A Woman of Our Times

At last, she sat down in a Victorian chair that she had recovered herself. She ran the tips of her fingers over the smooth heads of the upholstery tacks, looked out of the window at the changing light. The day was ending and the sky was thinly clouded, suffused with pink.

Harriet felt the fingers of shock beginning to loosen their hold on her. She began to think, effortfully at first, as if she had forgotten how to do it. The flat was silent, even the road outside seemed unusually still.

She thought about her marriage to Leo. She wondered how long it was exactly since they had stopped making each other happy, and then found that she couldn’t recall the precise dimensions of happiness at all. She knew, in the same way that she knew the multiplication tables or the words of certain songs, that they must have been happy together once. Leo was Jewish and his prosperous parents had been opposed to their only son marrying out. Their opposition had only strengthened Harriet’s and Leo’s determination to marry at once. They had been happy then, in their blithe certainty. And afterwards? She could remember certain times, a holiday when it had rained and it hadn’t mattered at all, a long drive that they had made together, little domestic events that she could no longer recall, only the joy that went with them. That had gone. She wished she could at least remember when. They lived together now, but that was only living, the plain mechanics of it.

Harriet wondered how long her husband had had other women. How many, and how often? The memory of the tall girl with her planes of light and shadow came back to her.

Harriet thought about Leo himself. Leo was handsome, stubborn, amusing. Women were always drawn to him, as she had been herself. He was a man like others she had known, who found it difficult to put his feelings into words. Or perhaps not even difficult, but unnecessary.

The light was fading fast. Harriet had the sense of ordinary life fading with it, the edges of reality softly crumbling and falling away into fine dust. It made her feel sad, the more sad because it was irrevocable.

It was dark when she heard Leo’s key in the lock. She had sat on in the darkness without moving and now she felt stiff and cold. He came in, clicking the light on at the door so that she blinked in the blaze of it.

They looked at each other, trying to gauge the precise gradations of mutual hostility. Harriet knew Leo well enough not to have expected contrition. Like a small boy, Leo would cover his guilt with defiance. But now she couldn’t read him at all; his face was flat and cold. She heard the smallest noise, the ground around them softly crumbling into dust.

‘I’m sorry you had to see that,’ Leo said stiffly. ‘You should have telephoned, or rung the bell.’

There was no tentative bridge in the words, if that was what she had hoped for. She knew, in any case, that there were no foundations for a bridge. Harriet said the first thing that came into her head.

‘You looked ridiculous.’

He stared at her. ‘You’re such a bitch, Harriet, do you know that? You’re cold-hearted and self-righteous. You operate like a machine.’

Probably he was right, Harriet thought. She didn’t believe that she was any of those things, but she was willing to accept that they might know each other better than they knew themselves.

‘Have there been other times, Leo? Before tonight? Could you tell me the truth, please?’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes, you’ll tell me the truth, or yes, there have been other girls?’

‘There have been other girls.’

‘How many? How long have you been doing this?’

‘Three or four. Eighteen months. Perhaps two years.’

‘Don’t you even know for sure?’

‘Does it bloody well matter?’

Harriet stood up abruptly. She went to the window and looked out. The streetlights had come on, but there was still a child skateboarding on the pavement. She watched him weaving in and out of the lamp-posts. She wanted to close the curtains, but she didn’t want to shut herself in here, in this flat. Behind her she heard Leo go into the kitchen and take a beer out of the fridge. He came back into the room, dropping the ring-pull into the nearest ashtray with a tiny clink. Harriet turned to face him. Her legs and back ached with sitting motionless for so long.

‘So what do you want to do?’ she asked him.

She felt the ground dropping away, faster and faster, in ragged chunks now. Chasms had opened up everywhere, and there was nowhere to put her feet.

‘Do? I don’t know. What is there to do?’

Harriet’s lips felt stiff. In their quarrels before now she had made similar suggestions but it had been to test him, even to test her own aversion to the idea. But this time, when she said, ‘Call it a day, Leo. Agree to separate,’ she spoke the words flatly because she knew what would happen was irrevocable. Tonight they had passed the last possible turning-point.

