, but she wasn’t sure if she would be able to cope.

‘Supposing she took against the baby, then what would I do? Nightmare.’

‘She won’t,’ said Matt cheerfully, ‘she’s not like that. I think we should go for it, Eliza, she’ll be at least three at this rate, and that’s a big gap.’

Eliza stopped taking the pill for a couple of months, then panicked, as Emmie’s behaviour worsened, and went back on it.

‘I don’t care how big the gap is, Matt, I’ll be in a loony bin at this rate by the time I have the baby, and then what will you do?’

‘Bring them in to join you,’ said Matt.

She missed Charles dreadfully; it was as if he had left her to live in another country. She had seen him only a handful of times over the previous year and a half, at family gatherings, her father’s birthday, Emmie’s christening, and he had seemed fairly cheerful, slightly subdued perhaps, but distant, reluctant to be alone with her, and resisted all her attempts to see him on their own. They had had lunch once at her insistence, but he had been wary of any attempt to get him to open up to her.

‘I just don’t know what to do about it,’ said Eliza to Maddy, ‘I know there’s something wrong, but he won’t talk to me. They’ve sort of shut themselves off down there, we’ve only been to the new house once, and then there’s another thing, I’d have thought they’d have had a baby by now, Juliet was so keen, and Charles is besotted by Emmie, said he couldn’t wait to have one of his own.’

‘Well, maybe that’s it,’ said Maddy, ‘maybe she’s just not getting pregnant, and they’re depressed about it, and don’t want everyone asking them all the time.’

‘Maybe. I don’t know, Maddy, my whole life is filled with things I can’t sort out. Charles, my parents, that little fiend I’ve given birth to. God, when I think how a couple of empty pages seemed like a problem – I didn’t know I was born.’

Going to visit her parents, which she did at least once a week, was dreadfully dispiriting.

She was shocked by the constant and ever more swift deterioration in her father; he was losing weight fast and his features were frozen into total immobility. He spent a lot of time sitting in the kitchen doorway, staring out at the garden, seemingly lost to reality; but whenever she arrived, he managed a grotesque echo of a smile and then as she kissed him, would start to cry.

Sarah had to feed him much of the time, draping him in a large napkin, and tenderly wiping his face afterwards; and then she would wheel him off to the lavatory, refusing help.

‘He hates it so, feels so humiliated, I promised him I would never let anyone else do it for him and I won’t.’

Everyone said he should be in a home, that she really couldn’t cope with the sheer physical hard work of lifting and moving him from his wheelchair to his bed and back again, skeletal as his large frame had become, and Anna Marchant – ‘darling, we are practically sisters, don’t argue’ – was paying for a nurse who came in twice a day. It was felt Matt had done enough in fixing the roof for what turned out to be a far higher cost even than he had expected and funding the loan himself – but it was still an extremely difficult situation for her. She was increasingly frail herself and the house was grotesquely unsuitable: but she was not to be moved.