‘Thank you,’ said Mr Imrie, with exaggerated politeness. He stowed the envelope away in a pocket of his own. ‘Now, if you wouldn’t mind making yourself comfortable here, just for twenty minutes or so, I’ll take your wife next door.’
‘Keep my coat and hat, will you?’ said Viv to Reggie, coldly. He took them, and reached after her fingers.
‘It’ll be all right,’ he said, trying to catch her eye. ‘It’ll be OK.’
She pulled her fingers away. A clock on the wall showed five past eight. Mr Imrie led her back across the hall and into his surgery.
She thought at first he meant to take her through this room into another. She thought he would have some quite different place set up. But he closed the door behind her and went to a counter, looking busy; and for an awful moment, then, she imagined he meant to do the operation with her sitting in his dentist’s chair. Then she saw, beyond the chair, a couch, on trestle legs, covered over with a wax-paper sheet, and with a little zinc pail beside it. It looked horrible with the great steel light shining on it, and the trays of instruments all around, the machines, the drills, the bottles of gas. She felt the suffocated rising of tears in her chest and throat, and thought, for the first time, I can’t!
‘Now then, Mrs Harrison,’ said Mr Imrie, perhaps seeing her hesitate. ‘Just slip off your skirt, your shoes and underthings, and hop up on to the couch, and we’ll make a start. All right? There’s nothing to worry about. A very straightforward procedure indeed.’
He turned away, took off his jacket, and washed his hands; began to fold back his sleeves. There was an electric fire burning, and she stood in front of it to undress; she put her clothes on a chair, and got quickly on to the crackling wax-paper before he should turn—for she felt more exposed, somehow, with only her bottom half bare, than she would have felt if she had stripped completely. It was like something a tart would do. But when she lay on the hard flat couch, she felt foolish in another way—like a fish, with gaping gills and mouth, on a fishmonger’s slab.
‘Let me give you a pillow,’ said Mr Imrie, coming over and carefully not looking at her naked hips. ‘And now, if you’d care to raise yourself?’ He slid a folded towel under her bottom—moving her blouse, as he did it, a little higher up her back, and saying, ‘We don’t want this to spoil, do we?’
She realised he was tucking it out of the way of any blood that might come, and grew frightened again. She had no idea how much blood would come—had only, in fact, the haziest notion of what he was about to do to her. He had not explained it; and it seemed too late, now, to ask. She didn’t want to speak at all, with her lower half all exposed to his gaze like this; she was too embarrassed. She closed her eyes.
When she felt him lift and try to part her knees, she grew more self-conscious than ever. ‘Lie a little less rigidly, if you can, Mrs Harrison,’ he said. And then: ‘Mrs Harrison? A little less rigid?’ She opened her legs, and after a second felt something warm and dry come between them and begin to probe. It was his finger. He pushed firmly into her, and with his other hand pressed again at her stomach, harder than before. She gave a little gasp. He pushed and pressed on, until she couldn’t help but draw her hips away. He moved back, and wiped his hands on a towel.
‘You must expect, of course,’ he said, in a mild and matter-of-fact kind of way, ‘a certain amount of discomfort. That can’t be helped, I’m afraid.’
He turned away, then brought back a sponge, or a cloth, with some sharp-smelling liquid on it, with which he began to dab at her. She lifted her head and tried to see. She could only see his face: he had put up his spectacles again, and again they looked like goggles—like a welder’s goggles, or a stonemason’s. On a shelf, near his head, was a toy: a bear or a rabbit in a flowered dress and a hat. She imagined him waving it before frightened boys and girls. A notice, pinned to the wall behind him, gave Information for Patients Regarding Stoppings and Extractions.