Leo’s bounce, the cocksureness that had been a part of him for as long as she had known him, seemed to have drained out of his body. He sat down heavily in the Victorian chair, his hands dangling loosely between his knees.

‘If you want to. I don’t know. I don’t know what I want.’

‘Are you unhappy?’

‘Yes, I’m unhappy.’

‘So am I,’ Harriet whispered.

But there was no path left that they could safely tread to reach one another. In the silence that followed Harriet went into the kitchen and began mechanically to tidy up where no tidying-up needed to be done. After a moment or two, the telephone rang. She glanced at the digital clock above the door of the oven. It was ten past eleven. Late, for a social call. She lifted the receiver from its wall socket, leaned back against the counter-top.

‘Harriet, I’m sorry, were you asleep?’

‘Charlie?’

It was Charlie Thimbell, husband of her old friend Jenny. Charlie was a friend, too.

‘I’m sorry,’ he repeated. ‘It’s late, I know it’s late.’

Harriet gripped the receiver tightly. ‘Charlie, what’s happened?’

‘It’s Jenny. She started to bleed.’

Jenny was thirty-two weeks pregnant. Harriet had begun to count the days with her.

‘When?’

‘Tonight. Seven o’clock. The ambulance came, rushed her in.’ Harriet could tell that Charlie was shaking. Even his voice shook. Harriet was aware of Leo appearing in the kitchen doorway, his eyes fixing on her face. ‘They did an emergency Caesarean. The placenta had just come away. I’ve never seen so much blood.’

‘Charlie. Oh, Christ. Is Jenny …? Will Jenny be all right?’

‘They didn’t know. Not for a long time. I’ve just seen the doctor. He says they’ll pull her round. She lost a lot of blood, you see.’

‘Charlie, listen to me, I’m coming. I’ll be there in — in half an hour.’ She was looking into Leo’s face. He had gone pale, his eyes were wide and dark.

‘No. No, don’t do that. There’s nothing you can do. They’ve told me to go home, and they’ll call me. I just wanted to talk, to tell someone.’

Harriet knew that Charlie’s parents were dead. Jenny’s elderly mother lived in the north of England somewhere. ‘Have you told Jenny’s mother?’

Charlie said very quietly, ‘I … I thought I’d leave it until the morning. Now that they say she’ll be all right.’

Full of fear, Harriet said, ‘What about the baby?’

‘It’s still alive. It went, it went without oxygen for quite a long time, they don’t know exactly how long. It’s in their intensive care unit. It’s a little boy. I haven’t seen him. I don’t know if they’ll let me. They let me take a quick look at Jenny. She opened her eyes and saw me.’

‘Charlie, please let me come. Or let Jane come. I’ll ring her now. I don’t want you to be on your own.’

He sounded exhausted when he answered, ‘I’ll be all right. I’ll go home and sleep, if they won’t let me stay here with Jenny and the baby.’

Harriet nodded. Leo came round the counter and stood in front of her, trying to decipher what had happened.

‘Call me first thing in the morning. Or as soon as you hear anything, it doesn’t matter what time it is. Will you, Charlie?’

‘Yes. Harriet?’

‘What is it?’

‘Nothing. Just, thanks. Jenny’ll be glad to know you’re … there.’

‘Don’t worry. She’ll be all right.’ Harriet groped for words of proper reassurance, but found none. ‘Everything will be all right.’

Charlie rang off. Leo put his hand on Harriet’s shoulder, but she felt the distance between them. She told him what had happened, and saw tears come into his eyes.

‘Christ,’ Leo whispered. ‘Oh God, that’s terrible. Poor Jenny. The poor little baby.’

Harriet was practical. Her concern had all been for what could be done, for what Charlie or Jenny might need. But Leo was different. She knew his grief was genuine, there was softness buried under his swagger, a deep streak of something vulnerable that was almost sentimentality. Tonight this underside of Leo irritated her, and she turned away in order not to witness it.

She put the kettle on and made coffee, performing each step in the sequence with careful attention. She was thinking that it seemed a long time, much more than the few hours of reality, since she had hurried towards Leo’s studio with the cinema tickets folded in her bag.

Harriet poured the coffee into two cups, and gave one to Leo. They sat facing each other across the kitchen table, in the positions they always sat in.

