The President’s Child

‘A pity Jason isn’t older. He could enter a Dandy Ivel double competition.’

‘I hardly think so,’ said Isabel. ‘He’s fair and Dandy Ivel looks fairly dark to me.’

‘Jason has the kind of hair that’ll get darker as he grows older,’ said Bobby’s mother, getting the elephant shape wrong. ‘I’m afraid these sandwiches look more like hedgehogs than elephants.’

‘Anyway,’ said Isabel, ‘I think Ivel will fade into insignificance pretty quickly. I hardly think he’ll get the presidential nomination.’

‘I think he will,’ said Bobby’s mother. ‘I did an evening course in political sociology. I think the women of America are longing for a husband figure. They haven’t had one since Kennedy. Dandy Ivel looks like the kind of man who’d take care of you.’

Homer came home with six frazzled children. They loved the sandwiches and ignored the cake. Jason threw jelly at the wall. He was over-excited. The parents came early and stood around drinking sherry. The children quarrelled over going-home presents. Bobby set up a roar, in the cloakroom. ‘I’m afraid Jason must have bitten him,’ Homer came back to apologise. Bobby’s mother took him huffily home, saying she always slapped for biting. Bobby had been a biter, but not for long. She’d seen to that. Scratching was one thing, biting another.

‘It’s not good,’ said Homer, when all had departed, supper had been eaten and night fallen. ‘Jason is aggressive.’

‘Perhaps it’s the lead in the London water,’ said Isabel.

‘No,’ said Homer. ‘No excuses. I think he’s disturbed.’

‘Disturbed!’ cried Isabel. ‘That’s ridiculous!’

‘Isabel,’ said Homer, ‘face it. He watched Superman II from the aisle, and when the usherette tried to make him sit in a seat he bit her ankle. There was a terrible scene.’

Isabel laughed.

‘It isn’t a laughing matter,’ said Homer. ‘I think he should see a child psychologist.’

‘What – Jason?’

‘It can’t do any harm, Isabel.’

‘I suppose not,’ said Isabel, but already she was terrified.

She had seen Jason as an extension of herself: flesh of her flesh, mind of her mind. But of course he was not. Jason, her child, was separated from her; the umbilical cord had been cut long ago but she had scarcely noticed. He no longer slept, ate, smiled, felt at her command. He did these things at his own prompting, not hers. She could no longer tuck him under her arm and run, should the going get bad. He could blame her for her decisions, dislike her for what she did, withdraw his love from her. Week by week he became less her perfect child and more his own imperfect master; yet still must suffer, as all children must suffer, because his mother’s love for him was not perfect either: had fallen away, in the light of his own growing independent will, from its moment of perfection, somewhere at the beginning.

Now here was Homer, who should love Jason, saying their son was imperfect and disturbed, implying the fault was hers. She could not protect Jason, because he was not hers to protect, being six and his own self. And she could not protect herself, because she was guilty.

‘Isabel,’ said Homer, alarmed by the expression on her face, ‘it’s no big deal. I just thought it might help. It does seem to me that Jason isn’t all that happy. We might be doing something wrong, between us. God knows what it is.

Perhaps it’s seeing you on the television screen when you ought to be here in the house.’

‘Ought to be?’

‘From Jason’s point of view, no one else’s. Christ, Isabel, he’s a kid of five.’

‘Six.’

‘Six. And Isabel, you’re under a strain yourself.’

‘Me?’

‘You slapped the poor child. Slapped him! And why? What was he doing wrong?’

‘Homer, I told him not to do something and he just went on doing it. There was a room full of screaming kids and bleating adults. I didn’t slap him hard, just enough so he’d listen.’

‘What was he doing?’

‘I can’t even remember. It wasn’t important. Homer, Jason and I are well within the limits of ordinary normal mother and child behaviour. Most mothers slap their children from time to time.’

‘I don’t think that’s true.’

‘Most children are rude, aggressive, disobedient and defiant some of the time.’

‘I don’t think that’s true either. And most children don’t refuse to sit in their cinema seat and then bite the usherette’s ankle when she tries to move them. There, you’re smiling! I think you’re acting something out through Jason, Isabel, really I do, and Jason is reacting badly to it.’

‘You mean I should see an analyst?’

‘Heaven forbid,’ said Homer, wearily, and Isabel felt she had been unreasonable.

