Part 6 (1/2)

'Let me come and get you in the car.'

'No. I've got to get out of here now. Please, George, get the oxygen.'

She hangs up.

Mother is blowing her nose, sorting out her eyes.

's.h.i.+rley's bringing her home,' I say, rising as one does to the drama of the occasion. In fact, while things are dramatic, life's generally plain sailing. I grab the yellow pages.

And so begins the great epic: the tiny baby running a high temperature, suppositories, constant changing of sheets, of clothes, of nappies, of dressings on her strange and butchered legs, constant forcing of bottles between clamped gums, followed by vomiting, contortions. Her skin is clammy with fever. She cries a shrill nagging cry. She fights, though ever more weakly, whenever she is touched in any part of her body, eyes almost always screwed tight, hotly red in the now wan wax yellow of her face. In her fits she will have respiratory crises which require the oxygen mask. An ear infection generates a constant flow of pus.

Grabbing a snack with s.h.i.+rley in the early hours, perhaps the second night, or the third, while Mother watches over the girl, I say: 'We should have left her in hospital. They have all the equipment there.'

The house breathes silently about us. A hundred and sixty grand's worth now and going up around 50 a day. The kitchen curtains haven't been drawn and the yellow overhead light is hard and cold on the marble black tomb slabs of the windowpanes. s.h.i.+rley's expensive pans are piled high in the sink. I stab at crumbs.

'Perhaps they were right.'

s.h.i.+rley doesn't answer at once. She moves purposefully in jeans and tee-s.h.i.+rt, scrambling eggs. She is living in a constant state of nervous tension. She doesn't have the ten-hour escape to the office and other people that I have. Her face is drawn, gleaming with excitement. But she seems much more present, more decided, more one particular facet of her character than in the listless weeks following the birth. She is resolved, as if she had decided once and for all what to do, who to be. With a quick firm gesture she pushes unwashed hair from her face.

'n.o.body,' she says, 'has the least reason for believing that Hilary will never think and speak and talk and laugh and sing. Why should we let her die?'

She is reasonable, sensible rather than aggressive, which makes it difficult to argue.

I say carefully: 'You didn't seem so concerned about her when she was born. I mean, a bit offhand and mechanical. Why the big change?'

She shrugs. She asks does she have to explain herself? She doesn't know. She might just as well ask why I have suddenly stopped hoping, since I was so hopeful and busy seeing specialists before. Arranging the operation. Wasn't I? And now I want her dead. That isn't fair, I say. We listen to the faint ticking of a wall clock. Then she says: 'I just want to see her smile again, you know. I rather fell in love with her when she smiled that day.'

Sitting down, she stares at me over the narrow table top. Our faces suddenly seem very close to each other and large. I notice her nose is too red. She is ageing.

I say: 'Think of the pain she's in. Going on and on and on. Day after day. That ear problem she has. Her legs. Life is nothing but pain for her. It's unbearable even to think of.'

'The thing about pain,' she says, 'is that when it's over, it's over. But not being a woman you wouldn't know anything about that.'

'Let's not argue, s.h.i.+rl.'

She smiles, stands up, leans over the table and kisses me. 'You've been wonderful, all the staying up you've done. I would never have expected it of you.'

'Oh thanks a lot.'

'Your mother too. Fantastic. Mine hasn't even come to visit.'

'Mum's in her element,' I tell her. 'She probably wishes it was twins,' and we both laugh.

Day after day then, nursing this sick child in a fetid, claustrophobic, overheated, over-emotive atmosphere. Two weeks, three. All taking our turns, s.h.i.+ft after s.h.i.+ft. Even the Filipino girl, Lilly, who will burst into tears occasionally and say how helpful it has been to find people worse off than herself, people she can help, how grateful she is. Peggy comes often. And Charles amazingly, an hour or two here and there, mucking in. People never cease to surprise you. If he does care for us in some way, then he certainly fooled me. I wonder will he use the oxygen if and when the child has a crisis in his sole presence. The question floats across my mind as an intriguing curiosity. The little girl's life hangs by the most snappable of threads. For myself, in the drama of our trance-like weary nights, I have decided I must be good as the rest, I must do everything possible to see the little girl through. I'm determined still to believe, or at least not one hundred per cent exclude, that she does have a chance. And while that is on the cards, I will, I will hope.

What a relief though when I go to work. Or to Susan's. Four, five times now. She always serves something of a feast after we've made love eggs and bacon and beer and ice-cream. Traditional, solid fare. It's almost better than the s.e.x. Coming home on the tube, I tear an article about euthanasia out of the Standard and slip it between the pages of a sc.r.a.pbook I keep in my briefcase.

The Worst Betrayal of All It's a few days after Hilary comes through her fever, that s.h.i.+rley breaks down. The little girl's improvement is sudden and dramatic. The temperature falls, her breathing becomes even, and in the s.p.a.ce of a few hours a bloom returns to her cheeks. We are euphoric. We open bottles of Oddbin's Verduzzo, we talk about the future, we jubilantly call the hospital to fix an appointment for the next check-up. Except that with this apparent return to health, we notice that the child isn't looking about her in the same way she did at two months, before the op. She seems unable to follow a finger, to see the teat of a bottle.

