With No Crying (11 page)

Poor old Norah! What a come down!

Janine smiled pityingly, and treated herself to a second little drink, as if in celebration.

M
EANWHILE, FAR AWAY
on the other side of London, Merve was staring resentfully into his typewriter, trying to piece together the trampled remnants of dialogue that had been going so marvellously last night before the interruption. He had just got it exactly the way he wanted it, in all its mordant realism, and had been about to immortalise it in a top copy and three carbons, when—wham!—there had imploded into the flat the Great Happening, scattering before it all traces of consecutive thought, and drowning inspiration in squeals of imbecile amazement.

“A
girl
!”
they’d shrieked, back and forth through the juddering doorways. “A
girl
!
Isn’t that
wonderful
!”

The only other thing it
could
have been was a boy, Merve reflected sourly. The chances were almost exactly fifty-fifty. This idiot wonderment was almost more than he could stomach, especially on top of all that he’d put up with already.

It wasn’t that he disliked Miranda, or had resented her unheralded arrival, pregnant, on their doorstep. On the contrary, he quite liked the girl, and during the long hours when the two of them were alone together, with the others all out at work, they got on famously. Being left in Miranda’s company was the nearest thing to being left alone that you could hope to find this side of Paradise. She didn’t bother him in any way at all, neither waking him before midday, nor trying to tell him her troubles; nor even asking how the book was going. And if she ever felt bored during the long, silent afternoons of dust-laden August heat, she had the decency not to tell him so. There is nothing so disturbing to creative genius as someone else’s boredom.

Yes, Miranda was okay. Her pregnancy was okay too, as far as Merve was concerned; he had nothing against unmarried motherhood,
or indeed any other kind. Even the baby might turn out to be okay, for all Merve knew to the contrary.

But what was
not
okay, and hadn’t been, right from the very beginning, was the way the rest of them had chosen to act towards their new flatmate: it made him feel quite sick, though of course he’d never dare say so. It was like a mixture of worshipping the Virgin Mary and fussing over a geranium cutting, he sometimes reflected sourly, as he listened to the soft, fluting patter about the baby this and the baby that, the baby, the baby, the baby, on and on, evening after evening, while he was trying to work. And then there was Tim, with his worried, semi-professional frownings and questionings whenever he happened along—really, it was enough to get on
anyone’s
nerves, even if they
weren’t
trying to write a novel about life as it really is.

And now this! Naturally, Merve had accepted the fact that the whole thing was going to end, sooner or later, in a baby. That was inevitable, and in no way Miranda’s fault. You couldn’t blame
her
for the whole tedious business being the way it was, because that’s how it had been for millions of years, in accordance with evolutionary forces which presumably knew what they were about, or if they didn’t it was no use Merve complaining.

But all the same, why
now
?
And why like
this
?
Such a fuss, such a chattering! Such a banging of doors, such a stampeding of footsteps, such a clamouring of shrill, feminine voices, swooping, rising, falling, like gulls when the catch is in…

Or do
all
babies arrive like this, roughshod over everyone’s convenience, in this disruptive, time-consuming and nerve-jangling manner, laying waste everyone’s plans and scrunching work routines underfoot like so much spilled sugar…?

Once again, Merve found himself wondering what the hell Evolution thought it was at, launching such a process on the biosphere without a word of consultation with any of the creatures involved? Again, he got no answer. Moodily, he stared some more at his blank sheet of paper, and there was no answer there, either.

Birth, copulation and death: are not these the very stuff of all great writing? So why is it that not one of the three, when they
actually occur in real life, is in the least compatible with getting anything written at all, great or otherwise?

God, what a night! Although the flat was quiet enough now, this morning, with all of them off to work at last, Merve still shuddered at the recollection of how it had been. Just after nine in the evening it had started, and at first, he’d paid no attention. He’d heard the outer door slam, and ignored it; he’d heard the uprush of chatter, like a thousand starlings; but no sooner had he succeeded in ignoring this, too, than the door of his room was flung open and they were upon him, cutting a swathe of elephants through every idea he had ever had…

“Swathe” of elephants, indeed! Thus had they succeeded in mucking up and making nonsense of that marvellous metaphor that had been shimmering on the edge of his consciousness just before the moment of impact.
Now
look at it…!