When he placed the mask over her mouth, it was so like an ordinary respirator—so much less unpleasant, in fact, than a regular gas-mask—that she almost didn’t mind it. Then she was aware of a sensation of slipping, and made a grab at the edge of the couch, to keep herself from tumbling off it…It seemed to her then that she must have fallen, anyway, but had inexplicably landed on her feet; for she was suddenly standing in darkness in a crowd of people, being jostled on every side. She didn’t know if she was in a street, some public place like that, or where she was. A siren was sounding, but it was strange to her; it meant nothing. She didn’t know the person she was with, but she clutched at their arm. ‘What’s that?’ she asked. ‘That noise? What is it?’ ‘Don’t you know?’ the person answered. ‘That’s the Warning for the Bull.’ ‘The Bull?’ she asked. ‘The German Bull,’ said the voice. At once, then, she understood that the Bull was a new and very terrifying kind of weapon. She turned, in fright; but she turned in the wrong direction, or not in the proper way. ‘Here it is!’ cried the voice in terror—and she tried to turn again, but was struck in the stomach and knew she’d been caught, in the darkness, by the horn of the terrible German Bull. She put out her hands and felt the shaft of it, smooth and hard and cold; she felt the place, even, where it entered her stomach; and she knew, too, that if she were to reach around to her back she would be able to feel the tip of it jutting out there, because the horn had run right through her…
Then she came back to herself, and to Mr Imrie; but she could still feel the horn. She thought it had pinned her to the couch. She heard her own voice, talking nonsense, and Mr Imrie giving a chuckle.
‘Bulls? Oh, no. Not in Cricklewood, my dear.’
He held a bowl to her face, and she was sick.
He gave her a handkerchief to wipe her lips with, and helped her to sit upright. The towel had gone from beneath her hips. His sleeves were rolled back down, his cuffs neatly fastened, the links in place; his brow was flushed, with a faint sheen of perspiration on it. Everything—the smells of the room, the arrangement of things—seemed subtly different to her; she had a sense of time having given a sort of lurch, while her back was turned, as if she’d been playing at Grandmother’s Footsteps. On the floor there was a single shilling-sized spot of scarlet, but apart from that, nothing nasty to see. The zinc pail had been moved a little further away and covered over.
She swung her legs over the side of the couch, and the pain in her stomach and her back turned into a dragging internal ache; she became aware, too, of smaller, separate discomforts: a soreness between her legs, and a tenderness, as if she’d been kicked in the flesh of her belly. Mr Imrie said that he’d put a wad of gauze inside her, to take up the blood; and he’d left, beside her on the couch, an ordinary sanitary towel and belt. Seeing that, she grew embarrassed all over again, and tried too quickly to put on the belt and fasten the loops. He saw how she fumbled, and thought she was still dazed from the gas, and came and helped her.
When she began to dress, she realised how weak she was; she thought she could feel, too, where blood had gathered between her buttocks and was starting to grow sticky. The idea made her nervous. She asked if she could go to the lavatory, and he led her down the passage and showed her where it was. She sat, and felt for the ends of the plug of gauze, afraid of it; afraid that it might disappear inside her. When she peed, she felt stung. The ache in her womb and muscles was awful. Only a little blood showed on the toilet paper, however, and that made her realise that the moistness between her buttocks must just have been water: that Mr Imrie must have washed her, with a cloth or a sponge. She didn’t like the idea. She still had the faintly frightening sense of having fallen or been plucked from time: of things having made a jump, with which she hadn’t yet caught up.
‘Now,’ said Mr Imrie, when she went back into his surgery, ‘you should anticipate a little bleeding, perhaps for a day or two. Don’t be worried by that, that’s perfectly normal. I should stay in bed, if I were you. Get your husband to spoil you a little…’ He advised her to drink stout; and gave her two o
r three more sanitary towels, and a tub of aspirins for the pain. Then he took her back out to Reggie.
‘Christ,’ said Reggie, standing up, alarmed, putting out a cigarette. ‘You look awful!’
She began to cry.
‘There, now,’ said Mr Imrie, coming in behind her. ‘I’ve told Mrs Harrison to expect a little weakness, for twenty-four hours or so. You might telephone me, if you’ve any anxiety. I do ask you not to leave messages, however…Any fainting, of course; any serious bleeding; any vomiting, fitting, anything like that, you must call your doctor. But that’s very unlikely. Very unlikely indeed. And needless to say, if a doctor were to be involved, you wouldn’t feel it necessary to mention—’ Again he spread his hands. ‘Well, I’m sure you understand.’
