Adultery. A lost baby. And one woman’s hard lesson about what really matters in life
A shatteringly frank memoir by celebrated writer DIANA ATHILL
The weeks when I was pregnant were so beautiful I was having to control myself not to scream
DURING my early 40s, it occurred to me one day that I might be pregnant. The reasons against having a child were these: I was unmarried and lived comfortably on what I earned, with nothing to spare. On the other hand, if I did not have a child now, I would never have one.
I loved its father. Barry was married — he had begun an affair with me simply because he was no longer romantically in love with his wife, and was polygamous by nature.
At 43, I was nine years older than Barry and he saw me as having chosen this form of relationship rather than having been persuaded or manoeuvred into it. He was right. If, when I told him I was pregnant, he were to offer to leave his wife, I would be quite as anxious as I would be happy. I would not, whatever I decided, try to make him do that.
So there was no doubt that, if I was pregnant, it would be sensible to have an abortion. But my sub-conscious was another matter: it wanted me to have this child.
So the best thing to do seemed to me to be nothing: drift for a week or so, think about it as little as possible and see what happened. Perhaps I would wake up one morning knowing what I wanted to do.
The next two weeks dragged. Each morning, when I awoke, I would lie still for a minute or two trying to overhear my state of mind, but all I picked up was irritation and depression at being in this quandary.
Then I spent a weekend in the country with my mother, and the depression increased. Supposing I had the child — how appalling the family explanations would be, how impossible it was to imagine the degree of consternation such a decision would raise. ‘Oh God,’ I thought, ‘I do wish it would all go away.’
Six days later — it was April — I awoke congratulating myself on having moved to a new flat. It was the top floor of a house which might almost be in the country; the last house in a short street which projected into a park. The sun shone through my bedroom window and the birds were singing so loudly that they had woken me before my alarm clock went off.
I got out of bed to lean out of the window and sniff the green smells, and found myself saying: ‘What a morning for birds and bees and buds and babies.’ This sentence was still humming in my mind as I walked to the bus stop, past the walls of gardens, not high enough to conceal the trees and shrubs behind them.
‘It is a lovely place to live,’ I thought. ‘I suppose I am going to have this baby after all.’
No thought of my predicament disturbed my morning’s work. Then my business partner at the publishing firm I worked at came into my room, to spring on me a discussion of long-term plans for the company. Certain changes of status would have to be made.
‘It concerns you, too,’ he said, ‘so you must think it over.’
I had a slight sensation of breathlessness and could feel my face flushing, but I made no decision to say what in fact I did say: ‘I don’t know that it will concern me. I may not be here then. I’m going to have a baby.’
And inside my head I was saying: ‘At last! The cat has jumped at last.’
I was also saying: ‘Oh Lord, now I’ve done it!’ — but the dismay was a laughing dismay, not a horrified one.
As it was, my partner, a very old friend, kissed me and said that he was happy for me, and I was left grinning across my desk like the Cheshire cat, established in my full glory as an Expectant Unmarried Mother.
After that I was happy. I was quite often frightened, too, but on a superficial level compared with the happiness.
The house in which I had my flat was owned by a cousin, who lived in the rest of it, and from the moment I told her of the pregnancy she was eager to help. Neither of us had much money. I myself had to let one of the rooms in my flat to help pay its modest rent.
I knew that in addition to my usual living expenses, I would have to pay for someone to care for the child while I was working, and for its food and clothes, and for its bicycle and its rollerskates and its holidays by the sea...
Year after year of financial strain stretched ahead. Financial strain and, to start with at any rate, physical exhaustion: office all day, child for every other minute — would I ever again be free to write? Not for years, anyway.
No less frightening was the thought of the gap in the child’s life where a father ought to be.
Material considerations could be managed somehow, but the argument advanced by my more sober-minded friends — and by my own mind as well — that one has no right to wish this lopsided upbringing on any child; that was less easy.
Surely only an exceptional woman could reasonably expect to steer her child comfortably through the shoals of illegitimacy — but could I make any claim to be exceptional? To this question, I found I could make no answer. I could only say: ‘Whatever happens, I believe that it will prefer to exist rather than not.’
Barry was, in a detached way, pleased. I wondered, sometimes, what would happen about that once the child was born: would an ‘uncle’ in its life instead of a father be a good thing or a bad one? We would have to see.
I knew that if it proved a bad thing, I would have to lose Barry — would lose him without hesitation however great the pain — but for the present, having him there was a large, warm part of the happiness which carried the anxieties like driftwood on its broad tide.
The biggest immediate worry was how to tell my mother. I veered between a desire to get the worst over by writing at once, and a longing to put if off for ever.
Barry advised me to put it off for a month or so, and finally I agreed, throwing a sop to my itch to get it over with by writing the letter in advance. I enjoyed writing it: putting into words how much I wanted a child. I found my letter so convincing that I couldn’t believe my mother would not agree.
Almost all my friends appeared to be delighted. The interest and sympathy that seemed to surround me was like a good wine added to a delicious dinner. I felt gloriously well, hungry, lively and pretty, without a single qualm of sickness and with only a shadow of extra fatigue at the end of a long day, from time to time.
‘Well, you seem to be all right,’ they said to me at the hospital clinic which I began to attend. I contrived to read details about myself over the shoulder of a nurse who was filling in a form, and glowed with ridiculous pride at all the ‘satisfactories’ and at ‘nipples: good’.
As I left the clinic, a man leant out of the cab of a passing truck and shouted at me: ‘That’s right, love —– keep smiling!’
