With No Crying (9 page)

“Oh, I don’t know.” Alison’s fingers were flashing through and around the pink wool for Miranda’s non-existent baby, and her face glowed, madonna-like, in the last of the sunset. “After all, Iris, she does really love him. Well, she must, mustn’t she?—look at that time on the Underground…!”

They all laughed uproariously, with delighted reminiscence. Clearly, whatever had happened between this Keith and this Christine on the Underground had been rich enough, and bizarre
enough, to have become a household joke, a delightful in-group reference, welding them together in shared merriment.

For the newcomer, though, these sort of exchanges were most tantalising. You couldn’t keep
on
saying, who’s Topsy, and
which
time on the Underground, and where do the bathroom curtains come in?—it would be just too tedious for the rest of them. Oh, well; that’s the way it was, being a new girl. Miranda would just have to sit quietly, listening, picking up what she could, and piecing it together, until gradually, as the days went by, it would all become clear to her, and she, too, would be sharing in the gossip and the laughter…

As the days went by… But for her, Miranda, the days
weren’t
going to go by, not more than one or two of them, anyway. By tomorrow, or the day after at latest, she must be gone.

And when it was all over, when Alison’s knitting needles clicked no longer; when Belinda’s fairy-godmother predictions ceased, and the girls chattered about her no more, then Baby Caroline would be gone, too. Gone in some final, irrevocable way which despite the abortion, despite everything, had somehow, as yet, not quite happened.

*

“Coffee, anyone?” Belinda was on her feet, numbering off the assembled company without reference to the replies—it wasn’t as if anyone ever did say “no” to this sort of offer.

“Black for you, Iris?” she opined; “and you too, Merve, if you’re really going to be rewriting that chapter all night.
Milk-and-
a-dash for you, Miranda, it’s better for the baby; remember what Tim said about too much caffeine… No, no love, you stay where you are, I’ll do it. Why don’t you put your feet up?—move over, Merve, and let Miranda have the whole of the settee. She’s the one who’s pregnant, not you… Yes, I
know
that writing a novel is as painful as giving birth, you’ve told us about ten million times, but all the same, it can’t give you varicose veins, now can it!

“
I
haven’t got varicose veins, either,” Miranda was beginning, with a little laugh; but Iris interrupted her:

“Funny you’re having so little trouble with your legs, isn’t it?” she remarked pleasantly. “No cramps. No swollen ankles. Nothing. My sister had all sorts of aches and discomforts in the last month—although she never got to half your size! You’ve been awfully lucky, haven’t you?”

Was Miranda imagining it, or was there in the older girl’s pleasant, conversational tone a hint of something other than ordinary, kindly interest? This was not the first time that Iris had called attention in a perfectly bland and casual sort of way to some feature of Miranda’s condition which struck her—so she claimed—as being just slightly different from the norm. She couldn’t, like Tim, lay claim to any specialised medical training in the field, but she did seem to possess an unconscionable number of sisters, cousins and girlfriends, whose pregnancies had every one of them differed in some small but disconcerting way from Miranda’s.

“You’re carrying very high, aren’t you, Miranda?” she’d remarked only yesterday, eyeing Miranda up and down as she stood at the cooker, stirring the big pan of soup thereon. “Usually, it tends to drop during the last month, and you go quite a noticeably different shape. The head
is
engaged, isn’t it? It should be, by now.”

Up to a point, Miranda was well able to counter expertise with expertise, so thoroughly had she read up the subject during recent weeks. But this was a new one to her.

“Oh yes. Oh, I think it is,” she answered hastily; and at that very moment Tim walked into the kitchen. By some unfortunate chance it always seemed to happen that, despite his long hours at the hospital, Tim invariably chanced to be around, and within hearing, just when Iris was making her casual but disconcerting observations.

“What’s this about the head not being properly engaged?” he asked sharply, looking from Miranda to Iris, and then back to Miranda again. “Was that what they said, at your last check-up?”—and then, with a sudden sharpening of anxiety: “You
are
going to your check-ups still, aren’t you Miranda? I know you told us the hospital you’re booked into is miles away, but all the same—listen, I’ll tell you what! I’ll drive you there. Just let me know
when your next appointment is, and I’ll get the time off somehow … you shouldn’t be travelling that sort of distance on public transport at this stage. Besides, I’d like to have a word with your doctor … there’s just one or two things I’m not quite happy about … Oh, now, sweetie, there’s no need to look so horrified! I don’t mean there’s anything wrong with the baby, I’m sure it’s fine, absolutely fine! It’s just—well—with your parents out of the picture like this, and you so determined to keep it that way—well,
someone’s
got to see that you’re being properly looked after. Surely you can see that?

