With No Crying (3 page)

T
HE MOON WAS
full, the air heavy with the scent of roses, but already, before he’d even kissed her, Miranda knew that it was over. She was in love no more. Somewhere during the course of this glittering long-awaited evening, between the moment when she’d entered the dance hall half faint with joy and this present moment of walking out under the moon arm in arm with the lover of her dreams—somewhere the glory had departed, and it would return no more.

In the grey of the moonlight, with the wet grass soaking up through her flimsy sandals, Miranda shivered a little; and her companion’s arm tightened across her shoulders, just as it had done in so many a dream scenario.

What had happened? Where was the sense of a miracle come true? On the day I die, she should have been saying to herself, this is the moment I shall remember. This is the moment for which I was born, the moment for which all the rest of my life has been but a prelude, a background of shadow. Where
were
these longed-for, long-anticipated feelings?

If only it wasn’t actually
happening
—that was what was spoiling it all! With a sort of desperation, like pushing her fist through a plate glass window, Miranda tried to reach right through and past the reality of it and get to the dream again; to clutch at those last wisps of magic which must—surely they must?—still be floating somewhere, just beyond her grasp, in the silvery light of the moon? This is
Trevor,
she kept insisting to herself…
Trevor
Marks
. Marks … Marks … the surname which only yesterday had set her heart thudding at the very sight of an L–R telephone directory? What had happened to the magic word? What ailed it? Why had it sickened thus in the pale light of
the moon? With a gigantic effort of mental concentration, Miranda willed her heart to beat faster in the old wonderful way; but it would not.

And now, in the black moon-shadow of some great tree or something, he was kissing her. Kissing her “
like
that
”
as they were wont to describe it in the Fourth Form, and his tongue tasted exactly as you would have expected a tongue to taste. Which was odd, when you came to think about it, because how could she have had any expectations, never having tasted another person’s tongue before? Once, in the childish times before they’d fallen in love, she and Sharon had discussed the matter at some length, and had decided—with some reluctance, indeed, but in the interests of research—to taste each other’s tongues; but when it came to the point, the sight of one another’s anxious faces
looming
nearer and nearer had reduced them to such a fit of giggling that the project had had to be abandoned.

They were in the shrubbery now, with hazel twigs and great flat clusters of rhododendron meeting above their heads. There was no wind, but the whole place was a-rustle with night sounds, and in the darkness silvery streaks of moonlight came at them like spears through the black leaves: and by now there was no doubt in Miranda’s mind at all about what was going to happen. He was going to do “
It
”. This was another Fourth Form euphemism. His arms were like tight bands around her, and his voice was trembling.

“On the Pill, are you?” he asked hoarsely; and, “Yes!” lied Miranda without a moment’s hesitation.

Well, you could hardly walk with a boy’s arm around you all across a moonlit lawn and into a shrubbery, and then say “No”, could you? Not nowadays, anyway. If you ever could, come to that, at any place or time?

Anyway, “Yes!” she answered stoutly—and then wondered, anxiously, what she was supposed to do next?
Did
the girl have to do anything, apart from saying “yes”, or was it all up to the boy from this point on? This was something they didn’t tell you in the sex lessons, and of course no one would dare to ask, because it would look as if they didn’t know.

It seemed wrong, somehow, with most of their clothes still on like this, her pretty frothy skirt all bunched up around her waist and getting ruined. Somehow, she’d thought you were supposed to be naked; but Trevor had made no attempt to remove anything but his trousers, and of course he must know best. His weight was crushing, sharp twigs and spikey dead leaves left over from the winter were grinding into her shoulder-blades through the nylon, but she dared not ask him to shift his position. Maybe the man couldn’t, once he’d got started?—in which case it would be an awful request to make. Besides, she was supposed to be
experiencing
rapture, wasn’t she, not thinking about twigs and things…

How
long
did it go on? That was another thing they didn’t tell you in the sex lessons, didn’t give you even the most approximate idea. Suppose it went on for an
hour
!

And there was another anxiety growing upon her as the moments passed: were you supposed to
talk
while it was going on? To make conversation? It had been bad enough trying to think up something to say while drinking beer with him, but this was much, much worse. What could you talk
about,
for Heaven’s sake? Nice evening, isn’t it…? Do you do this often…?

Was it possible for the man to be actually
bored
while doing “It”? Was this why he wasn’t saying anything, and had begun hurrying so…?