‘Anyway,’ said Isabel, ‘we don’t know any child shrinks. They’re out of fashion.’

‘I can always find out through my office,’ said Homer. ‘What’s ten years out of date for you TV people, we publishers are just about cottoning on to.’

‘Homer,’ said Isabel, ‘I get the feeling you resent my job. Shouldn’t we be talking about that, and not shifting the whole problem on to poor little Jason?’

‘I think,’ said Homer, ‘we are nearer to having a row than we ever have been. Let’s go to bed.’

Homer and Isabel went to their white lacy bed with its delicate brass tracery at head and foot, in a bedroom with dark green walls and purple blinds. It was tidy because Homer kept it so. Isabel tended to leave her clothes where they fell. But she made the bed every day, lovingly and neatly, and even sometimes ironed the cotton sheets, when they came from the washing machine, because they were so pretty.

Homer forgave Isabel more quickly than Isabel forgave Homer. Or so it seemed. In fact, it was fear that kept Isabel lying stiffly on her back, her flesh shrinking from her husband’s, and not anger at all. But he was not to know that. ‘What’s the matter?’ said Homer. ‘Look, if it so upsets you I’ll never mention the matter of Jason and a shrink again.’

‘Good,’ said Isabel.

‘Then turn round and kiss me.’

‘No. I can’t. I don’t know why.’

‘You see,’ said Homer, ‘it wasn’t only that he bit the usherette and there was this fuss, but afterwards he denied it. He really honestly didn’t seem to remember it. That was what really got me. I don’t think the other kids noticed much. It was the bit when Superman throws the villain into the Coca-Cola sign. It was actually a shockingly violent film – not at all like Superman I, which was innocent.’

‘Sometimes,’ said Isabel, ‘I get the feeling we’re all being softened up for something, children and all.’

‘If we are,’ said Homer, ‘there’s nothing we can do about it, except look after our own.’

Isabel went to sleep and dreamed about the end of the world. Missiles flashed to and fro above her head, phallic every one. In the end, all was rubble.

She moaned and again Homer tried to take her in his arms and again she refused. Had that ever happened before? She could not remember but she did not think so. She did not want his flesh in hers. It was too dangerous: an opening she could not control. She was half asleep.

Upstairs Jason, as if responding to the tumult and upset of the night, woke and started to cry. Isabel, glad for once to be called fully into consciousness, got out of bed and went upstairs to see what was the matter. Jason was wide awake.

‘I had a nasty dream,’ he said.

‘What about?’

‘Bombs.’

‘You shouldn’t be so naughty through the day,’ said Isabel. ‘Then you wouldn’t punish yourself at night. It’s your dream, you know. You own it.’

She didn’t think he would understand, but he seemed to. He was open and receptive; a midnight child.

‘I wasn’t very naughty.’

‘Biting is naughty.’

‘It was my birthday. Bobby took my present.’

‘No. At the cinema. You bit there. A grown-up, too.’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘Daddy said you did.’

‘I didn’t.’

She didn’t pursue the matter. His blue eyes were wide and clear. They followed her as she moved about the room. So Dandy’s eyes had followed her. Every day, she thought, he grows more like Dandy. I never thought of that. I thought if the child took after anyone he would take after me. I thought that somehow you snatched a child from a man and that was that. I thought, moreover, that I would have a girl. That I would have a boy, and carry the father with me for ever and ever, was something I never envisaged.

She kissed him goodnight, settled him for sleep, and went back to bed.

‘Everything all right?’ asked Homer.

‘Fine,’ said Isabel.

3

Now. Washington’s clocks are five hours behind those of London. It was seven o’clock in the evening when, on the thirty-fifth floor of the Evans building, which towers over the rushing and romantic waters of the Potomac river and houses the overflow from the Russell Senate office building, Joe (Hot Potato) Murphy and Pete (Kitten) Sikorski resolved to work late on something that had just turned up on the print-out.

Joe and Pete had semi-official access to the big CIA computer along the river. Both were ex-Company men. Now they were part of the big new up-and-coming Ivel-for-President campaign team. Their days of Dirty Tricks were past. Joe and Pete worked tirelessly and logically for the IFPC and, so far, within the law. If both kept firearms in their office drawers, and bedroom shelves, and gun holsters beneath their left arms, both were licensed and entitled so to do. They were allies; kingmakers. They were devoted and loyal. Hot Potato and Kitten! Joe and Pete made more of their nicknames than did their familiars and friends, perhaps feeling the need for sympathetic magic to make themselves ordinary and kind, and more like other men.

