Goodness

How Things Happen.

There is a taboo about handicapped children of course. I’ve had time and occasion to think about this. Either they are wept over by social-consciousness mongers who want to show the government’s not spending enough, or they are simply not mentioned at all. Except perhaps in jokes of the worst taste. Their parents are generally perceived as angels who love them against all the odds, or devils who abuse and abandon them. Martyrdom and brutality make good copy. Another focus of occasional interest are the ones who overcome horrendous difficulties to paint Christmas cards with a brush gripped between the second and third toes. Maybe the TV’ll show you about thirty seconds of their sad and twisted bodies (not that I’m saying they should show more). Then there are the tabloid fables of what genetic engineering may be able to do in the future, and of course the emotive question of whether the severely mentally handicapped girl should be sterilised regardless of consent, that’s an interesting old chestnut. But the day to day business of working, nursing and cleaning, while all the time facing that enormous sense of loss, of no hope, of no way out. . forget it. I certainly would if I could.

I was kissing Shirley’s wet cheeks, she was squeezing my hand hard, sobbing for joy. The child was born. Our child. It was a girl. And so Hilary. We felt extraordinarily whole, fulfilled as a couple, we really did. I was truly happy. When the young doctor, examining the child on a white cloth, says in the kind of regional accent one has come to associate with sit-com and soap opera: ‘It’s a right mess this one I’m afraid. Never seen anything like it.’ Doctors, I’ve discovered, have quite a way with the handicapped.

How things happen and one is tricked into getting used to them! My mother, bringing flowers and baby clothes, says she’s sure it’s nothing they can’t put right. They can do such amazing things these days and we must all pray. Deliberately, I sense, she keeps calling the child by her name, as if she were already a person, picking her up, kissing her, celebrating, as if everything were perfectly normal. Immediately I’m aware of an undercurrent of pious persuasion, to accept this child on any terms as one of the flock, which immediately, instinctively I resist. Then resist the resistance. She is my child. So that I too say, ‘Darling little Hilary,’ while my mother kisses and fondles her.

But Shirley is listless. She keeps her baby completely swaddled and leaves it to the nurses to change her. She doesn’t seem to want to touch or look at her. She doesn’t want to talk about the problem, nor to hear all the rumours of syndromes, cures and prospects that I am rapidly gleaning. I sense that in her silence she is simply willing for it not to be true. She is waiting to wake up into a different reality. Breastfeeding, she weeps quietly, smoothing the child’s thin damp hair. The little face is strange, and strangely endearing.

Mrs Harcourt arrives at last. She bustles brightly but keeps her camera in her case. She doesn’t ask to see the girl’s body. Mr Harcourt comes, phoning first to make sure he won’t find Mrs Harcourt. He is grave and distant. There have been, he says, no cases, to his knowledge, of handicap in the Harcourt family. In the corridor he tells me confidentially that any way he can help financially not to hesitate to ask, and he claps me on a shoulder and says if anybody is equipped to deal with a problem like this it is me. I am so straightforward and sensible. I have my head so firmly on my shoulders.

Shirley’s brother Charles surprises us with a first visit in ages and says he’ll check up what benefits the government has left intact and we’d better grab them before they disappear. Shirley flares up and tells him to get lost. I feel this is a positive development, though when she goes to the bathroom I tell him by all means to do all the checking up he likes. We’d be grateful. ‘The whole game,’ he says, ‘with the Welfare State, or what’s left of it, is knowing what’s due to you.’ I remember the waiting room of the clinic where we attended our pre-natal course and above plastic pigeon holes, the sign: KNOW YOUR BENEFITS. These brief imperatives. Somehow it reminds me of my mother saying: ‘Couunt your blessings.’

They are doing tests, so Shirley has to stay in hospital. They have moved her and the child to Great Ormond Street. They take X-rays and do scans. They are trying to decide, they say, whether maybe an operation wouldn’t put it right. But they have never seen a child with its feet the wrong way round before. Also the thighs are disjointed.

I tell Shirley I suspect we are being drip-fed the bad news at the speed they imagine we can handle it. Whereas I want to know everything now. She shrugs her shoulders. She says she has enough to cope with without my paranoia.

I take a few days off work to think. Already I am aware that I must decide on some strategy, some plan, not just let events take over, especially with Shirley withdrawing into herself. But to make plans I need information. I get on the phone and bother the specialists, the doctors, the ward sister. For God’s sake, it’s been ten days and still no sign of a diagnosis! Coming back from visiting, I stop at Dillons and spend half an hour picking up two hundred quid’s worth of medical books. When I come out into heavy rain they have put the old yellow boot on the car. One thing you soon discover about personal catastrophes is that they don’t excuse you from any of the other rules.

Shirley whispers: ‘At least we’re close to each other, Georgie. At least we’re close.’ I storm out of the room to demand some information from somebody.

The doctors stall me. They say our child is perfectly healthy, eating well and moving her bowels, and there is no hurry. Later I wonder if this isn’t all part of a strategy. By not telling me anything they offer me the role of relief, of he who has to busy himself bothering other people and their secretaries. They slot your shock into their little routines. They have a way of getting you through. Which you hate and cling to.

Peggy comes. She is leaving the hospital as I arrive and we have a coffee together in the cafeteria. She keeps waggling her big knees under the table so that our coffee slops. I ask if she is cold, and I ask: ‘So what does Buddhism have to say about the handicapped? Are they reincarnated dinosaurs?’

She says: ‘You know there’s nothing I can say, George.’

‘Mother’s praying,’ I say, ‘so that’s one angle covered.’

She says: ‘So am I as a matter of fact. Aren’t you?’

I say I thought the Oriental brigade didn’t go in for that direct request kind of prayer. I thought it was all meditation and inward illumination.

She says: ‘I may not do it very often but I’ve always prayed just how I like, thank you very much.’

She is wearing a loose lilac jump suit, an old fashioned blue spotted foulard tied under her plump square chin. She has let her hair grow a bit and it’s chunky and messy. She looks slightly overweight, jolly, attractive, a very normal London mother. I think: her career has always been just being herself, rather than doing anything, achieving anything. She has no direction, no thrust. Warming her hands round her coffee cup, she tries to look into my eyes and smiles. I look at my Jaffa Cake. I say: ‘I always knew you were the lucky one, Peg. Fancy being able to pray.’

‘You couldn’t lend me fifty quid?’ she asks.

Driving home that afternoon I stop at a Tempo discount warehouse and picked up the best videorecorder they have, plus half a dozen films to watch. I dream that I have lost my leg. It has been torn from my thigh. And I look in the fridge, in the airing cupboard, under the bed.

What is Life Expectancy?

Finally there is the interview with the geneticist. He is portly, dark-suited. He hums and ha’s and smiles. He has the manner of someone who has accepted that sensitivity is a necessary accessory to his profession but has never been able to master it. He describes the baby’s condition as defined in the reports of the various paediatric specialists: the physical deformities, notably of the legs and the major joints, an unusual brain scan.

Which adds up to what, I ask. What is it? And what are they going to do about it? Shirley in blue dressing gown with tiny pink flowers is silent with the sleeping child in her arms. Snuffling in its sleep it might be any child.

‘Slowly does it, chaps. One thing at a time.’ He has the consultant’s avuncular smile, calmly twiddling with a propelling pencil behind an unnecessarily large leather-topped desk. He draws a breath, knits his brow: ‘Now what I want to put to you is this: can either of you recall any similar problem in your family histories? Anything at all. Think carefully now. Some aunt, uncle, great grandparents, anything.’

Perhaps it is his curious manner of addressing us as if we were five-year-olds that makes me fail to see the obvious. Behind him, across the courtyard, I watch a tiny oriental girl wiping condensation from a window with the sleeve of her green pyjamas. Shirley shakes her head. A cousin of her mother’s had a child with problems, but that was due to a trauma at birth.

The consultant nods with pantomime gravity. I jingle change in my pocket.

‘Well, have we got any brothers and sisters?’ He raises white eyebrows. ‘And have they got children, yes? No problems with miscarriages, for example? That’s often an indication that. .’

‘Mavis!’

Yes, Mavis. In one split second, one click of the interminable and generally uneventful ratchet of time, my whole life, childhood and youth, career and marriage, apparently so varied, changing, picaresque, so much my own to do what I want with, succeed or fail, all collapses, concertinas, flattens, into my aunt’s flat and mooning face. And is no longer mine.

Aunt Mavis. Hilary. Past. Future.

Perhaps fifteen minutes later, leaving his office with its big desk, its framed photos of smiling but obviously wrong children (in bad taste surely), Shirley says: ‘I think that’s the first nice bloke we’ve spoken to. At least he told us something.’

But I’m moving in a trance. Like some insect who discovers colour and flight is just a dream. He is still a cocoon-trapped grub. How can I live with a repeat of Mavis? Plus physical deformities into the bargain. Worse than Mavis!

‘Well?’ When we get back to the ward Mrs Harcourt has arrived. Despite the powerful central heating she hasn’t taken off an elegant cashmere coat.

Charles is with her and comes out with me, asking for a lift to Shepherd’s Bush. A caucus meeting. What is a caucus meeting exactly? Taking him gives me an excuse for going straight on to Park Royal to tell Mother. Tell Mother it is her fault.

Tall, lean, glassy-eyed, unshaven, old leather jacket, narrow blue jeans, Charles begins talking about the ins and outs of some Labour Council committee he is involved in. I’m not paying attention and anyway he must surely have appreciated by now what I think of his politics. Eventually I cut in to say, ‘But what on earth do I care about rights for black unmarried mothers? Don’t they have the same rights everybody else does?’

His tic is to rub thumb and forefinger along either side of his off-white teeth, an intellectual, concentrated look on his face. He says he’s been trying to distract me. And begins to roll a cigarette. It must be a difficult moment for me.

I tell him not to bother. I don’t want to be distracted. On the contrary. My particular style is to look at problems and deal with them.

Pushing in the lighter, trying to be clever, he says okay then I can try some lateral thinking, I can look at black unmarried mothers as a category similar to my own, another minority who need defending.

‘I beg your pardon?’

I am a member of a minority now, he says, with a handicapped child. The only way to progress is through solidarity with other minorities.

I’m quite harsh. I tell him not to talk like an arsehole, it isn’t as though the black unmarried mothers are spending their days worrying themselves sick about my plight, is it? Nor can they possibly help me. Or I them. Each to his own. Anyway, it’s their own fault if they have kids, with the State positively hurling contraceptives at them. Whereas what’s happened to us was pure bad luck.

He seems to relish my rudeness: ‘How you get into the hole you’re in is irrelevant. It’s how you get out that needs attention. You have to pull together.’

He has a bony, slightly freckled, very intense face, Charles. When he speaks, it is always with the assumption that he has thought more, and more deeply, about the subject than you have. I suck my teeth and decide to let the matter drop.

But as we are nosing our way out onto Southampton Row, he remarks: ‘Anyway, Shirley’s going to see what it’s like on the other side now, I’m afraid.’

When asked what he means, he explains, as he did in a pub almost two years ago, that Shirley has always had an easy life, never really got away from home to see what things are like for the underprivileged. She was always the favourite child.

I’ve got chewing gum or something stuck to my shoe which is bothering me with the accelerator. And of course I’m thinking how I’m going to explode with Mother.

‘She’s never really wanted to look beyond her middle-class horizons at the way people are suffering out there. It was the same when we were kids. She was always so complacent. Whereas the real truth about the world is suffering.’

‘She gives a lot of money to charity,’ I throw in from a spirit of contradiction, trying to rub whatever it is off on the rubber floormat now we are at a light.

‘Not too tough a proposition, when you take eighty thousand off Dad to buy a house.’

‘She could perfectly well not give it.’

‘On the contrary, charity of that kind is a luxury. Makes you feel better. In any case, private charities only confuse the issue. The responsibility is the government’s.’

As so often, it’s not enough in life to have things happen to you. You have to hear people’s opinions as well. I breathe deeply. I say: ‘I’m perfectly willing to accept responsibility for my own problems. I don’t see how the government can be held responsible for my having a handicapped child.’

‘You won’t be saying that,’ he remarks, ‘when you see how much it costs.’

I turn round to him in almost disbelief. He is calmly inspecting his nails, my A-Z on his lap, frizzled cigarette between thumb and index finger. He doesn’t seem to appreciate how incredibly unpleasant he is being. Nor, for that matter has he made any comment on the pleasure of riding in a new Audi 80. So I put it to him point blank: given that he’s hardly bothered to contact us over the last two or three years, why the hell is he coming and visiting almost every day now?

He says unperturbed: ‘Because you need help. I want to help. I mean that’s what I’m doing with the Council and so on. What’s life expectancy by the way?’

‘You what?’

‘Life expectancy. How long’s the girl supposed to live?’

This question wasn’t actually mooted with the geneticist (why not?), but instinctively, from Mavis’s example, I know to say: ‘Normal.’

After a brief pause for an underpass, he says: ‘Too bad.’ And he says: ‘No chance of a little overdose or something. You could speak to the doctors. Sometimes they do that for you in the hospital.’

Despite the wave of anger that rises boiling inside — this is my child after all — I nevertheless have to struggle to suppress the first dim inkling that Charles is right.

‘Better for absolutely everybody,’ he is saying. My grip tightens on the steering wheel.

A Precedent

By the time I drop off Charles and pull up in Gorst Road I’m thoroughly keyed up. But Mother is out at her Asian women’s conversation group. For some reason this annoys me intensely. She should be around at a moment like this. Not out showing solidarity to another minority group.

So I set about Grandfather. I set about him at once. I don’t think at all. He’s sitting in front of the television, as he might have been twenty years ago, sucking liquorice, poking about in his pipe, his belt unbuckled, his waistcoat, his hairy porish face. Walking in, I’m swept by a feeling of staleness and frustration. This is the mollusc shell I never really left somehow.

With no preamble I put it right to him: ‘Didn’t you ever ask yourself what was wrong with Mavis?’

I cross over and snap off the television. ‘Didn’t you?’

‘Mavis?’

‘Didn’t you ever wonder why she was so dumb?’

I shout. I suppose really I’m still reeling from the blow, it still hasn’t come home to me. And in a way I’m enjoying this reeling, this disorientation, knowing that it amounts to little more than a grace period before I’ll be obliged to get on with things and make decisions.

Perfectly lucid, he says: ‘What on earth are you on about Mavis for? Do we have to pay something?’

‘Mavis had a syndrome!’ I scream.

It’s infuriating, but the fact that you have to shout at him anyway because of his deafness, neutralises any effect volume would have on a normal person. It’s like beating fists on a wall.

‘You what?’ He squints.

‘I said a syndrome. A genetic fucking illness. And you should have found out.’

The room is staler than ever. The old man has cakecrumbs all over his lap. I think: this should have been over years ago, years and years ago, the stale farce of this pissy old man in this never-to-be-refurnished room. My mother has kept it going beyond all reason, because of her selflessness, her refusal to start a new, fresh, cheerful life. Dimly I sense that this is what is to blame for Hilary. This decaying, stinking existence is touching mine, tainting mine, dragging me down. Or that’s how it feels. As if Mother were keeping those bad genes alive on purpose, because for Mother life, however awful, is everything.

He says in a growl: ‘Our Mavis was all right till she took up with that Mormon fellah. She brought home a decent wage. Anyway, how’s Peggy? Never bothers to visit, the little

‘I said, Mavis had a syndrome and now my kid’s got the same thing only a million times worse. Do you understand or don’t you?’

His wrinkled, limp-balloon face stares. His Adam’s apple shifts. Then, grinning foolishly, pushing his tongue about in slack cheeks, he tells me: ‘Stick the kettle on, will you? I could do with a cuppa.’

Almost raving now, and at the same time perfectly conscious of the mad futility of what I am about, I begin to tell him what a completely useless, useless old sod he is. He had a deficient child and never bothered to find out why, never worried that the same thing might happen to his children, his grandchildren. For thirty years he sat around doing absolutely bugger all but eat and drink and smoke and wear my Mother to a rag. And now the last straw is that, having never been warned, without the faintest inkling, I’ve gone and had a child like Mavis, but worse than Mavis, I’m going to be dragged back into the same ugliness I fought so hard to get myself out of, just because I share the same stinking gene pool he gave me and nobody ever bothered to inform me about. Well at least he might have the decency now to lie down and fucking-well die and let those who know how to live get on with it without the burden of a filthy old albatross like him round their necks.

My blood is pumping. I have never shouted so loud.

‘You’re nuts.’ He heaves himself to slippered feet and tries to push past me. ‘You’re loony. Get yourself some pills.’

I push him back. He sits heavily.

‘I’ll kill you if you don’t listen.’

Even if he can’t really understand, at least he is fully aware now. At least he can see I hate him. His scabby old face begins to register a creeping alarm, veiny eyes squinting through gathering cataracts.

‘Can’t you see you’ve ruined my whole life? Ruined it.’

But words aren’t enough. I just can’t seem to make them mean anything of what I’m feeling. I stand and stare at him. And with that lucidity that lies like deep water beneath the foaming surface of my rage, it comes to me that this has always been the source of my frustration when I argue. Words just aren’t adequate. It isn’t about words. None of it.

So I hit him. Instinctively. I take a great swipe and let the fiat of my hand slap solid into his cheek. One is so unused to violence. He ducks his head down, yelling. I slap again and again. I kick his shin hard. In a sudden desperate movement, he jerks himself up and comes at me, arms flailing like an angry child, uncoordinated and helpless, cartoon-like. He lashes. I grab him by the shoulders and, throwing my whole weight against him, heave him bodily back. He collapses into his chair again, panting. I raise my hand to slap and he weakly pulls up an arm to defend himself. I brush the arm away and slap hard. We stare at each other, his old unhealthy face quivering with fear and incomprehension. God knows what I’m looking like.

Enunciating fiercely, I tell him, ‘Now if you don’t agree to go into a home, old man, if you don’t just leave my mother be, then I’m going to come here every week and beat hell out of you, okay. I’m going to beat you to a pulp. Now get upstairs and wash your face and stay out of my sight.’