And quite suddenly, it was over. It hadn’t lasted an hour or anything like it: more like a minute, really, or even less—and at first Miranda was uncertain whether it really
was
over? Suppose those little cries, this sudden collapse of movement, were a prelude to something further—something she ought to know about, that other girls knew about, and that he’d expect her to know? How
did
you know for certain when the man was finished…? Only when Trevor sat up, and began brushing twigs and leaves from his jacket, did she feel sure that the thing was really at an end, and ventured to sit up likewise.

In the darkness, she could hear him scrabbling his trousers back on, and she needed no silver shaft of moonlight to show her that he was avoiding looking in her direction.

Only when he was fully dressed and on his feet did he at last speak.

“Better go back separately,” he muttered awkwardly. “I’ll clear out right away, but don’t you come… You wait here another couple of minutes…” and with a crash of undergrowth and snapping twigs he was gone.

There wasn’t a reason in the world why they shouldn’t have walked back across the moonlit lawn together, and he must have known it. The gardens were alive with strolling couples, no one would have given them a second glance. Sadly, Miranda fancied that she could see right through him to his real motives; that she understood, with her woman’s intuition, the true nature of his reluctance.

He was bored with her. He’d been bored with her on the dance floor, bored during the stroll in the moonlight, bored during the sex act. Why should he inflict on himself the further boredom of escorting her back indoors?

“O.K.,” she mumbled, utterly humbled by failure, and with no other thought in her mind other than so to comport herself as not to make matters even worse, to pile further humiliations on top of those already endured.

And never for one moment did it occur to her, either then or later, that he might be feeling just as bothered about the quality of his performance as she was about hers.

They had one thing in common, though, despite all these doubts and misunderstandings; and this was an urgent mutual need never to encounter one another again.

“B
UT, DARLING, IF
you love each other there’s
nothing
to feel guilty about,” urged Norah Field, leaning forward in her high-backed chair and gazing earnestly into her daughter’s face. “Sex between young teenagers is
the
most
natural
thing…. I can understand
exactly
how it happened…”

Understanding on this scale was only to be expected, of course, in a home like Miranda’s; sitting there at her mother’s feet, she felt it coming at her, wave after familiar wave.

“And I’m so
thankful,
darling,” Mrs Field continued, bending to stroke the bright, drooping head, “that you’ve come to
me
with your troubles, and not kept them hidden away, … that you feel you can trust me… I’m so pleased about that—so very,
very
pleased…!”

She sounded pleased, too. Tracing with her forefinger the muted, pinkish patterns of the drawing room carpet, Miranda could not repress the suspicion that her mother was thoroughly enjoying herself. And why not, indeed? The whole thing was right up her street, she’d have been wasted, in a manner of speaking, on a daughter who
didn’t
get pregnant while still in the Fourth Form.

“There’s only just one thing, though, sweetheart”—Mrs Field was hurrying through this bit as quickly as she could, anxious to get back to being non-judgmental at top speed—“… just one thing I feel you’ve been a
teeny
bit naughty about. You should have told me, dear, as soon as—well, at the start of—I mean before the two of you actually… You see, if only I’d known, I could have had a word with the doctor, got him to fix you up with something…”

“He wouldn’t have. I’m under age,” Miranda retorted, quite rudely; and for just a fraction of a second, Mrs Field looked quite stunned, as if she’d been slapped across the face.

“Yes. Well…” She recovered herself. “And that’s another thing dear. This boy. Of course,
I
know that it was all perfectly innocent and loving, on his side as well as yours, and of course I wouldn’t dream—Daddy and I wouldn’t
dream
—of doing
anything
to get him into any trouble—well, the police or anything, we wouldn’t
dream
of it. But all the same, what he’s done
is
a criminal offence. In the eyes of the silly old law, I mean. And so I do feel—if you could just bring yourself to tell us his name, in the most absolute and strictest confidence—after all, it
is
his baby too…

“It’s
not
!
It’s
my
baby!”

Miranda had leaped to her feet and was confronting her mother red-faced and hands on hips.

“It’s
my
baby! It’s
mine
! It’s nothing to
do
with him, nothing whatever!” she shouted—a pronouncement so patently absurd that even Miranda herself could think of no way of following it up. With a defiant toss of the head, she turned on her heel and flung out of the room. She refrained, just in time, from slamming the door behind her. To bring Daddy in on it at this juncture, blinking worriedly behind his gold-rimmed spectacles and trying feebly to be as progressive as Mummy—this would have been just about the last straw.

Lying on her bed, eyes shaded against the blaze of the summer evening through the open windows, Miranda found her anger cooling. What had possessed her to be so rude and horrid, when Mummy was being as kind and nice about it all as any mother could possibly be? Why couldn’t she respond with gratitude and appreciation instead of with sulks and rudeness—not to mention stupid and irrational back-answering?

