The Invisible Victory

17

I did not ask Rosie into the flat. I took her to a nearby Lyons teashop by St George's Hospital at Hyde Park Corner. She was crying most of the way. I did not want to talk about it until we were sitting down. It would give me time to collect my thoughts. I bought her a cup of tea and a shiny bun with lumps of sugar like broken glass on top. She never touched either, but went on crying.

'Why didn't you tell me before?' I demanded.

'I couldn't…I couldn't be sure.'

'But you are sure? Are you?'

She nodded dumbly, the cheap pink handkerchief at her eyes thoroughly wet through.

'How long has it been going on?'

'I haven't had my monthlies since last June.'

'But how can you be sure. There might be other reasons.'

'I can see it.'

'I can't.'

'When I has my wash. I can see it, plain as anything. Soon everyone will be able to.'

'You're sure it's me?'

For a moment she did not comprehend, then she exclaimed, 'How can you say that?' starting to cry again, making me feel doubly guilty, ashamed, frightened, desperate and confused.

'You must pull yourself together,' I commanded. She went on crying. People at other tables were staring at us. I felt all of them were in the secret. 'We've got to look at this coolly.' I waited until her sobs had quietened. 'Listen, Rosie-if either of us loses our heads we shall get nowhere.'

'Ow, Jim! You do still love me, don't you?'

'Of course I do. Now, who else knows about it?'

'You're sure you love me?'

_'Of course_ I love you,' I told her fiercely. 'Who else knows about it?'

'No one. Not a soul.'

'Not even Lady Tip?' She shook her head vigorously. 'You must keep absolutely quiet about it for a bit. Not a word to my parents.'

'You'll stand by me, won't you, Jim?' she asked pathetically.

'Of course I shall.' I had no option.

Rosie had to go back to help with the dinner. I hurried to the flat, desperate to put everything before David Mellors.

'I haven't done my gynae yet,' he confessed unhelpfully.

'But there must be other perfectly good reasons for a girl stopping her periods, surely?'

He frowned at the eggs and bacon he was frying for himself in the grimy kitchen at the back. 'There must be. There's more than one reason for everything in medicine. Though they say in the hospital, if any female outside a nursery or a nunnery stops menstruating, she's pregnant until proved otherwise.'

I sat down on a hard kitchen chair. David forked over the sizzling bacon. The smell made me feel sick.

'Didn't you take precautions?' he asked.

'Of course I took precautions.'

'What sort?'

'I…well, I pulled out.'

He said impassively, _'Coitus interruptus,_ the poor man's french letter.'

'That's safe enough, surely?' I protested.

'Obviously, it wasn't.'

'You're not being very sympathetic.'

'Sorry, boy.'

I sat staring at the pock-marked linoleum of the floor in silence. David slipped his meal on to a plate with a fish slice, sat at the scrubbed wooden table and began to eat. 'If she is pregnant, can I do anything about it?' I asked.

'You could find a witch in a back street with a knitting-needle, I suppose.'

'I could end up in the dock, though, couldn't I?'

'I suppose you might: You'd have to take the gamble. Mind, there's plenty of girls who come into casualty for the gynae department to finish off what they've started themselves, or someone else has. The police ask questions, but nobody tells them much. Do you want anything to eat?'

'No, no…but if I don't want to run that sort of risk, what can I do?'

'You can let her go ahead and have it. There's plenty of unmarried mothers in Mary's. Sister keeps a store of wedding rings and issues them out.'

'But you don't understand. The very idea of a person like Rosie producing a child which I've fathered utterly nauseates me.'

'You might grow very fond of her. I've seen that happen before. Down where I live, there's plenty of chaps who wouldn't think in a blue moon of getting themselves hitched up before they put the girl in pod.'

'You're not trying to tell _me _that I should actually marry her, are you?'

'That's something I'd never tell anyone.'

There was another silence. David went on eating. 'Of course, you're trying to tell me something rather different,' I said. 'That I've an overpowering moral obligation to marry her. Well, that's unnecessary. I'm already aware of it.'

'Was I saying that? Well, if you did marry her, you might not be doing too badly. She's a pretty thing. Whether she'd make a good wife is a toss up with any woman, but it generally works out all right.'

'But she's an ignoramus.'

David wiped a slice of white bread in his mixture of egg yolk, scarlet ketchup and fat. 'It's not the biological function of women to be brainy, no more than for the birds of the air to ride bicycles.'

'Now you sound like Almroth Wright.' I got up to leave the kitchen. At the door I turned round. 'She's common.'_

David made no reply.