“So go look at your appointment card, there’s a good kid, and we’ll fix it right now. The only time I absolutely
can’t
do is Thursday afternoon, between two and four…”

A
ND THUS IT
came about that it was on Thursday afternoons, between two and four, that a certain non-existent Dr Fergusson held his mythical ante-natal clinic at a St Benedict’s Hospital of infinitely indeterminate location. Though Miranda’s first visit to this establishment was exhausting in many ways, and involved sheltering for two hours in a station waiting room as well as mooching round and round unfamiliar streets until the requisite number of hours had been filled, she nevertheless managed to arrive back at the flat in good spirits, and full of the news that this Dr Fergusson had pronounced her to be perfectly O.K.

Rejoicings all round. Anxiety levels down to zero. Life resumed its happy-go-lucky routine until, almost before she knew it,
next
Thursday was upon her, and off Miranda had to go again, reluctantly this time, and with glum anticipation of the long, tedious hours ahead. Five of them at least would have to be whiled away, for so remote had she made St Benedict’s sound—to explain why nobody had ever heard of it—that she could not also claim that it could be reached by public transport in anything less than one and a half hours, at the very least. So three hours’ travelling had to be presumed, on top of the two hours spent hanging about among all those non-existent maternity cases with their non-existent symptoms, ranging from disembodied blood-pressure to spectral haemorrhoids. Last time, Miranda had fallen down a bit on these sort of details, and Iris had expressed mild surprise that she knew so little about her fellow patients, even after all these months of attending ante-natal clinic together. And so this time, Miranda was determined to make good the deficiency, and spent most of her five hours in the public library looking up Obstetrics and Home Midwifery, to such good effect
that even Iris could not fault her. As she talked, she even began to feel herself that all these detailed anecdotes of her afternoon at the clinic must, in some sense, be true; including Dr Fergusson’s reiterated assurances that she was getting on fine, nothing to worry about at all; and the baby likewise. And it did seem perfectly plausible: in this non-existent world of non-existent mothers and visionary symptoms, the non-existent Baby Caroline fitted in like a dream.

All the same, her report on this occasion, detailed and
reassuring
though it was, did not quite allay her friends’ anxiety as her last week’s account had done. She was now (by her own calculation) more than a week overdue, and though they were very kind, and very, very reassuring, she could feel, this time, a build-up of anxiety, and indeed of puzzlement, which nothing could stem. When Thursday came round for the third time, and she set off yet again on her futile and increasingly implausible errand, she knew, with secret inner panic, that it was for the last time. She could not keep it up much longer. Before next Thursday came,
something
would have had to happen. What, exactly, it would be, she did not even dare to wonder.

Meantime, there was today to be got through. Five hours, to be filled up somehow, somewhere.

In the park, it was too hot. In the library, it was too boring. She’d gone in there with the intention of relaxing in the quiet and the coolness, whiling away the long afternoon by reading the papers, or maybe browsing along the shelves until she came across something amusing enough, or gripping enough, to
distract
her mind from its preoccupations, ever more insistent as day followed day.

But it was no use. She could concentrate on nothing. Sitting at one of the empty, polished tables in the quiet room, her book unread in front of her, all she could do was think, think, think. The same old thoughts, over and over again, without respite, and leading nowhere. By now, her brain was like a gramophone record, going round and round, senselessly, in the same old grooves, until suddenly it screeched to a halt, in the exact same place, time after time: the place from which there was no further
to go. Then, back to the beginning again—on … and on … and on…

Already, the baby was more than two weeks overdue; her friends at the Squat were growing more and more bothered about her day by day, more and more concerned and puzzled. Tim, in particular, armed with professional knowledge which was proving impossible to laugh off, was becoming more and more insistent; only last night, he’d been on at her in a big way. What were they
doing
about her at that damn hospital, he’d demanded, quite angrily. Hadn’t they said anything about an induction? Or having her in for observation? What the hell did they think they were playing at? And don’t give him that one about having “got her dates wrong”—hadn’t they told her almost three weeks ago that the baby was even then eight pounds or over? How
could
they let it drag on like this, without so much as taking her in for a proper investigation?—and who
was
this damn doctor, anyway? Was he a qualified obstetrician? For two pins, Tim would ring him up himself, medical etiquette or no medical etiquette…

Two pins. That’s not much of a bulwark to stand between yourself and total, irretrievable disaster. If Tim
did
ring up this non-existent Dr Fergusson (and who knew that there might not be such a person?) in this non-existent hospital, and started cross-questioning him about his non-existent patient… At this point, Miranda’s imagination stopped dead, refusing, like a recalcitrant horse, to take so impossible a fence. It baulked, veered sideways, reared, and refused again. Any direction—any direction at all—except this one.