Irrational, perhaps. But stupid? Miranda closed her eyes against the glory of the sunset, deeply pondering. Had there not been a kind of truth in her wildly illogical declaration—a truth that lay beyond logic? There was a sense, explicable to no one but herself, in which the baby
was
nothing to do with Trevor. The
encounter had been too brief, too trivial, too disappointing, to have had any part in so mighty a consequence. The whole thing had lasted barely a minute, and seemed, in retrospect, so unimportant, so devoid of meaning. Having once got over the sense of failure, the feelings of shame at her own ineptitude in the sex act, it was the
triviality
of the whole experience which had amazed her most; its total lack of significance. Here she was, a virgin no longer, the mysterious hurdle surmounted, the
legendary
Rubicon crossed—and
nothing
was
change
d
!
She felt the same. She looked the same. Back in the cloakroom, she’d run a comb through her hair, straightened her rucked-up skirt, and gone back to the dance as if nothing had happened. By morning, even the slight soreness and the faint achey feeling were gone. No trace of bodily disturbance, no upheaval of the soul, no flicker of unaccustomed sensation of any kind, gave warning of the mighty changes that had been set in motion. And even a fortnight later, her period already six days overdue and her breasts tingling strangely, she still could not take in what was happening.

It was not that she had failed to notice the symptoms, or was unaware of their significance: it was just that the whole thing was impossible to believe in, like a fairy story. That a hurried and graceless entangling of limbs and genitals, lasting a minute or less, should have consequences vast and incalculable, stretching on and on into the unimaginable future—it was beyond all comprehending. As a result of that single inconsequential minute, a new and perfectly-formed living creature was destined to walk the earth, to breathe the air, to feel the heat of the sun, for seventy or eighty years… Easier, far, to believe that the Doctor would bring the baby in his black bag, that a stork would swoop down with it out of the bright air.

Yet truth it was. It was a scientific fact. Those passing moments of embarrassment and disillusion had been sublime moments of creation. The imagination could not register so incongruous a causal sequence, nor belief encompass it.

But as the days went by—seven … eight … nine, and still her period hadn’t come, belief began almost imperceptibly to establish itself in her consciousness. It came not suddenly, in a
flash of revelation, but in a slow, unstoppable tide of growing wonder, of half-incredulous joy.

A baby! I’m having a
baby
!
I, Miranda Field, schoolgirl, have been vouchsafed this miracle of new life growing inside me! I’m pregnant!
Me!
It’s happening to
me
!

There had been occasions, in the long-ago time before all this had happened, when she and Sharon had indulged in fantasies of Virgin Births, and man-less pregnancies. They had discussed, with much giggling and yet half-credulously, the likelihood or otherwise of being impregnated while they slept by the Holy Ghost: what it would feel like? and whether they’d still remember it in the morning…?

An immaculate conception! Strange how childish fantasies can so truly foreshadow the realities to come! For this was exactly what it felt like—as if the glory that had come upon her had its origin in some sacred source beyond human understanding, far, far removed from Trevor with his heavy gasping and his offhand, uneasy haste…

It was
real
!
It was happening! To
her
!
Lying here on her rumpled bed, in her familiar childhood bedroom, the miracle was already beginning. Inside her, right now, as she lay here, a little creature no bigger than a frog was forming limbs for itself, and eyes, and the beginnings of a brain; a brain which would one day contain a vocabulary of forty or fifty thousand words, as well as geometry, and algebra, and the names and addresses of countless friends and acquaintances yet unborn. At this very moment, only an inch or two below her knicker elastic, those first clusters of cells were gathering in readiness to read Shakespeare, to listen to Beethoven and Elvis Presley, to learn “On Westminster Bridge” by heart; to gaze through a telescope at the moons of Jupiter, to read about Black Holes, and wonder about the infinite spaces beyond the furthest galaxies…

*

“Darling…! I’m so sorry I upset you, I didn’t mean…”

But it was
she,
Miranda, who should be apologising, not Mummy! It wasn’t
fair
!
Mummy always managed to get the better of you, somehow! Swivelling round onto her stomach,
Miranda buried her face in the pillow, and lay there, mute and ashamed, waiting for it all to be over.

And yet still Mummy kept hovering there between the bed and the door, baffled and uncondemning, poised as on a tightrope between staying and going, and babbling uneasily on and on about misunderstandings, and about it being nearly dinner-time, and about not worrying Daddy just now, with the by-election coming on, and about nobody blaming anybody for anything, and was Miranda not feeling well, would she like some nice hot soup on a tray, in bed…?