‘Praise be,’ said Joe Hot Potato Murphy, staring at the coded print-out. He liked to emphasise his Irish origins. He cultivated the twinkle in his eye and the roguish charm of his manner. They disarmed the unwary.

‘Here’s the Australian bitch again. She’s moved up a notch to the Pay Good Attention file. What are our options here, Pete?’

Pete proposed and Joe disposed. Pete had one degree in economics and another one in law, and burn marks on his upper arms, to mark the spots where he had practised steeling himself against pain.

‘We disclose nothing,’ said Pete, ‘in case we blow something. This is a very sensitive area.’

‘It might be more sensitive than we can legitimately handle,’ said Joe.

‘Hell no,’ said Pete. ‘She’s just a woman like any other.’ Pete’s wife was a tall, pretty blonde who sprayed herself all over with deodorants four times a day, so as not to cause offence. If she stood still, which she seldom did, so busy was she in the pursuit of hygiene and physical perfection, that she appeared like a painting against the drawing-room wall, framed by drapes. Then the sound of her husband’s voice would activate her again, and her pretty hands would start patting and folding and tidying and replacing, and her long legs would scissor to and fro, and her manicured feet in their shiny shoes go clip-clip-clop on the tiled kitchen floor.

‘A feminist and a radical,’ warned Joe. ‘And her father’s a communist, now resident in Saigon. That doesn’t make her a woman like any other. Her show goes out live and she’s got a six-million audience hanging on her every word. And that doesn’t make her like just plain folks, either.’

‘We can take care of the talk show,’ said Pete.

‘We should have taken care of her,’ said Joe, ‘a long time ago.’

‘Joe,’ said Pete, ‘quit living in the past. She’s a wife and mother. We don’t wage war on women.’

‘It is an insult to the sweet name of womanhood,’ said Joe, ‘to call her a woman at all. A feminist and a radical! A wife, you say! Is a woman who makes her husband wash the dishes worthy of the name of wife? What sort of mother is it who makes her man change the baby’s nappy? We have some problem with definitions here!’

‘I hear you, Joe, I hear you.’

They talked like this for a while longer, using words as cloaks of darkness, the better to build the trivial into the significant; the easier to justify ill temper, neurosis and spite, and thus keep their good opinion of themselves. Now they made decisions. They would take appropriate precautionary measures, intensify the security ring around her, and wait and see how the cookie crumbled.

‘There are more ways than one,’ said Joe, ‘of crumbling cookies.’

And they both went home to their wives, comforted by the thought of their many options, first double-locking and otherwise securing their offices, which bristled with anti-bugging devices of one kind or another.

4

Buzz-buzz! Listen to the bees! A fuchsia hedge runs along the bottom of Wincaster Row, all the way from No. 1 to No. 31. There can’t be another fuchsia like it in all London. Six foot high, five foot broad, and a mass of scarlet flowers for most of the summer. What trick of soil and weather and intent produced it, I do not know.

I cannot see it now but I can hear it. The bees suck the flowers all summer long, humming and buzzing, quite overwhelmed by their discovery of such an extensive treat. I am sure they come from as far afield as Enfield, and Richmond, and Epping and Dulwich: from the green outer suburbs. For surely bees live in hives, and where in the crowded inner city is there room or time for anyone to keep beehives? Neighbours would complain.

Hilary suggested to the garden committee that the hedge be removed: she thought the bees were dangerous: she thought they might sting her little girl, Lucy. The garden committee looked at her in amazement, and explained that bees were good, and necessary to man’s survival.

‘What about woman?’ asked Hilary, triumphant.

That was when she was pregnant for the second time, having lapsed briefly into heterosexuality with a man who could be guaranteed to treat her badly and abandon her; which indeed he did, in the sixth month of her pregnancy.