So suppose she simply disappeared, as she’d originally planned? Disappeared; vanished from their lives for ever,
without
a word of explanation? Apart from the monstrous ingratitude of such a course, there was no chance, any longer, that it would work.

“I’d ring them up myself,” Tim had threatened, worried and frowning; and if this was the way he felt about the mere non-arrival of the baby, then how was he going to react if Miranda herself (still, as he would suppose, in this precariously overdue condition) were simply to vanish?

He’d ring up every hospital in London, that’s what he’d do. And as soon as he’d satisfied himself that both Dr Fergusson and his ante-natal clinics were figments of the imagination, then, inevitably, he would ring the police.

There seemed no chance that Miranda was not, by now,
somewhere
in the police records as a Missing Person; no chance, either, that it would take them long to match up Tim’s description of her with that which her parents must have given many days earlier.

Within twenty-four hours, Tim would know everything. He would know about the abortion: about her craven and despicable surrender to parental pressure. He would remember her empty boasting that first night in the car, her phoney heroics; would remember, too, the way he’d been taken in by it all.

“Christ, but you’re a plucky kid!” he’d said—she could still recall the respect, the wonder in his voice—“I’ve never heard anything like it! Every other girl I’ve ever known would have chickened-out right from the word go!”

As she, Miranda, had in fact chickened-out; and soon, terribly soon, he was going to know it. Those eyes that in the darkness of the car had been shining with admiration for her courage—what was their expression going to be when he learned the truth about her cowardice and lies? When he learned that his sympathy, his kindness, his professional concern were become a mockery, a laughing stock?

It
mustn’t
happen! It
mustn’t
!
Surely there was
some
way…?

*

Already it was five o’clock, and the library was beginning, gently but relentlessly, to close, with soft-footed assistants gliding purposefully this way and that, hell bent on the polite and soundless disturbance of everyone. Thrusting her book back on the shelf as randomly as she’d extracted it, Miranda gathered up her sparse belongings and stumbled out into the sunshine.

The glare was terrific after the muted coolness of the reading room; the heat struck at her as if she had stepped through into an oven. She would have liked to go straight home and run a cold bath, but of course this was out of the question. There was still an
hour to fill in before she dared reappear at the flat, and face, once again, the thickening miasma of concern and puzzlement, the barrage of kindly, anxious questions.

Could
she face them? As she moved, unseeing, through the sweating, swaying crowds Miranda visualised, all over again, how it would be. The anxiety; the forced cheerfulness; the pretence that there was nothing to worry about. The cossetting, too, the cushions and the cups of tea, and the mounting bewilderment.

But didn’t the doctor say
anything,
Miranda, dear? Isn’t he worried about you by now?—I mean, of course, there’s nothing to worry about
really,
heaps of people go overdue, but all the same, Tim did say…

Slower grew Miranda’s steps, and slower; and the heat beat down relentlessly on her smooth, glowing young skin and her shining hair.

What
could
she do? What
could
she? Even suicide was no answer, for when they identified her dead body, as of course they would, they would identify her deception with it, as surely as in life. Tim, and all the rest of them, would still learn of her cowardice and her treachery, blazoned, as likely as not, over every newspaper in the land.
Everyone
would know.

No, death was no solution. What was it John Donne had said, in his Defence of Suicide?—“Methinks I have the keys to my prison in mine own hand”—which is well enough, no doubt, if all that is the matter with you is melancholia and debts.

But for Miranda there were no such keys, her prison was co-extensive with the entire reading public—not to mention television-viewers as well—and the duration of her sentence was the life span of all who had ever known her, and who would carry to their graves the memory of her lies, her treachery, and her craven, unforgiveable surrender.

What
could
she do? What
could
she?

Slower and slower still. Her feet dragged on the hot pavement, and with every step in the direction of the Squat, her whole body flinched, her stomach churned. The streets were growing familiar now as she approached the environs of her current domicile; and at last, right on the corner of the road, she found herself coming
to a halt, stopped in her tracks by a thought so tremendous, a plan so bold, and yet so simple and so obvious, that it was amazing it hadn’t occurred to her before.

“I must have the baby tonight,” she said to herself; and quietly turned about and walked back the way she had come. Anyone watching would have assumed she’d suddenly remembered some extra item on her shopping list, so abrupt was the change of direction, and so coolly purposeful the expression on the smooth young face, tanned almost golden by the stored-up sun of all these long, dry summer days.