If Mrs Field had been one of those straight-laced, censorious parents she so despised, actually
trying
to make her daughter feel guilty and awful, she couldn’t have made a better job of it. Miranda pulled the eiderdown over her head and buried her face deeper in the pillow; and when, a few minutes later, she ventured warily to peep out, her mother was gone.

Presently, a delicious smell of oxtail, cooked with thyme and bayleaves, began to float upstairs.

Her favourite meal! Had Mummy done it on purpose, to make her feel even more churlish and ungrateful? Or (let’s be fair) had she done it lovingly, to cheer her up, and make her feel cherished?

Either way, there was the same decision to be made: sulks or supper? No one can reasonably expect both, and so after a brief struggle between the flesh and the spirit, Miranda rolled off the bed, combed her hair, slid her feet into her slip-slop sandals, and went downstairs to the dining-room.

Daddy had already been told, obviously. He was wearing his see-no-evil, hear-no-evil look which he never ceased to hope would somehow make things not have happened. And indeed, it worked well enough at Ward Labour Party meetings quite often, but less well at home.

On this occasion, the better not to see what was going on, he had taken his glasses off as well (he was short-sighted) and laid them by his plate, so that the bluish fuzz now materialising in the doorway bore but a minimal resemblance to anyone’s daughter, let alone his own, in blue-and-white checked shirt and
faded jeans, carrying Trouble towards his dinner table like a loaded tray…

“Hello, Daddy,” Miranda greeted him, brightly and
deliberately
—the transparency of his evasion tactics always irritated her, wasn’t he supposed to have an I.Q. of 140, or something?—“I’m having a baby, did Mummy tell you?” she continued chattily, pulling out her chair and sitting down at the table, “around the beginning of March—”

“Hush, dear! Not just now!” her mother admonished in an urgent undertone, while her father made a brave effort to choke on a forkful of mashed potato, and then to hear the telephone ringing out in the silent hall. Twice he rushed headlong to answer this phantom summons; and by the time he’d returned the second time, the conversation had sure enough moved into safer channels, and he was able to finish his meal in peace.

The ostrich, burying his head in the sand, has long been a laughing stock; but all the same, it really can work. After all, if it couldn’t, ostriches would have been out of the evolutionary stream long ago, and so, presumably, would people like Edwin Field. The Survival of the Fittest manifests itself in diverse and sometimes surprising ways—look at the Toucan, for example, or the Duck-Billed Platypus.

Sooner or later, of course, Mrs Field would pin him down and force him to face the facts, but by that time the worst would be over, and she would be in a position to tell him what he should think and, if there was anything he ought to do, to make him do it. Such had been her benign practice over all these years, and there seemed no good reason why any drastically different system should suddenly be put into operation now.

By the time the meal was over, and she’d gone back upstairs, Miranda’s room was bathed in pinkish light, and the bright cotton curtains that Mummy had made her for her thirteenth birthday were stirring gently in the cool of the evening. In the far corner of the room, dusty, unloved and neglected these five or six years, Miranda’s old dolls’ house was flashing with sparks of rosy light from its tiny lattice windows, long unopened.

How she had loved that dolls’ house once! And what a nuisance
it had been ever since, remorselessly continuing to exist,
gathering
dust, blocking up that useful alcove, and yet somehow quietly and inexplicably resisting every decision to give it away to this or that deserving child, or on behalf of this, that or the other worthy cause.

Miranda hadn’t looked at the thing except with mild and
helpless
irritation for years, but suddenly this evening she found herself noticing all over again how pretty it was—how enchanting, really, all aglow in the last rays of the sunset, and the little windows shining just as they used to shine when she polished them with that inch-square of wash-leather that Mummy had snipped off for her that rainy afternoon six—seven?—years ago. There’d been a tiny bucket, too, and a ladder made from match sticks glued to cardboard struts, for Grandfather to climb up on his stiff, unyielding plastic legs.

What fun it had been! Crouching down in front of her old treasure, Miranda manoeuvred open the absurd little front door (it had always been inclined to stick, and now it was worse than ever from disuse), and peered into the dark little hallway, still carpeted with those scraps of maroon corduroy left over from the pinafore dress Mummy had made her one winter holidays, when she was about eight. The little stairs were carpeted likewise, boasting even stair rods made from wooden tooth picks,
laboriously
halved with blunt (and subsequently quite useless) scissors.

On to the ornate, ridiculous dining room, crammed with match-box furniture, and lumpy, impossible sets of dining-chairs (even a doll couldn’t balance on them) made from conkers stuck with pins. How well she recalled Mummy showing her how to make them … and the wonderful, golden October afternoon when they’d collected the conkers, gleaming like polished mahogany through the cracks in the green, spikey rind…