Muttering under his breath, but definitely defeated now, he struggles to his feet and limps out into the passage and off upstairs.

Left alone, I find myself trembling and truly truly appalled. Resting against the mantelpiece, I pick up a dusty Hummel of a small boy and two yellow birds sitting together on a country fence, their mouths wide open in song. How my mother loves these quaint images of innocence and happiness. An ice-cream van tinkles in some suburban distance, exactly as twenty years ago. And I draw breath. I try to steady myself. I feel deeply justified in going for the old man, yet can’t escape the terrible ugliness of what I’ve done. Have I ever hit anybody before? Never. What am I sinking to? Yet the paradoxical pattern of this experience — justification followed by ugliness — is all too familiar (didn’t I feel much the same after cheating on my wife: justified, ugly).

When Mother comes back I burst into tears in her presence for the first time since childhood.

‘We were so so happy,’ I weep. ‘We’d really got so close together. Why did it have to happen? Why?’

Mother hugs me and repeats over and over: ‘Bless you, my dear heart, bless you, bless you, bless you, my dear heart.’

Later, driving home, I reflect that of course I only let rip with Grandfather so as not to have to do so with Mother. It was an easy way out. For in many ways it is more her fault than his. A generation on, it was she should have known what to do, her I should have been shouting at. Yet I know I never will.

I get home, transfer a Heinz curry and rice from freezer to microwave, and while that’s cooking look up Christensen’s syndrome in the medical book I bought. Of one thousand eight hundred expensive pages, my baby girl’s condition merits only six lines:

Rare syndrome of varying intensity involving multiple disabilities and/or deformities. Cases differ widely and little is know of causes. Affects only females, but may (or may not) be passed on by males. Possible manifestations: spasticity of lower limbs, malformation of major articulations, cerebral palsy (rare). May occur together with, or be mistaken for, Down’s syndrome.

The phone rings. My mother’s voice speaks breathily: ‘Something’s happened to Dad.’

She found the old man upstairs on the floor by his bed unable to speak or move.

‘Dead?’

‘No, he opens his mouth, it’s just he can’t speak.’

‘Stroke,’ I say. ‘You. .’

‘Oh, sorry, that must be the ambulance already, I. .’

I say to phone me just as soon as she’s got any concrete news or needs help. Then I put down the phone and eat. Going about all the routine domestic tasks that evening, washing dishes, wiping surfaces, I numbly wonder whether Grandfather will manage to tell the powers that be that I beat him, or whether they themselves will find signs of violence. I feel nervous, faintly horrified, but there’s a growing sense of grim satisfaction too. Surely now he will be forced into a home at last. I have liberated my mother. It is not a crime. On the contrary I have done something good.

A precedent perhaps.

Four Thousand to One

What happens over the following months is that Shirley gives up entirely while I throw myself heart and soul into saving the situation, into finding, no matter how far I have to go, how much I have to spend, some cure that will reverse our little girl Hilary’s condition. My reasoning is that they can’t know for certain that her brain is in the same condition as Mavis’s. The medical books, when they mention it at all, say the syndrome is entirely unpredictable in terms of severity and areas affected. No one can really know how she will develop. She might have a severe physical handicap and a brilliant mind, for example. So perhaps, I think, there is still a chance for our daughter and for us. And if there is such a chance, however remote, it is my duty to go for it.

Shirley comes home after a month in hospital. She refuses to speak about Hilary’s condition. She avoids wheeling her out where she will be seen by neighbours. She looks after her carefully but clinically, never complaining how difficult it is to dress her with her stiff joints, never making even the most remotely relevant comments. She is efficient, tight-lipped, mechanical, beaten.

‘Please don’t tell me,’ she says quickly, when I begin about something I have read, some information gleaned. ‘Please, I don’t want to know, okay?’

I say how important it is for us to communicate, pull together.

She says: ‘When a tragedy occurs there’s no point in pretending it hasn’t.’ And she says I was right all along, we should never have had children, they’re too risky. Never never never. She could have found a job at another school, or in business, in the end she could have done it. We could have been happy. It is all her fault.

But I say no, she was right. And I tell her how much I want a healthy child now. It was just sheer bad luck.

‘Bit worrying,’ she remarks, ‘when we both start telling each other the other was right.’ She looks up at me from plucking a thread on her blouse and half smiles.

‘Everything will turn out okay,’ I say. ‘I was talking to a specialist who. .’

‘Please, George.’

Weeks pass. We don’t make love for the unspoken fear of somehow generating another Hilary. The geneticist has said a one in four chance. Add that to the, what, thousand to one chance of getting pregnant despite contraceptives and you’re talking about four thousand to one, the kind of odds you might never win at, but could perfectly well lose at. Lying in our bed sometimes, watching the evening shadows that stretch and flit, I will be urgently aware of our extraordinary isolation, from each other, from the rest of the world.

Still, I resist the temptation simply to work late at the office and absent myself from family life. When I am at InterAct I work hard, I plunge into work as into a warm healing bath, I seem to reach intensities of concentration, speed of operation, I never dreamt possible before, but I always make sure I’m home in good time. I think, we will come through even this, I will save little Hilary. I will. And I am terribly tender with the little girl, changing and feeding her myself since Shirley lost her milk almost immediately. Sometimes I’ll be up half the night, heating bottles in the microwave. I look into her small, slightly fish-like blue eyes and wait, hope for the first smile.

Many men, I’ve heard, simply refuse to look at a handicapped child.

Of the relatives, my mother and Shirley’s brother Charles are assiduous to the point of irritation. Mrs Harcourt on the other hand pays ever rarer visits during which she will talk eagerly about proportional representation and the advantages of using faster film, before making for the door with the near panic of someone leaving a sinking ship. Mr Harcourt occasionally phones offering advice about specialists suggested by his professional friends. He will look after the consultancy fees. Peggy brings Frederick over at weekends and offers to babysit Hilary so that we can go out together. Shirley invariably refuses. She doesn’t want to go out. She wouldn’t know what to do.

So that one evening I say, does she mind then, seeing as she has company, if I go out myself? On the Finchley Road I phone Susan Wyndham, my contact at Brown Boveri, a small girl, almost plain, but with a certain glint in her eye. My wife is away, would she like to go out for a drink? And in a Hungarian restaurant off the Edgware Road we talk very seriously and theoretically about relationships and faithfulness and fun and what life is for. Discrete loudspeakers are playing mazurkas. With make-up and washed hair, she looks better than I’m used to seeing her and has a knowingly wry smile as we wander around for a while under thin rain looking for a decent pub. When I kiss her below her Willesden flat, she comes back so fiercely I’m taken aback. But afterwards she cries and pushes her face into her pillow and says she has a fiancé who had to go to Australia for a year with his company and she’s been faithful to him for nearly ten months. Why, oh why did she let him down now?

When I get home it’s almost one. Charles and Peggy are arguing heatedly about feminism, which Charles is fiercely defending and Peggy fiercely attacking. Shirley has gone to bed with a couple of Mogadon. Hilary has obviously shat and they are ignoring the smell. I change her and re-make her bed. I sit on the loo and stare at the wall for perhaps fifteen minutes, then grit my teeth and go downstairs to propose Glenlivet all round.

Charles says: ‘Of course, it’s not too bad while she’s still a baby like any other. It’s when she grows up that things’ll really get heavy.’

Please

Shirley has always been against an operation, or at least not for it. But the doctors tell us that if the child is ever to walk something must be done. And if nothing else there will be the aesthetic effect.

However, they need both our signatures.

My response, being first and foremost a doer is, okay, try it, go for it, cut. Shirley, who, for all her bubbliness and energy when she’s up, has a fundamentally passive streak to her, is not convinced.

‘What’s the use?’ she says.

‘What do you mean, what’s the use? We’ve got to try everything.’

‘But the girl is like that. I don’t see what’s to gain by chopping and changing her. It won’t work.’

I ask her how can we go on, how can we go on with our lives if we don’t believe the child can be made normal?

‘You always set such store by normality,’ she says.

‘I should hope so.’

‘We’ve lived without it before one way or another.’

I say there’s hardly any point in bringing that up. That was an aberration. We’ve got over it.

‘And this is a tragedy.’

‘Right, so we’ve got to get over this too.’

She finds her wan smile. ‘George, you don’t “get over” tragedies. Haven’t you got it into your head yet that this has really happened?’

I remark that we would serve the little girl better if we argued about the matter logically without attacking each other. Anyway it is she, it seems to me, who is refusing to find out what’s happened or to look into it in any way, while I’ve been all over the place consulting authorities and books and talking to specialists and so on.

‘But it’s not the kind of thing you need books and experts to help you understand. It’s simple, you just sit and look at it.’

We stare at each other. Her face is drained, thin, but with a kind of luminous serenity to it. Which is new.

‘They said if they did the operation she might be able to walk, they might be able to fix everything.’

‘They said not to raise our hopes. You can’t refuse to live with things just because they’re not normal.’

‘We were so together, Shirley,’ I plead, ‘before she was born. We were so happy. Weren’t we? If only they can sort her out, everything will come right between us.’

‘It’s a chimera.’

‘But how can you know?’

‘Because they’d never have offered an operation if you hadn’t bothered them so much.’ And she says: ‘I don’t want her hurt any more than she is now. God knows what they’ll do when they start cutting. She’ll be strapped up for months. Nor do I see why we have to operate on her to improve our relationship. Which is fine as it is.’

My mother comes round and over tea and angel buns, brought in a biscuit tin I remember from earliest childhood, she begins to say what marvellous marvellous things surgeons can do these days. She’s been praying so hard and it’s true that the Lord is capable of revealing himself through science, His healing powers. She is sure it will come good.

Shirley asks how Grandfather is and says I really ought to go and visit him.

I phone Mr and Mrs Harcourt, Charles and Peggy, and get all of them to put pressure on Shirley. Everybody is on my side. Everybody supports the quick fix-it drama of orthopaedic surgery. Intervene, is the general chorus, do something about this wrong child, heal her, quick. And they are right. If the doctors are offering hope, who are we not to grasp at it? What kind of life could I have without it? Every time I come face to face with Shirley’s entrenched fatalism, her ‘accept, learn to live with it’, I find myself feeling quite sick. I know I’ll break down. I know that this is not my life.

The day before the operation Hilary smiles for the first time. She smiles and keeps on smiling. She beams from an apple-red complexion lying in a carrycot on the living room sideboard. The sight of this personality shining out of the so slightly strange face is at once immensely exciting, and distressing.

The same afternoon Mother phones to say that Grandfather is speaking again. They are moving him to a rehabilitation ward. ‘He asked after you.’

‘Oh really. What did he say?’

I notice that I’m not flinching at all.

‘Just your name. He’s not very coherent. Oh, and he asked for his pipe of course.’

‘Are you pleased?’

‘What do you mean? Yes of course I’m pleased. I was thinking perhaps it’s a good omen for Hilary’s op, love.’

Occasionally she does give away that it’s all pure superstition.

Hilary is ten hours in the operating theatre, far longer than they planned. Afterwards the doctors aren’t even encouraging. The assistant surgeon, with a frankness I have come to prefer to the usual flustering for an improbable sensitivity, says he didn’t find a single bloody tendon he honestly recognised. Coming out of anaesthetic in the early hours, the child begins to have very severe fits, contortions, retching. Shirley phones me towards midnight, fearing she is going to die. I drive back to the hospital and we pass the dawn pacing a corridor and occasionally peeping in at a now heavily sedated baby.

In the morning I drive straight from Great Ormond Street to InterAct which has its offices in Hammersmith now. I press for extra sugar and look out through dirty panes at the huge black thrust of the Cunard Hotel, the lively, grey-gloss bustle of a summer morning in London. I realise I have been more than half hoping through the night for the easy drama of a death which would attract sympathy from all and generally make life possible again. Even now I imagine Shirley calling and telling me it is all over; I think how careful I will be to express no sign of relief. On my Filofax, to some unknown deity, I write the word: PLEASE.

How Do You Feel About Your Life?

Grandfather has accused me of trying to kill him. The nurses are assuring Mother this kind of delusion is entirely normal, indeed is one more reason why he really ought to be in a home now. I say perhaps I shouldn’t visit if it is going to disturb him.

So at least that side of the story seems to be working out happily enough. After just a few weeks on her own, Mother is already in better form than I can remember and since Shirley is out day and night at the hospital and seems likely to be so for some time to come, I accept her offer to come over to Hendon and cook for me. Thus when I get home of an evening she will more often than not be in the kitchen arguing with Charles about unilateral disarmament or euthanasia or privatisation, since Charles seems to be treating us almost as a home from home now (I really can’t understand this). He will be sitting at table eating biscuits while she fusses with the oven or over the sink. Sometimes she brings a Filipino girl along to help, one of the walking wounded, a battered wife I think. She’s a slip of a girl, dark, with a kind of furtive, injured beauty about her which I find rather attractive, though she never lets me get beyond the merest pleasantries before scuttling off to wherever her sad existence is based.

Despite the desperate situation at the hospital, this turns out to be really quite a pleasant time for me. A sort of hiatus. I’m waited on hand and foot. The house is calmer than when Shirley is around. There are even flowers Mother has picked from the garden, inexpertly arranged, but soothing all the same. Flowers are so alive and fresh in their stillness. Indeed, I can’t remember when I last felt so free of tension. And after Charles has finally pushed off with his politics and endless advice, and Shirley has called with the evening’s last bulletin on Hilary’s condition, Mother and I will have the most amicable mother-and-son conversations.

‘Hasn’t got over the fits yet?’ she enquires. Her knitting needles click along the edge of a tiny sky-blue cardigan. Cardigans will be easier she thinks if the child has difficulty bending her arms. How easily she thinks these thoughts! Knitting she hums softly. Hymns. I recognise: ‘Oh God our help’, ‘Lo, He comes’, ‘Immortal, invisible’. Quite.

I’ve got the TV controls in my hand and, flicking back and forth through channels from the sofa, surprise myself by reflecting that had I married my mother, or rather someone like her, all would have been well. Wouldn’t it? I would have prevented her from spreading her generosity about too carelessly and she would have looked after me and generally agreed to do what I suggested, without the constant friction one has with Shirley.

Channel 4, I see, is illustrating the progress of the Spanish Armada with animated cartoons.

I say no. The girl has been at death’s door all day. Severe spasticity. I dropped in on the way back from work and she was in an awful state. Shirley is barely sleeping. A consultant friend of her father’s says that all the anaesthetic involved in such a long operation could cause brain damage in a child suffering from nervous disorders. Even cerebral palsy.

One says these things so calmly. And as I speak I do feel peculiarly calm. BBC2 is ‘examining’ safety in the air in the eager way journalists will. Should we be allowed to buy duty-free drinks? This is a burning issue. I fix myself a short.

Mother counts her stitches. She says: ‘Perhaps it was wrong of us to agree to the operation. But I’d prayed about it so much.’

I have less trouble these days accepting the non sequiturs in my mother’s conversation. One waits a moment as if to let a smell disperse.

On EastEnders some money has been stolen and race prejudice is polluting the investigation. As well it might, frankly.

‘It’s so difficult to know what to do for the best,’ she sighs. She begins to hum, ‘Oh worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness,’ reminding me of odd smells in choir stalls and paper pellets chewed from the corners of hymn books. Perhaps she finds the language on EastEnders hard to take.

‘The doctors should have warned us. Charles was saying we should take them to court.’

‘I can’t quite see what that would solve.’

‘We might get some money.’

It is her turn to let a non sequitur pass. Fair enough.

ITV are showing a couple of hippos in the incongruous process of copulating. A regular evening’s viewing. I try:

‘He also said it might be better if she died.’

‘That kind of thing,’ she frowns at her pattern, ‘makes me very angry. You start with remarks like that and you finish up with Hitler and death camps. The little girl deserves to live as much as anybody else.’

It’s curious. I am simultaneously thinking that Charles is right, but that Mother is also right. Yet surely they can’t both be? Does the key lie in that word, ‘deserves’? And why is everybody else so sure of themselves, so well defined? While I flounder. The press have been going through a phase of admiring people who have the courage to help their old sick relatives over the great divide. Selection of pills. The right mix. Contact the Euthanasia Society.

Upset by this kind of talk, Mother goes to the kitchen and five minutes later brings me some tea and fruitcake. Her light, flowery dress is hung with careful looseness about her bulk, her shoes are flat and sensible. One knee is visibly swollen.

Snapping off the TV, I find myself saying: ‘How do you feel about your life, Mum?’

‘How do you mean, love?’ With a knitting needle she is scratching at the instep of a foot where veins bulge fiercely.

‘You grew up looking after Grandad and Mavis. Dad gets killed after you’ve been married just a few years. Then you spend the rest of your life slaving for Peggy and me and Mavis and Grandad and none of us were ever particularly grateful.’

‘What a grim way to look at it,’ she laughs. She seems not in the least perturbed by this, as she clearly was by the notion of mercy killing. ‘No, I’ve had a very rich life. God has been good to me. He gave me a small ministry. I’ve been able to pray and have fellowship with all kinds of people and there has always been just enough of this world’s goods. If you knew the number of times people have slipped things through the letterbox without leaving their names. It’s been a very fulfilling life.’

Getting excited, I say: ‘Yes, but Peggy and I didn’t exactly turn out how you wanted, did we?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Peggy has this nice boy Barry. You’re happily married. I’m a grandmother twice over. What more could I want?’

Of course we both know very well what more. A great deal more. And yet I realise that this obstinately optimistic attitude is what I want to hear this evening. I want to hear my life described like this. And with tears suddenly in my eyes I find myself saying: ‘You know, if it hadn’t been for this awful business with Hilary, I would have loved to have had another child, more than one. What’s one earning money for after all?’

Have I ever articulated this view before? Even with myself. It’s perfectly obvious what one is earning money for: there’s so much still to buy.