Reggie looked rather wildly at him, and didn’t answer. ‘Are you OK?’ he asked Viv.
‘I think so,’ she said, still crying.
‘Christ,’ he said, again. And then, to Mr Imrie: ‘Is she supposed to look like this?’
‘A little weakness, as I said. The slightly advanced nature of the pregnancy made things a shade more complicated, that’s all. Just bear in mind, about the vomiting and the fits—’
Reggie swallowed. He put on his coat, and then helped Viv to put on hers. She leant on his arm. It was ten to nine. They all went out into the hall, Mr Imrie closing the door of the waiting-room and then stepping nimbly across to close the door to the surgery. He put off the light, unlatched the front door, but only opened it a little—just enough for him to peer out into the street.
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘The moon is still rather bright. I wonder—’ He turned to Viv. ‘Would you mind very much, Mrs Harrison, just holding your handkerchief across your face, like this?’ He put his hand to his mouth. ‘That’s right. It gives the impression, you see, that you’ve come for some ordinary dental work; which, after all, is not uncommon…I’m thinking of my neighbours. The war gives people such suspicious ideas. Thank you, so much.’
He pulled the door wide, and they left him. Viv kept the handkerchief across her mouth for a minute or two, then let her hand fall. The cloth, like the piece of paper Reggie had taken from his pocket on the way, seemed almost luminous in the moonlight; but she looked at the cloudless sky now and felt too weak and sore and miserable to be frightened. She began, instead, to grow very cold. She thought she could feel the plug of gauze inside her, slipping out of its place. The edges of the sanitary towel chafed her thighs. She leant more heavily on Reggie’s arm. But she wouldn’t speak to him. ‘All right?’ he kept saying. ‘OK? Good girl.’ Then, when they’d gone a hundred yards or so, he broke out with, ‘That shyster! Christ, what a thing to spring on us! All that stuff about the extra ten quid. He knew he’d got us over a barrel. Christ, what a bloody Jew! I ought to have stood my ground a bit harder. For two pins—’
‘Shut up!’ she said at last, unable to bear it.
‘No, but honestly, Viv. What a racket.’
He grumbled on. At Cricklewood Broadway they waited for ten or fifteen minutes, then picked up a cab. They were going to a place Reggie had got the use of, a flat, somewhere right in the middle of town. He had the address they wanted on another piece of paper. The driver knew the street, but said that some of the roads were up; he had to take them a roundabout route. Reggie heard that, and gave a snort. Viv could feel him thinking, That’s a nice trick, as well. The cab went slowly, and she held herself in a state of miserable tension all the way. When she thought the driver wasn’t looking, she opened the tub of aspirin and took three: chewing them up, swallowing and swallowing to get them down. From time to time she slipped a hand beneath herself—afraid that the gauze and the sanitary towel might not be working after all.
She didn’t look at the house, when they reached it; she never knew exactly where it was—though she remembered, later, having crossed Hyde Park, and thought that it must have been in some street in Belgravia. It had a porch with pillars, she remembered that, for Reggie had to get the key to the flat they were borrowing from an old lady in the basement, and while he ran down the steps and knocked on the door she closed her eyes and leant against one of the pillars, and put her hands flat against her stomach to try and warm herself up. Her needs and wants had shrunk, condensed: she could think only of finding a place to be private and still, to be warm. She heard Reggie’s voice. He was joking with the lady, in a strained kind of way: ‘That’s right…I should say so, too…Isn’t it?’ Come on, she thought. He reappeared, puffing, cursing, and they went inside.
The flat was up on the highest floor. The staircase windows were uncovered, so they had to climb with only the torch to light them. She felt moisture at the top of her thighs and began to think she must be bleeding: with every step it seemed to her that she could feel the soft, hot release of a little more blood. At last she was sure that it was running down her legs, soaking her stockings, filling her shoes…She stood very still while Reggie fumbled with the keys in the unfamiliar locks, then stood still again as he went about from one window to another, kicking bits of furniture on his way, striking his shins, sending china rattling.