Hilary then worried, throughout the seventh and eighth months, in case the baby turned out to be male, and as such designated as enemy and rejected by the lesbian friends on whom she now depended for help and support, and who gave it gladly but not unconditionally. Hilary could not bear the thought of handing a male baby out for adoption – a Caucasian male infant, a prize in the world of baby-bargaining would be handed out to the straightest of straight middle-class couples. And then she, Hilary, would be responsible for bringing into the world she was trying to reform the worst form of male oppressor. Nor could she damage little Lucy by exposing her to the brutality and aggression of a male brother. In the ninth month the only solution seemed to be to put down the baby at birth, if it should be male. She wept and writhed and told Jennifer, and Jennifer refused to speak to her any more.

‘She’s wicked!’ said Jennifer. ‘Wicked!’

‘She’s mad,’ was all Hope would say. ‘She’ll be better when the baby’s born. How could anyone look like that – tight to bursting – and not be slightly mad? Let’s hope it’s temporary.’

And Hope waved her scarlet, perfect fingernails in the vague direction of Hilary, who refused to wear the kind of full and blousing garment which would hide her extraordinary shape – she seemed to be without fat, and the baby lay inside her, with its folded form straining and outlined just beneath, it seemed, the skin of her belly.

When the baby was born, plopping easily into the world, it was, indeed, discovered to be a boy, and Hilary loved him very much, and little Lucy spent her time attending to its infant male needs; and Hilary’s friends were indeed scornful of its maleness; and Hilary’s lovers complained of the attention she paid it in the night; so Hilary renounced her lesbianism altogether, and thereafter had to put up with Jennifer’s rather patronising forgiveness, and the told-you-so attitude of Wincaster Row.

The new baby’s father, even, cautiously, came back from time to time to dandle it upon his knee. He took Lucy out as well.

‘I’m not one of your sissy men,’ he’d say. ‘I’m not one of those poncy men who dance attendance upon feminists and get their kicks out of being mentally whipped, and run the crèches at women’s conferences in return for a kick and a smile. I’m just sorry for the poor little bugger.’

Hilary would dance up and down with rage. She was a beautiful girl, in a brownish, sinewy kind of way, and tried to live by her principles. Even Jennifer acknowledged it.

‘The world is so arranged,’ said Jennifer, surprisingly, ‘as to make doing right almost impossible. At least Hilary is trying.’

Jennifer gives Hilary little dresses and little white socks for Lucy, but Hilary just puts them in the jumble sale, and Lucy goes on wearing dungarees. Lucy longs for dresses and dolls, but perhaps that is only because she isn’t allowed them.

I had a baby once: it was neither male nor female. It was born without reproductive organs: it died within five minutes of birth and just as well. Extraordinary things are born to woman: mutants of another race, unviable. Cling to a sense of self through that, if you can. Of purpose. I asked the doctor not to tell Laurence what the matter with the baby was. (Can we call this thing, my child, a baby?) How could I say to Laurence, you and I together, this is what we made. Nothing. We cancelled each other out. I bore the burden of this knowledge alone. Stillborn, I said, and Laurence didn’t ask any further: barely a why or a wherefore, and he an investigative journalist, and, as usual, away at the time.

Easier to find out and condemn what goes on in another country, in a far-off place, than what happens in your own home and in your own heart.

I told Isabel. ‘Aren’t you angry?’ she asked. ‘I would be, if fate picked me out amongst millions, and dealt me a blow like that.’

I replied that I had worn anger out. But it may not be so. Perhaps after all it was red rage that burned out my eyes. Or perhaps it was only fate, being kind, dealing me a trump card. Certainly I have caught Laurence’s butterfly nature on the pin of my helplessness; he struggled a little and made his protest, drunk and unshaven down at the pub, and now lies still, and holds me in his arms, careful and caring and good at last, frightened to move suddenly unless something else gets torn.

You really cannot expect a blind woman to have a baby. Some do, of course, but it isn’t expected. Soon I will be too old, in any case, and saved.

Buzz-buzz! How busy we all are along Wincaster Row. At least the bees stop at night, when cold slows their wings and the weight of the honey they won’t let fall all but defeats them. They make it back to the hive if they can, and die if they can’t, uncomplaining and dutiful. A bee could spend its days, as a butterfly does, glorifying its maker, dancing in the sun, rejoicing in the Lord – but no, it prefers to labour. Nevertheless, the bees are clearly pleased by the fuchsia hedge.

Work in Wincaster Row does not stop when night falls. Then the fuchsia bush hangs darkly and silently at the end of the garden. I remember it from my sighted days: how the lights from the windows – which sometimes burned all night – would outline its shape: it seemed then a hovering storm cloud, picked out with flecks of blood.