_He that doth get a wench with child and marries her afterward,_ wrote Samuel Pepys on October 7, 1660, _it is as if a man should shit in his hat and then clap it upon his head._ I fulfilled Pepys' ludicrous picture.

Archie declared that of course I must marry her. To his mind, one of the bourgeoisie-even the _nouvelle bourgeoisie_-leaving a servant girl with a bun in the oven had no alternative but make an honest woman of her. My father was refreshingly cheerful and encouraging. He said it happened every day, and she was a lucky girl knowing who the father was. My mother implored with tears that I gave the child a name. Sir Edward was back home, and would of course know all about it. He sent through my father a message to call, but I stayed away, not wishing to meet the eye of Lady Tip. As for Elizabeth, I prayed the affair was too shocking to be allowed her ears.

It happened on Saturday, November 3, at Marylebone Registry Office. In a red dress and with a little bunch of brownish chrysanthemums, Rosie was blooming and bulging-dispelling my hopes to the last moment that Nature might put an end to my predicament. We had a social difficulty. She was a waif; reared in a home in Clapham. Mrs Packer volunteered to 'give her away', and appeared with a husband in a bowler and fringe of moustache, looking like Strube's Little Man from the _Daily Express._ The Registrar had a cold, which I caught. Archie was my best man, and gave me Ј100.

Sir Edward had charitably taken his family to the country. We had our wedding-breakfast in the basement. My mother made a superb cake. My father made a speech and got drunk. There was confetti, as we took a taxi to the pair of furnished rooms I had found in Coram's Fields, round the back of the College and not far from Doughty Street, where Dickens used to live.

I completely forget how those days of early marriage felt. I forgot whether I loved Rosie, or had any particular sensation about her. I recall only an odd awareness of possessing her totally, her plump body, her cotton petticoats, the prayer book she had kept from the orphanage, her umbrella. It was all mine. She cooked for me every night, my mother having relentlessly instructed her. I cannot remember a word that we exchanged, nor what we did to pass the time. The unborn baby dominated us. Because of the baby, Rosie rested in the afternoons, never went out in the wet, never looked a cripple in the face. Because of the baby, we shared the thin-mattressed double bed every night without the solace of each other.

The baby was to be born in Queen Charlotte's. We were delighted to have within reach so famous a maternity hospital, which had taken the name of George the Third's Queen, who had fifteen children. In the mid-eighteenth century it was providing free lying-in for married mothers, with a diet of brown and white caudle, and infant baptism by the chaplain, which was compulsory. Colebrook worked in the research laboratory attached to the isolation block, which had shed its old walls for new in the suburb of Chiswick, above an elbow of the Thames to the west. I did not see him after my marriage until the end of February, when he appeared one morning in the hall of Arundel, removing hat and damp raincoat and dropping his bag all in one movement as usual. 'I hear your wife's having a baby in Charlotte's,' he greeted me. 'When's she due?'

'In about a week's time.'

'I'm sure everything will go splendidly.' I wondered if he was doing any mental arithmetic. 'Here's something which might interest you, as you speak German.' He handed me a rolled-up journal from his mackintosh pocket. 'I got it this morning from a colleague in Breslau-he must have thought it important, posting it off in a hurry. Take a look at it while I'm in my meeting. There would seem to be something brewing in the Rhineland.'

I unrolled it standing in the hall. It was the last edition of the _Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift,_ the German Medical weekly, published in Leipzig the previous Friday. The issue contained special supplements on tuberculosis and medicine in sport. I was wondering why Colebrook should have recommended it, my eye running down the list of main contents on the cover. The first was _Aus den Forschungslabatorien der I G Farbenindustrie A G Werk Elberfeld_-From the Research Laboratories of I G Farben Elberfeld. Underneath came, _Ein Beitrang zur Chemotherapie der bakteriellen Infektionen_-A Contribution to the Chemotherapy of Bacterial Infections. The author of this modest title was Professor Gerhard Domagk. The following article I translated as Prontosil in Streptococcal Disease. I wondered what 'Prontosil' was. It was written by Professor Klee, and I remembered from Domagk's letter to Dr Dieffenbach that Klee had been testing out 'Streptozon' in Wuppertal. I turned over the pages, starting to translate Domagk's paper, lips moving and finger running along the lines. They seemed to have re-christened 'Streptozon', as 'Prontosil'. But undoubtedly it was the same sulphonamide drug which had saved my hand. The world was at last learning what I had heard from a part-time prostitute in a Cologne slum the night they burnt down the Reichstag.