Her knitting needles click along the edge of a silence now welling with unexplained emotion; evenly and determinedly: clickety click, click and click, clickety click, click and click. Then she stops. She looks up from a face that age has rather bloated. She says very calmly: ‘If you must know, dear, the one thing I regret in my life is the words they made me speak before they killed your father. I often wonder if they aren’t somehow to blame.’

We stare at each other, in some amazement that this has come out. As if a ghost (my father’s?) had crossed the room.

‘You what? To blame for what?’

She sighs over the crumpled knitting in her lap, not tearful as sometimes in the past, but with a weary ravaged softness about her roughly-shaped features under their helmet of grey hair.

‘For Hilary?’ I put incredulity into my voice.

Unable to speak, she nods.

I jump up. For reasons I don’t understand myself I’m quite ruthless. ‘Don’t be so bloody ridiculous, Mum!’ One thing I am not going to do is be lured into her metaphysical scheme of things. ‘You should see a psychiatrist. You know that? It’s mad to think that kind of thing. Mad.’ ‘Dear George,’ she’s muttering. ‘Dear George, I feel you’re so near, yet so far.’ ‘No,’ I say, ‘the only thing you did wrong,’ and I spit the words out, ‘if you must know, was not getting Mavis thoroughly checked out. Okay? That’s all there is to it.’ And I’m stamping over to the drinks cabinet with at least a quadruple whisky in mind, when the phone rings.

‘I’m bringing her home,’ Shirley says.

I Will Hope

‘I’m bringing her home.’

‘What? She’s better?’

Shirley is urgent: ‘She’s dying. I think they’re trying to let her die here.’

I tell her not to be ridiculous.

‘We’ll need some oxygen. Apparently you can hire it. Check out the yellow pages.’

‘But Shirley.’

‘Do it. Now. I’ll be back in an hour or so. I’ll take a cab. I’ve already signed her out.’

‘Let me come and get you in the car.’

‘No. I’ve got to get out of here now. Please, George, get the oxygen.’

She hangs up.

Mother is blowing her nose, sorting out her eyes.

‘Shirley’s bringing her home,’ I say, rising as one does to the drama of the occasion. In fact, while things are dramatic, life’s generally plain sailing. I grab the yellow pages.

And so begins the great epic: the tiny baby running a high temperature, suppositories, constant changing of sheets, of clothes, of nappies, of dressings on her strange and butchered legs, constant forcing of bottles between clamped gums, followed by vomiting, contortions. Her skin is clammy with fever. She cries a shrill nagging cry. She fights, though ever more weakly, whenever she is touched in any part of her body, eyes almost always screwed tight, hotly red in the now wan wax yellow of her face. In her fits she will have respiratory crises which require the oxygen mask. An ear infection generates a constant flow of pus.

Grabbing a snack with Shirley in the early hours, perhaps the second night, or the third, while Mother watches over the girl, I say: ‘We should have left her in hospital. They have all the equipment there.’

The house breathes silently about us. A hundred and sixty grand’s worth now and going up around £50 a day. The kitchen curtains haven’t been drawn and the yellow overhead light is hard and cold on the marble black tomb slabs of the windowpanes. Shirley’s expensive pans are piled high in the sink. I stab at crumbs.

‘Perhaps they were right.’

Shirley doesn’t answer at once. She moves purposefully in jeans and tee-shirt, scrambling eggs. She is living in a constant state of nervous tension. She doesn’t have the ten-hour escape to the office and other people that I have. Her face is drawn, gleaming with excitement. But she seems much more present, more decided, more one particular facet of her character than in the listless weeks following the birth. She is resolved, as if she had decided once and for all what to do, who to be. With a quick firm gesture she pushes unwashed hair from her face.

‘Nobody,’ she says, ‘has the least reason for believing that Hilary will never think and speak and talk and laugh and sing. Why should we let her die?’

She is reasonable, sensible rather than aggressive, which makes it difficult to argue.

I say carefully: ‘You didn’t seem so concerned about her when she was born. I mean, a bit offhand and mechanical. Why the big change?’

She shrugs. She asks does she have to explain herself? She doesn’t know. She might just as well ask why I have suddenly stopped hoping, since I was so hopeful and busy seeing specialists before. Arranging the operation. Wasn’t I? And now I want her dead. That isn’t fair, I say. We listen to the faint ticking of a wall clock. Then she says: ‘I just want to see her smile again, you know. I rather fell in love with her when she smiled that day.’

Sitting down, she stares at me over the narrow table top. Our faces suddenly seem very close to each other and large. I notice her nose is too red. She is ageing.

I say: ‘Think of the pain she’s in. Going on and on and on. Day after day. That ear problem she has. Her legs. Life is nothing but pain for her. It’s unbearable even to think of.’

‘The thing about pain,’ she says, ‘is that when it’s over, it’s over. But not being a woman you wouldn’t know anything about that.’

‘Let’s not argue, Shirl.’

She smiles, stands up, leans over the table and kisses me. ‘You’ve been wonderful, all the staying up you’ve done. I would never have expected it of you.’

‘Oh thanks a lot.’

‘Your mother too. Fantastic. Mine hasn’t even come to visit.’

‘Mum’s in her element,’ I tell her. ‘She probably wishes it was twins,’ and we both laugh.

Day after day then, nursing this sick child in a fetid, claustrophobic, overheated, over-emotive atmosphere. Two weeks, three. All taking our turns, shift after shift. Even the Filipino girl, Lilly, who will burst into tears occasionally and say how helpful it has been to find people worse off than herself, people she can help, how grateful she is. Peggy comes often. And Charles amazingly, an hour or two here and there, mucking in. People never cease to surprise you. If he does care for us in some way, then he certainly fooled me. I wonder will he use the oxygen if and when the child has a crisis in his sole presence. The question floats across my mind as an intriguing curiosity. The little girl’s life hangs by the most snappable of threads. For myself, in the drama of our trance-like weary nights, I have decided I must be good as the rest, I must do everything possible to see the little girl through. I’m determined still to believe, or at least not one hundred per cent exclude, that she does have a chance. And while that is on the cards, I will, I will hope.

What a relief though when I go to work. Or to Susan’s. Four, five times now. She always serves something of a feast after we’ve made love — eggs and bacon and beer and ice-cream. Traditional, solid fare. It’s almost better than the sex. Coming home on the tube, I tear an article about euthanasia out of the Standard and slip it between the pages of a scrapbook I keep in my briefcase.

The Worst Betrayal of All

It’s a few days after Hilary comes through her fever, that Shirley breaks down. The little girl’s improvement is sudden and dramatic. The temperature falls, her breathing becomes even, and in the space of a few hours a bloom returns to her cheeks. We are euphoric. We open bottles of Oddbin’s Verduzzo, we talk about the future, we jubilantly call the hospital to fix an appointment for the next check-up. Except that with this apparent return to health, we notice that the child isn’t looking about her in the same way she did at two months, before the op. She seems unable to follow a finger, to see the teat of a bottle.

At the check-up, which a surprised consultant arranges almost at once, a paediatric optician is called and immediately confirms that Hilary is indeed not seeing. The eyes, he says, are perfectly okay in themselves, but not responding or focusing. Something in the brain. The consultant hopes, clearing his throat, fussing with a pen, that this will be a temporary ‘symptom’ due to post-operative trauma. ‘You should feel very proud of yourselves,’ he goes on quickly, ‘I honestly didn’t think the girl would survive.’

‘Just that now she seems a great deal worse than before the operation. And her legs won’t bend.’

This middle-aged man smiles. He is long-jawed, schoolmasterly. ‘Actually, that remains to be seen.’ He focuses deep-set eyes on me. ‘I’m sorry, but this was not by any stretch of the imagination routine surgery, hence there were risks which we did warn you of. Certainly we don’t take these decisions lightly. However, and be that as it may, we shall have to wait a good, what, at least six months more to know the real results of the operation one way or another.’ He stops. ‘Nor do I see any need to be too pessimistic. The child has survived after all, which shows remarkable resilience.’

Shirley says: ‘She doesn’t seem to be able to hold her head up straight, doctor. I mean, she should be able to do that at four months, shouldn’t she?’

I haven’t actually registered this myself before, but realise now that this is what makes the girl so odd. Even when you hold her up, her head will loll slackly to one side. And I have one of my sudden piercing revelations, visions, of what our life will be like from now on with this handicapped child. I see her at five years old, ten, her head lolling.

Shirley is nodding gravely as the consultant describes the special kind of chair we will have to buy in about six months’ time to keep the spine and neck straight. Some kind of allowance, he is saying, is available to cover at least part of the cost.

Which is? Shirley is being very practical.

He doesn’t know. About £400 perhaps.

We stand up to leave. Then no sooner have we got in the car than Shirley flips. She straps Hilary into her seat and bursts into tears. She howls: ‘All those nights, all those nights of pain, and now she can’t even see!’

I drive brilliantly fast. I’m getting to know the lights and lanes round behind the hospital. That splendid feeling of challenging the great city machine: filters, left-only lanes, bus lanes, bollards, no right turns, sequence-timed lights, brake and accelerate, brake and accelerate. I stay silent a long while.

‘I can’t stand it, I can’t, I won’t stand it.’ She doesn’t even fiddle with handkerchiefs, just weeps, shoulders shuddering.

Finally, caught on a long red, I say: ‘Shirley, Shirley!’

‘I wish I was dead,’ she shrieks.

I drum my fingers on the wheel: ‘We should have been angrier. We should have told him we’d sue.’

‘God, do I wish I was dead!’

I storm up the Caledonian Road, jerking from pedal to pedal. The motley buildings race toward us, the wheeling sky, the low neon, tall blocks of flats, the afternoon sun occasionally spangling on blank glass, the rubbish outside cheap restaurants, the usual motley on the pavements.

Our child is blind.

Shirley is moaning now. I can think of no other word for it, a low animal cry, her face in her hands.

Overtaking on the inside lane, squeezing back into the flow before a parked car, it occurs to me that driving is not unlike a computer game. Some program that would project your score onto a corner of the windscreen perhaps?

I say maybe it really is only post-operative trauma. How can we know? In any event we must find some other consultant to contact who will tell us more. ‘These guys never tell us anything.’ Maybe we can find out if there’s some big specialist in America or Switzerland or something. ‘You can bet they’ll be light years ahead of the NHS for this kind of thing.’

‘I wish we’d never met,’ she says.

‘Come on, Shirley.’

‘Sometimes I hate you for all this.’

I don’t object. I often feel the same.

We drive on with an urgency that scatters other traffic like confetti. She doesn’t comment on it as she usually does. One secretly hopes for an apocalyptic accident of course. She leans over her seat and caresses the child’s thin hair. She is murmuring now. I stare at the road.

Has my mother been working on Shirley these weeks she’s been staying with us? I haven’t actually noticed anything, but I often think Mother manages to exude influence even without speaking. Her eyes, her posture, her tone. She will persuade you to see the world as she sees it. In any event, when we get back home, Shirley carries the baby with her into the house while I stick the car in the garage, taking my time over everything now, relaxing, calming down, turning keys and handles with the slow, almost voluptuous pleasure I have recently begun to find in doing all those little activities that keep you just outside the family sphere: taking a pee, a bath, a shave, carrying the rubbish out to the bin, changing a lightbulb in an empty bedroom. I move with meticulous painstaking slowness, the exact opposite of my driving, though the escapist intent is no doubt the same. When finally I walk into the living room, Shirley is in my mother’s arms weeping.

She is making some kind of confession. It is all her fault she is saying in a low voice broken by sobs. All her fault. She’s been a terrible wife, she forced me to go and have other women, had an affair herself for ages and ages.

‘Shirley!’

Instinctively I try to wade in and stop this, but she clings tightly to my mother whose large face watches me over her shoulders.

‘It must be a punishment. It must. It’s too awful.’

‘Shirley, shut up!’

I start to shout, to try to pull them apart. Hilary wakes, as she always does, screaming. Through the bedlam, my mother says quietly: ‘George, why don’t you just go out for a while and let her get this off her chest.’

I hate, no really hate the attempt, inherent in that everyday expression (’get this off her chest’) and again in her tone of voice, her willed serenity and motherliness, to reduce the whole thing to a kind of understandable outburst which will soon be over.

‘No. It’s ridiculous. Shirley. Don’t be crazy! Let’s talk this over on our own.’

My mother, her face half in Shirley’s mussed hair, mouthes the word: ‘Please.’ Her old eyes, tremulous in their papery net of wrinkles, glow and plead, insisting I am her son. And I go. As much simply to be out of it as anything else. I go to Child’s Hill Park and smoke about a hundred cigarettes.

When I get back, they are in the baby’s room, kneeling and praying by Hilary’s cot. They don’t see me at first and I spy on them a moment from the landing. They are knelt in a clutter of toys and baby clothes on the carpet. The curtains must be drawn, because the light is pinkish grey filtered through red. My mother, on her swollen knee, has both raw hands hooked over the top rail of the cot, her face pressed against her knuckles, shoulders hunched, back bowed. Shirley on the other hand is kneeling straight up in perfect finishing school posture, girlish, virginal, the smart dove-grey wool dress she put on for the consultant falling prettily over her curved back, her slim calves; the fine ankles still in their white summer sandals. Then Mother launches into another prayer: Oh dear Lord who so often in the past. .’

In bed I ask: ‘You really had an affair?’

‘Yes.’

‘Who with?’

‘A teacher at school.’

‘When you were so depressed?’

She laughs softly: ‘No, before that. I was depressed when I lost him.’ She adds: ‘I’m sorry, George.’

I take this in. After a moment I tell her: ‘I don’t blame you for that. But this with my mother is the worst betrayal of all.’

And next morning when I get Mother alone for a second I ask her please to go. I don’t care how much help she is being, she’ll have to go.

It is a Saturday and I spend the whole day cracking a computer game called Helicopter Attack. The sneaky thing is the way they keep altering the wind speed so that you drift off course into the flak. In the evening Peggy comes over with Charles and mentions almost in passing that Buddhist Barry, her lover of two years standing, has left her. The marvellous thing, it occurs to me, about Peggy is how she never needs comforting.

Flow Chart

Drama over, routine sets in; looking after this strange child who catches every possible infection, who is allergic to antibiotics, to food additives, who knows no difference between night and day; the progress of other children (Peggy’s Frederick, Greg and Jill’s Rachel, running, jumping, chattering, doing jigsaw puzzles) simply underlining this other baby’s utter lack of it, can’t roll over, can’t hold anything, can’t sit up; Shirley giving all her time, all her energy, the exhausting nights. At age one, eight months after the op, the little girl smiles again, she even chuckles.

‘You see, she’s happy.’

‘Shirley, she’s blind, she’s immobile, she’s utterly deprived.’

‘But she doesn’t know she is. In her spirit she’s happy.’

I say: ‘I smile a lot. At the office I even guffaw. I tell jokes. It doesn’t mean I’m happy.’

‘That’s your problem,’ she says. ‘Or do you want me to kill you out of sympathy?’

She begins to find the most minimal signs of progress, an ability to clasp a hand around your finger, to move her head, just ever so slightly, when she’s called. Sometimes. She doesn’t attach disproportionate hopes to these developments. On the contrary, it’s really a sign that she has accepted things. She is content with this much. The girl can clasp your finger. So there is something there. Some personality.

At nearly two the child learns to roll over. We can’t leave her on the couch any more.

Stimulation! Yet another consultant expensively tells us what we’ve already read in books. And now I am encouraged to design ‘computer games’ for the child. Well, I’m willing to try. I start with a big board that straps onto the eating tray on her £500 chair. When she presses coloured knobs an amplifier plays different tunes and bright colours shine on our TV screen placed right in front of her. Perhaps she can see, just a little. Perhaps. I wire up a system of pedals for her feet, I make the controls of the hand-operated board more complicated so she has to manipulate them, to the right, to the left. This strange child giggles, hearing our voices around her. She gets excited, heaving herself about. And it is gratifying. Shirley is impressed, grateful. I become enthusiastic. Hilary is pressing the pedals. She is, somehow, with wrist and elbow as much as fingers, moving the knobs. On purpose or at random? Her face is blank apart from those sudden brilliant smiles. Which don’t always seem to coincide with any visible stimulus, but does that matter? When I introduce a knob she has to turn rather than push she can’t do it. Immediately she loses interest. If it really was interest. She bellows. Flails limbs. What does she want? Give her food? Her bottle? No, she spits it out and screams. Hug her? She bellows even louder. What then? I think, this child will be in nappies, at five, at fifteen. At thirty. While Shirley tells our friends: see the progress she is making, she can push these knobs, look, these pedals, she makes the tune play, the lights come on. I can see the pain in the visitor’s eyes, the desire to change the subject, to head for the drinks cabinet. Even Peggy doesn’t seem to want to hold the girl. She’s heavy. With no real exercise she’s getting fat. How loud will she bellow when she’s twenty?

I am convinced I shall go mad. The sense I have of constant high tension in the jaws. The nightmares. And I now have a whole file full of euthanasia cuttings. I keep them locked in the bottom drawer of my desk. A woman in Carlisle has drugged to death a four-year-old boy terminally ill with bone cancer. The judge let her off with a suspended sentence. In Truro a man and wife are fighting because the wife wants their two-year-old comatose daughter taken off an iron lung and the husband doesn’t. He’s divorcing her over the matter and wants custody of the child. She’s contesting it. She says she’s the merciful one. In Dijon, France, a man butchers his new-born mongoloid with a pair of scissors.

I read these articles on the Northern Line. Never more than a couple of brief paragraphs, they nevertheless hold me spellbound the whole journey from Hammersmith to Hendon Central. In Rotherham a nine-year-old boy with severe muscular dystrophy claws his way out of his wheelchair to throw himself from the third floor flat of the council estate where he lives with his unmarried, unemployed mother and alcoholic grandfather. Or was he pushed? And they’re actually bothering to check! Yes, full scale police enquiry. Time, tax money. Is this the public good? Medical evidence shows signs of struggle. Mother says yes but she was trying to hold him back. I miss my station.

Hilary, I think, could never be imagined to have climbed to a window.

On the other hand she can’t simply be switched off.