At the check-up, which a surprised consultant arranges almost at once, a paediatric optician is called and immediately confirms that Hilary is indeed not seeing. The eyes, he says, are perfectly okay in themselves, but not responding or focusing. Something in the brain. The consultant hopes, clearing his throat, fussing with a pen, that this will be a temporary 'symptom' due to post-operative trauma. 'You should feel very proud of yourselves,' he goes on quickly, 'I honestly didn't think the girl would survive.'

'Just that now she seems a great deal worse than before the operation. And her legs won't bend.'

This middle-aged man smiles. He is long-jawed, schoolmasterly. 'Actually, that remains to be seen.' He focuses deep-set eyes on me. 'I'm sorry, but this was not by any stretch of the imagination routine surgery, hence there were risks which we did warn you of. Certainly we don't take these decisions lightly. However, and be that as it may, we shall have to wait a good, what, at least six months more to know the real results of the operation one way or another.' He stops. 'Nor do I see any need to be too pessimistic. The child has survived after all, which shows remarkable resilience.'

s.h.i.+rley says: 'She doesn't seem to be able to hold her head up straight, doctor. I mean, she should be able to do that at four months, shouldn't she?'

I haven't actually registered this myself before, but realise now that this is what makes the girl so odd. Even when you hold her up, her head will loll slackly to one side. And I have one of my sudden piercing revelations, visions, of what our life will be like from now on with this handicapped child. I see her at five years old, ten, her head lolling.

s.h.i.+rley is nodding gravely as the consultant describes the special kind of chair we will have to buy in about six months' time to keep the spine and neck straight. Some kind of allowance, he is saying, is available to cover at least part of the cost.

Which is? s.h.i.+rley is being very practical.

He doesn't know. About 400 perhaps.

We stand up to leave. Then no sooner have we got in the car than s.h.i.+rley flips. She straps Hilary into her seat and bursts into tears. She howls: 'All those nights, all those nights of pain, and now she can't even see!'

I drive brilliantly fast. I'm getting to know the lights and lanes round behind the hospital. That splendid feeling of challenging the great city machine: filters, left-only lanes, bus lanes, bollards, no right turns, sequence-timed lights, brake and accelerate, brake and accelerate. I stay silent a long while.

'I can't stand it, I can't, I won't stand it.' She doesn't even fiddle with handkerchiefs, just weeps, shoulders shuddering.

Finally, caught on a long red, I say: 's.h.i.+rley, s.h.i.+rley!'

'I wish I was dead,' she shrieks.

I drum my fingers on the wheel: 'We should have been angrier. We should have told him we'd sue.'

'G.o.d, do I wish I was dead!'

I storm up the Caledonian Road, jerking from pedal to pedal. The motley buildings race toward us, the wheeling sky, the low neon, tall blocks of flats, the afternoon sun occasionally spangling on blank gla.s.s, the rubbish outside cheap restaurants, the usual motley on the pavements.

Our child is blind.

s.h.i.+rley is moaning now. I can think of no other word for it, a low animal cry, her face in her hands.

Overtaking on the inside lane, squeezing back into the flow before a parked car, it occurs to me that driving is not unlike a computer game. Some program that would project your score onto a corner of the windscreen perhaps?

I say maybe it really is only post-operative trauma. How can we know? In any event we must find some other consultant to contact who will tell us more. 'These guys never tell us anything.' Maybe we can find out if there's some big specialist in America or Switzerland or something. 'You can bet they'll be light years ahead of the NHS for this kind of thing.'

'I wish we'd never met,' she says.

'Come on, s.h.i.+rley.'

'Sometimes I hate you for all this.'

I don't object. I often feel the same.

We drive on with an urgency that scatters other traffic like confetti. She doesn't comment on it as she usually does. One secretly hopes for an apocalyptic accident of course. She leans over her seat and caresses the child's thin hair. She is murmuring now. I stare at the road.

Has my mother been working on s.h.i.+rley these weeks she's been staying with us? I haven't actually noticed anything, but I often think Mother manages to exude influence even without speaking. Her eyes, her posture, her tone. She will persuade you to see the world as she sees it. In any event, when we get back home, s.h.i.+rley carries the baby with her into the house while I stick the car in the garage, taking my time over everything now, relaxing, calming down, turning keys and handles with the slow, almost voluptuous pleasure I have recently begun to find in doing all those little activities that keep you just outside the family sphere: taking a pee, a bath, a shave, carrying the rubbish out to the bin, changing a lightbulb in an empty bedroom. I move with meticulous painstaking slowness, the exact opposite of my driving, though the escapist intent is no doubt the same. When finally I walk into the living room, s.h.i.+rley is in my mother's arms weeping.