With No Crying (5 page)

P
ERHAPS IT WOULD
have been better if they
had
threatened her with wild horses, or some similarly heroic ordeal. To be forced by sheer physical violence into submission may leave scars on the body, but the soul, with any luck, can soar above it unscathed. If Miranda had fought, as she had planned to fight, with teeth and nails against a steely-eyed robot of a surgeon, whose response to her screams and pleadings was merely to summon four muscular orderlies to hold her down—had this been the scene, then she might have emerged from it with her spirit unbroken; vanquished indeed, but with some shreds of self respect to sustain her through the ensuing days of grief and loss.

But that’s not the way it was at all. They couldn’t have been nicer, all of them, from the young, smiling surgeon who talked to her so soothingly and reassuringly while he examined her before the operation, to the pretty, kind-hearted nurses who greeted her return to consciousness in a bright, sunny room full of flowers. A private room, apparently. “Real V.I.P. treatment!” as one of the young nurses laughingly put it, remarking on what a lucky girl Miranda was to have parents who cared so much about her welfare as to pay for private treatment. “Nothing but the best good enough for
their
daughter!” the girl summed it up, half admiring and half critical. “And getting you to the top of the list, too!—there’s girls nearly four months gone and still waiting, to my certain knowledge …
Somebody’s
Dad knows how to pull the strings, that’s for sure…”

It would have been Mummy, of course, not Daddy, who would have pulled the strings—or, rather, would have guided his hand while he did it, making sure that he deployed to best advantage
his contacts both at work and in politics. Mummy was marvellous at this sort of thing. She must be loving it.

And as a result of all this, the whole affair had gone off splendidly; everything turned out exactly as Miranda had been promised it would. As far as physical pain was concerned, it really had been “no more than a visit to the dentist”—less, if anything; and by the end of the day she really was feeling “as right as rain”. The young surgeon, visiting in the late afternoon, was delighted with her—regular pulse, no disquieting fluctuations of
temperature
or blood pressure, no complications of any kind. Like most doctors, he found it quite a treat to be dealing, now and again, with a perfectly healthy body in peak condition and with
absolutely
nothing wrong with it. Among all the fibroids, prolapses and hysterectomies of his gynaecological practice, this sort of thing was quite a little oasis in his day.

And of course, from his point of view, it was an open-and-shut case—the perfect, archetypal situation for which the more liberal abortion laws of the past decade had been expressly designed: a young teenager, still at school, getting herself pregnant after a few drinks, by a boy she scarcely knew and with whom she’d had no contact since—this was just the sort of case to which abortion was the humane and obvious answer. Fortunately the parents weren’t Catholic or anything, there were no complicated religious scruples to be got round, nor were they the guilt-ridden
old-fashioned
types who were against the easy way out on principle. In fact, they seemed to be a singularly enlightened couple, remarkably free of the sort of hang-ups typical of their generation, and thus able to come to a balanced, sensible decision, their daughter’s welfare the only consideration. If only all parents were like these!

The girl herself had seemed a bit quiet and tearful; but then this was by no means uncommon, and when you considered what these girls had usually been through in the preceding weeks—family rows, perhaps, and anxieties and humiliations of all kinds—you couldn’t wonder. To see the way they perked up when the op. was safely over, to witness the relief and gratitude on the young faces when they woke to their new freedom, their new
lease of carefree living—this was what made the job so
worthwhile
.

Not that “perked up” was quite the phrase that best described this latest patient of his when he paused, smiling, at her bedside. She was still subdued and monosyllabic, though physically (as he quickly and expertly ascertained) in tip-top condition: good colour, regular pulse, everything exactly as it should be.

“My prize patient!” he tried to jolly her up, “I wish they all looked like you three hours after leaving the theatre! Any pain anywhere? Any headache? Any problems with passing water?”

He knew there wouldn’t be; he was far too good a surgeon for bungled side effects of this nature to be a feature of his
postoperative
rounds; and so, “Good girl, you’ll be fighting fit by the week-end!” he encouraged her, smiling down into the wide, unblinking eyes fixed on his own, “and this time watch your step a bit, eh, young lady?”—and with a friendly pat on her shoulder, he was gone.

