Chapter 10 Goodbye, Tiny Sea Creature #2
“Mm.” George used to go out with a chap who worked at Dominic’s firm.
Most days, he said, Dominic would go to the pub at twelve, followed by lunch, followed by an afternooner with his mistress du jour.
George had once bumped into him walking down Queen Victoria Street with a girl on his arm.
Bold as brass, as Mina would say. At most eighteen, Dominic’s companion wore a mink wrap, large paste earrings, and a leopard-skin beret.
She looked like a child who’d raided the dress-up box.
Dominic, who couldn’t have been less embarrassed if the girl was his dowager aunt he’d accompanied to church, introduced them as “my colleague Svetlana” and “my sister-in-law, the Honorable Miss Mountford-Owen.” Equally unfazed by encountering her sugar daddy’s wife’s sister, Svetlana offered a squeaky greeting more redolent of Liverpool than Leningrad.
Get him to buy you some real diamonds, George felt like saying, and it still won’t be worth it.
Dominic was portly, florid in the face, at least fifty, the type of man whose waggish air didn’t quite conceal a nasty edge.
She’d contemplated telling Venetia about Svetlana.
But she didn’t want to make trouble for the girl.
For all George knew, Dominic was the best of some even worse options.
Also, she suspected the news would be received by Venetia as a hostile act on George’s part.
If George were honest with herself, that wouldn’t be entirely untrue.
But of course, she thought. Why didn’t I think of it before?
She could get the money from Dominic. It wouldn’t seem like blackmail, not really.
The Svetlana incident was ages ago. “Anyway, dearest,” she said to Venetia.
“Afraid I must dash. Awfully nice to see you. Love to Diana and the boys.” If she hurried, she thought, she’d catch Dominic in his usual pub.
Disgusting man that he was, he read the situation in an instant.
“In the club, are we? Come on, you can tell your uncle Dom. Gosh, it seems only five minutes ago that you were a bridesmaid at our wedding. How old were you? Ten, eleven? You were such a sweet child. Like butter wouldn’t melt.
And now look at you, you naughty girl. Don’t worry, I won’t tell V.
” He patted her knee. “It’ll be our little secret. ”
“You just lie down on the table and make yourself comfortable, miss,” Dr. Jenkins was saying.
She could have sworn he put a sardonic emphasis on the miss.
How did he know she wasn’t married? You could have a husband and still not want a baby.
“Nothing to be frightened of,” he went on in his faux-soothing way.
“I’ve done this hundreds of times. Nothing to it.
Underclothes off, you can leave them on the chair there.
You can roll your girdle up. Stockings on or off, it doesn’t matter. ”
George did as instructed, letting her stockings droop down her thighs.
The table was hard against her back. She stared at the frosted-glass light fixture, its curved lip rimmed with dust and dead flies.
The towel behind her head smelled strongly of bleach and washing powder.
Then again, everything smelled strongly these days.
The other day an Italian (she could tell by his shoes) sat near her on the bus, and his aftershave was so pungent she had to get off three stops early.
But no one else seemed to notice. This must be what being a dog was like, she reflected.
Dr. Jenkins loomed over her. She saw the spidery veins inside his nose, the metal fillings in his upper molars, the faint yellow stains under his arms. “Now, young lady, I need you to relax. That’s your only job.
Relax, keep still, and know that you’re in excellent hands.
If it starts to hurt, you can tell me and I’ll stop.
All right? All right. Now, I want you to bring your heels toward you and let your knees flop down. That’s it, that’s it. Good girl!”
She screwed her eyes tight shut. From one of the flats below came a baby’s wail.
How ludicrous, she thought. His hands were near her groin; she could feel the wiry hairs on the back of his fingers, the glass face of his wristwatch.
A freezing-cold, smooth object was pushed inside her, and she gasped in shock.
He seemed to winch it open, and she squirmed involuntarily.
“If you wriggle, it will only take longer.”
She kept still and started to cry silently as he finished his winching.
“There’s a good girl.” Then, to himself, “Very healthy-looking cervix. No sign of disease.” Humming under his breath, he unscrewed a bottle and fiddled with the syringe.
He placed a dry hand on her lower stomach.
Between her legs, metal clinking against metal preceded a sudden piercing agony.