‘Will the baby survive?’ Leo had sniffed and cleared his throat, then lit a cigarette. His face had regained some colour.

‘I don’t know. I don’t suppose they do, either. Oxygen deprivation is critical, isn’t it? I imagine if he does live, he may be badly damaged.’ She tried to imagine the small addition to humanity, suspended under lights and wired to machines, but she could not. Her feelings were all for Jenny.

Leo and Harriet talked for a few moments about the possibility of the baby’s survival, the significance for Jenny and Charlie if he should be handicapped.

‘Perhaps it would be best in the long run if he didn’t live.’

Harriet shook her head. It felt very heavy. ‘I think they will just want him to be alive. However bad the reality is, they’ll still want him to survive.’

They were doling the words out to one another, aware of the diminishment of their own unhappiness by comparison, but all the same unable to forget it, or to hope of overcoming it.

Harriet drank her coffee. When she looked back at Leo she saw that he held his head in his hands, and that he was crying again.

‘Leo …’

His head jerked up. ‘If we had had a baby, Harriet.’

Harriet thought, had had. As far in words as it was possible to get from will have, or even might have. That distance made her understand more clearly than the longest explanatory speech could have done that their marriage was finally over.

‘If we’d had a baby,’ Leo shouted this time. Anger licked up in him. Harriet saw how he seized on his own anger almost with gratitude, as though giving vent to it eased his pain. ‘I would have loved a child, but you wouldn’t consider it, would you? That’s what marriages are for. They’re about creating families. Not about all this, shit.’ His arm swept sideways. Her eyes followed the movement of it. He meant the tiled floor and the ceramic hob and the dishwasher, the Spanish plates hung on the wall, the wedding presents on the shelves and the painting and decorating they had done together.

‘I wanted a whole tribe of kids. I’d have been a good father, a great dad. Like my parents were to me.’

Harriet thought briefly of Harold Gold, a blandly bonhomous man fond of delivering advice on how to succeed in business, and Averil, her mother-in-law, to whom Leo was a religion with its own commandments, most of them to do with food.

‘But there was never any chance of that, was there? Your own concerns came first, your fucking career, your little business. You’re a chilly bitch, Harriet. It’s like living with a robot, living with you. You do what’s expected of you because you don’t like criticism, but it’s all an exercise, isn’t it?’

Harriet stopped listening. He went on, with his familiar mixture of selfishness and arrogance and childish disappointment. He wasn’t wrong, Harriet knew that. He could make every complaint against her with justification, but she no longer wished to change herself for him.

This is what you feel when you stop loving someone, Harriet thought. You see them quite plainly, in all their dimensions, with no blurring into hopes or expectations. It was the absence of hope that made it final.

She stood up and went to the coffee-pot for a refill. Too much coffee would keep her awake, but she wasn’t optimistic about sleep in any case.

Leo was right to protest that she had refused him a baby, too. They had talked about it, although not often. Leo had always been interested in other people’s offspring, much more than she had ever been, except for Jenny’s. She had watched the progress of her friend’s pregnancy with interest, but without envy. Jane, the third member of their trio of old friends, had been envious. Harriet shied away from the possibility for herself. She felt too precarious to contemplate it, believing that stability, such as Jenny Thimbell had possessed, was as much a prerequisite for motherhood as a womb.

It came to her that she had simply felt precarious with Leo. She wondered why she had never reached the obvious conclusion before.

She had felt, too, that there was still time. She was not yet thirty, and there were other things to be accomplished first. If pressed she might have admitted that she meant business achievements, although she would not have been able to say what kind of achievements. Something more than Stepping, she would have said, with uncharacteristic vagueness.

Leo’s spurt of anger had died away. Her silence had denied it its necessary fuel. He sat and stared dully at the table-top.

Harriet found that she could imagine Jenny’s baby now. She could see his tiny, folded limbs and his birdlike chest heaving as he took painful breaths.

Live, baby. Live, she commanded silently. She wondered if he was living at this moment, or dying.

She picked up her own coffee-cup and Leo’s, and rinsed them in the sink. She left them on the draining board, turned off some switches.

‘I’m going to bed.’ There was no answer, but she had not expected any.