*

To have let off her rage, her grief and her despair into that kindly, unsuspecting face would have been unthinkable. Besides, the thing was done now, and couldn’t be undone. And even this morning, when the options, in theory, were still open, the practical impossibility of making any sort of last ditch stand against the calm and ordered structure of events in a well-run hospital, was something that had caught her completely by surprise. To have turned upon all these kind, committed people, who had gone to such trouble to fit her into their busy schedule, to repay their concern and sympathy with shrieks of rage and ingratitude: to have fought off with kicks and blows those gentle, ministering hands: to have clawed with her sharp nails at that pleasant, boyish face as it leaned over her so eager to comfort and reassure—it would have been impossible. How could she have known that
these
would be the enemies, and that the weapons she’d been secretly, silently sharpening against them through the long nights of sleepless fury, would suddenly be limp in her hands, like toy daggers, cut out of cardboard, and left all night in the rain?

Rather than make an undignified and shocking scene, rather than affront and appal all these pleasant, well-behaved, well-intentioned experts, rather than disgrace herself in public, she had allowed Baby Caroline to die.

It was no good hating them. They had only been doing their job. For her remaining hours in hospital, Miranda’s behaviour was quiet and unremarkable. She ate little, but answered politely when they spoke to her, said Yes, thank you, she was feeling fine.

Hating was for when she got home.

*

Mummy couldn’t possibly have been kinder, or more loving. During the two days after Miranda left hospital, Mrs Field devoted herself totally to her daughter’s comfort and wellbeing, cosseting and fussing over her as if she was a little girl again suffering from some minor childhood illness, bringing her cool drinks, and trays of delicious food—even offering to read aloud to her, and to play card games, as in days gone by. If Mrs Field was aware of the waves of silent hostility and rejection that met her every overture, she gave no sign of it: Miranda’s monosyllabic rudeness was put down to “the strain of it all, poor child!” and her sullen silences to “Hormonal readjustment—only to be expected!”

On the third evening, Daddy was brought in on the act. One on each side of her bed, in the last of the evening sunshine, the motes weaving back and forth between the two pale faces in the shafts of dying light, they sat like two effigies attendant on a medieval tomb.

They were telling her—or, rather, Mummy was telling her, with Daddy nodding, and polishing his glasses, and making little noises of assent while furtively glancing at his watch—about the lovely lovely holiday they were going to have, a real family holiday, as soon as Miranda was quite recovered. Sicily… Tangiers … Morocco … it was going to be the holiday of a lifetime: warm seas, hot sunshine, exotic foreign food, and dancing in Tavernas far into the night…

It was reminiscent of a funeral service for someone who has died in not very creditable circumstances: the hushed, uneasy evocation of bliss to come, combined with a careful avoidance of
any reference to the unfortunate goings-on that had led to the demise; and all this against a background of overpowering scent from the roses with which Mummy, in a frenzy of conciliation, had filled her daughter’s bedroom. What with one thing and another, Miranda felt that she was lying on her own bier, all the formalities of death completed except only for oblivion, which had somehow, in the press of funeral arrangements, been overlooked.

I hate them. I hate them. I hate them! I’ll never forgive them: never! With eyes downcast, Miranda allowed the gruesome travelogue of sea and sky to flow round and past her, and spoke never a word in answer.

“And of course you’ll need lots of new clothes, darling,” Mrs Field was continuing, bright and indomitable as ever, and embarked straight away on a dazzling list of all the crisp sun dresses, all the expensive tailored slacks and the stylish bikinis with which she proposed to pay for the death of Baby Caroline.

I hate you. I hate you. I hate you. I’ll die in the gutter before I’ll go with you on your grisly, murderous holiday, before I’ll wear a stitch of clothing bought with your bloodstained
conscience
money!

If only she’d dared to say it aloud! Where was she now, the proud girl who had flung defiance across the summer lawn, head held high, eyes blazing?—the girl whom even wild horses couldn’t subdue?

Ah, where was she? Defeated, broken, traitor to her own true self as well as to her child: a craven, vanquished thing, without courage, without pride. She hadn’t even the nerve, now, to say so much as “I’m sorry, I don’t want to go.”