And I could never kill her with a pair of scissors. I love her.

This happens. I am walking back to the car in the tube-station carpark when I see a hoarding. It says: MUSCULAR DYSTROPHY: We Know The Cause, Now Help Us Find The Cure. What it shows though is three stylised green Plasticine figures. They are children. The two at each side are standing and reaching a hand down to help the third between them who seems to have stumbled and is crouching low. Tripped by the disease. Can they pull him up? Can they rescue their little companion? Buzzing open the car lock with the remote control, I burst into tears. I cover my face. This hopeless, stupid, heart-rending image of human solidarity. I feel so vulnerable. There is a Giro number to send cheques to, but I don’t write it down. The illustration has already convinced me that there is nothing to be done but turn away.

Shirley takes Hilary to church. She has converted though there have been no more dramatic scenes since the confession to my mother. Quietly and conventionally (I almost said sensibly), she goes to church, gets involved in creches, in organising the kind of charitable events I have avoided since I was fifteen. Occasionally ‘church folk’ drop round and make an inhuman effort, maybe twenty minutes, thirty, to give Hilary some attention. Occasionally I find Shirley in what can only be an attitude of prayer, usually by the cot Hilary is now too big for (but she would fall out of a normal bed). So, after all our laughter years ago at Mother’s expense, Shirley has become a Christian. Whatever that really means. But she doesn’t want to talk about it. Nor do I. Just once she says, ‘However obscure, there must be some reason for this, some plan, there has to be. I do believe there has to be a God behind it all.’ Just once I say: ‘You can’t honestly believe we’re guilty and this is the punishment. It doesn’t work like that.’ She says slowly: ‘I know. You’re right. It’s just that sometimes I feel that’s how it was. I make that connection.’ It seems pointless trying to argue the absurdity of this out logically, since sometimes I feel the pull of this explanation myself.

Typical scene. Shirley comes running, says excitedly: ‘Hilary called me Mummy today.’ ‘Great!’ But I know that if the miracle ever happened it will never be repeated. The girl may giggle when you soap her in the bath, she may randomly press those knobs I have provided her with and laugh at the electronic tunes that result, she may even be able to see just a little light and colour, but she certainly never calls her mummy, Mummy.

Dressed up she looks a plain ordinary little girl somebody has tripped up, floundering on her back. On a rare visit, Mrs Harcourt takes a photo of her against a background of Alexandra Palace flowerbeds.

And two hours physiotherapy every single day. It’s a new American method. A trip to Philadelphia to gen up. We, or rather Shirley, bend her joints, roll her head around, knead her muscles. She screams throughout.

Will she ever be able to eat on her own? Even to bring a bottle to her lips? Who knows, but it has become Shirley’s mission I sense. All the more conclusively and engrossingly, because it is a mission that can never be accomplished.

Is this the life she wanted? We wanted? Isn’t it pathetic, creepy, giving so much help to a helpless case? Like my mother with Grandfather, with Mavis. Isn’t it a way of giving up on that other, bigger life we should be living? Shirley is intelligent, attractive, valuable.

‘Is this the life you wanted?’ I ask.

‘It’s the life I’ve been given,’ she says mysteriously.

‘You sound like my mother now.’

‘What’s so bad about that? Your mum’s okay.’

I don’t say it, but I think, At least my mother’s wounded can walk. For some reason I think of the Filipino girl.

The fact is that although Mother hardly ever comes since that day I told her to leave, Shirley spends anything up to an hour on the phone with her every other day. Talking about me no doubt, and about Hilary’s ‘progress’. Meanwhile, at the office, I draw up the following flow chart:

What Heroes

I find it pretty funny frankly that it took an atheist like me to think of faith-healing. Still, weird things do happen. It would be foolish to pretend otherwise.

‘But you don’t believe in it,’ Shirley protests, laughing.

I remind her that we have tried all the consultants, we have flown to Houston and to Geneva. We have blown upwards of fifteen grand. It’s simply a case of trying to cover every angle. ‘That’s my way.’

She gives me her narrow look. ‘What exactly,’ she asks, ‘is Hilary preventing you from doing in life that you would otherwise like to do? Why keep hunting for a solution you know isn’t there? Come on. Tell me one thing she’s preventing you from doing. Nothing. You see. You can’t think of anything.’

I tell her: ‘Look, Shirley, if Hilary wasn’t here, I’d be happy to have another child. We could adopt one. I do believe we would be happy.’

‘What do you mean, “wasn’t here"?’

She knows perfectly well what I mean. Nevertheless, I say: ‘If she went into a home.’

‘But we’ve been over that a million times. She wouldn’t get any attention. She’d make no progress.’

‘She’s not making any progress as it is.’

‘Yes she is.’

My own inclination is to be honest about these things, however brutal it may seem. All the same, I say:

‘If she were being looked after, you could get a job.’

‘I don’t want a job.’

‘But you must want to get out of the house sometimes. Don’t you?’

‘Of course I do, but I can’t and that’s that, so what’s the point of moaning about it.’

‘You’re denying yourself.’

‘Yes.’

‘For a creature who has no hope, no future.’

She pauses. She bites her lip. ‘Not perhaps in the narrow way you define those concepts.’

‘So how does Shirley Harcourt define them.’

‘I don’t. I just get on with things, that’s life.’

‘Oh, mysterious life again.’

‘Right.’

Then she says: ‘Anyway, what future do you have, George Crawley?’

‘Oh come on.’

‘You see.’

‘I’m sorry, but I don’t.’

‘And didn’t George kill the dragon to save the damsel, not vice versa.’

‘What on earth is that supposed to mean?’

‘I’ve seen your scrapbook,’ she says, ‘okay? And it’s inhuman what you’re thinking.’

I turn away. ‘Only too human to go by what’s written in those articles.’

I persuade her, after the ten consultants, at least to go and look at a home. Check it out. We drive up to the Penelope Hardwick State-assisted Charity School for the Severely Handicapped in Enfield. In the car she says chattily: ‘I honestly can’t understand what’s eating you so much. I’m doing everything with her now. You have all the time in the world to do whatever you want. Leave earlier in the morning if you like, come home later. Work weekends. The world’s your oyster, George. Go get it.’

I realise she is telling the truth. I mean about not understanding. She can’t understand. This is the crux, she can’t understand me. Otherwise she wouldn’t say these things.

‘And if you want some fun at least get yourself snipped so we can make love. I could do with some action too, you know. Then we could go out occasionally if you want. Your Mum is willing to babysit. So’s Charles, though I’m not sure I could trust him.’

‘I don’t want to see my mother any more than is necessary.’

She says not to be such a big baby. What does it matter if she knows we screwed around?

She doesn’t understand.

‘You’re hung up,’ she tells me then.

‘Perhaps I am. But at least one should be able to count on one’s wife to respect one’s hang-ups.’

And when Enfield’s one-way system at last allows us to find it, the home really is pretty awful. One storey, yellow brick, the windows blue metal-framed, black lino floors, walls green to waist height, white above, firedoors at regular intervals down an interminable corridor reeking of disinfectant; in short, the spaces, shape and general utilitarian meanness of any institution, rendered poignant in this case by worse than usual childish scribblings pinned on the walls, by a background smell beneath the disinfectant of shit, by the cluttering paraphernalia of the handicapped: wheelchairs, walking frames, lifting devices in the bathroom. And then, inhabiting this ersatz fluorescent-lit environment, the fifty hopeless, slavering, contorted, clamouring, spastic, clumsily-dressed, unkempt basket cases. I know, I know, but what else do you want me to call them? Do we have to be pious? Except that sometimes the eyes are so intelligent, the gaze so piercingly clear as they register your panic. One little Asian boy in particular. A tiny, horribly deformed monkey with huge gorgon eyes. Amused. He laughs when he sees me in my suit and tie.

But Hilary is not one of those. Her eyes don’t see.

The white-coated staff are kind, bored, complacent, addressing the children with the same slightly sharp, patronising voice one might use for untrained pets or for the senile. Irritation, one senses, is kept at bay only by professional resignation. How else could it be? Much flustering to get a certain overweight Thomas to renounce a pen he is in danger of jabbing in his eye. ‘Come on, Tommy, you’ve been such a good boy this morning.’ Judging by his bulk, he’s at least eleven, ugly and belligerent.

Shirley smiles readily. She doesn’t seem to have the same difficulty simply looking that I have. Her manner reminds me of our pre-natal courses; she’s fresh, gregarious. Immediately she plunges into earnest conversation with one of the younger ‘teachers’ on the kinds of handicaps, the types of treatment. How many hours of this and that do they do, staff/children ratio, frequency of parental visits. ‘This child has Horner’s syndrome.’ As if we were connoisseurs. ‘Yes, it’s so exciting to see the progress they make, the way they come out.’ What were they like before? A spastic boy, wrists unnaturally twisted, is incessantly fingering pouted lips, his face blank in front of a morning TV programme showing how tennis balls are made. The TV is high up on the wall, out of harm’s way. In the corner a boy with only flippers protruding from his shoulders is trying to turn the pages of a comic book.

Of course these people must be looked after.

We are invited to stay to watch the children eat their lunch. I quickly invent a business appointment.

Silence in the car. I don’t even bother persuading. Shirley is kind enough not to say told you so. What she does do though is whistle as we inch down Ponder’s End High Street. She doesn’t often whistle. I recognise: ‘New every morning is the love’. She has recently joined the choir at St Barnabas. Apparently she sits at one end of the stalls with Hilary in her special chair on the chancel steps to the right. It is one of her illusions that Hilary appreciates music.

Finally she says: ‘What heroes.’

I say: ‘Yes, I was wondering why my mother never thought of it.’

Good Thick Foil-Wrapped Chocolate

The first faith-healer I try operates from a semi-basement flat off the Fulham Road. She is not a big name. I go to this woman because the MD, Johnson, and his wife have been enthusing about her for months. Margaret, the wife, in her early fifties, is intelligent, upper-class, well-educated; a sceptical type I would have thought. For more than fifteen years she has suffered intermittently from severe back pains which sometimes make it impossible for her even to stand up. After innumerable medical examinations, tests, X-rays, scans, drugs, massage, acupuncture and even an exploratory operation, she was finally persuaded by a friend to try Miss Whittaker. In just three ‘sessions’ she was healed. She hasn’t had the pain for months. So what did Miss Whittaker actually do? Nothing more than lay her hands on Margaret Johnson in a darkened room.

Normally of course I would take this kind of story with the very large pinch of salt it probably deserves. Menopausal women are famous for their psychosomatic problems. I’ve always given faith-healing about the same credibility rating as flying saucers and abominable snowmen. Things we’d like to believe in, good newspaper fodder. But at a price of £12.50 a session it is surely worth a whirl.

At the back of all my calculation there is always that faint, that constantly suppressed but in the end indomitable craving for a miracle, that residual part of me which is still a little boy kneeling in a cold church clutching at a thread of faith. Surely this is normal. The fact is I have made a sort of promise that I will become religious, Christian even, if a miracle occurs. ‘Master, we would see a sign from thee,’ I remember the verse from Sunday school. Who was it? The Pharisees? And what could be fairer? People have been doing these deals for centuries. If He wants my soul (if I have a soul), let Him show me a sign.

So I casually mention to Neil, the MD, who any day now will be inviting me to be a director (I have seen an exchange of memo’s between himself and one of the non-executive partners), that my mother also has a back problem. (I have never told anyone at work that I have a handicapped child. Somehow I know it would be unwise.)

Having thus wangled address and phone number, I then have to persuade the fabled Miss Whittaker to give me an appointment on Saturday afternoon. Soft-spoken, the woman has the irritating habit of leaving long pauses on the telephone. She doesn’t usually ‘receive’ on Saturday. She goes to see her mother in Richmond. I offer to pay double and to drive her on to Richmond afterwards if that would help. Politely, she says she is not interested in money. Then I remember that what I must say with this kind of person is, ‘please’. ‘Please, Miss Whittaker, please, I’m desperate, and I really can’t come any other day.’ The appointment is arranged.

Now it’s merely a question of getting Shirley to let me have Hilary for the afternoon. Because I don’t want Shirley to know. Lourdes is one thing, huge, institutional, traditional, respectable. Everybody tries Lourdes. You’d be amazed how many common-or-garden, middle-class protestants have been there with their chronic arthritis, low sperm counts, dyslexic children and miscellaneous cancers. Lourdes is respectable. But a faith-healer off the Fulham Road is something else altogether. The trouble being that the more I try to solve the problem, to save Hilary rather than just leave be, the more bizarre the gestures I make, so the closer Shirley believes I’m getting to doing something drastic.

A certain macabre suspicion has crept into our relationship. She keeps her eye on me.

‘I just thought I’d take her off your back for an afternoon. Give you a chance to relax.’

Shirley is indeed worn out. Who wouldn’t be? It’s been a week of ear infection again. Hilary can’t take regular antibiotics because of the additives they have. She is likewise allergic to the solution most drops come in.

‘Of course if you don’t want me to get close to my daughter. .’

She concedes.

And as I prepare Hilary for the trip I sense again how right I am to insist on finding some kind of solution that will truly be a solution, on not accepting this miserable situation as permanent. For just getting a coat and hat on the girl is a hopeless, wearing, heartbreaking task. Her arms won’t go in the holes. The elbows don’t bend properly. She wriggles and moans, arching her little body fiercely, unnaturally, backwards, eyeballs rolling away so that the iris is almost gone.

I try so hard to be gentle. I force a hand into a sleeve. Then she scratches herself quite badly behind an ear. There’s blood.

Shirley says I haven’t the knack.

I say the girl’s nails shouldn’t be allowed to get so long. Briefly I reflect on the quite endless occasions for discord.

I carry her down the back steps to the garage tossed over my shoulder like a sack of potatoes. She has no muscle-tone. She can’t cling to me like a normal child would. But sensing, from the changes in sound, smell and light, that we must be going out, she begins to gurgle happily. Then cries again as we go through the business of getting her into the car and into some kind of acceptable position on the car seat where I can strap her in. Leaving her crying, I hurry back to the house for nappies, creams, her special two-ton pushchair.

I tell Shirley I’m taking her to hear the band in St James’s Park. It’s a pleasant spring afternoon. Open air and music are two of the few things she is capable of enjoying, aren’t they? Shirley is touched now and embraces me. We would both like not to argue, to be close. ‘George,’ she mutters. ‘Thanks, really.’

In the car when I look in the mirror, my daughter’s head is lolling heavily to one side, a beatific smile on her face which gradually smooths out into sleep. At least I get the fun of the drive.

I suppose I’m expecting somebody thin, drawn, spiritual, mysterious, perhaps dressed in black. I have in mind a medium I saw on some up-market TV drama with dull, glazed, at once unseeing and all-seeing eyes. A make-up job probably. Instead, having humped the sleeping Hilary down a flight of cement steps and negotiated my way past a line of bins and assorted pots with geranium cuttings, I am greeted by a woman who surprises me by her likeness to my mother when she was younger. It is the florid, matronly wholesomeness of the round middle-aged face that strikes me, the clear, kind eyes.

‘You must be Mr Crawley. Do come in. Is this your little daughter?’

Miss Whittaker’s dumpy body is dressed cheaply and sensibly in patterned skirt and synthetic pink sweater. I am disappointed. Far from a mysterious place of healing, her flat might be any of the more middle-class variety one sees when visiting colleagues from work: stuffy, cleanly-kept, unexciting. Photographs of relatives and so on. Though plentiful flowers do give a sense of repose.

‘Mrs Johnson told me about you.’

She wrinkles her forehead and frowns: ‘Mrs Johnson? I’ve got a head like a sieve I’m afraid.’

‘She had a bad back and. .’

‘Oh, yes, right. It’s better now of course.’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘I am glad. And what can I do for you?’

Catching a faint twinkle in her clear eyes I realise that she is aware of, and rather amused by, my sense of disappointment. She is intelligent.

As I begin to mumble my story she walks me through to a small back bedroom where floral curtains and a mass of potted plants are allowing only a dim green light to filter onto spartan furnishings: divan bed, armchair, chair, bookcase. There is none of the religious bric-a-brac I had imagined. Not even the texts my mother invariably hangs on bedroom walls (’They shall rise up on wings as eagles: they shall run and not faint’). Perhaps it’s not going to be the performance I expected.

‘Ah, the girl. No, don’t tell me anything, Mr Crawley. No medical details, please. It only interferes. Just lay her on the bed then, will you.’

Naturally as I try to slip her coat off, for the room is over-heated, Hilary wakes with a heart-stopping howl that freezes thought. Her mouth opens wide, wide, wide. She wails. Under my breath I involuntarily mutter, ‘Bloody hell!’ And immediately, startlingly, I sense that although it is surely impossible with the volume of that howling, Miss Whittaker has somehow heard me. I turn quickly to find her smiling at me with sympathy, but also with a certain sternness. Again I am reminded of my mother.

‘You don’t believe, do you, Mr Crawley?’

‘No, I’m afraid I don’t.’

‘You don’t believe I have any power.’

She talks sweetly without any hint of challenge.

‘Well, I. .’

And all the while I’m trying to stop poor bloody Hilary from rolling off the bed. She is unusually agitated.

‘So may I ask why you came?’

With sudden and I know rude belligerence, I say, ‘Why shouldn’t I come? I’ve got nothing to lose.’

She doesn’t react. On the contrary, there is something irritatingly demure about the way she stands with her fleshy white hands folded in front of her. ‘I think I understand,’ she says. ‘In any event it surely doesn’t help if you curse and swear over your child, does it?’ She raises her eyebrows. We exchange a brief glance, during which I again have the impression that she is coolly aware of what I am thinking: that she is a pious fraud.

‘Do you want me to undress her?’ I ask. The child is crying softly now.

‘No, no, you just relax and sit in the armchair for a little, will you?’

I had been afraid I might be asked to pray or something. She waits for me to move away and then goes to the bed and strokes Hilary’s hair. Immediately the child quietens and begins to gurgle softly.

