Part 5 (1/2)

'Stroke,' I say. 'You . . .'

'Oh, sorry, that must be the ambulance already, I . . .'

I say to phone me just as soon as she's got any concrete news or needs help. Then I put down the phone and eat. Going about all the routine domestic tasks that evening, was.h.i.+ng dishes, wiping surfaces, I numbly wonder whether Grandfather will manage to tell the powers that be that I beat him, or whether they themselves will find signs of violence. I feel nervous, faintly horrified, but there's a growing sense of grim satisfaction too. Surely now he will be forced into a home at last. I have liberated my mother. It is not a crime. On the contrary I have done something good.

A precedent perhaps.

Four Thousand to One What happens over the following months is that s.h.i.+rley gives up entirely while I throw myself heart and soul into saving the situation, into finding, no matter how far I have to go, how much I have to spend, some cure that will reverse our little girl Hilary's condition. My reasoning is that they can't know for certain that her brain is in the same condition as Mavis's. The medical books, when they mention it at all, say the syndrome is entirely unpredictable in terms of severity and areas affected. No one can really know how she will develop. She might have a severe physical handicap and a brilliant mind, for example. So perhaps, I think, there is still a chance for our daughter and for us. And if there is such a chance, however remote, it is my duty to go for it.

s.h.i.+rley comes home after a month in hospital. She refuses to speak about Hilary's condition. She avoids wheeling her out where she will be seen by neighbours. She looks after her carefully but clinically, never complaining how difficult it is to dress her with her stiff joints, never making even the most remotely relevant comments. She is efficient, tight-lipped, mechanical, beaten.

'Please don't tell me,' she says quickly, when I begin about something I have read, some information gleaned. 'Please, I don't want to know, okay?'

I say how important it is for us to communicate, pull together.

She says: 'When a tragedy occurs there's no point in pretending it hasn't.' And she says I was right all along, we should never have had children, they're too risky. Never never never. She could have found a job at another school, or in business, in the end she could have done it. We could have been happy. It is all her fault.

But I say no, she was right. And I tell her how much I want a healthy child now. It was just sheer bad luck.

'Bit worrying,' she remarks, 'when we both start telling each other the other was right.' She looks up at me from plucking a thread on her blouse and half smiles.

'Everything will turn out okay,' I say. 'I was talking to a specialist who . . .'

'Please, George.'

Weeks pa.s.s. We don't make love for the unspoken fear of somehow generating another Hilary. The geneticist has said a one in four chance. Add that to the, what, thousand to one chance of getting pregnant despite contraceptives and you're talking about four thousand to one, the kind of odds you might never win at, but could perfectly well lose at. Lying in our bed sometimes, watching the evening shadows that stretch and flit, I will be urgently aware of our extraordinary isolation, from each other, from the rest of the world.

Still, I resist the temptation simply to work late at the office and absent myself from family life. When I am at InterAct I work hard, I plunge into work as into a warm healing bath, I seem to reach intensities of concentration, speed of operation, I never dreamt possible before, but I always make sure I'm home in good time. I think, we will come through even this, I will save little Hilary. I will. And I am terribly tender with the little girl, changing and feeding her myself since s.h.i.+rley lost her milk almost immediately. Sometimes I'll be up half the night, heating bottles in the microwave. I look into her small, slightly fish-like blue eyes and wait, hope for the first smile.

Many men, I've heard, simply refuse to look at a handicapped child.

Of the relatives, my mother and s.h.i.+rley's brother Charles are a.s.siduous to the point of irritation. Mrs Harcourt on the other hand pays ever rarer visits during which she will talk eagerly about proportional representation and the advantages of using faster film, before making for the door with the near panic of someone leaving a sinking s.h.i.+p. Mr Harcourt occasionally phones offering advice about specialists suggested by his professional friends. He will look after the consultancy fees. Peggy brings Frederick over at weekends and offers to babysit Hilary so that we can go out together. s.h.i.+rley invariably refuses. She doesn't want to go out. She wouldn't know what to do.

So that one evening I say, does she mind then, seeing as she has company, if I go out myself? On the Finchley Road I phone Susan Wyndham, my contact at Brown Boveri, a small girl, almost plain, but with a certain glint in her eye. My wife is away, would she like to go out for a drink? And in a Hungarian restaurant off the Edgware Road we talk very seriously and theoretically about relations.h.i.+ps and faithfulness and fun and what life is for. Discrete loudspeakers are playing mazurkas. With make-up and washed hair, she looks better than I'm used to seeing her and has a knowingly wry smile as we wander around for a while under thin rain looking for a decent pub. When I kiss her below her Willesden flat, she comes back so fiercely I'm taken aback. But afterwards she cries and pushes her face into her pillow and says she has a fiance who had to go to Australia for a year with his company and she's been faithful to him for nearly ten months. Why, oh why did she let him down now?

