The Silent Tide (27 page)

Some evenings there would be a cocktail party to go to, or a dinner out with friends, and more often than not the theatre, and then there'd be little time for anything when they got home but to fall into bed. And there they might not sleep at once. That first disastrous occasion had cast a pall over their short honeymoon by the sea, for the bleeding she'd experienced at the hotel continued for a day or two, but lighter. She visited the doctor on their return to London and he was able to reassure her. Perhaps, he told her, with some concern, her husband should not treat her quite so enthusiastically. She'd sustained a small tear, although it had quickly healed.

There came times when Isabel arrived home and knew as soon as she opened the door of the flat that the day had not gone well for Hugh. He'd be morose or sardonic, and she'd feel and awful lump in her throat, fearing that in some way she'd annoyed him, that his mood was her responsibility.

'What's the matter?' she would ask repeatedly, but it might just be that his mind was wrestling with some dilemma in his writing, or the muse had failed him that day. In time she became used to these occasions, though they still upset her.

Then there'd follow a delicious making up when she'd weep and he'd apologise for being monstrous, and somehow they'd end up in each other's arms. There were other times again, when the writing went superlatively well, that he might rise in the night and switch on the light in the drawing room and write until dawn. Then both of them would be tired and crotchety in the morning and so she tried to forbid these episodes. But if he didn't get up, the sounds of him lying awake beside her, restless and tormented, stopped her sleeping anyway. Such were the proud marks of being married to a writer.

Autumn became winter, and winter turned to spring. In May 1951 the Festival of Britain opened to much fanfare.

‘It’s just hanging in thin air, isn’t it?’ Isabel whispered. ‘Extraordinary. It’s like they say, a giant icicle.’ She and Hugh, sheltering from the heavy rain, were staring up at the Skylon, trying to make sense of its strangeness, the way it appeared to be suspended from the sky.

‘Or a flying saucer tipped on end,’ Hugh said. ‘It’s certainly much bigger now one sees it close up.’

‘Isn’t it a shame about the weather, though.’

It was the opening day of the exhibition. They’d come through the turnstiles amazed by the alien landscape spread out before them. Acres of bombed-out buildings south of the river near Waterloo station had been transformed into a designers’ playground. There was the new Festival Hall, all bleak modernist concrete, the Skylon, a sculpture like a mock cathedral spire apparently floating in the sky, though actually held up by cables. Most extraordinary of all was the curved white roof of the Dome of Discovery.

‘Heavens, won’t it blow away in this?’ Isabel said, pointing in alarm. Sure enough, the huge circular canopy, like a big top without walls, was shivering and lifting in the gusting rain, straining at its tethers.

‘A triumph of illusion over practicality,’ Hugh murmured, getting out his notebook and writing the phrase down. He’d been commissioned by a newspaper to write his impressions of the day.

Isabel struggled to open her umbrella, but the wind took hold of it and swung her round, so she gave up and tightened her rainhood. To one side of the exhibition area, masking the ugly lines of the railway bridge, was a display of giant coloured balls, like a child’s abacus. ‘Oh, I like those,’ she said. ‘And the fountains.’ The waterspouts gushed every which way in the gale so that anyone near them was at risk of a soaking.

This is the new Britain, she thought. We’re finally leaving the dowdiness behind. She tried not to think of the ugly old London hinterland, the brooding hulk of Waterloo station visible between gaps in the bright festival buildings, the acres of sooty houses with their villainous smoking chimneys beyond.

‘Where shall we begin?’ Hugh asked, offering her his arm. ‘Why don’t we visit the Dome first of all, before the shenanigans begin. At least we’ll be dry under there.’

Despite her pleasure at being there, Isabel was tired. It had been a difficult week at the office and she’d not been sleeping well. Now she clung to Hugh to avoid slipping as they crossed the vast expanse of concrete, shiny with rain.

The weather was a terrible shame for the opening day and its ceremonies. Great walls of rain blew across the concourse, the sort of rain that wets right through, dulling the bright plastic seaside colours of the striped pavilions, the automatons and the merry-go-rounds. They passed a tribe of half-drowned donkeys, waiting for custom with all the endurance of their breed. ‘Look at them!’ Isabel exclaimed. ‘Surely no one would hire one in this weather.’