‘What a pretty little girl,’ Miss Whittaker murmurs. ‘What a pretty pink ribbon Mummy has put in your hair. What pretty clothes. Someone’s mummy and daddy think a lot of them, don’t they? Someone’s a very lucky little girl.’

Curiously, she is right. We do think a lot of her.

I sit in the chair watching the woman’s squat back. Hilary is lying quite still and calm, despite the strange place, the strange voice. This is very unusual. A good sign. So, do I sense the faintest ray of hope? It’s quickly quelled. How can this woman even know what’s wrong with my daughter? There’s nothing to be seen without taking her clothes off. She’s not obviously spastic or mongoloid. The charlatan doesn’t know what I brought her for.

Kneeling on a cushion, Miss Whittaker runs her small podgy hands the length of the child’s body, letting them slide lightly over her clothes. Minutes pass. She has stopped talking now, her hands move back and forth, not hypnotically or even rhythmically, but more with a questing motion, stopping here and there, hovering, moving back, coming quietly to rest: on her head for a full minute, above her knees, her ankles, which below her socks, I know, are fierce with scars. Hilary lies still, eyes blindly open, breathing soft. She doesn’t even move when a plump hand covers her face, gently pressing the eyelids. Leaning over her, Miss Whittaker blows very lightly on her forehead. Then repeats the whole rigmarole.

I watch, biting a nail. Fifteen minutes. It’s hard keeping still frankly. I fidget. I feel tense. It’s farcical. For of course, now I’m here, I don’t expect anything. In the end I would have done a lot better by myself and Hilary if I’d gone to St James’s Park. Shirley would think I’d lost my marbles.

Another ten minutes before at last Miss Whittaker rises slowly to her feet, then sits on the bed and strokes Hilary’s hair in what is now an entirely normal way. Immediately the child begins to smile and gurgle again.

‘Poor little lovey.’ Then she turns to me. She says: ‘Well, apart from some small irritation or infection which I may have been able to help, your child is really perfectly healthy, Mr Crawley, and beautifully, beautifully innocent. Don’t you see how her smiles shine?’

What? Is the ‘session’ over? Is that her verdict? But she holds up a hand to stop my protest. ‘As for the question of what she is, I mean the form in which she was sent into this world, I’m afraid it is far, far beyond my humble powers to alter that.’

After a moment’s awkward silence in this dimly-lit room, I decide the best thing to do is cut my losses. Only £12.50 after all. A joke. I stand up to go, reaching for my wallet.

She smiles her sad smile, so similar to any sympathetic, middle-class smile an older woman might give you waiting in a long queue at supermarket or post office. She is still stroking Hilary’s hair. For the first time, standing above her now as she moves her legs, crosses her ankles, I think of her as feminine, ample, faintly perfumed, a woman. They are always women. And she says calmly:

‘Perhaps I could help you, though, Mr Crawley.’

‘I’m sorry, I beg your pardon.’

‘Perhaps I could help you more than your child.’

‘Oh I’m fine.’ Caught by surprise, I automatically assume my jocular office persona. ‘As terminal patients go I mean.’ I laugh falsely. I’m never ready for people’s extraordinary presumption.

She raises her eyebrows. ‘In some ways you may be less healthy than your daughter.’

‘That,’ I tell her emphatically, dropping any attempt at humour, ‘is patently non-sense. Anyway, I’m in a hurry.’

‘Of course, as you wish.’ But then as I extract my wallet, she adds: ‘It’s just that you said you were desperate.’

‘I am. For her.’

‘And for yourself.’

‘Only in so far as I find her suffering unbearable.’

‘So perhaps I could help you with your desperation, help you to bear it.’ She works on me with her soft eyes the way certain women will.

‘Frankly I’d say desperation was the only normal response to this situation. I shall be desperate while she is like she is. She is the cause, not a symptom. And that’s that.’

Miss Whittaker sighs, faintest half-smile wrinkling the corners of a generous pale mouth. ‘As you wish. Dear Hilary,’ she says again as I struggle to get her into her coat.

At the door she declines payment with a simple shake of the head. She has exactly my mother’s serene sad wistfulness. For Christ’s fucking sake. I hate people who won’t take the money you owe them.

And once in the car I go for the Fulham Road with a real vengeance. Only at the second or third lights do I remember I’d offered to take her to Richmond. Of course. Suddenly it’s very important that I honour this promise. I don’t want to be thought a shit. I am not. Quite the contrary. I swing the car through a U-turn, alarming the inevitable pensioner in his Morris 1100. But when I get back to Fernshaw Road no one answers the door. She has put two milk bottles out that I don’t remember seeing before. I look up and down what is after all a fairly long street. Could she really have walked so far?

At the first newsagents I pick up a few bars of chocolate and feed myself quickly, heading for Battersea Park. Who knows if a band mightn’t be playing there? In the mirror I can see poor Hilary’s lolling head. My eyes fill with tears. It is this I can’t stand. I would so dearly like to give my daughter some chocolate, to see her gobble it up greedily like I do. I would like to give her at least this small piggy pleasure: good thick foil-wrapped chocolate. But the sugar brings Hilary out in rashes that cover her whole body.

I shan’t be going to any faith-healers again.

The Good Samaritan

January 1988. Hilary is five. Feeding her this morning, I thought: ‘We get less change out of her than one would out of a three-week-old puppy.’ I alternate between this ruthless realism and cloying sentimentality. The girl is so constipated that sometimes we have to hook a finger into her anus and lever the turds out. Shirley does this. I simply can’t.

Travelling to work, I am fascinated by the truth that I am both seriously mentally disturbed and at the same time among the most conventional of commuters on the Northern Line; the soberly dressed junior director of a highly successful software company, personally responsible for a whole new concept of computer usage on small- to medium-size building sites. Forty grand. Saab Turbo. Walletful of plastic. On/off highly erotic affair with lovely marketing director, Marilyn.

But the Telegraph tells me that an Indian in Walsall has been arrested for the attempted murder of his five-year-old Downs syndrome son using poisonous mushrooms masked in a hot curry. I buy the Telegraph now, not just because it is generally free of the kind of social pieties one finds in the other ‘serious’ dailies, but mainly for the eye they have for these sort of stories. The paper comments briefly on the deplorable morals of some ethnic minorities who not only abort healthy foetuses for no other reason than that they’re female, but have a quite horrific record as far as handicapped children are concerned. ‘All too often the social services cover up such incidents out of a perverse inversion of race discrimination. In March 1986 a young black girl suffering from elephantiasis was burnt to death in a caravan in Brixton. The story was not. .’

Fire. The idea suddenly comes to me. Cleansing fire.

If the cause were sufficiently disguised. .

For a moment I am quite rapt by the beauty of this solution. Fire. Pushing my way through the crowd at Hammersmith with briefcase and squash racket before me, I am, as it were, enveloped in flames. I can really see myself doing it at last. This is actually possible.

But not in our beautiful Hampstead home.

For Mr Harcourt, I should have said, died last year, just as we were about to set off to Lourdes. Which is why in the end we never went. Being a profoundly lucky man he died suddenly: heart attack on the john, in company of the FT. In any event, we called off the trip to Lourdes for the various solemnities, quickly followed by the sharing of the spoils, which in this case, fortunately, were considerable indeed. Of course, the taxman took his whack, but what was left, in both our names I was relieved to see, allowed us to move up into the three-hundred-grand property bracket. Gainsborough Gardens, a gorgeous close a stone’s throw from the Heath and no more than five minutes from the tube.

I’m not going to burn that place down.

‘Unless somehow,’ I’m saying to myself on the return journey of that same day, ‘it’s the sacrifice required of me.’

What a strange thought! Much easier surely, just to refuse her oxygen when she has one of her respiratory problems. How could they ever really know I’d done it on purpose.

But staring at my curiously double image in the carriage window, I remember an incident of a few weeks ago which made a big impression on me. I’d stopped to fill up on the Finchley Road and after paying, as I was walking to my car, somebody on the road hit a cat. The animal wasn’t dead. Using just its front paws and squawking fearfully it dragged itself toward me in spastic jerks across a patch of pavement. With the winter evening’s yellow sodium light, its mutilation was garishly lit. Its back haunches had been completely crushed into a pulp of black fur and blood. Its wild howls were attracting the attention of passers by. Then, unable to pull itself further, it lay and writhed. Clearly the one thing to do to this cat was to get a brick, or even the jack from the boot, and put it out of its misery as soon as possible. Yet nobody did this. Not I, nor the home-going secretaries, executives, workers. Nobody had sufficient compassion or courage to dirty their hands with a liberating violence, to bring down the brick, the jack on this poor animal’s skull. Nor did anybody want to talk about it. They hurried by silently, not stopping. Perhaps, you could suppose, if it had been a question of playing Good Samaritan, of saving an animal with glass in its paw, a cut on its haunch, perhaps somebody would have stopped. For that is something entirely different and infinitely easier. But what was needed here was a savage coup de grâce. And for maybe two or three minutes I hesitated, staring at this shrieking cat. Then got into the Saab and drove away.

House or no house, the advantage of the fire is that I would not need to be in the same room as her. I would not have to see her clawing for breath.

But what decides me in the end is Peggy’s abortion. We have been seeing Peggy and Charles regularly for a couple of years now. Really, they are our only visitors. Shirley did go through a period of trying to contact and make friends with other couples with handicapped children, and we would drive out to meet them some evenings or Saturday afternoons. One does these things, looking for reassurance, I suppose, others in the same boat. But it was too depressing. One’s own handicapped child is bad enough, but the deformities and spastic contortions of a stockbroker’s boy in Walthamstow, a railway worker’s teenage daughter in Hounslow are too appalling. And far, far from reassuring. Merely a reminder in fact of how lost and wave-tossed the shared boat is. Somehow the more these people insisted on the little progresses, the tiny achievements of their doomed offspring, the more obstinately cheerful they were, showing you family photos in fields of flowers, so the worse, at least for me, the whole scenario became. Until, with the reasonable excuse that we were only depressing ourselves, I managed to put an end to this interlude. Shirley offered no resistance. She is not quite at my mother’s level of martyrdom yet. In fact we will have these moments, sitting on the sofa for example, watching the box, when our fingers will meet, involuntarily it seems, and some kind of communication, of affection will pass between us.

We haven’t made love for more than five years.

Shirley has confiscated and burnt my euthanasia scrapbook. Though I don’t generally go in for hocus pocus, I find the fact that she burnt it excitingly symbolic. Anyway, I shan’t be collecting any more such articles now. I sense the need for them is over.

Although never exactly assiduous, all our old regular friends, Gregory and Jill and Shirley’s one-time school colleagues, have completely dropped off. They find it too hard to handle. Shirley has her church friends of course, but she generally sees them in the morning or afternoon when I’m at work, or at Wednesday evening choir practice or after Sunday Morning Service. So our paths don’t cross. Anyway I have no desire to see them. Their determined niceness grates on me, reminds me of Mother humming ‘Count your blessings’, under an umbrella on Park Royal Road with an empty purse in her threadbare pocket. There is a primal anguish behind it all for me, dating back I sometimes wonder, to some experience I can’t even remember. I dream my dreams of mutilation.

But we do see Charles and Peggy. They come over once, twice, even three times a week, eat with us, talk, argue. They always come together because they are sharing a house he has persuaded his buddies in Camden Council Housing Authority to let Peggy have, pending demolition. This is a wangle I’m sure. They’ve had the place more than a year now and there’s no sign of the bulldozers. Meanwhile, God knows in what investments Charles has sunk the hundred and fifty-odd grand he got from Daddy-oh. In British Airports, I wouldn’t be surprised. Nothing would surprise me.

I didn’t realise they were lovers at first. Why? Because Peggy has always enthused over her lovers, always pronounced herself everlastingly in love with them. Because, being our brother and sister, they have a good excuse for arriving together. Because Charles never shows a shred of fatherliness toward the exhaustingly exuberant Freddie. And because I always suspected he was queer.

‘Peggy mentioned it,’ Shirley tells me one day.

‘Mentioned it!’

‘She was very offhand.’

‘Wonders will never cease.’

‘I was thinking, probably that’s why he became so assiduous about visiting us in the first place. To see her.’

I reflect on this.

‘They don’t show any affection together. Why don’t they act like a couple?’

‘The amazing thing about you,’ Shirley says, ‘is that for all your super logic and supposed modernity, you’re so incredibly traditional.’

‘Sorry, I just thought it was common sense. You’re lovers, you live together, you may as well act like a couple.’

‘Why don’t you just accept that people are different. You got angry with her when she was naïve, now maybe she’s being less so.’

But although in some obscure way I disapprove of Charles and Peggy, I do enjoy their visits. Discussing things between four people they seem manageable, whereas on one’s own, or alone with Shirley, hysteria is always just around the corner.

‘Now the girl’s five,’ Charles tells us this evening, ‘you’re due for nappy relief, since a normal child would now be out of nappies.’

‘Oh yes?’ Shirley asks chattily. ‘What do we have to do?’

Charles begins to describe the bureaucratic procedure. He obviously enjoys this. His voice is quick, incisive, very faintly patronising in a teacherly sort of way. As he speaks, lean and sinewy, I watch how his thin fingers twine and untwine around a tumbler. His Adam’s apple is also jerkily mobile.

‘A wonder they haven’t cut it,’ Peggy remarks. She is helping Frederick with a jigsaw puzzle of the Changing of the Guard.

‘No, there’s no actual means test per se,’ Charles reassures. ‘More to the point they need a letter from your GP to the effect that the child really is incontinent.’

‘Fair enough. After all, they’re eight quid a box,’ Shirley says, ‘and it’s only paper and a bit of plastic in the end.’

‘You know you can’t use them at all in Washington State,’ Peggy informs. ‘Anti-ecological.’

‘Then you present proof of purchase and you get the cash.’

I remark that eight quid, what, a week, isn’t going to change our lives in any major way, is it? It hardly seems worth the time in the queue. In fact — and I make the mistake of getting drawn into an old argument — the whole point about state help, or any such sops of this kind, is that they merely draw your attention away from the real issue while you waste your time picking up crumbs.

‘And what is the real issue?’ Charles asks sharply.

‘That this is our problem. Our huge problem, and we’re stuck with it. There is no imaginable help that could really amount to anything or significantly change our lives.’

‘Well, obviously it’s useful for the less well-off,’ Charles says, faintly offended by my lack of interest, ‘which is why the government’s no doubt trying to cut it.’

‘But we’re not less well off, we’re rich. I’m on forty-plus grand. If I don’t pick it up there’ll be more for someone else.’

‘No, if people don’t pick it up, the government’ll say they don’t need it and remove it all together.’

Looking away from me to inspect a ladder on dark tights, Shirley says: ‘George is just lamenting the absence of state assisted abortion post birth.’ She looks up with her little smile. ‘N’est-ce-pas?’

I shrug my shoulders. We’re old campaigners now. I don’t think either of us is capable of shocking the other any more. ‘Abortion certainly solves a problem in a way a few quid for nappies doesn’t.’

Then before Charles can stop her, Peggy says simply: ‘I’m going to have to have an abortion. Next week.’ And very matter of fact, she explains that she is pregnant by Charles (he fidgets fiercely, pushes thumb and forefinger around his teeth), but that he doesn’t want the child. Anyway, she already has Freddy and that’s quite enough for anyone the way men come and go. She doesn’t seem to be saying this as an attack on Charles, or even as an expression of reproach.

Why am I so stunned? It is the ease with which my sister handles these decisions, the lack of any hint of guilt.

‘She insisted,’ Charles says, ‘on using the Okino Knauss method.’

Peggy laughs: ‘Rhythm and blues! In that order. Still, I just can’t afford another.’

Later, when they have gone, I watch Shirley liquidising meat to store away in little tubs in the freezer for all Hilary’s meals for the week to come. She follows an intense routine now of keeping house and feeding Hilary. She is always doing something, locked into some procedure.

‘What do you make of that?’

She shrugs her shoulders. ‘Probably they’re afraid it’ll be like Hilary.’

‘But we asked, on her behalf, don’t you remember. It was one of the first things I did. And the specialist said how unlikely it was and that anyway they can test for it now they know it’s a possibility.’

Shirley doesn’t seem interested.

‘The child is probably perfectly healthy,’ I insist.

‘So maybe it is.’

Obliquely I say: ‘Soon they’ll be able to keep foetuses alive as soon as the cells meet. Will they still let people abort them?’

As if she were another part of my own mind, she says: ‘No, at that point, they’ll tell you you can kill anybody who’s helpless and inconvenient.’

‘But why didn’t she use contraceptives, for heaven’s sake?’

Shirley’s working fast, slicing some stewing meat into manageable chunks. Her once finely tapered pale fingers are growing rough and red, like Mother’s.

‘We all have our fixations. She’s into Buddhism, natural foods, natural body functions, no contraceptives. Charles is into politics, his career, he doesn’t want a kid he would have to feel responsible for. Probably he’s quite right.’

‘And you?’ I ask with the husky tenderness that will sometimes spring up unexpected as a wild flower on the roughest terrain. ‘Don’t you think life should have a certain grace, Shirley?’

‘Leave be, George,’ she says. ‘Please, please, please leave be.’

Foul Medicine

I’m not a pig. In an attempt to recapture something of my relationship with Shirley I decide on a vasectomy, let’s see if we can’t get back to lovemaking. She says: ‘I’ll have forgotten how to do it. I can’t quite see why we ever bothered, it’s so much more hygienic without it.’ Though a week or so before the op she hugs me from behind, squeezes my crotch, and murmurs: ‘I can’t wait, if you knew how much I want you and want you.’

Since I’m determined no one at the office should know about the whole thing, I take a fortnight’s holiday during which time I arrange for the operation to be done privately in the London Clinic in Harley Street. Typically, Shirley informs my mother without first conferring with me, hence the day after the op, there she is at my bedside in her ancient black coat with the fake once-white fur inside the collar. The strap of her blue handbag, doubtless full of used paper handkerchiefs, is held on by a heavy duty safety pin.