“A girl!” “A
girl,
Merve!” “Oh, Merve,
listen
!—Miranda’s had a girl!” “A
girl
!
Miranda’s had…!”

Miranda, Miranda, Miranda.

A girl, a girl, a girl.

So what? So what? So what?

Gritting his teeth, and lifting his fingers from the typewriter keys, Merve tried to be nice about it.

It had gone on half the night: and then this morning, long before his usual hour, Merve had been wrenched out of deep sleep by a renewed caterwauling over some further message which some telephone-owning neighbour had brought hot-foot to their door before eight in the morning.

“
Tomorrow
?
Oh, how super!” someone bellowed—voices always seem so painfully loud when you’ve only just woken: and then someone else (Alison, by the sound of it) shrieked something about some pink nylon net at Jones’s Sale, and about doing the gathers this evening…

God! What was the
point
of having no telephone if this sort of thing could still happen?

The outer door slammed; and slammed again. That must be the last of them, for there were no more voices. But the air still rocked with the haste and purposefulness of them all. Further
attempt to sleep was futile; there was nothing for it but to get up—actually
up
—while it was as yet barely nine in the morning.

Even now, it was only ten. Bleary-eyed, and with consciousness returning as painfully as blood into frostbitten fingers, Merve had made himself a mug of coffee, and was now sitting sluggishly in front of his manuscript, adding a comma here, scrubbing an adjective there. But it was no use. It never was at this sort of unearthly hour. His wavering genius needed time to recover from the ravages of a healthy night’s sleep. It had to be humoured like a crotchety invalid, coaxed back to consciousness gently, compassionately, and by gradual stages. It needed time, it needed coffee, it needed solitude.

Sighing, Merve turned back to the bit he’d written yesterday, before all the commotion had begun. He tried to recapture the sense of excitement, the stirring of creative power, with which he had launched into the tense and dramatic scene in which Henry falls into the clutches of the predatory older woman who was to drive him, had he but known it (if he
had,
of course, many thousands of words would have been saved, but then where would have been the story line?) to the verge of suicide. Black-haired, black-eyed, blasé and sophisticated to the nth degree, and with a creamy olive skin smooth as a something-or-other, not peach, too hackneyed, she’d found herself strangely fascinated by Henry’s unspoiled youth and innocence…

“Strangely” was the word. Would
any
woman, however predatory, find herself anything other than bored through the floor by unspoiled youth and innocence on this sort of scale? Why couldn’t Henry
say
something, for God’s sake? Something witty and amusing, preferably, to make this creature’s continued interest at least plausible?

Hell, why should he? Surely a fictional character (unlike his less fortunate counterpart in real life) should be entitled to turn to his author for a helping hand in this sort of all too familiar impasse?

“Fascinated by Henry’s witty and amusing conversation,” Merve wrote, “Myrtle (query Alicia?) allowed a small smile to
soften the corners of her thin, harshly-painted lips…” At which crucial moment, her creator became aware of a small sound.

Hell! Had one or other of them not gone to work after all? Just when he thought he really had got the flat to himself at last, with even Miranda out of the way? Which of them was it, and what did she think she was doing, knocking off work before eleven in the morning? What a way to run a country! Bloody bunch of skivers…!

Hearing his father’s familiar expostulations running through his own head like this was unnerving, and only went to show what a state he was in, with all these disruptions and upheavals. Really, it was too much! He found himself literally trembling at the enormity of the decision that now confronted him. Should he go and say “hullo” straight away to whoever it was, and get it over with, or should he stay doggo in here, in the hopes of missing the salutation altogether? The trouble with this last tactic was that though it might easily work—people often popped in and out without exchanging a word if they happened to be busy—it also easily mightn’t. If the intruder (for thus he viewed the fellow lodger who had invaded
his
part of the day) felt like exchanging a word with him, then exchange it she would; he was a sitting duck, in here with his typewriter, with no locks on the doors, and all this bloody togetherness thing, which worked out so well financially, but so badly on the spiritual level, or when you wanted to fry kippers in the pan they kept for bacon…

Waiting on tenterhooks lest someone come and say “Hullo” to you is every bit as disturbing as having them actually come and say it. Flinging caution to the winds, Merve took two strides towards the door—and then once more came to a halt. An awful thought had struck him.

