Infidelity (25 page)

33

A
fter Sarah's disastrous visit to the neurologist, our relationship became more overtly strained. She had clearly been hoping for some definitive information that would let the decision make itself, but that hopeful little boat had been pushed back out to sea. We both knew there was a reckoning coming, and it felt to me as if the moment was almost here. In spite of the tension between us, we maintained our Friday afternoon ritual, including long walks by the Thames. On the most memorable of those walks, when Sarah had just passed the ten-week mark in her pregnancy, we crossed the Lambeth Bridge and found a bench on the Albert Embankment, gazing again at the Thames.

‘There's plenty of time to discuss this properly, Tom,' Sarah said to me. ‘Plenty of time to work it out, and still be inside the twelve-week limit.'

‘Do you mean work it out? Or do you mean persuade Tom to agree to a termination?'

The sky was blue, with a few puffy white clouds low on the northern horizon, and the Thames was as close to sparkling as I'd ever seen it. The air was cool but, warmed by walking, we had removed our coats.

‘As usual, I meant what I said,' Sarah said, somewhat tartly. ‘I want us to work this out and come to some finality. The uncertainty is bad for both of us. Bad for
us.
'

I suggested we should go back to the apartment, to talk in comfort and privacy, and she agreed, on one condition – that I took her to bed and made love to her before we said another word about the pregnancy.

‘This is not the biggest thing that's ever happened to me, Tom,' she said. ‘
You're
the biggest thing that's ever happened to me. I want us to keep that in perspective.' How desperately I wanted to believe that; how desperately I wanted to banish the thought that this was the oldest softening-up strategy in the book.

We recrossed the bridge and walked back to Vincent Square. Sarah took my arm and we maintained a companionable silence, broken only by her sotto voce snatches of ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence', the subject of that morning's lecture.

As we walked, it was almost possible to believe there was nothing more momentous on the agenda than our desire for each other.

Sarah lay in my arms, half dozing, and the conversation began as little more than a murmur.

She said, ‘Do you think people ever really decide things like this?'

‘Meaning what?'

‘Well, do you think anyone ever finds the answer to a really big question by working through a logical process? It's a bit like faith, isn't it? It just evolves. It just happens. You find you believe. Or you find you've stopped believing. You don't
decide
.'

‘I think some people do. Some people take a logical approach and are bound by the answers they come up with. I think logic drives a lot of people
away
from faith.'

‘I totally disagree. I think logic is the rationalisation they use after their faith has dried up for other reasons.'

‘This isn't about faith, though, is it?' I said. ‘This is about our child.'

‘Oh, Tom. Don't say “our child” in that maudlin tone. It's not a child yet. I know you want it to grow into one, and I suppose I'd want that too, if there were no other considerations. But it isn't that simple.'

‘So what do you suggest? How are we going to decide?'

‘That's the whole point of what I'm saying. I don't think we
will
decide. I think, at some point, we'll just know. It won't be about the weight of argument. It won't be quantifiable, like betting odds. It will be more like breathing.'

‘Breathing?'

‘Don't you think we mostly decide in the same way we breathe? The answers come to us like the breath that fills our lungs. And we go on, just knowing. Like we go on, just breathing. I wonder if deciding, or even pretending to decide, is a bit like a leap of faith. I think that's what I was trying to say a moment ago.'

‘I think of faith as a work of the imagination. I'm not sure I see the link.'

‘But that's it! That's it exactly. That's good, Tom. Deciding
is
a work of the imagination. That's exactly what it is. You imagine this scenario, or this outcome, and you imagine that one, and it sort of . . . well, it sort of evolves out of your imaginings.'

‘So try to imagine having a daughter.'

‘What?'

‘I'm just suggesting you could start by trying to imagine what it would be like to have a daughter.'

‘Why not a son?'

‘All right, a son.'

‘No – that doesn't work for me at all. That's not what I mean. In this case, it's nothing to do with boys or girls. It's to do with us and our life together, and Perry, and the way we're going to traverse these next weeks or months.'

‘But surely the reality of a child – a real son or a real daughter – lying in wait for you, just another thirty weeks down the track . . . isn't that something to take into account? Deciding if we could incorporate that actual child into our dreams of the future? The child that's already forming – the one we soon won't have to imagine because there it will be, bulging and kicking inside you. And, soon enough, mewling and suckling and overflowing with milk and smiling a dopey smile at us.'

‘I'm afraid your imagination is working along different lines from mine, Tom. You're thinking Disney. I'm thinking the Brothers Grimm. Or possibly Ibsen. I'm not ready for idyllic scenes from childhood. I'm trying to decide how we navigate our way through a beastly situation. A
bloody
beastly situation. The most beastly thing about it is that you and I seem to be approaching it from completely different angles, and we'd normally never do that. That frightens me, I must admit.'

‘All right – free associate.'

‘Oh, Tom, the trouble with this is we both know how desperately you want to keep this foetus. I wish it were as simple for me as it seems to be for you.'

‘That's not free associating. That's you thinking about how I might cope with the loss of this –'

‘Don't say the word. Whenever I start thinking about this, I always end up saying to myself – Sarah, you didn't want a child. You were taking steps to prevent conception. You never discussed any of this with Tom. This is an accident. You're trying to decide whether to incorporate an accident into a very complicated set of circumstances. Dominated by the spectre of Perry's looming demise, of course.'

‘Spectre? Who's Disney now?'

‘All right – prospect. Anyway, it's looming, whatever you want to call it.'

‘So when you start imagining things, what do you see?'

‘I see myself coming out of an abortion clinic and I'm trying to imagine how I would feel – relief, pain, guilt, shame, confusion, regret, jubilation, serenity? God knows.'