My mother. She sold Gorst Road to the first buyer and then instead of getting a smaller place for herself and keeping the remaining cash for Grandfather’s expenses, she went and put the whole lot in Barclays for him with a standing order to pay the home (’it’s his money, love,’), renting herself the most miserable terraced house in derelict black Irish Cricklewood. Apparently through friends! It was a show of independence that took me by surprise, since I’d imagined she’d leave the whole property side of things to me. As it was she didn’t even ask my advice. We have scarcely seen each other since Shirley’s ‘conversion’.

Shirley said: ‘Why didn’t she stay in Park Royal. She’s been there all her life. She’ll be lost in a new neighbourhood at her age.’ But although she knew no one in Cricklewood on arrival, Mother very quickly gathered the regular army of walking wounded about her. Indeed her ‘ministry’ is obviously flourishing now Grandfather is at last out of the way. People don’t have to pass his scornful cerberian gaze to reach the prayerfulness of her bedroom. So perhaps all things do work together for good for those that love God: my beating him up promoted her ministry, saved souls even.

She stands over my hospital bed the morning after my vasectomy, plastic shopping bag under her arm. We are embarrassed, but she tries to jolly her way over this.

‘How are you, love? Everything all right?’

Actually I’ve got quite a lot of pain. It was a more serious business than I expected.

She has brought grapes. Her face, though shiny and lumpy, radiates unshakeable kindness. We chat. She has been up to see Shirley. In my absence obviously. Over sixty now, she travels free on the buses. It’s quite a boon. She feels free to travel in a way she didn’t just a year ago. And isn’t Hilary coming on, certainly sitting up a lot straighter.

I say: ‘You don’t notice when you’re with her all the time.’

I ask her if she knew about Peggy. And immediately regret it. But I don’t want to be the only one who’s let her down.

‘She told me.’

Peggy would of course. Without thinking probably.

For a moment we are both silent in this tiny private bedroom I have paid through the nose for. The fittings don’t look much better than National Health frankly.

Why did I bother trying to hurt her? Surely some resolution, some accommodation can be reached at some point.

She must be thinking the same thing, because she suddenly says, lower lip trembling like a child’s: ‘Can’t we put all that nasty business behind us, George? Can’t we?’

The direct appeal catches me by surprise.

She says: ‘It was unfortunate Shirley confessed to me of all people, and in front of you, but I could hardly refuse to hear her, poor girl, could I, the state she was in.’

How clever my mother is. She has brought me to tears. We are embracing.

‘At least we can be good friends,’ she murmurs, with a catch in her voice.

Then she sits down and tells me how awkward Grandfather’s being, refusing to obey any of the rules in the home and even biting one of the nurses. It’s his ninetieth birthday next week. The inmates will be having a little party. Perhaps I’d like to come. And then the Lord has been so good to her because her next door neighbour but one commutes regularly to Kilburn where the home is and so frequently gives her a lift back in the evening. Also there is a delightful girl from the church who may be going to rent her spare bedroom, which would be so nice.

There is always that faint persuasion in her voice, she can never let go, pleading with her son to believe that the Lord has indeed been involved in the daily itinerary of her neighbour, the housing needs of the Methodist girl; pleading with me to accept my martyrdom and join her on the way to heaven.

Shortly after she goes, Marilyn phones. ‘Can’t wait to have you without your sou’wester on,’ she says.

But I know I won’t be going to see Marilyn again. My strategy is complete at last. I was always a monogamist at heart.

For the second week of my fortnight’s break we’ve lined up a cottage in Suffolk, for holiday and, hopefully, celebratory hanky panky, if not actually lovemaking. Our first real holiday, as it happens, since Hilary’s conception nearly six years (centuries?) before. But when I come out of hospital, feeling pretty damn cool and relaxed actually, after four whole days on my back, the child has fallen ill again.

She has an acute kidney infection (perhaps like the George of Three Men in a Boat, the only thing she’ll never have is housemaid’s knee). And of course she always suffers severe side effects from whatever drug we give her. Shirley meets me sleepless and speechless at our rather fine old wistaria-framed door as I return in a cab. The doctor wanted to put the girl in hospital, but Shirley has refused. I know there is no point in commenting on this, just as there is no point in remarking on the fact that we could easily afford to have a nurse in to do a few nights. Shirley must look after the girl herself. Because I think in a curious way she is embarrassed for Hilary with strangers. She doesn’t want to sense other people’s objective eyes coldly weighing up the truth of the situation. On her own she can nurse her illusions — or perhaps that is ungenerous, perhaps what I should say is, the choices she has made. She doesn’t want to hear them challenged by some kind, efficient girl. For my own part, of course, there is nothing more frustrating than having so much money at last after years of work and not being allowed to buy a little pleasure with it.

Hilary is in severe pain. Naturally, through the long nights and days that follow my return there will be no question of trying out my vasectomy. Though one evening Shirley does cling tight to me a moment in bed. She murmurs: ‘You know what I can’t believe about you, George.’ ‘What?’ ‘That deep down, after all your huffing and puffing and playing tough, you’re really a good man.’

I make no comment.

‘I’m glad you made up with your mother. I’ll have her over tomorrow to help if she’s free.’

Obviously everything gets chatted about behind my back. Fair enough I suppose. I never really imagined otherwise.

‘I don’t even really mind about this woman you’ve got at work. I understand the pressure you must have been under.’

‘What?’

A desperate half hour then trying to persuade her that all that’s over, that I only saw her once or twice, that I never really cared for her, etc., etc. And how did she find out, anyway? How, how, how? Shirley insists she doesn’t care. After all, she’s been unfaithful in her time. I insist that she should, she must care, it was a terrible thing for me to do, I want her to care, and I’m sorry, truly I am; that was the whole reasoning behind the vasectomy after all, to get back to her and to family life after this second derailment. Which would never have happened had it not been for Hilary.

In the end, after maybe an hour’s persuasion I actually manage to get her involved in something resembling foreplay, kissing, fondling, albeit somewhat listlessly, when Hilary’s harsh cries interrupt us from the next room.

I offer to go since I’m on holiday. Anyway, there’s guilt to assuage. I pad down the landing.

The baby’s room has a red nightlight. It’s full of cuddly toys which Hilary has at last learnt to hold to herself and presumably draw some comfort from. The little girl is twisting and turning in her cot, buckled up with stomach pains. I pick her up. Not without some effort given the size she is now. She recognises me at once and whimpers. I push my cheek against hers on the side where the head lolls. Her skin, poor girl, is dry and burning. She relaxes a little, then doubles up with pain again. Her eyes screw tight. Since it’s impossible to sit her on one’s knee — she just collapses — I put her into a little tipped-back bucketseat kind of thing that we had cut for her from a huge cube of rigid foam rubber. This more or less immobilises her while keeping her sufficiently upright to take a few spoonfuls of medicine.

I give her a specially made up additive-free antibiotic and a sedative in heavy syrup. The antibiotic tastes foul and she refuses to open her mouth. I trick her by dipping my finger in the sedative syrup and smearing it lightly on her plump, child’s lips. She has the features of a five-year-old but utterly blank. Sometimes I force myself to use words like gormless, to remember what the hard world will think of her, how they will laugh, as once long ago my friends would laugh at Aunt Mavis. The coral lips are delicate though and faintly rubbery under my finger.

She falls for the syrup trick and opens her mouth. As soon as the spoon of foul-tasting medicine is in, I force the mouth shut to prevent her from spitting the stuff out. I manage to do this quite gently really. Firmly. Without frightening her. I’m not bad as a nurse. The only problem then is convincing her that the syrup to follow really is syrup. In the end I have to press thumb and forefinger into her cheeks to force open the mouth. As soon as she gets the whole spoon of syrup I can give her two, three, four more spoonfuls. Double the maximum dose. From small red-rimmed brown eyes, she looks, or gives the impression of looking, in my direction, and there is a hint of appreciation. So that I sense how much within my power she is, her feverish infant body in that foam rubber chair we thought was such a clever idea.

For I could keep spooning and spooning this whole bottle of sedative, couldn’t I? Her mouth is open, eager. So why don’t I? Why not? Because I know that Shirley would see. Because I reason that the way they measure out these drugs it wouldn’t quite kill her anyway. Because it’s not the solution I’ve settled on and I simply can’t face reopening the whole discussion. Yet in the quiet of her little nursery room, with its red light warm on walls and blankets, on the Beatrix Potter frieze and on the shambles of soft toys people like my mother insist on buying for her as if she were capable of distinguishing one from another — in this cosy atmosphere smelling of cream and talcum and warm breath, I feel that this would be an acceptable, a humane way to do it. If only society would sanction it. If only everybody would say, yes, George, we forgive you, George, you are right, George, go ahead, kill your dragon, save your damsel (for I do love her). Yes, here and now. This would be the way. Spooning sedative to the child as she senses my friendly presence and enjoys one of her few sensual luxuries, the rich cloying sweetness of that syrup.

Are those red little eyes really looking at me? Is she asking me to do it?

But of course she can have no concept of such things. All she knows is her pain, her comforts.

She begins to whine and wriggle again. I lay her down and sing to her. Nursery rhymes. Christmas carols. I sing them with expression as if I meant them. I even sing, why I don’t know, ‘Rock of ages cleft for me’, insisting on the words of the last verse (When I soar through tracts unknown/See thee on thy judgement throne. .). I keep it up for half an hour, wondering how Shirley will rate this virtuoso performance on the domestic contribution scales. Will Marilyn be forgotten? Will I ever get a blowjob again? Finally I pull off the miracle and my little girl falls into an uneasy sleep. Feeling really pretty proud, I pad back to our bedroom, but Shirley is snoring soundly. Fair enough, she does have a filthy cold. I slip downstairs, pour myself a generous Glenfiddich and watch a European football match in which a Scottish team is soundly beaten.

Vasectomy Ball

Our tenth wedding anniversary, I think, should be excuse enough for a party, but Shirley says wrily, ‘Hardly an occasion for celebration.’ She’s not really objecting, though. It’s just that she never expected the idea of a party to come from me.

‘If you look at it as a life sentence,’ I suggest, ‘let’s say we’re celebrating completion of the first quarter. Why not?’

I’m straightening my tie. She’s copying things down from a recipe to complete a shopping list, writing rapidly, a sliver of tongue between her teeth as so often when she concentrates. Now she looks up.

‘You’re not serious, are you?’ She laughs. ‘Okay. I’m game. We can call it the Vasectomy Ball.’

Because yesterday we finally made love. And again this morning. Hence the pleasant atmosphere. I choose my moments.

I tell her: ‘You don’t want to spread that kind of news about, sweetheart, the phone’ll never stop ringing.’

Again she laughs. Then wrinkles her nose. She really doesn’t seem to care terribly much about my faithfulness or otherwise. In many ways she is more independent of me than I of her. I can’t really decide whether this is a good thing or not. I don’t want to feel free to do what I choose. I want her to want all or nothing, like me. Perhaps when she no longer has the child to exhaust all her energies. .

Come the evening of that same day and she is positively enthusing about it — our Tenth Anniversary Party. A grand affair. In the space of a day the idea has taken on a milestone symbolism. George and Shirley back on the rails.

‘You see,’ she says happily, as we draw up the guest list. ‘There’s no reason why Hilary should prevent us from having a good time. It’s all in your mind.’

The girl is half sitting, half lying in her lap. At five and a half she has begun to chant the first ma-ma-ma’s and da-da-da’s that most babies start at six months. Shirley is very excited about this, though there is no sign of the sounds being referred to anything or anyone in particular. The little girl smiles continuously this evening from inside the frame of her gloriously thick chestnut hair which Shirley keeps brilliantly washed and brushed. Her only real asset, it picks up faint hints and depths from the discrete wall lighting which proved such a wise and fashionable choice. When tickled under her tubby chin, she giggles. She hasn’t been ill for upwards of a fortnight now, and since a dietician suggested we substitute cow’s milk with goat’s, she has definitely been less irritated and irritable.

These are the blessings Shirley counts with a religious mathematics she might have learnt from my mother, i.e. add this hundredth to that thousandth, multiply by whatever crumb or fragment is available and then lift to the power of a small sop and somehow you can cancel out negative figures with untold noughts after them.

‘No reason at all,’ Shirley goes on, kissing the child’s fat cheeks as I scribble out the names. ‘We should have started doing this ages ago. I mean, if we can’t go out, obviously we’ll have to have people come here. And if we don’t invite them they’re not going to come, are they?’

I don’t remark that they used to invite themselves. Instead I say: ‘I haven’t exactly been preventing you from inviting them, have I?’

‘No, but you’re such a monster of purpose, always working or reading medical journals or planning trips to consultants. It’s as if you were always putting off living to some distant date when you’ll have sorted everything out.’ She lays a hand on the inside of my leg and looks into my eyes. ‘I’m glad you’re beginning to let be at last. If you don’t insist on its being a tragedy then it isn’t.’

The touch has a definite promise of sex.

She giggles. ‘Perhaps it’s to do with the op. Less hormones about or something. You’re mellowing out.’

I haven’t seen her so silly and girlish in years, though the silver strands are daily thickening in her once copper hair.

‘We’ll invite everybody,’ she says. ‘Even if we haven’t seen them in years and years. We can clear the lounge and dining room for dancing and set out a big buffet in the kitchen and breakfast room. How much money can we afford to spend?’

‘Anything. Doesn’t matter. No object.’

‘Great, now, let’s see. .’

But what is George Crawley really thinking inside the dark lumpy 900ccs or so which is his brain, which is me? Obviously I am feeling terribly tender toward my suddenly excited, though definitely ageing wife. I am thinking how smart I’ve been to renew our relationship before the great event, to have her feel I’m on her side at last. And I’m genuinely heartened by the thought that after all we’ve been through this renewal can still occur and be so warm and genuine. I’m thinking that in a way I’m doing this for her sake even more than mine. But at the same time I am wondering if perhaps she isn’t right, could she be? if perhaps we mightn’t be happy like this, if I shouldn’t have let be ages ago, if I oughtn’t to give the whole thing up and just enjoy the incongruous adventure of hosting a party. Suddenly surprising myself with all these heterogeneous thoughts, I shake my head to chase them all away. They rise and flutter like birds surprised by gunshot, leaving nothing behind. I wonder, where is my identity in all this chaos of feeling and reflection? Who am I? All I can sense is a feverish darkness gathered around an even darker purpose. I have given myself to the decision now. It won’t be reconsidered.

‘And for booze? Couple of hundred quid cover it do you think? Er, Earth to George, come in please. The booze. How much?’

Oh.’ In a daze, I say, ‘The more the merrier.’

Another thought wings across the dark night sky of my spirit: the more booze, the faster the place’ll go up in smoke.

Three weeks on; D-Day minus five days. I am now absolutely determined that the day after, Sunday the tenth, I shall feel only regret for my beautiful home, its three reception rooms, four bedrooms, delightful conservatory and garden (in the meantime I have checked that the insurance is more or less adequate; could have been better but one can’t alter it now). I shan’t fear detection, for of course I have planned the thing so well, and from the forensic point of view my tracks will be perfectly covered. Clearing the dining room to dance is going to mean cramming four highly inflammable armchairs into my little study, which, as fortune would have it, is directly below Hilary’s room with only plaster and timber between. Ten minutes, max fifteen. All things work together for good. .

For it will be an act of goodness, the first time I will have channelled everything that I know is abrasive and unpleasant in my character into a gesture of love greater and more healthy than anything my mother or Shirley with their interminable self-sacrifice could manage. I will have the courage of my convictions.

I Think of Us Beginning Afresh

The most elementary secret to a successfully disguised arson is that the fire must have only one focal point. So far so good.

My mother is the first to arrive, bringing Frederick who she has been looking after for the day. She has construed her invitation, though this has never been asked, as a request for help and babysitting, and thus arrives early to give Shirley a hand with the food and with Hilary. Although she no doubt disapproves of the regiment of glinting bottles marshalled end to end of the sideboard, she is clearly glad that we are celebrating our tenth anniversary; no doubt she sees it as a kind of triumph over evil, a sign that our marriage is healthy again, and she mucks in, jollily washing saucepans.

Frederick, sensing excitement in the air, becomes a Japanese robot and struts about, hissing destructive laser sounds. He paces mechanically round and round Hilary who lies on her foam rubber mattress in the huge lounge now cleared for dancing. She wriggles wildly from side to side following the direction of his laser fire as best she can, her oddly flat face smiling blindly, unaware he is shooting her.

When she goes to bed, the foam mattress will go in the study room to make way for the dancing. I have already made sure that a huge pile of mags and newspapers are stacked on one of the armchairs.

Not to put too fine a point on it, I’ve been shitting a lot this afternoon, as was to be expected I’m afraid. Unpleasant, hot, acidic shits that leave your anus burning. I’ve got some good cream for it though. In the bathroom I run my fingers regretfully over silk-finish, coffee-coloured Italian tiles. Opening the window I look out at a broad stretch of garden to the side of the house. A blackbird is hopping in the grass. There are roses. The air is sweet, soft. Toward the Heath, and this is always a symbol of joy for me, swallows are diving and wheeling in the warm twilight. Eating their prey alive of course. Though as a child I believed they just whirled about for fun.

Which reminds me, I must open the window in the study, make sure there’s some oxygen about. Some weeks ago, complaining of Hilary’s racket while I was debugging a program, I got Shirley to buy some strips of foam insulant to put round the door. No one will smell anything until it’s roaring.

Coming down the stairs, I let my feet feel the fibrous sponginess of expensive pile carpet. My hand lingers on the polished wooden banister. Illuminating the red and gold wallpaper up the hallway are two light fittings with elaborate Venetian glass which Shirley bought from a shop in Belgravia. It annoys me that Mother never expresses any real admiration for this house, anything beyond, ‘what big rooms, what a huge garden, it must be a nightmare keeping it tidy’, etc. etc. If she were to show any desire to come and live here, instead of endlessly singing the praises of her Cricklewood shoebox, I would be glad to have her. I’m not in the business of bearing grudges.

And in fact I meet my mother going back to the kitchen. We hug warmly.