Oliver the architect sometimes works until two or three in the morning. He is designing a building for the disabled: he works for nothing. Anna, his wife, would prefer that he should work for something and spend more time with her and the children: but seldom says so.

‘For heaven’s sake,’ Hope says crossly, ‘if only everyone would look after themselves and forget about the rest of the world, it would be in a much better state.’

Hope’s lovers bring her chocolates and flowers, in the hope of making her feel something more than kindness towards them. They puzzle her. What is it they want? Sex she understands, and offers, but they want her essence, her very soul, not just her body. She is writing a paper on Thucydides. No one will pay her for it, she explains. It will be published in an obscure magazine and forgotten. But it’s interesting: such things must be written. Hope lectures in Greek poetry at Birkbeck College, to mature students. They study for the sake of it, not in the hope of future employment. One pupil is over eighty.

Buzz-buzz! Dawn’s breaking. I can tell, because I hear the bees.

Hope once got stuck halfway up the oak tree in the communal garden. She was trying to rescue a kitten. Hope wept: the kitten wailed: the fire engine arrived. Ivor the alcoholic fell hopelessly in love with Hope, for at least a month, and Ivor’s wife baked bread furiously, in the hope that her proper domestic worth and value would become apparent to him—which indeed it always was, but what has love to do with just deserts? Those who don’t deserve it, receive it. Those who most need it, seldom have it. To those who hath, as Jesus once observed, to the shock and dismay of all around, shall be given, and to those who hath not, even that small portion that they hath shall be taken away.

It was Hope who let the men who called themselves electricians in to No. 3. They turned up at six one morning in a London Electricity Board van, when Homer, Isabel and Jason were off visiting friends in Wales, and spent an hour inside the house, seeing, they said, to faulty wiring.

Hope was out early trying to find a kitten she thought she heard crying. Buzz-buzz! She shinned up a drainpipe for the LEB men, climbed over on to the balcony, and in through the window and down to the hall, through the coats and the bicycles and by the grandfather clock, and opened the front door for them, before you could, as it were, say Jack Robinson.

‘Thank you, miss,’ they said, admiring. She had lovely legs, which showed to advantage as she leapt gazelle-like from point to point on the face of the building. Hope always let everyone in, up and down the row, if they’d forgotten or lost their keys.

‘Think nothing of it,’ she said.

No doubt they could have let themselves in more simply, had she not happened to be out of bed early, looking for a lost kitten.

After the electricians had been and gone, listeners could hear everything that went on in No. 3, if and when they wanted. The IFPC had their listening devices installed. Buzz-buzz!

5

Homer, for a day or so, said no more about Jason needing to see a child therapist. Isabel went nervously about her work and life, watching Jason for signs of inner disturbance. Any child, when watched closely, when faith has gone, can appear both deranged and malicious. Naivety can seem calculated, charm self-conscious, the noisy and instant expression of emotion a covert attack upon the adult. Isabel knew this, and reassured herself. Jason was a six-year-old child behaving like a six-year-old child, and was neither her persecutor nor her victim.

Which was just as well, because if Jason was indeed suffering some inner turmoil, which only truth would resolve, then she would have to start digging away at the very foundation of her life with Homer, and this she did not wish to do. Self-interest, as well as maternal pride, was at stake. Jason, for everyone’s sake, had to be in good heart and good health.

Dandy Ivel made a speech about probity, integrity, endurance and fidelity. It was reported on British television. Isabel changed programmes. Homer said, ‘That man throws abstract words about like karate chops, the better to confuse and terrify.’ Isabel said, ‘Yes, doesn’t he?’

Isabel and Homer and Jason went to stay for the weekend with the Humbles, in Wales. Ian and Doreen had given up their Wardour Street life of (him) dress-designing and (her) film-making, and taken to sheep-farming up a distant Welsh hillside. Ian and Doreen drove a battered Land Rover stuck with anti-nuclear stickers, and their children were dressed in stiff woollen garments, hand spun, natural dyed, and knitted on very thick needles; their tiny limbs, thus encased, and macrobiotically lean, found movement difficult. They sat on the splintery wooden floor of their homestead and wailed. Jason took offence at this, and no amount of reproof or explanation could prevent him from setting about them with his fists.