‘What else?'

‘I imagine myself at Perry's funeral in a maternity smock.'

‘Great.'

‘I imagine myself having to give up work, at least for a while, to care for a baby. I imagine us deciding Vincent Square would be a hopeless place to raise a child, and contemplating a move to – where? The 'burbs? No, thank you. Littleton? Better, of course, but I try to imagine how either of us would feel about commuting to and from London every day. Would you want to give up work and stay home with the child? Would you expect me to? Or would we commute together and leave the child in day care down there, or up here? Or what? I can imagine the moment where one of us decides it would be easier to stay in London for a few days each week . . . I hate going down that track in my imagination, I can tell you. This is not Disney, Tom.'

‘No. Definitely not Disney. I can see that.'

‘And don't you ever think of the dark side of this? Regardless of what you and I might decide, nature might snatch this thing away at any time. Thirty percent, remember. Thirty percent of foetuses never make it to full term because of spontaneous miscarriages.'

‘Totally out of our hands. No point trying to imagine that. We'd deal with it, either way. What else is dark?'

‘Downs is dark. Other birth deformities are dark – and the chance of chromosomal abnormalities is dramatically increased because of my age. I'm forty-four, Tom. That's ancient for eggs.'

‘Same for Fox.'

‘Of course it's the same for Fox and she's had every imaginable test to rule out the obvious disasters. As I would, if we decided to go ahead. She's already taken me through all that. But it's different for Fox.'

‘Different?'

Sarah hesitated, as if she were not quite sure how many of Fox's confidences she was prepared to divulge. ‘Once Fox had her pregnancy confirmed, she abandoned herself to it. Totally. Ever since we both turned forty, she had been talking about how time was running out for us in the fertility stakes. She really wanted that pregnancy, Tom. She really, actively, wanted a baby. I think she was almost ready to have one on her own, courtesy of a sperm bank, if no one was prepared to be its father. I'm afraid she's even hoping it will win E over. Make him more . . . make him into a father, I guess. Or a more wholehearted partner. No, Fox's case is quite different.'

‘But she knows the risks.'

‘Of course she does. She's a doctor, Tom. A gynaecologist. But she's committed. Don't you see what I'm saying?'

‘About the difference between Fox and you, or about the risks of a pregnancy not making it to full term? I'm confused.'

‘All I'm saying is, on balance, there's probably not much better than a fifty-fifty chance we'd actually go to full term and produce a normal healthy child. The difference between Fox and me is that she is desperately hoping hers
will
survive.'

‘And you?'

‘Let's not go through that again. I'm . . . ambivalent. Can't you accept that? I'm not as gung-ho as Fox.' A long pause. ‘Or you.'

‘I assume you got this fifty-fifty business from Fox and she might well be right, though I'd have thought the chances were better than that. But even if she is right, that would make a good outcome even more remarkable. The child would seem even more precious.'

‘You're going gooey again, Tom. Fifty-fifty – those aren't good odds. Anyway, Fox is already much further along the pregnancy road than . . .'

Sarah tailed off. She was having increasing difficulty mouthing words like ‘pregnancy', let alone ‘baby'.

I knew I was fighting a rearguard action, and I was no longer sure my own heart was really in it. One more try: ‘The other side of that argument is that some of the parents of Downs kids say they are the most delightful –'

‘I know, I know. Please don't go down that path, Tom. If this happens and we end up with some deformity or disability we hadn't bargained for, of course we'd cope. Of course we'd nurture the thing. Or I think we would. Have you read Peter Singer on this? Your fellow countryman?'

‘I have, as a matter of fact.'

‘He's tough but sensible about such things. The opposite of sentimental. He'd have a seriously abnormal child disposed of at birth.'

‘Well, I wouldn't. Would you?' I stretched my hand over Sarah's naked belly, as lovely as ever.

‘I honestly don't know. I don't think so. I might. It would depend how bad the abnormality was, wouldn't it?'

‘All right, if we're going to be so theoretical, where do you stand on the whole idea of a termination? We've never actually talked about that. In the abstract, I mean.'

It was true. In all the to-ings and fro-ings of the debate about the child and its possible future, Perry and his limited future, Sarah and her own preferred future, she had never declared herself to be morally comfortable or uncomfortable with the idea of terminating a pregnancy. All the signs pointed to her willingness to abort a foetus in certain circumstances, but I'd have liked to have heard more about what those circumstances might be – beyond the question of the physical state of the foetus itself. Did she believe a person's circumstances could be used as a basis for moral justification of abortion? A rape that leads to pregnancy? The health of the mother, including her mental health – and the health of the father, come to that? The state of the relationship between the mother and the father? Their economic or social circumstances? We had discussed none of these things, even in the abstract; my attempts to bring them up had always been deflected. I had the impression that even though we were in the midst of a classic moral dilemma, Sarah was disinclined to give the moral dimension much thought at all.

And what did I think about all this myself? I regarded myself as a liberal-minded person on all such questions and, yes, I'd have said that every situation does demand its own moral compass, calibrated to the circumstances. But I resisted the idea of frivolous or capricious factors weighing too heavily. I had occasionally felt uncomfortable when a client talked about terminating a pregnancy in favour of waiting for a more convenient time. I had even felt ambivalent about clients who wanted to have their babies by caesarean section so they could make a reliable entry in their crowded diary. Yet I realised all these questions were fraught with cultural baggage – a Japanese client once told me that abortion was essentially a form of birth control in her country, and that the gynaecologists of Japan had resisted the introduction of the contraceptive pill until 1999 because of its potentially disastrous impact on their lucrative abortion business.