Almost seven o’clock. The kitchen and breakfast room are lined with tables draped with white cloths and laden with the kind of goodies we certainly never ate in Park Royal. The floor in the breakfast room is a dark herringbone parquet with two small Persian rugs. In the kitchen we have pearl grey polished granite tiles (not as expensive as you’d think).

What a long way I’ve come. And not all thanks to Shirley either (it was me, for example, chose the Regency dresser she loves so much). What a long way, just to find ourselves imprisoned by the life sentence Hilary is.

Shirley pulls a child’s red plastic bowl from the fridge.

‘I’ll feed Hilary,’ I offer.

‘Oh thanks. I’ll just heat it up a minute.’

The electronic bleeping of the microwave.

I refuse to go to the john again. Just ignore it, clench.

‘Okay. Check it isn’t too hot.’

To start the thing I shall use a cigarette smoked almost to the stub. I shall place it down the side of what, according to a government warning pamphlet found in Central Finchley library, should be our most inflammable armchair where I will have spilt/poured a full tumbler of whisky just a few minutes before. The armchair I have forced half under my desk and on the surface of the desk is a nearly full ashtray which I will tip over the chair as soon as the flames begin. This will thus seem, I trust, to those who sift through the ashes, to have been the little mishap that set the whole thing going: a jacket flap, or dress catches that ashtray as someone leaves the room, they don’t wait to hear it fall and anyway it would be almost inaudible on the soft whisky-wet upholstery of the chair; in a few minutes the room is in flames.

I have made no attempt to salvage anything from this lovely little study room with its wood-panelled walls. Not my precious library of floppies with some of my best ideas for new software, not my IBM 8000 with expanded RAM. Not even our wedding photos in the bookcase. I feel quite glad to make these sacrifices, to lose things that are both valuable and precious. I think of us beginning afresh with the insurance money and a new house, and no Hilary. How free and happy we will be at last.

It would be dangerous to be seen to have squirrelled things away.

Forcing the girl into her special high chair, always a struggle, I almost burst out laughing: ‘Too bad Grandad couldn’t be here,’ I shout to my mother as she clatters the vacuum cleaner back into the cupboard. ‘He’d have a heart attack seeing all that booze.’

Mother doesn’t like even the word, ‘booze’.

‘Poor old soul,’ she says. ‘If only he’d agree to have his teeth done it would be something.’

‘Might be worse when he bit the nurses though.’

Both he and Hilary bite the hands that feed them.

‘Poor old soul,’ Mother says again, as if this were some kind of incantation. She will not think badly. Often I feel I’ve had to do the job for both of us.

I stir the food in its microwave dish and blow on it. Hilary is held upright by two strong waist bands and two rigid, vertical cushions either side of her head. Her face is at the same level as mine as I sit to feed her and she opens her mouth in anticipation. A few of Shirley’s church friends have arrived, bringing more food, and somebody now puts Strauss’s waltzes on, very loud. Hilary is suddenly so excited she bangs down her wrist in the dish, splattering chunks of ham and spaghetti rings, laughing furiously. The kind of thing that usually has me cursing with frustration (my trousers are splattered). But I’m cool tonight. We’re on the home straight.

Then it vaguely occurs to me, is this what being mad is like? I aim a spoon into the glistening pink wetness of gums and lips. Her head waves perilously.

‘Would you like an aperitif, sir?’

It’s Shirley coming up behind me in excellent mood with a tray of chilled white wine.

It will look odd if I don’t act merry and do some drinking. The party was my idea, wasn’t it? Though I’ll have to keep a clear head. The most important thing to remember is, since Frederick is to be put to bed in the spare bedroom, I shall have to get up there pretty smartly. But in a way that is part of the plan. I am hardly likely to forget.

And no, I will not go to the bathroom again.

The Romantic Fort

I always find parties of this kind in friends’ houses somewhat dull. Okay, you have a lot to eat, a lot to drink, that can be nice, and maybe you manage to brush thighs, bump arses with some pretty women jiving about the furniture. But mostly you just find yourself sitting on the stairs with a plate of sausage rolls, trapped into conversations so irretrievably humdrum that even an argument with one’s wife would be exciting by comparison; this between getting up every couple of minutes to let somebody climb upstairs to the loo. At best you might find another man reasonably intelligent and sufficiently interested in your own line of business to share a bottle of whisky with till it’s time to go home.

Which is why we’ve never had a party before, I suppose. I remember Shirley was very eager to have a housewarming do years ago when we moved into the Hendon place. ‘Parties are for fun,’ she said. ‘You’re the one who’s always saying he wants to have a good time.’

And it’s true. Parties are for fun. But the only people who really seem to have any are the ones who break through all inhibitions and get into snogging and petting and even bonking people they’ve never met before. Those are the kind who have fun. And the fact is that much as I envy them, I would never be so much of a beast as to do stuff like that with my wife around, or even amongst people who know her. Often, I’m afraid, one must come to the conclusion that one’s inhibitions are the best part about one.

Other people are different of course. Some are quite shameless and have always done exactly what they want when they want. So it is that towards midnight, my chosen hour for the sale of my soul, I will slip discreetly out into the hall away from the guests in lounge and breakfast room, down the passage, through the cloakroom to the study, a lighted cigarette between the fingers of one hand, a big tumbler of whisky in the other, only to find Gregory and Peggy sprawled across two armchairs, more or less humping each other.

Why didn’t I lock the door, for Christ’s sake?

It’s an odd party because we’ve invited such a mix of guests, many of whom we haven’t seen for so long we can barely remember what they look like. We sent out sixty odd invitations but have no idea how many people are actually going to come. Twenty? A hundred? The invitations said eight thirty, but by nine only Shirley’s friends from the choir have arrived, well-behaved, carefully-dressed people happy to drink a glass of white wine, eat snacks and speculate about their dictatorial organist/choirmaster’s private life. The women take it in turns to hold Hilary in their arms and say how well she is looking. One, in a strapless black velvet outfit, looks just the kind decked out for pleasure she won’t have. I can’t help noticing her thin knees and calves and thinking of Marilyn.

Peggy phones to say she’ll be late and can we put Frederick to bed or he’ll become a monster. ‘Grandma’ll read you a story,’ I tell him, thinking to kill two birds with one stone, have both of them out of the way. For Mother, after barely a glass of Soave, can be heard fervently praising the Lord in conversation with a plain weasily little man with his arm in a sling.

‘I don’t want Grandma to read a story. I want to stay downstairs. Five minutes, Uncle George.’

‘Your mummy said bed.’

‘Then you read, Uncle, I want you to read.’

He says this because he thinks I’ll refuse. He’s a sharp little lad with whom I feel a certain affinity. But as it happens I’m quite glad to be out of the fray for a while.

I take him upstairs, make him clean his teeth and sort through the kiddies’ books people have occasionally given us, not realising Hilary will never be able to understand them. What would he like? Tom Thumb? He says the giant scares him. Eating the children. But it’s only stalling. Nothing would scare Frederick. I tell him it’s only pretend, there are no giants, nobody eats children. But I agree to dig out the Ugly Duckling instead. Where unfortunately, I reflect as I read, it is the welcome transformation that doesn’t convince.

I kiss my nephew goodnight. Having got the door closed, I take the opportunity to change my soiled trousers and, before going downstairs again, size myself up in our wardrobe mirror. Five-ten. Blond. Pale-skinned, straight-nosed, clear eyes. Perhaps a little serious-looking, but certainly nothing loony about me. In the end, if I have to insist before a court of law on any one thing, it will be my complete normality, my modernity. Show me, I’ll say to the jury, just one, just one part of my overall vision which is out of line with the dominant social philosophy in England today. I bet you can’t. I just bet. But watching myself in the mirror I can see the tension about teeth and jaws. I have big jaw muscles.

Hearing noises at the top of the stairs I walk down the long landing to the other bathroom where Mother is struggling to change a particularly dirty nappy before putting Hilary to bed. I take over, for the girl’s heavy and helpless and needs washing. I work quickly and efficiently and, though I say it myself, gently. Hilary always rouses a quite terrible gentleness in me. I wipe carefully inside the folds of skin around the pale warm split bun of her crotch. And talc generously.

At a certain point, my mother touches my shoulder and smiles at me with a bright winsome look. ‘I think you’re magnificent with the girl.’ For some reason she says it in a whisper. Then in her normal voice. ‘I’ll put her to bed now. You go down and talk to your guests. It’s your party.’

This is a little annoying because I had meant to give Hilary a very heavy dose of Calpol to make sure she won’t wake and attract attention during the evening. As Mother walks off with the girl along the landing, she is already humming mournful hymn tunes which she presumably imagines are soporific. And indeed they are.

Downstairs I pin a little notice to the first column of the bannister. ‘Use downstairs loo: don’t want to wake kids.’ I hesitate, then decide to accept one last call to the bathroom.

Finally towards ten, everybody arrives more or less at once. Squash partners from my Hammersmith club, a few blokes from karate classes, couples we met on the maternity course and perhaps went out with once, or used to meet for a drink sometimes, at least until Hilary was born. Mark and Sylvia, our old neighbours from Finchley. People from work. People from school where Shirley taught — her ex amongst them? Stout Ian Perkins has a lecherous look to him, trailing a petite wife with pink rabbitty little mouth and pursed lips. And now there’s a faint aroma of dope in the air? Who? Can I allow that? If the police should come before I start the fire? Calm down please. It would be madness to make a fuss. Probably I’m just imagining it.

Mrs Harcourt arrives, bringing a sprightly older man with middle European accent who seems determined to make a fool of himself telling jokes and drinking heavily. He is tall, but lean, over-dressed in a dinner jacket that doesn’t quite fit. Obviously out for a good time. Mrs Harcourt introduces him, with no comment, as her dear friend Jack. She is looking younger and happier than the last time I saw her, in an elaborate taffeta dress with sparkling butterfly brooch and pearl necklace. I’m surprised to notice she hasn’t brought her camera. Our tenth anniversary will pass unrecorded.

Gregory turns up with a girl I’ve never seen before, a thin-lipped, depressed looking lass with a sudden false smile of greeting that heaves up the downturned corners of the mouth. Tight jeans and ample curves up top tell all though. She moves with a soft predatory pad in expensive running shoes.

‘Divorced, old man,’ he explains. It’s at least two years since I saw him. The girl is leaning over the table for food and he is watching her arse. So am I for that matter. He chuckles: ‘Just got too much. And boring into the bargain. You know, marriage, always the same. We both wanted out.’

As I open the door for someone else, Charles and Peggy can be heard arguing quite violently as they approach down our lovely, tree-waving street. They are calling each other names. Sometimes I wonder if Shirley and I aren’t the only couple in the world guarding the romantic fort of first marriage.

Lobster Claws

‘Hi, what you up to? How come we never get to see each other?’ Greeting guests in the porch I’m putting on an extraordinary show of bonhomie: I sound positively American. Meanwhile Shirley is marshalling drinks and food in the breakfast room. In the lounge somebody’s put on ‘Street-Fighting Man’ of all things. I check my watch. Ten fifteen.

‘Congratulations,’ I tell a very pregnant Susan Wyndham; she is leaning on the arm of the bearded man whose photo I used to see in her bedroom. ‘What do you want, boy or a girl?’

‘Just as long as it’s healthy,’ he says solemnly.

The evening gathers momentum. Much as planned. People finally begin to mingle, to get drunk. And to dance. The volume of the music is creeping up, and with the noise comes bustle, confusion. I’ve spotted several cigarette butts on carpet and parquet and a glass of red wine has gone over the bottom of the heavy green velvet curtains in the lounge. Pretty expensive enjoyment frankly. What I can’t understand, though, is how Shirley, who has committed so much time and energy in recent years to cleaning everything up far more often than is necessary (’because Hilary spends most of her life on the carpet’), is now being so blasé about it all. ‘Oh that doesn’t matter, I’m sure the stain’ll come out. We’re not that finicky. I mean, you can’t live in a museum, can you?’ She lifts her hand to cover her laughter, embraces someone, whirls off in a dance.

Still, the louder and rowdier the party, the better it suits my purpose. And I break open a couple of fresh packs of Rothmans and spill the cigarettes into a cut-glass bowl on the sideboard. The lounge is already a smog. When they’re always telling you on the news that everybody’s giving up.

Where’s Mother? I expected she’d have gone by now. Got one of the ‘church folk’ to drive her home. But she hasn’t said goodbye. I don’t want her around when it all happens. There are two rather handsome people kissing deeply at the bottom of the stairs. Which reminds me. I walk briskly to the back of the hall and slip into the cubby under the stairs, crouching down under the slanting ceiling. Amongst dusty boxes, there’s a heavy half-full drum of varnish from when they did the floors. I shift it over to the wall on the study side (barely a yard from the armchair) and prise the lid open a little with the car keys in my pocket to release some fumes. Ideally, I would like the stairwell to go up before people realise what’s going on. Though that seems a little ambitious.

Then up to check the children one last time. Fortunately the guest room is at the opposite side of the house from Hilary’s. For obvious reasons. The important thing is that everybody be where they should be when it begins.

I ease open the door. Frederick has his arms flung out above his head in red pyjamas. His face is so smooth in sleep, despite the thumping rhythm from downstairs, so smooth, so calm. But then he doesn’t have dreams like I have, like last night’s for example. I watch him. Although they don’t actually move you can sense, beneath the calm features, an intense, fluttering, delicate life. Not for the first time I reflect that I too might have had a lovely child like this.

Where the hell is Mother? I don’t want her holed up in a bedroom somewhere praying. That would be typical. And I quickly move along the two passageways that meet at right angles at the top of the stairs, opening doors, checking the bedrooms, the linen cupboard, the bathroom, even the tiny laundry room. Which paranoid activity inevitably reminds me of last night’s dream again, and I pause a moment at the top of the stairs as it all comes back.

I knew it had been a bad one. Of course, essentially, it’s just the same old mutilation fare. The new twist being that this time I was looking for my face. All over the house opening doors, looking under furniture, searching for my face. Unusually, though, as anxiety mounted, as I desperately hunted for and equally desperately hoped I wouldn’t find my nose, my eyes, my mouth, and worse still the expression those features must form, I came across Shirley brushing her hair in the bathroom the way she does, tossing it this way and that with a lovely sensuous motion. Instinctively I lifted my hands to cover myself, but she says calmly, ‘Nothing wrong with your face, love,’ and immediately I’m calm too. At least no one has noticed, I think, so perhaps it doesn’t matter. One can perfectly well go through life without a face if nobody notices. But now she frowns: ‘You really should get your arms looked at though, George.’ As though changing slides on a projector, attention switches in a flash to my right arm where strange pink rubbery outcroppings of flesh are forming just beneath the shoulder. I run a finger across them. ‘Age,’ I say, in the way one might of the dry fatty skin one tends to get above the elbow. But these jelly-like protrusions are gross. And then I see my forearms. They are bristling, bristling, with long, maybe four-inch lobster claws, blackish, as if burnt, unutterably ugly as they wave and grope of their own accord. I open my mouth to scream. To find I haven’t a mouth, for there is no face of course. At which point one wakes up to find that all is perfectly okay.

Downstairs I check out the lounge. Maybe fifteen people. Almost everybody is busy dancing or at least deep in conversation. Gregory’s girlfriend is writhing particularly wildly, though always stony-faced. Very suggestive contortions, and not near Gregory either. No sign of Shirley, or Mother. Where is she? In the breakfast room Charles is at the buffet table with a leg of chicken in his mouth, defending Liverpool local council against the robust good sense of Susan’s man, Eric. One of the karate guys splits his trousers showing how important it is to assume a low centre of gravity.

There is something very stable about the hum now, as if this buzz of alcohol-fuelled voices will go on for many hours. And checking my watch it is indeed time. I planned to do it now, when in the general tipsy hubbub Hilary will be forgotten. Sensing that if I stop to think, the cold sweat which is already coating face and hands will turn into violent shivering, I move to the sideboard where the spirits are. A well-dressed, clean-shaven boy who doesn’t know who I am, offers to do me the honours. ‘Fill it up,’ I tell him. He grins as if at a fellow freeloader. I take a gulp, light myself a cigarette, and armed, as it were, to the teeth, push through people down the hall, down the passage by the stairs, round through the cloakroom, past the bathroom and the door to the cubby and into the secluded study room.

To find Peggy and Gregory.

Why, after my silly, automatic, ‘Oops, sorry,’ closing the door on them, do I have such an overwhelming sense of frustration, and more precisely of déjà vu? My childhood. Hearing, finding, knowing of Peggy with her lovers, feeling excluded, feeling somehow that my bubbly sister has a monopoly on life, on gaiety, that I am always to be in outer darkness gnashing my teeth. It’s only a couple of months since she had her abortion for heaven’s sake.

I hesitate in the cloakroom where hooks are overloaded with rain-scented jackets, duffles, macs, mohair. In the bathroom someone coughs. An explosion of laughter comes from just round the corner in the hall. My cigarette is more than half burned. I take a good gulp of the whisky, knock brusquely on the study again and push back in.

‘George, really!’

‘Sorry, I don’t want to bother you guys, but Charles is looking all over for you, Peg. Could walk in any moment.’

They’re still at the stage of fumbling in each other’s clothes. They only met at most a couple of hours back. They both came with other partners. Gregory half sits, flustered, a glint of saliva on his beard.

‘Why don’t you, er, adjourn a moment and nip upstairs. Go to our room at the end of the passageway to the right. There’s a key in the door.’

But our room is next to Hilary’s room. Why on earth did I suggest this? Do I want them to burn? Or do I want them to save Hilary? In which case, what’s the point? Or was it the only thing I could think of? In any event I’m screwing up. I’m losing control. I draw the last puffs on the cigarette with my black lobster claws and tip another gulp of whisky into the place where my mouth must be. Only half the glass left.

‘Good on you, bruv,’ Peg says chuckling. The two of them are getting up, rearranging their clothes. ‘We’ll run the gauntlet of the hall then.’ And crouching down, like a commando about to storm a beach she grabs gangly Gregory by the hand and begins to hurry out through the cloakroom.