‘For God’s sake,’ she said weakly, when something had fallen and he had stooped, swearing, to pick it up. ‘Never mind this room. Do the bathroom first.’
‘I would,’ he said testily, ‘if I knew where it was.’
‘Can’t you see?’
‘No, I can’t. Can you?’
‘Put a light on, it’s just for a minute.’
‘We’ll have Mother Hubbard coming up from her basement. We’ll have a warden at the door. That’s all we need.’
He had been fined a pound for showing a light, two years before; and had never forgotten it. The beam of the torch swept wildly about. She saw him move, then strike his head, hard, against the edge of a door.
‘Christ!’
‘Are you all right?’
‘What do you think? Hell! That hurts like buggery!’
He rubbed his forehead, then went on more cautiously. When his voice came again, it was muffled. ‘Here’s the bedroom. The lav’s meant to be off that, I think. Just a minute—’ She heard a thud, as he struck his head again. There was the rattle of curtain-rings, and then a click, and then another. ‘Oh, to fuck!’ he cried. The electricity was off. They needed shillings: he made his way back to her and sorted through his change, went through her purse, then blundered around a second time, looking for the meter.
The coins went in at last, and lights sprang on. She made her way, wincing, to the bathroom. When he saw how gingerly she was moving he came forward to help her, and she pushed him off.
‘Go away,’ she said. ‘Go away!’
She had not bled as much as she had feared, there was only a little staining on the surface of the sanitary towel; but the tip of the gauze, which had been white before, was now the colour of rust. She felt it with her fingers: it seemed looser than it had been at first, and again she worried about it travelling about inside her, getting lost. She got a smear of blood on her hand, and stood to wash it. She looked at the bath, and imagined filling it with hot water, soaking away the pain from her hips. But the bathroom was queer and luxurious, done up with a thick, milk-coloured carpet and with tiles made to look like mother-of-pearl. It made her feel grubby; she thought of the manoeuvres it would take not to leave marks or stains. She shivered, suddenly exhausted; she lowered the lavatory lid and sat back down on it, with her elbows on her knees and her face in her hands. She still had her coat and her hat on.
She sat so long, Reggie knocked on the door to ask if she was all right. When she let him in he glanced around with fluttering eyelids, nervously.
He helped her to walk. She had passed through the bedroom before and hardly looked at it; now she saw that, like the bathroom, it was done up outlandishly. There was a tiger-skin rug on top of a carpet, and satin cushions on the bed. It was like someone’s idea of a film-star’s bedroom; or as though prostitutes or playboys lived here. The whole flat was the same. The
sitting-room had an electric fire built into the wall, surrounded by panels of chromium. The telephone was pearly white. There was a bar, for drinks, with bottles and glasses inside it, and on the wall were pictures of Paris: the Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower, men and women sitting gaily at pavement cafés with bottles of wine.
But everything was chill to the touch and dusty; and here and there were piles of powder: paint and plaster, which must have been shaken down in raids. The rooms smelt damp, unlived-in. Viv sat, still shivering, in the armchair closest to the fire.
‘Whose flat is this?’ she asked.
‘It’s no one’s,’ said Reggie, squatting beside her and fiddling with the fire’s controls. ‘It’s a show-flat.—I think one of these elements has gone.’
‘What?’
‘It’s just for show,’ he said. ‘It’s just to show you what your place would be like, if you bought one. They did it all up before the war started. No one’s interested now.’
‘Nobody lives here?’
‘People come to stay, that’s all.’
‘What people?’
He turned a switch, back and forth. ‘Pals of Mike’s, I told you. He was one of the house-agents and he’s still got the key. He leaves it with the old mother downstairs. If you’ve got leave, and nowhere to spend it…’
She understood. ‘It’s for you blokes to bring girls to.’
He glanced up, laughing. ‘Don’t look at me like that! I don’t know anything about that. But it’s better than a hotel, isn’t it?’
‘Is it?’ She wouldn’t smile. ‘I suppose you’d know. I suppose you bring girls here all the time.’
He laughed again. ‘I wish! I’ve never been here before in my life.’
‘That’s what you say.’