In their bedroom she undressed and lay down under the double quilt. After a moment she sat up again, took the telephone extension off the table on Leo’s side of the bed and brought it round to her own. She lay down once more and closed her eyes. She wondered if Leo would come to bed. They couldn’t both stay here after tonight. Then she remembered that Leo was going away for three days from tomorrow, on an assignment. Before he came back, she would have to find somewhere to go. She didn’t mind very much that she would be the one who would have to leave. The idea of staying here, alone in this house of strangers, was less appealing still.

She was awake when Leo came to bed. They lay back to back, without speaking. Later Harriet fell into a heavy unrefreshing sleep.

In the morning, very early, Charlie rang to say that Jenny had woken up properly. She was in pain, but she was only concerned for her baby. The baby’s condition was stable. The next few days would be critical, and if he survived them his long-term chances would be good. They would not be able to tell for some time yet how severely his brain had been damaged, if it had been damaged at all.

‘That’s good,’ Harriet said warmly. ‘That’s better than it seemed, isn’t it?’

‘I suppose so,’ Charlie said. He was normally an ebullient man, but there was none of it in his voice that morning.

‘Can I come in and see her?’

‘Tomorrow, Harriet, perhaps.’

‘All right. Give her all my love.’

Harriet dialled Jane’s number. Jane was a teacher, at a huge comprehensive school in east London. It was impossible to reach her during the day, and it was still early enough to catch her before she left.

‘Jane? Have you heard what’s happened?’

‘Charlie just rang.’

‘What do you think?’

‘It doesn’t sound very promising.’

They murmured their concern together. Jane was a forthright, single woman, a feminist and espouser of causes. Sometimes she exasperated Harriet, but she also loved her for her warmth and honesty.’

‘I wish I could go over there and just hold her,’ Jane said.

‘I’m sure Charlie will do that.’

‘Hm.’ Jane took a less positive view of the relationships between men and women, never having achieved a satisfactory one herself.

‘We’ll go tomorrow.’

‘Yes. God, I wish this hadn’t happened. If anyone deserves a normal healthy baby Jenny does. I can’t think of anyone who would make a better mother. How are you this morning, Harriet?’

‘I’ll tell you tomorrow, when I see you,’ Harriet said, without emphasis. ‘Bye, now.’

While they talked Leo had been putting shirts and socks into a canvas grip. Now he tossed a sponge bag and a camera body in on top and zipped up the bag.

‘I’d better go. I’ve got a couple of things to organise at the studio before I leave for the airport.’

‘Yes. Well, you wouldn’t have had time for that last night, what with everything else, would you?’

He straightened up, with his bag in his hand. ‘I’ve said I was sorry, Harriet.’

‘No you haven’t, actually. You said you were sorry I had to see what I did. That’s something quite different, isn’t it?’

Leo hesitated, somewhere between contrition and petulance. Then he sighed. ‘There just isn’t time for another bloody great row this morning. I’m going to Amsterdam, and that’s it. I’ll be back on Sunday. We’ll talk then.’

Harriet lifted her face to him. ‘It’s too late.’

He stared at her. ‘I’ve got to go,’ he repeated. Harriet knew that inside himself, within all the layers of bullishness and sentimentality, Leo also knew that it was too late.

He went, closing the door between them, without saying anything more.

Harriet went to work, came home again, and spent the evening alone. The news from the hospital was that Jenny was recovering well, and the baby continued to hold his own. Charlie seemed encouraged by the doctors’ predictions.

The next day Harriet left the shop early, to go and see Jenny. She stopped on the way to try to buy her something, but every magazine she picked up seemed to have a picture of a rosy baby on the cover, and every book the word mother or child in the title. In the end she settled for flowers, late-summer blooms that seemed touched with weariness.

As she walked up the street towards the dull, red-brick bulk of the hospital she saw Jane hurrying in the same direction ahead of her. She was easily recognisable by her everyday ensemble of loose trousers with numerous pockets and flaps, a shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and her pale hair pulled into a thick plait down her back. ‘Combat gear,’ Jane called it, saying, ‘I need it in that place.’ Harriet had never visited the school, but she had heard the stories about it.

She had asked Jane more than once, ‘If it’s so bad, why don’t you leave? Get a job teaching nice, bright, motivated children in a private school somewhere?’