When I get home it's almost one. Charles and Peggy are arguing heatedly about feminism, which Charles is fiercely defending and Peggy fiercely attacking. s.h.i.+rley has gone to bed with a couple of Mogadon. Hilary has obviously shat and they are ignoring the smell. I change her and re-make her bed. I sit on the loo and stare at the wall for perhaps fifteen minutes, then grit my teeth and go downstairs to propose Glenlivet all round.

Charles says: 'Of course, it's not too bad while she's still a baby like any other. It's when she grows up that things'll really get heavy.'

Please s.h.i.+rley has always been against an operation, or at least not for it. But the doctors tell us that if the child is ever to walk something must be done. And if nothing else there will be the aesthetic effect.

However, they need both our signatures.

My response, being first and foremost a doer is, okay, try it, go for it, cut. s.h.i.+rley, who, for all her bubbliness and energy when she's up, has a fundamentally pa.s.sive streak to her, is not convinced.

'What's the use?' she says.

'What do you mean, what's the use? We've got to try everything.'

'But the girl is like that. I don't see what's to gain by chopping and changing her. It won't work.'

I ask her how can we go on, how can we go on with our lives if we don't believe the child can be made normal?

'You always set such store by normality,' she says.

'I should hope so.'

'We've lived without it before one way or another.'

I say there's hardly any point in bringing that up. That was an aberration. We've got over it.

'And this is a tragedy.'

'Right, so we've got to get over this too.'

She finds her wan smile. 'George, you don't ”get over” tragedies. Haven't you got it into your head yet that this has really happened?'

I remark that we would serve the little girl better if we argued about the matter logically without attacking each other. Anyway it is she, it seems to me, who is refusing to find out what's happened or to look into it in any way, while I've been all over the place consulting authorities and books and talking to specialists and so on.

'But it's not the kind of thing you need books and experts to help you understand. It's simple, you just sit and look at it.'

We stare at each other. Her face is drained, thin, but with a kind of luminous serenity to it. Which is new.

'They said if they did the operation she might be able to walk, they might be able to fix everything.'

'They said not to raise our hopes. You can't refuse to live with things just because they're not normal.'

'We were so together, s.h.i.+rley,' I plead, 'before she was born. We were so happy. Weren't we? If only they can sort her out, everything will come right between us.'

'It's a chimera.'

'But how can you know?'

'Because they'd never have offered an operation if you hadn't bothered them so much.' And she says: 'I don't want her hurt any more than she is now. G.o.d knows what they'll do when they start cutting. She'll be strapped up for months. Nor do I see why we have to operate on her to improve our relations.h.i.+p. Which is fine as it is.'

My mother comes round and over tea and angel buns, brought in a biscuit tin I remember from earliest childhood, she begins to say what marvellous marvellous things surgeons can do these days. She's been praying so hard and it's true that the Lord is capable of revealing himself through science, His healing powers. She is sure it will come good.

s.h.i.+rley asks how Grandfather is and says I really ought to go and visit him.

I phone Mr and Mrs Harcourt, Charles and Peggy, and get all of them to put pressure on s.h.i.+rley. Everybody is on my side. Everybody supports the quick fix-it drama of orthopaedic surgery. Intervene, is the general chorus, do something about this wrong child, heal her, quick. And they are right. If the doctors are offering hope, who are we not to grasp at it? What kind of life could I have without it? Every time I come face to face with s.h.i.+rley's entrenched fatalism, her 'accept, learn to live with it', I find myself feeling quite sick. I know I'll break down. I know that this is not my life.

The day before the operation Hilary smiles for the first time. She smiles and keeps on smiling. She beams from an apple-red complexion lying in a carrycot on the living room sideboard. The sight of this personality s.h.i.+ning out of the so slightly strange face is at once immensely exciting, and distressing.

The same afternoon Mother phones to say that Grandfather is speaking again. They are moving him to a rehabilitation ward. 'He asked after you.'

'Oh really. What did he say?'

I notice that I'm not flinching at all.

'Just your name. He's not very coherent. Oh, and he asked for his pipe of course.'