Suppose it was
Miranda
out there, complete with baby! What should he
say
?
What should he
do
?
Merve had never spoken to a baby in his life, let alone one only a day old; and as to Miranda, he envisaged her as mysteriously and absolutely changed. A
mother,
now, just as his own mother was; a totally different category of being, and wholly outside his ken. For a full minute he stood there, in a state of pitiable and abject terror: though what,
exactly, he thought Miranda might do to him, or the baby either, he could not have explained.

Gradually, though, common sense began to seep in round the edges of his panic, and a certain cautious optimism. “Forty-eight hours!” someone had shouted during this morning’s bedlam, and the cry had been taken up: “Forty-eight hours…!” “Only forty-eight hours, isn’t that super…?” At the time, more than half asleep, Merve hadn’t bothered to make sense of the joyous, reiterated cry: but it was clear enough now. Miranda and the baby were to stay in hospital for forty-eight hours, of which—yippee!—not much more than twelve had as yet elapsed! It
couldn’t
be Miranda.

Emboldened by this thought, but still wary, Merve put his head round the door and listened. From the kitchen, he could hear the faint but unmistakable clink of crockery. The dresser drawer was opened, and then closed. The delicious aroma of fresh coffee, made from freshly ground beans, began to fill the air.

It was Iris. This much he might have guessed, actually, she being the only one who ever took the trouble to make coffee in the proper way. Wearing a sleeveless dress of brown and white striped cotton, very crisp and trim, she was sitting at the kitchen table sipping black coffee from one of the Wedgwood mugs, and studying with quiet intensity the newspaper outspread in front of her.

She looked up as Merve came in.

“Hullo: coffee?” she offered pleasantly, gesturing towards the percolator still bubbling softly: and then, as he clattered around finding himself mug, spoon, sugar, evaporated milk, she continued smoothly: “I suppose you’ve heard that the proud Mum will be back in residence tomorrow? Complete with offspring?”

Merve nodded dumbly. How could he not have heard? And heard, too, until his ears rattled with it, how the child had blue eyes, fair hair, and weighed nine and a half pounds—an exceptional weight, apparently, judging by the chirrups of awe and admiration that had accompanied the statistic, though in fact it wasn’t much heavier than an average sort of cat.

Was Iris really planning to tell him all this
again
…! Oh, God…!

But Iris, when she spoke, seemed to be talking more to herself than to him.

“The silly girl! There was no need for it to have weighed
that
much!” she remarked softly, with a sort of dry amusement; and Merve, momentarily startled out of his boredom, very nearly asked her what on earth she meant.

But he stopped himself just in time. She would only have answered, and then there he’d have been, with a
conversation
on his hands, the very thing he’d been trying so earnestly to avoid. Conversation was endemic in this place and, if you let it, would gobble up every moment of your free time, every ounce of your emotional energy. It would somehow lap up and trivialise the best and brightest of your creative ideas, nourishing itself on them like some gigantic spiritual tapeworm.

So Merve said nothing; just got himself out of the kitchen as rapidly as possible, slopping coffee over the edge of the mug as he went. And Iris, after giving him a swift, pitying glance, said nothing either.

For she, too, was preoccupied this morning. Carefully, she selected from the morning’s newspapers such pages as she was going to need, and tucked them into the back of the dresser drawer. She was neat and precise in all her movements, for she was an orderly person by nature—as indeed she needed to be, for these chaotic, free and easy households can only survive if somewhere in the background there is a clear and disciplined intelligence in charge. Without this, they will disintegrate within a week.

But Iris had not taken the whole day off from her fairly demanding job just to read the papers. There was a lot that she had to get through yet, one of the items involving a journey of a good many miles, right across London, and she was particularly anxious to be back in plenty of time to listen to the News.