Maggie Gee - The White Family

‘Let’s make love,’ he said, and kissed me. Just ‘Let’s make love,’ but at least he asked. I don’t think I heard that as sexual intercourse, although my pants were round my ankles, although his penis stood up like a candle. I heard it as love, and as a request. I heard it as tender, and infinitely hopeful. And I did have a choice, and I did say ‘Yes’. I did make a choice, even late in the day, I did make a choice, even if it was the wrong one. I didn’t just — let people do things to me.

And with that choice, I changed my life. Because I got pregnant, with that first sexual act. It seems amazing now, impossible now, it seems bitterly, unfairly enviable now. It lasted three minutes, and he didn’t walk me home, and I lied to my mother that the party was boring, and I waited five weeks or so for him to phone, and I waited three months for my period to come.

And then I went to the doctor in terror, and he was definite, and grim.

I saw Alison in the Refectory next day. It was September; the party had been in June. ‘Have you heard from Kate, at all, since the party? You haven’t heard from Ivo, have you?’ ‘I hate my cousin now,’ she said. ‘It was Ivo and his friend who were smoking cigars and made burn marks on our carpets. You haven’t fallen for him, have you?’

When I told her the problem she went very pale and her long ugly jaw wobbled in horror. ‘But you’d only just met him,’ she complained. ‘And you must have seen they were different from us. Kate’s an atheist. She told me so. And Ivo wouldn’t help with the washing-up … Besides, they’re modern linguists. They’ve all gone away to France for a year.’

Total despair. I can feel it still. He had gone away, he had gone to France. I was nineteen years old and I’d never been abroad, and if I had a baby I knew I never would –

‘May I offer you more cakes, madam? Perhaps the religieuse ?’

‘No more thank you. I’d like the bill.’

I make mistakes, then pay for them.

Alison put her arm round me, I remember. It felt heavy, and out of place. ‘Oh Shirley,’ she said, ‘what shall we do?’ But I didn’t want her pity. And we weren’t the same. I couldn’t bear her thinking that we were the same. I wanted to be the same as Ivo, tall and slim and sexy and selfish. I wanted not to be Shirley White, the sort of silly booby who’d get herself pregnant.

I tried to be mature. I went back to the doctor. I said I had discussed things with the father-to-be. Neither of us was ready to make the commitment. I wanted an abortion. He looked at me.

‘Do you know what it means, a late abortion? You’ll go through labour, with a dead baby.’

Oh God, I thought, I’ve got a Catholic. ‘It isn’t a baby, not to me.’ But for some reason then I burst out crying. I couldn’t bear the sound of the words, ‘dead baby’, I don’t know why not, it was stupid of me, and only encouraged him to give me a lecture.

He talked about adoption, and I laughed in his face. I didn’t know that one day I’d try to adopt, that one day I would be accepted to adopt. Kojo and I had just been accepted when he started to get ill, and the dream collapsed.

‘I can’t have this baby. I’m at college. I’m studying.’

I suddenly saw in a sickening flash that I’d have this baby, there was no escape, I had started to walk down a long straight tunnel that led to a room full of absolute pain, and after that I could see only darkness.

What happened was messier, more tortuous. My doctor reluctantly agreed to a termination, but there was muddle and delay until somehow I was already four months pregnant. I rejected all knowledge of the life inside me, but whatever was growing refused to be rejected. One day I had woken to feel it stirring, a gentle tickling, a gentle stroking. I didn’t care. I went ahead.

I took a taxi to the hospital. I went with a friend, who sat and cried. Lynn was a true friend — (indeed she still is, we try to meet twice a year to go shopping) — and funny, and kind, and not prim like Alison, but she was very fond of me, and scared of blood, and scared of me dying, so she wasn’t happy. By then I don’t think I’d have minded dying. To be taken away from all the horror. She kept saying ‘Are you sure? Are you totally sure?’ and staring at me with big frightened eyes.

We sat side by side in the waiting-room on rock-hard chairs that made me long to go to the toilet. She held my hand, and both of us were sweating. ‘I hate the smell of hospitals,’ she whispered. Suddenly she took her other hand off her handbag and laid it on the lump of my belly, my swelling belly underneath my dress, it was warm late spring, I was young and pregnant — ‘Shirley,’ she said, in absolute horror. ‘I felt it move. I felt it kick.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘I know. I’ve felt it.’ I wouldn’t look at her. I made my voice hard. Against You only have I sinned .

‘It’s alive,’ she said. ‘It’s really alive. It’s already alive. I know you know that —’ The tears were pouring down her face. You would have thought it was her who was having the abortion, and me the friend who was holding her hand. I was trying hard not to hear what she said except with a mechanical part of my brain.

‘I know she’s alive, I know she’s alive —’ It wasn’t what I had meant to say.

‘ You know the sex .’ She was calm this time, almost beyond shock, but she dropped my hand. She sat there watching me as if I was an alien.

‘I don’t know why I said that. I feel it’s a girl.’ I got up off the seat, walked to the window with its view of a garden, a neglected, walled-in hospital garden, just scrub, really, in the gap between buildings. I stared out across the dark bushes to the sky, which was blue with wild clouds sprinting across, and I thought, this baby will never see it, this baby will never get out alive …

She. She. Will never do it .

And I couldn’t go ahead. Of course I couldn’t. I never had a chance, once she started moving.

So I had to tell Mum. ‘I knew,’ she said. ‘I’ve been watching you. I hoped I was wrong.’ She went grey, I remember. She slumped by the sink, then sank on to a stool to stop herself falling. ‘He’ll go mad. Mad. You should have thought about your father.’

‘I don’t care about Dad.’ But I did, I did. ‘Will you tell him, Mum? Will you do that for me?’

She looked at me. She twisted her rings. She twisted her rings as if to torture herself. ‘Don’t ask me,’ she whispered, like a little girl. ‘I’d do anything for you. Anything else.’

So I waited till Dad came home from the Park, practising my lines, stroking my stomach. And he came home in a benevolent mood, and told me I looked pretty, and I was looking pretty, because pregnant women look pink and pretty.

Mum brought him some tea. He put his feet up.

I told him. He was remarkably calm. He sometimes was calm about big things; it was little things that annoyed him most. Or perhaps he hadn’t quite taken it in.

‘Who’s the father?’ he asked.

I remember feeling blank. What on earth did he mean? He was the father, he would always be the father.

‘Oh, no one you know.’ It came out wrong, as if I were saying, he’s too good for you.

‘I suppose you know him, do you? You knew him a bit before you let him get you pregnant?’

‘He’s a university student,’ I said.

For a moment he was cheered. Only a moment. ‘And when is he going to put in an appearance?’ I didn’t say anything. ‘Oh, I see. It’s like that, is it. We’ll see about that. If he thinks he can just muck about with my daughter …’

‘He’s gone abroad. He doesn’t know.’