“And
perhaps
,” Mrs Field was concluding, with the bright panicky optimism of a conjurer scrabbling for a last rabbit in a final, desperate hat, “
perhaps,
if he’s home in time, Sam could come too? It’s years since we’ve had a holiday all together, all four of us. Or maybe we could meet him somewhere en route—wouldn’t that be fun?”

Fun it would
not
be, nor ever could have been, even in circumstances far more propitious than these. Fond though she was of her older brother, Miranda had often found herself
wondering why it was that her parents could not accept, once and for all, that deeply though they loved their now grown-up son, they simply could not stand his company. Hadn’t been able to for years. He’d been such a disappointment to them, for one thing—and such a poor advertisement, too, for the painstakingly
enlightened
methods by which they’d brought him up. They’d had to stand by and watch first one and then another of his
contemporaries
—products, quite often, of broken marriages,
corporal
punishment, rigid authoritarianism, the lot—watch them one after another sailing successfully through University, landing good jobs, forming stable relationships, while all the time here was Sam continuing mildly but inexorably a disgrace to them.

Not that Sam had ever done anything so very dreadful: it was more the things he
hadn’t
done. Hadn’t finished his homework ever; hadn’t gone in for any creative hobbies; hadn’t practised on the expensive violin they’d bought him; hadn’t done well enough in A-levels to warrant applying to Oxford or Cambridge; hadn’t even filled in his UCCA forms properly. And when, finally, he’d arrived at his not very prestigious University, he hadn’t stayed there. Even his dropping out hadn’t been a positive act of defiance; he hadn’t marched out in mid-term as a gesture of protest against something or other, shaking the dust of the place off his feet; rather, he had simply failed to return at the end of one Easter vacation, had failed, if the truth must be told, to wake up in time to catch the right train.

From then on, the things that Sam hadn’t done were as the sands of the sea. He hadn’t applied for any proper jobs, attended any courses, or even found himself a nice steady girlfriend; and on top of everything else, he had made not the smallest attempt to get away from home and lead a life of his own. He had seemed perfectly content to remain in his parents’ house, lying in bed till midday, playing pop records, and conducting singularly
labour-saving
love affairs with such girls as happened along. And when, in a last desperate attempt to get him to lead a life of his own, Mr and Mrs Field had had the top floor of their house converted into a self-contained flat for him, he had taken neither pride nor interest in his new domain, letting it go to rack and ruin, never
tidying it, never cleaning it, and never even cooking anything much in the spanking new little kitchenette; preferring to bring home take-away meals from the local Kebab House, and to eat them in front of his parents’ television, just as he had always done, leaving a trail of greasy plastic containers all over the drawing room. Occasionally, when a more than usually
domesticated
girl happened to have floated within his range, things would be different for a few weeks. The flat would burst into sudden hectic life, pans of burnt rice left soaking in the little sink, and all the woodwork suddenly daubed with orange (or Prussian blue, as the case might be) emulsion paint, splinters, rusty nails and all; and yet another batch of gallon paint cans (bought wholesale, for economy’s sake) would stand with their lids off on the little landing, gently drying up in company with yet another set of brand new paint brushes, standing caked with paint in a jar of dried-up turpentine.

No, there was no harm in Sam; as older brothers go, he wasn’t bad at all. Miranda had always found him kind enough, and quite fun to have around. She had long ago formed the opinion that his failings, many and various though they might appear, were really only one failing: he couldn’t stand bother.

And yet, this couldn’t be the whole answer either, because hitch-hiking overland to India must surely be a bother, by any standards; and this was the adventure from which he was expected home some time during the next few weeks.

*

The daylight was nearly gone now, and as dusk gathered in her pretty flower-filled bedroom, Miranda pretended to have fallen asleep, her eyelids closed in apparent tranquillity over the hatred, rage and misery that seethed beneath. She heard her mother’s bright, strained voice faltering at last into hopelessness; and then, a little later, she heard the two of them tiptoeing furtively from the room. Presently, the familiar evening sounds of the household sank likewise into silence; and now, at last, Miranda crept softly out of bed and tiptoed across the room.