Excerpt

The Delivery Room

CHAPTER THREE
May

It was not the source of shame it had been once. There would have been a time, not that long ago—ten years? a bit more?—when to reveal such a thing to anybody would have been tantamount to declaring you were certifiable, one small step away from the asylum. It was seen, at the very least, as a rank admission of failure. Now, though, the country had softened, had Americanized she supposed. Caroline had not told many of her friends that she went—just Eleanor, who knew everything—but Mummy knew, of course, and had been sweet about it. She was quite modern, actually, her mother, in spite of appearances. She could say to Caroline, “I'm sure the therapist must be helpful about that,” naturally, easily, as if she thought nothing of pouring out one's most humiliating secrets to an Eastern European woman with a cold war accent in a soup-scented flat in Camden Town. Mummy was a good sport. More comfortable, it sometimes seemed, than Caroline was herself with the presence of Mira in her week.

Olivia. Or Sebastian. Or Cosmo. There had been a time when Caroline thought only of having a daughter. She had no intention of having a son, boys were so noisy and dirty and even if they weren't, like Hugo, they had other monstrous qualities, no loyalty or decency or capacity to listen, it was always them and their concerns and their discussions of god knows what. Money. Politics (as if it mattered). Computers. But recently, to appease the gods—not that she believed, exactly; it was a feeling, rather, a superstition; in the past few years she had become entirely too superstitious, everything carried secret meaning, a number, a day of the week, a color worn, a torn headline from the daily news—Caroline had decided quite clearly that she did not mind if it was a girl or a boy. She would welcome a boy, too. She was open-minded. Did they hear that, the fickle gods of fertility? She would welcome a boy! She would welcome triplets! She wanted a child. She needed a child. She wanted—please, someone, please God, please Dr. Beech, please Mira—she wanted someone to hold.

And yet, as she pulled up in the Range Rover—it was absurd in London, on the narrow streets of Hampstead where they lived, but Hugo had to have such a thing for their weekends in the country, it fed some fantasy of his to return with a cluster of pungent, shot-addled pheasant for a late Sunday supper—she did feel some shame. Parking across the road from the dreary sixties mansion block to see Mira, she felt as often did that there must be something wrong with her, to be still making these journeys, a year on. A year on from their near divorce and she was still driving to Camden Town one morning a week to sit in a room staring at some odd Chinesey abstraction on the wall. Tell horrible stories about Hugo and issue increasingly distressed bulletins about their failure to have a baby. (As if a baby could make up for that woman, Miranda, and however many others; and yet, a baby would make up for it, Caroline counted on that). She was beginning to feel rather ashamed about having not yet sorted it out. All right, a therapist, perhaps for a small amount of time, just to get you through a rough patch, marriage not exactly what one had hoped for, family not taking shape as it might; but now, surely, by now she should have managed to pull herself together, shouldn't she? What good was it to talk?

There was some shame in the other too, of course, but Caroline had sooner got over that. IVF, like the initials of some splinter terrorist group, the infertility victory front, waging a busy war against the uncooperative sperm and eggs. They were quite open about it, she and Hugo, or had been in the beginning when they were sure it would work—“Bacon, sperm, eggs, and sperm” Hugo had joked at dinners, that was how open they'd been at the beginning. It had seemed science fictional and almost absurd, a medical gimmick, and they were young(ish) and thought it bound to work, it had for various people they knew. Test-tube babies, there were hundreds of them around these days. That phrase “test-tube babies”, gone now, she remembered it from her childhood—seemed far more direct and graphic than the euphemistic “IVF”. How old had she been when that first one was in the news? A teenager? The newspapers were full of it, the first Test Tube Baby (Louise wasn't she called?), it made one think of Bunsen burners and small glass beakers and other antiquated items of equipment in Miss Bellhouse's Chemistry class at school. Those funny green aprons they wore for “lab” work which might or might not involve petri dishes. Now girls, Miss Bellhouse in her commanding, troops-gathering bray, Today we will be combining cadmium and liquid hydrogen to make test tube babies. Organize yourselves in pairs, please. Any questions? This will be on the O-level, girls, so you'd best pay attention. Please write up the results for prep and explain whether you made a girl or a boy, and how. And please name the babies as your heading. (Do use a ruler for underlining, I can't bear wobbly lines on the page.) Olivia. Or Sebastian. Or Cosmo. Nothing too silly please, girls, do stay away from Flavia or Bertrand.

Caroline sighed. She hated to be early, that pathetic minute standing outside the mansion block door like a tradesman selling magazines, or schoolboys raising money for a halfterm trip to the Soviet Union—Russia again now, don't forget. Hugo rolled his eyes in utter exasperation when she issued some cretinism like that. There were times you could see him literally seething with embarrassment to hear Caroline speak. She waited till it was five minutes past the hour, rang the bell, and tripped on in.

And back to the Aristocrat. A long neck, spidery limbs, mouth wide and imperious, dark hair falling about her shoulders like an elegant ermine. Not to Mira's eye attractive; Mira found the fashionable thinness anemic, and precisely did not associate it with those feminine virtues to be resisted or succumbed to: the desire to feed and nurture, the ability to bear children, the offering of oneself as pillow and solace to men and to children and to those in distress. Thin people seemed to Mira uncomfortable. Who would want to embrace them? Mira accepted that this view put her drastically outside of this culture and its values, its images of beauty, but she could not feel otherwise. She did not consider herself beautiful, of course, simply because she was plump (though she knew that her plumpness was an integral source of Peter's adoration); she had had a haunting, round-eyed look when she was younger that had been called striking, but as she aged she had become merely wise-looking. But she found it hard to see the Aristocrat as beautiful either. Other people apparently did. Or had. The past few years of Hugo's infidelities had keened the edge of the Aristocrat's weight and threatened to turn her thinness into an unhappy spindly spinsterdom.

If you want to have children, Mira sometimes wanted to say to the woman in simple terms, in her own tongue, no prevarications, no circumlocutions—you should eat. Eat! Make room in yourself to give the child a home. If your body feels ready for children rather than fashion, perhaps it will understand its new purpose. If Mira could have rewritten the rules for these measured, deliberate exchanges as she occasionally wished to do, she would first have fed the Aristocrat. Started each session with a hot cup of soup: a chicken broth base, probably, as chicken broth solves everything, and dumplings to give the lean woman some softness and shape.

“Good morning,” the Aristocrat began, and “Good morning, ” Mira replied, awaiting her patient's first significant words, the ones that would launch them into an exchange they had both agreed to, that Mira would be paid for, in which an attempt would be made to carve out some truths of the kind not found in ordinary conversation.

Copyright © 2006 Sylvia Brownrigg