“It hurts,” she yelped. “It really hurts.” But he didn’t stop, and she heard herself scream.
“Shush, shush,” he said. “Come along now. Deep breaths. That’s right.
Nearly done now.” There was a crescendo of pain, and she began to black out.
She was brought around by the oddest sensation of a stinging chill spreading inside her womb. This is how I’ll die, she thought.
“There,” said Dr. Jenkins, replacing his instruments on the tray and patting George’s shoulder.
“All done. Now it’s simply a matter of time.
Just go home and wait for it to start. It will hurt, but nothing too awful.
Best to stay in bed. By tomorrow you ought to have passed the fetus.
Look out for it. Then you’ll know it’s over.
You’ll bleed for another week, but don’t go worrying about that. ”
George fastened her stockings, pulled her dress down, and got up to put her drawers on. “The fetus—it won’t look like a baby, will it?” No one had told her about this. She’d assumed it would disintegrate before she expelled it.
Dr. Jenkins regarded her with weary condescension.
These girls. Too squeamish to face the facts of what they were doing.
But not too squeamish to sleep around all over the place, goodness no.
He had more sympathy for the poor ones, the gray-skinned hussies from County Council housing who couldn’t be expected to know any better, whose only hope of any excitement was a knee-trembler in the alley after closing time.
Or their mothers, exhausted from successive births barely a year apart, whose husbands still wouldn’t leave them alone.
He saw those types rarely, of course. They couldn’t afford him.
Their only resource was some wicked crone who charged five pounds to blindly inject a dirty cylinder of soapy water.
But he saw plenty of this type: spoiled, frivolous, too sexy for their own good, never been told no and didn’t know how to say it.
They all assumed someone would always step in and fix their mistakes. In this they were usually correct.
“It will look like a very small baby,” he said patiently, as though explaining it to a slow-witted child. “Like a jelly baby, in fact.”
She nodded, but she must have looked upset, because he said, “Next time, come to me straight away. None of this hanging about. Then there’ll be hardly anything there. The whole thing will be a good deal easier. You’ve got my phone number.”
“Thanks, but there won’t be a next time.” Wild fucking horses, she thought, wouldn’t drag me back here.
He gave her a that’s what they all say, duckie look and practically pushed her out the door.
Lying on her bed, a tide of pain surging from her rib cage to her knees, George thought she’d be thrilled to see a little jelly baby fetus if it signaled the end of this.
Even if it was kicking its legs and smiling, she’d be pleased to see it before she flushed it away.
“Thank you,” she said to Jimmy. “I’ll be fine now. ”
“Got a towel? I’ll…” He pointed to the landing.
“Oh, but…” She thought better of protesting. “In the bathroom. There’s a blue towel hanging over the bath.”
He nodded and left the room. She heard him going in and out of the bathroom.
Then he went upstairs. Good, she thought.
That was that. It was very embarrassing.
Completely mortifying, in fact. Not that he’d cotton on to anything.
He’d assume it was a nasty bout of the curse.
No reason for him to think otherwise. Men knew nothing about such matters.
A minute or so later he was back, carrying two clean white towels. “Look,” he said, “why don’t I put one of these underneath you?”
“I couldn’t possibly…” George began. But she was too weak to argue.
She let Jimmy undress her to her vest and girdle, wrap her in one towel, and lay her on top of the other.
Then he covered her with a sheet and blanket.
He did this all so tenderly, she felt like crying.
“Now, what can I get you?” he said. “Cup of tea?”
“No, I don’t want anything. You can leave me now, honestly. I’m feeling better.”
“But you can’t be left alone. I know we can’t call a doctor, but the least I can do is sit with you.”
“It’s not what you think—”
“Shh,” he said, sounding like Dr. Jenkins. “Try to rest. Close your eyes.”
She did close her eyes, but the pain didn’t abate, not for hours, or what felt like hours.
A kind of delirium took hold of her; she kept hallucinating that she was floating up to the ceiling and looking down at herself.
The blood kept spreading over the bed like flames.
She feared she was bleeding to death, but Jimmy was right: They couldn’t call a doctor.
Eventually she must have fallen asleep, because when she opened her eyes, the room was in darkness and she was alone.
She still felt a dull, low ache, and the mattress was probably ruined. But she was alive.