‘A display of British stoicism too far,’ Hugh agreed as they reached the shelter of the Dome of Discovery.

‘Are the poor troops really going to parade about in this? We’re not all as long-suffering as the donkeys.’

They wandered about under the wind-tossed marquee for an hour or so, looking at displays about British discoveries, famous people and their achievements. It felt like being in the bowels of a great ship, the roof shifting and sighing overhead as though with the movement of wind and sea, and this compounded Isabel’s feeling of lightheadedness. After a while, Florence Nightingale seemed to blur with Sir Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin and she couldn’t care less about any of them. She found herself staring blankly at an empty showcase, its shelves covered modestly with coloured paper.

‘They haven’t finished putting everything up, have they? Darling, you look cold,’ Hugh said. ‘Why don’t we get you something hot to eat?’ They hurried over to a large tent that housed the café. Here she ate soup and an omelette and was able to recover a bit.

‘You are a bit pale, you poor old thing. We won’t stay too much longer, but I really ought to walk round quickly and get a sense of everything. Shall I leave you here and come back later?’

‘No, I’ll come. I do feel a little better now.’

The weather was clearing slightly and the place was beginning to feel crowded. As Hugh and Isabel trailed round the sights, the sun even made a brief appearance, so that all the bright colours gleamed and the shiny ground threw up iridescent reflections of the buildings and sideshows. The layout was very eccentric, Isabel thought, not grand at all. In fact, there was something intimate about the jumbled way the different structures were juxtaposed. She and Hugh might leave a building through an inconspicuous doorway to find it opened onto a series of courtyards cheerful with murals. It was a voyage of continual discovery.

She loved watching the people. Groups of schoolboys would push past, intent on secret business of their own, to them the whole thing being like a giant playground. In one room Isabel admired a group of women fashionably dressed in jackets with wide shoulders and matching narrow skirts, finding them more interesting than the textiles machine being demonstrated. In another building, spectators tried samples of party pastries which a chef whisked piping hot from the very latest in modern ovens.

People had come from all over the world. On the escalator travelling back down into the Dome, Isabel watched eight members of an Indian family from father down to youngest child pass on the upgoing escalator, their dark eyes round with wonder. She smiled at them, but was alarmed that their bright figures were coming in and out of focus, the children’s shrill voices ringing round her head. She experienced the sensation of floating like a balloon, up towards the roof of the Dome and looking down on everything and everybody spread out below.

‘Isabel!’ she heard her husband cry, as though from very far away. ‘Isabel!’ And after that she knew nothing at all.

‘Isabel!’ When she came to consciousness, it was to a cacophony of sound and a throbbing pain in her side. Someone was calling her name. Hugh, it was Hugh. Her eyes fluttered open, but she couldn’t focus.

‘Lie still, Mrs Morton.’ It was a woman speaking, soothing, but at the same time firm. ‘The doctor will be here in a minute. He must check that we’ve not broken anything.’

‘I don’t think I have,’ she said, concentrating on a pair of shrewd blue eyes. She tried to sit up. She felt a little sick, and her hip hurt, but she thought she’d only bruised it.

‘Isabel, thank God.’ Hugh’s face appeared before her and she fell into his arms.

‘Did I faint?’ she asked him.

‘Yes, on the escalator,’ he said, kissing her face. ‘If it hadn’t been so crowded I dread to imagine how far . . .’

‘It’s not very helpful to think that, sir.’ It was the nurse again, brisk now that it was apparent her patient was perfectly all right. ‘It was only a tiny little faint. Once the doctor’s here and has had a look at your wife, I suggest you take her straight home. Fainting is something that often happens to women in her condition.’

‘My condition?’ Isabel stared at the woman, who looked rather disconcerted.

‘I’m sorry. It was only a guess, but you have that look about you.’

Her meaning was clear in Isabel’s mind.

‘I can’t be,’ she said, almost fainting again with surprise. ‘It’s impossible.’

‘My congratulations, Mrs Morton,’ said the young doctor in his Kensington surgery, ten days later. ‘The test results have come back and I can confirm the good news. It’ll be the end of December, if we’ve got your dates right. A Christmas baby. What could be more special?’

Isabel’s face was a mask of misery. She didn’t want a baby. Not now, it would ruin everything.

