Tim Parks - Goodness

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.’