And Jane had looked at her from under her thick, blonde eyelashes. ‘One, you know that I am not a supporter of private education. Two, to leave the school would be to diminish it further. Don’t you think I should stay and continue to do my best for it?’

Harriet could only answer, ‘If you say so,’ knowing that it would be useless to embark on an argument about it.

She smiled, now, at the sight of her and ran to catch her up. Jane turned in response to Harriet’s shout. In one hand she was carrying an old-fashioned battered leather briefcase, probably stuffed with sixth-form essays on Wuthering Heights, and in the other a bunch of flowers more or less identical to Harriet’s. The two women hugged each other, awkward with their separate armsful.

‘What else can one bring?’ Jane said wryly, nodding at the flowers. ‘Everything I thought of seemed too celebratory or too funereal.’

‘I know. Jenny won’t care, anyway.’

They went into the hospital, following signs, and climbed some stairs. At the end of a long corridor they came to the maternity ward. There was the sound of new-born crying and a glimpse of cots at the ends of beds. Harriet and Jane looked at each other, but said nothing. They found Jenny alone in a sideward. She was propped up against pillows, with arms outstretched, palms up, on the smoothed covers. She looked as if she might have been dozing, but she opened her eyes when they came in.

‘I’m so glad to see you,’ she said, which was Jenny’s familiar greeting. It was a facet of her appeal that she made it invariably convincing, but today Harriet thought she might have preferred to be left alone. Her smooth Madonna-face was white and drawn, and there were shadows like bruises under her eyes.

‘We won’t stay for long,’ Harriet promised. ‘Only a minute or two.’

‘I’m tired because my mother’s been here most of the afternoon. She needs more looking after than I do. She’s gone now to do some shopping and some tidying-up at home for Charlie. I told her he didn’t need shopping for or tidying-up after, but she wouldn’t have it.’ She put her hand out to touch the flowers. ‘Thank you for these. They’re beautiful, aren’t they?’

‘This is all right,’ Jane said, looking round the little room.

‘Tactful,’ Jenny said. Her mouth gave an uncharacteristic twist. She had been put in here away from all the perfect babies in their cots in the big ward, of course. They all knew it, there was a strong enough bond between them for anxiety and sympathy to be unspoken. Harriet and Jane sat down on either side of the bed, their hands touching Jenny’s.

‘How is he?’

Jenny didn’t answer at first. Then, with a smile that contradicted the rest of her face, she said, ‘We’ve called him James Jonathan. The hospital padre baptised him, you know. Charlie and I were there, the nurses let us hold him for a minute. It was, oh, I didn’t mean to cry on you, it was very moving, that’s all.’ Her face collapsed, disfigured with pain. Jane bent forward silently until her forehead touched Jenny’s bare forearm. Harriet sat motionless, aware of how much she loved them both. By contrast with the enduring, unemphatic resonance of friendship her concluded marriage seemed over-coloured and dissonant. She saw that Jenny’s face was shiny with tears. Gently she released her hand, took a handkerchief and dried it for her.

‘The news sounded all right this morning,’ she ventured.

‘It was, to begin with. I’d started to make plans. You know, in a month, taking him home. Not expecting too much, just finding out what he could or couldn’t do. Then they came to tell me that there was a problem with his breathing. They’re ventilating him because his lungs don’t want to work. Then they said there was something wrong with his kidneys. There’s a blockage in his intestine. They’re watching him now, to see if they can operate to clear it.’

‘It all happened as quickly as that?’

‘He’s very small. They can … they can deteriorate very quickly. But he’s much bigger than some of the babies in there. If he can survive the operation, and it’s successful, he may still be all right.’

They saw the equal and opposite currents of hope and fear in her, and understood some of the tension that made her arms and fingers seem stiff.

‘The doctor said not, not to be too hopeful yet. One day, even one hour is critical.’

Harriet and Jane said what they could, making little more than small, soothing sounds. They sat quietly for a moment or two when they had come to the end even of that, listening to the hospital noises. There was the metallic rattle of big trolleys, and a smell of boiled vegetables. Early institutional supper was on its way.

‘Do you want us to go, Jenny?’ Harriet asked gently.