Those weeks of April and May were the only ones in my life when spring was wholly, fully beautiful. It was as though, instead of being a stationary object past which a current was flowing, I was flowing with it, in it, at the same rate. It was a happiness new to me, but it felt very ancient, and complete.
One Saturday, Barry came to see me. After lunch, he was telling me a funny story when I interrupted with, ‘Wait a minute, I must go to the loo — tell me when I get back,’ and hurried out.
When I came back to the sittingroom, I told Barry in a small voice: ‘I’m bleeding.’ He pulled me against him, saying quieting things, saying: ‘It’s all right, we’ll ring the doctor, it’s probably nothing.’
And although I didn’t know I was going to start crying, I felt myself doing it. I had not yet been able to tell what I was feeling, but suddenly I was having to control myself hard in order not to scream.
I called the doctor but there was nothing to be done but to go to bed at once and stay there for at least 48 hours. ‘Does this necessarily mean a miscarriage?’ I asked. ‘No, certainly not,’ he said.
I found myself crying again, flopped over the arm of my chair, tears streaming down my face, saying over and over again in a sort of whispered scream, ‘I don’t want to have a miscarriage, I don’t want to have a miscarriage’.
During the next two days I was comfortable in my pretty bedroom, reading Jane Austen almost non-stop for her calming quality, listening to the radio and doing a little office work.
By the fourth day, my chief anxiety had become not the possibility of a miscarriage but the fear that slight bleeding might tie me to my bed for weeks. That night, I came slowly out of sleep at 3am to a feeling that some-
thing was amiss. It took me a minute or two of sleepy wondering before I identified that I was in pain.
I went to sleep again. When I woke an hour and a half later, I told myself: ‘This is it’. Dull resentment was what I felt. ‘Oh God, oh God,’ I thought, ‘I didn’t know it would be like this.’
Soon after that, the first blackbird began to sing. I lay still between the crises, watching the sun’s first rays coming into the room. At 6.30, I began to feel sick. I knew I must get to the telephone.
I took two steps towards the door, felt myself swaying, thought quite clearly: ‘They are wrong when they say everything goes black; it’s not going black, it’s disappearing. I must fall onto the bed.’ Which I did.
Then I called out to the lodger when I heard him in the passage outside my door, telling him to fetch my cousin. ‘You mean now?’ came his startled voice through the door.
Oh, that was wonderful, the sound of his feet hurrying away, and only a minute or two later in came my cousin. One look and she ran for the telephone.
The doctor arrived so soon that it seemed almost at once. He felt my pulse, pulled down my eyelid and left the room to call an ambulance. The relief of not having to worry any more would have been exquisite if it had not given me more time to realise how ill I was feeling.
The ambulance men wrapped me in a beautiful big red blanket. They carried me into a cubicle in the casualty department, and I didn’t want them to leave because they were so kind. The nausea came again, worse than ever. A nurse said brusquely, while I was vomiting: ‘Did you have an injection to bring this on?’
My ‘no’ came out like a raucous scream, so I had to gasp laboriously: ‘I wanted most terribly to have this baby.’ I noticed that the nurse couldn’t find my pulse, and that when the doctor came to listen to my heart through his stethoscope, he raised his eyebrows a fraction and pursed his lips, and then turned to look at my face, not as one looks at a face to communicate, but with close attention.
I also noticed that they could never hear my answers to their questions, although I thought I was speaking normally.
‘They think I’m really bad,’ I said to myself, but I didn’t feel afraid.
When, a little later, the same doctor said, ‘She’s very near collapse,’ I thought perfectly clearly, ‘Near collapse, indeed! If what I’m in now isn’t collapse, it must be their euphemism for dying.’
It did, then, swim dimly through my mind that I ought to think or feel something about this, but I hadn’t the strength to produce any more than: ‘Oh, well, if I die, I die.’ I had always dreaded the kind of anaesthetic one breathes in, but when I understood that they were about to give me that kind and began to attempt a protest, I suddenly realised that I didn’t give a damn: I would go with it willingly.
The operation must have been a quick one, because when I woke up to an awareness of hands manipulating me back into bed, I was confused only for an instant. And I began to be sick again.
I had a deep-seated neurotic queasiness about vomiting, a horror of it, and until that moment I would never have believed that I could have been sick and been happy while doing it. But that was what was happening. An amazing glow of relief and joy was flowing up from my healed belly. ‘I AM ALIVE.’
It was enough. It was everything. It was filling me to the brim with pure and absolute joy, a feeling more intense than any I had known before.
So if I were pinned down to answer the question, ‘What did you feel on losing your child?’ the only honest reply would be, ‘Nothing.’ Nothing at all, while it was going on. What was happening was so bad — so nearly fatal — that it eclipsed its own significance.
During the four days I spent in hospital, I felt very little: no more than a detached acknowledgement that it was sad. And when it was time to go home, I was afraid that I would hate my bedroom, but I saw that it was still a pleasant room. There was even relief: I would not now have to tell my mother anything.
I thought often of how happy I had been while I was expecting the child. This was what sometimes gave me a dull ache: that someone who didn’t yet exist could have the power to create spring, and could then be gone.
And that once he was gone (I had always thought of the child as a boy), he became, because he had never existed, so completely gone: that the only tears shed for him were those first, almost unconscious ones. ‘I don’t want to have a miscarriage.’ Oh, no, no, no, I hadn’t wanted it; it was the thing I didn’t want with all my heart.
Yet now it had happened, and I was the same as I had always been.
Except that now I knew the truth: that I loved being alive so much that not having died was more important to me by far than losing the child. More important than anything.
Oh no, no, no. I wanted this with all my heart