‘Now come, come,’ he said, patting her knee. ‘I know you’re feeling unwell, but I can assure you that everything should proceed normally. Thousands of women every day have babies with very little trouble at all.’ He stopped, aware that he wasn’t carrying his audience.

‘I don’t know how it happened,’ she said, bewildered, and seeing his man-of-the-world smile, rushed on: ‘No, no, I understand the process, but you see, my husband was very careful. He uses French letters.’

The doctor started to look a little uneasy, now that he saw his patient really was unhappy.

‘They are not, unfortunately, infallible,’ he said gently. ‘Cheer up. It might have happened a little sooner than you’d have liked, but children would have come along at some point, eh? You’ll get used to it, I promise. Or is it your husband who’s nervous? He can always call in to see me. That’s the ticket.’

She remembered Hugh’s face when they’d got home from the festival and they’d discussed what the on-site nurse had implied. He’d been as surprised as she was, but then, she supposed the only word to have described his expression was proud – yes, he’d looked proud, and as the days passed and her pregnancy was confirmed, he frequently told her how delighted he was. It was only she who was sunk in gloom, and it wasn’t just due to the onset of nausea and the episodes of lightheadedness, which continued to plague her for the next fortnight. It was the idea of a baby itself. It would get in the way of everything, especially her work. She had vaguely imagined that they’d have children sometime, but not for years and years. She’d not chosen this baby. It had insinuated itself into her body without permission, and when it was born it would take over her life as she’d seen Lydia, whose birth had also been unplanned, take over her mother’s.

The dawn light coming through the curtains would find her sleepless, her mind alert and anxious, as it grappled with this new reality. Her body felt different; it wasn’t hers any more. It had abandoned its usual secret harmonies and was singing a new song, one which she’d given it no permission to sing. Her body was at odds with her mind: her breasts tingled uncomfortably all the time, her nerves thrummed with electricity.

Pregnancy revolted her in various ways. The tang of metal was constant in her mouth. The next time she arose early and made a cup of tea, hoping to dispel the nausea, she spat out the first mouthful. It tasted of fish. At a launch party Berec took her to, she sipped a glass of wine and screwed up her face. After that she stuck to gin. The tiredness was the worst thing, though. She dragged herself through the days, and any glimpse of her face, oatmeal-grey, in a mirror would send her hunting for her powder puff. Nothing, of course, was said to anyone yet, but she knew that Trudy, at least, had her suspicions. The older woman was too reserved to say anything, but sometimes Isabel caught her curious glances.

It was a couple of weeks after the doctor’s confirmation that she was indeed two months’ pregnant that she and Hugh paid a visit to her family. They were on the way back from lunch with the Steerforths, who had recently moved house down to Kent. Constance and Victor, whose wedding the Mortons had attended shortly after their own, were also there, and Constance announced at lunch that she and Victor were expecting a happy event. Her obvious happiness, her ethereal glow, the protective way Victor reached for her hand as she delivered the news, so touched and at the same time horrified Isabel because it contrasted with her own feelings, that she could barely get out her congratulations. The men smoked cigars on the terrace while the Steerforths’ four-year-old girl Sally ran about in the garden, drowning flowers with a toy watering can, and the women drank China tea in the drawing room, the French windows standing open. Joan Steerforth gave Constance a liturgy of advice about everything from vitamins to layettes, and Isabel listened, a fixed smile on her face.

‘I hope we aren’t boring you, Isabel,’ Joan said, noticing. She and Constance were still nervous with Hugh’s independent-minded new wife. They never knew what to say to her, though they felt they were doing their best. ‘I’m sure a baby will happen for you soon.’ Isabel nodded and said nothing rather than say something she’d later regret.

When the men came in from the garden, Hugh stood behind her chair and massaged Isabel’s neck. Though finding this public show of affection irritating, she forced herself not to pull away.

She’d seen the pain in his eyes about the way she’d withdrawn into herself over the last few weeks and felt awful that she’d caused it, yet couldn’t help herself. She’d try to go to bed before him, no hardship given how tired she was, and curl up, pretending to fall asleep straight away if he came to join her, but after he fell asleep her tears would silently soak the pillow. Last night, though, she’d allowed him to roll her over and had buried her face in his neck as he made gentle love to her. The tenderness helped, but it did not allay the tide of anger and frustration about the coming child.