I look around. They’ve turned on the angle lamp on the desk, pointing it down at the floor near the wall. And in this would-be romantic, shadowy light, I quickly toss my whisky onto a dusty green armchair, then dislodge the dying coal of my cigarette so that it falls at the edge of the little pool of yellow spirit seeping into the cushion. Immediately it goes out. Without hesitating I pull a lighter from my pocket and try to light the material directly. An almost invisible paraffin flame appears, but seems not to touch the material itself, seems to dance, detached and ghostlike. It surely can’t be enough. But I must get out now. I can’t wait to see. I haven’t even closed the door properly. I turn to grab the ashtray I left on the desk and spill it over the flame. But it isn’t there. Why? Why not? Has some creepy person like my mother already gone round gathering and emptying ashtrays? For heaven’s sake!

The flames are biting into the material now, the metamorphosis of fire is taking place, flaring yellow and smoky. I should put the thing out at once. Any forensic idiot will be able to see it was started on purpose. But in a trance I move to the door. And at last I realise, with the sudden lucidity of revelation that I am only acting here and now so that some action in my life at last there may be. So that I won’t keep plaguing myself trying to decide what to do. The outcome is almost irrelevant. I am acting because I can’t bear myself. I find my mental processes intolerable. I am horrible. And I may very well just go upstairs and sit out the horror with Hilary, burn away my lobster claws, my jelly flesh. My mother is right. I have been damned from earliest infancy.

The light of the flames is now brighter and fiercer than that of the lamp. I must have been here five minutes. There’s the fierce crackle of a bonfire. Suddenly frightened by the common-sense fear that somebody will hear, will smell, I hurry out of the room and close the door carefully behind me. The heavy wood clicks softly on good do-it-yourself insulating foam. And in an unplanned brainwave I go and pick up the low table at the bottom of the hall, bring it back, set it down across the study door and, unburdening the hooks one by one, place a huge pile of damp coats on top. Now back to the party. My face, I feel, like Moses returning from Sinai, is glowing with heat.

Help Me

‘You’re wanted in the lounge.’

I’ve barely turned the corner out of the cloakroom when I run into one of the church folk Shirley introduced me to earlier. The word ‘wanted’ frightens me. I would have washed my face if only the bathroom was empty.

‘Oh really. Thanks.’

I meant to hang around chatting in the hall at this point until the fire was discovered, then rush upstairs, save Frederick and report that Hilary’s room is already engulfed in flame. Can I spare a moment?

‘Hey, George,’ Charles calls through a group of talkers. ‘There you are. You’re wanted in the lounge.’

I’ll have to go. I cross the hall and start to walk across the parquet of the lounge, normally covered by carpets, where twenty or thirty people are dancing to African music I didn’t know we had. Who wants me? Is it a trick? All at once Shirley comes across from the window end and throws her arms round me in celebratory embrace. ‘George, where’ve you been? Everybody’s waiting for you!’

People dancing part about us. It’s like a scene from a film. Or a dream. It feels orchestrated. And Shirley has changed. She’s wearing a short black dress with glitter, the skirt pleating out high on her thighs, black tights with a zig-zag pattern, silver heels. Her hair is up with just two copper ringlets falling round each temple. A lot of make-up makes her look younger than I ever expected to see her again. I realise I haven’t really looked at her all evening. She must be mad at me.

She does a twirl, a pirouette, the motion lifting her skirt, then grabs me in a tight hug. Apparently this is prearranged because the music stops now and everybody cheers. But my ears are straining for some sound behind this sound. One of the school crowd, a small, smug, balding man in cord jacket and jeans, throws handfuls of confetti over us. Everybody’s clapping. ‘Give the girl a kiss,’ a voice shouts. But it’s Shirley kissing me, twining tight to me. I try to return some passion. Thankfully, the stereo crackles, starts, stops — somebody is having trouble with the faulty cueing device — then settles into ‘As Times Roll By’, or whatever it’s called. The appropriate guff, but loud enough to cover anything behind I think. Everybody is crowding into the room for the celebrations. Nobody will notice anything.

Tears glistening in her wide eyes, an extraordinary yearning look on her face, Shirley whispers: ‘Shall we dance?’ Her voice conveys infinite tenderness and irony. It’s a voice that says, ‘Despite everything, George, here we are, so we may as well celebrate.’ She begins to lead me in a slow lilting embrace.

Am I crying? I register such intense alarm. What am I doing? She hasn’t guessed the slightest thing. If she knew, if she knew even what I dreamt last night she might never touch me again. She might sense the lobster arms, the cancerous jelly protrusions.

Instead here she is being very sexy, pressing her whole slim body against me, her small breasts. The guests part into two lines forming an aisle down the lounge as we drift in slow and frankly clumsy rotation toward the fireplace end where a huge cake has appeared on a glass trolley. Behind it stands my mother, knife in hand, beaming almost tangible sentimentality. I recognise at once her Christmas cake recipe from Gorst Road days, it will be full of a pension’s worth of dry fruit and suet. Though instead of the usual Mary, Joseph and Jesus plus farmyard friends in adoration, another holy family are standing on the icing: three figures, toy figures, cuddly bears but dressed as human. There’s Daddy with a peaked railwayman’s cap, Mummy in an apron, and little girl. Us. Except that the child is standing up.

I glance at my watch. How long has it been?

A sudden hush. Mother pushes a knife into the cake. ‘Bless you, my dears,’ she says. ‘Many happy returns.’ Charles pops a champagne bottle. He says, ‘Good on you, George lad,’ in a fake downwardly-mobile voice. Shall I tell him that Peggy is having it off with Gregory upstairs? Around the happy figures on the cake, in rose-pink icing, Mother’s shaky hand has traced with how much love, ‘10TH ANNIVERSARY’. Loud cheers go up with the first splashing of champagne. Everyone crowds round to kiss and squeeze.

Then someone cries: ‘Speech, speech from the happy couple.’

‘Speech!’

A slow handclap begins: ‘Speech, speech, speech.’

My house is burning.

Shirley says: ‘Go on, George!’

I can feel the muscles in my face working. What is happening? Why has nobody said anything? Obvious. Because everybody is in the room here, looking at me. It couldn’t have been more perfectly timed. The jostle of glasses, plates of cake moving round, jokes, red faces, comments. Two or three flashes pop.

Frederick. I must hurry. Unless it has already gone out. Just say something and get it over with. Say something.

‘Oh come on, George.’

Why can’t I speak!

‘Tongue-tied by love.’

‘Give the man a drink.’

‘Spoilsport!’

My mother says: ‘Come on, love.’

And now I am perfectly aware that I am breaking down. This is what it is like, then. I open my mouth, but nothing comes out. My whole body surges with damp nervous heat. My bowels are melting. I gaze at all these faces, eager, grinning. They find my bewilderment so touching. Probably all I have to say is thank you, thank you, for this wonderful surprise. But I feel my jaws locked, paralysed. They will not speak. I can sense tears rolling down numbed cheeks. Until finally I manage to croak, ‘Help me.’

But nobody hears; my whispered plea is drowned in a fierce yell from the door: ‘Fire! There’s a bloody great fire. Everybody out.’

An Act of Goodness

I should say, if for no other reason than not to appear ridiculous, that I always knew my plan was a risky one, that it could perfectly well have an entirely different outcome from the one I intended. Or, most probably, no outcome at all. At the time I reasoned that this was precisely why I was choosing it. In this sense: that no one with only moderate insurance and no financial problems could ever be suspected of arson against his own household; and second, that no one could ever be suspected of a murder attempt when the outcome was so spectacularly uncertain and in circumstances where so many people might, theoretically, rush upstairs to save the handicapped child who couldn’t save herself. That said, however, I felt fairly confident that in the selfish tipsy hubbub that is a party around midnight, the general reaction to a fire that in the secluded back study under cover of the thump of music and a haze of cigarette smoke ought to be well advanced before being discovered, would be to panic and rush to get out.

I was worried, of course, about Shirley and Mother. It was unlikely they would forget the little girl. Which was why I’d much rather Mother had never been invited, or had gone home early. But my idea was that I, being mentally prepared and well placed at the foot of the stairs, would shout commandingly to the others to stay down and dial 999 while I went up for the children. Given that Hilary’s room was directly above the study, given that both windows would be open, given that curtains are reasonably inflammable, and given above all that I would have the excuse of going for Frederick first, I very much hoped that on arrival in her room the child would be beyond saving, already liberated I liked to put it to myself, and why not for heaven’s sake? from the prison of her body. I would rush down with Frederick only seconds before the staircase was engulfed in flames from burning varnish beneath, and by the time the fire brigade arrived all would be over.

Looking back now, I realise that this schoolboy-fantasy scenario was never really entirely probable, for who can know where or how fast a fire will spread? Nor in the end perhaps was it why I had decided to act as I did.

The voice shrieked fire, a voice I didn’t recognise. The reaction of this party crowd, these people we had sought out for this improbable celebration, was, as expected, first confusion, then a strong fast surge to the door. My problem was that I should have been at the foot of the stairs, ready. In the event, as I threw myself into the crowd, screaming, ‘The children, the children!’ it was to feel the whole house suddenly shudder; a deep crash rumbled the walls and a blast of hot air rushed to meet the fleeing party guests. Perhaps the place wasn’t as well built as the estate agents had led me to believe.

Desperately forcing my way, and being forced in turn, through urgent bodies out into the hall, I found the stairs already invaded by quick low flames. How could that be? At the same moment all electric light — this I had never even thought of — went out, throwing the whole scene into a lurid flickering relief that was simultaneously bright and dark. Looking up, aghast, disaster dawning, I saw my mother at the halfway landing where, behind candlestick columns of polished oak, the staircase turned. Incongruously she had lifted her long satiny party dress to hurry through fire licking across blue carpeting. As she scuttled round the corner out of vision, three or four stairs on the main flight crashed down in a fierce spouting of sparks and flame. The varnish, it seems, had been something of an excess of zeal. The armchairs must have been veritable incendiary devices. They shouldn’t be allowed. In any event, the scene, as I backed off from the heat, was lost in a billow of dark smoke and cinders, chokingly hot. And I paused.

Shirley grabbed me from behind in hysterics. She was shrieking. I didn’t turn to her. Now the drama had begun in earnest and so much was at stake, I found myself quite cool in that heat and thinking so rapidly.

The last of the guests were forcing their way out of the front door. Telling Shirley to follow me, I crossed the hall to breakfast room and kitchen, suddenly almost normal after the choking bonfire of the stairway. I sensed a curious adrenalin-filled togetherness as we dashed through the twilit spectre of our domestic life, a table laden with dirty dishes and party snacks, a black gleam from the door of the microwave. She reached for my hand. I pulled her along, shouting commands which she obeyed. So in just a few moments we were out through the side door, had opened the garage, pulled out the light aluminium ladder there and were stumbling to the house through flowerbeds and rockery to prop it wobbling against the wall below Frederick’s window. It will be quicker, I tell her, to cross the house once in, than to walk the ladder round to Hilary’s room.

How gloriously instinctively one acts. Without knowing where I’ve picked it up, I find, as I climb the ladder Shirley holds, that I have a hammer in my hand. Though it does occur to me as odd that Freddy hasn’t opened the window himself.

The top of the ladder is three feet short of the sill. Hammer clamped between my teeth I place my hands flat against the gritty brick, hugging the wall, and very precariously raise my feet to the second-to-top rung. Shirley shouts encouragement, begs me to hurry. ‘George, George, please!’ But her noise comes as if from a distant television. I am not listening to her. Extraordinarily lucid, what my mind is actually registering as my hand comes down with the hammer on polished glass, is that there is now a wavering glow sharpening the edges of the house to either side, that as yet there is no sound of a fire engine, that a group of guests are gathering at the base of the ladder.

The glass shatters. My hand reaches in for the catch. At the same time I’m shouting down that no one else should come up. I can handle it. And in the distance I distinctly hear Charles voice calling urgently for Peggy. Indeed. Where is she? Why haven’t they saved the kids? I heave myself forward over the sill, tearing my shirt on the pin that holds the bar.

The small room is acrid with a slow, almost leisurely grey smoke which flaps and curls as I open the window. Frederick is not on the bed.

My mind speeds up, spacily aware. Crossing rapidly to the door, I’m shouting for Frederick at the top of my voice. ‘Freddy, for Christ’s sake!’ No reply. Just the loudening roar of the flames. Through the door there’s laundry room, another bedroom and bathroom to the left, stairs to the right. I go right, towards danger, the fire; perhaps he tried to go down the stairs. I’m calling more and more urgently, Freddy, Freddy, fighting the urge to cough, to turn back; until, advancing into ever thicker, yellowish smoke which stings my eyes and makes me retch, I stumble over him, stretched on blue pile carpet, his slight body sprawled in red pyjamas, his blond hair, outflung arms.

In only a moment, less, I have snatched him back to the open window. He weighs nothing. He’s a feather. And I am sure he is alive, he must be. He can’t have lain there more than a minute. How long has it all been? Not more than a minute or two, surely. He must be alive. Suddenly I find I have faith. Am I breathing a prayer? No. I just know the worst can’t happen, it can’t. I race through the spare room and simply pass this dear child directly into the hands of the small balding man from St Elizabeth’s (my wife’s ex lover?) who, disregarding my orders, is standing at the top of the ladder looking in.

It’s so incongruous. As if I were living in my dreams. Or is that the key? For instead of throwing a leg over the sill and following Frederick down the ladder to safety, I stand at the window, filling my lungs, preparing to turn back, just as in my dreams I will insist on going back and back, looking and looking for that horrible thing that remains forever hidden. I turn back. And only now in this scorching, unbreathable heat, when I could perfectly honourably retire, do I begin to appreciate why I have acted as I have. It must have been, I see as I fill my lungs at the window, it must have been to force myself, in these precious seconds of action and drama, to truly decide once and for all, and in decision to find myself, that mutilated part of me I spend my nights seeking, that missing face. At the door to Hilary’s room presumably.

My chest painfully full of air, I grab the blanket from off the bed, gather it about me and run at the thickening smoke and flames at the top of the stairs, from where, forming a right angle, the other landing leads off to airing cupboard, our room, Hilary’s room.

I pass through flames. Screaming inwardly, breath fiercely held, I blunder, eyes closed, along the corridor, blanket tight about my head, legs scorching. The noise has become deafening, a rage of spitting, crackling explosions above a steadily booming roar. I pass through it. Weeping. Then suddenly there are no more flames, the landing beyond the stairs is clear, though the smoke here is dense as thick wool. Another sudden crash shakes our house.

How long can I hold this breath?

I turn toward the flickering quick orange light through an open doorway to the left which must be flames in the curtains of Hilary’s room (I planned for this). And I am just crossing that fatal threshold when I realise that they are already here, at the end of the landing. It was the smoke and my almost closed, burning eyes kept me from seeing them. My mother is slumped against the door to our bedroom. Her dress, her underskirt, are burnt up to the waist. Her skin is black. Despite the urgency, I experience a strange sense of revelation at the sight of her heavy vulnerable flesh. My mother. And the ragged bundle left to roll to one side, half in the airing cupboard, must be Hilary. She is motionless. I reach for the handle of our bedroom door, the only escape route, but even before I touch it I know what has happened. They locked it, Peggy and Gregory. Mother couldn’t get through to take the child out.

They locked it. But why didn’t they unlock it? For Christ’s sake. Can they still be in there? Surely not. The roar of the fire in Hilary’s room is ear-splitting. Why why why didn’t they unlock that door? This is mad.

My mother stirs and groans. I can’t see her face which is squashed against the angle of door and carpet. Hilary likewise is merely a mound in the swirling dark.

Has it been thirty seconds, forty, fifty, since I took this breath?

In the space of a breath, a single breath, I must decide who I am.

I look about me from stinging, streaming eyes. My generous mother. My hopeless, helpless child. My expensive, graceful, gorgeous house, burning. This is the moment of truth I have so expensively engineered. I look, but there is no revelation, no dream mirror to show me whatever my face may be, nor through the suffocating smoke do I miraculously see any missing part of me to be rushed off to that improbable surgeon. There is no help. Only unthinking, with savage violence, I begin to do my instinctive duty by these others.

Indeed my fury and aggression are their only hope now. For I cannot drag them both back through the bonfire at the top of the stairs. I know that. One perhaps, but not both. And though again I know that this is precisely the kind of situation I strove to bring about, nevertheless the simple solution of leaving that blurred bundle behind, is, for reasons beyond reason, immediately discounted now. I turn to the door, step over my mother and with the last of this interminable breath give the jerking kick I learnt long ago at karate.

The wood shudders but does not give.

Why shouldn’t I just pull my mother free, back along the passage through the flames, assuming it can be done? Why am I forever thinking one thing and doing another?

I’m shaking. To regain control I begin to breathe out, slowly, slowly, from squeezed and painful lungs. And kick again. This time I yell fiercely, expelling the last of that breath in an explosion of violence, springing the kick right by the lock.

Nothing.

So now I have to, have to, take this next breath, the beginning of the rest of my life. Which may be very brief. My lungs are crushed, skewered. My vision falters. In a frenzy of frustration, I take a few paces back to where the flames are darting in glowing beads across the carpeting and, head down, I simply charge the door with my thick stubborn skull. In a shock of pain, it gives.

I grab my mother. Heaving her dead weight across the room to the window, already flung open, I register that Peggy and Gregory are not here. Insanely they have fled through the window. Did they think somebody was trying to discover them? The roof of the side porch is only five or so feet below. I could lower mother down first, then follow her myself. Mission accomplished.

For a moment I pause. Leaning over the sill, I gasp the sweet air, taking in the dark garden scene, the crowd, the shouts, the halo of a tree in blossom, the silhouette of other chimneyed houses stretching away downhill under a yellow city glow, the sudden wail of sirens. Then, against my better judgement perhaps, like my mother so many years ago when she renounced her faith for me, I go back in there and lift that small soul clear.