The Fifth Child. Doris Lessing
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Another girl came in from the village, found by Dr Brett. She was, like the other three, pleasant, lazy, seeing nothing to be done unless her attention was directed to it, affronted by the amount of work needed by four children. She did, however, enjoy the people sitting around and talking, the sociable atmosphere, and in no time she was sharing meals and sitting around with them; she found it quite in order to be waited on by them. Everyone knew that she would find an excuse to leave when this delightful house party broke up.
Which it did, rather earlier than usual. It was not only Jessica (in her bright summer clothes that made no concession to the English winter except for a slight cardigan) who remembered people elsewhere who had been promised visits. Jessica took herself off, and Deborah with her. James followed. Frederick had to finish a book. The enraptured schoolgirl, Bridget, found Harriet lying down, her hands pressed into her stomach, tears running down her face, moaning from some pain she would not specify – and was so shocked she, too, wept and said she had always known it was too good to last, and went off back home to her mother, who had just remarried and did not really want her.
The girl who had come to help went home, and David looked for a trained nanny in London. He could not afford one, but James had said he would pay for it. Until Harriet was better, he said: uncharacteristically grumpy, he was making it clear he thought that Harriet had chosen this life and now should not expect everyone to foot the bill.
But they could not find a nanny: the nannies all wanted to go abroad with families who had a baby, or perhaps two; or to be in London. This small town, and the four children, with another coming, put them off.
Instead, Alice, a cousin of Frederick’s, a widow down on her luck, came to help Dorothy. Alice was quick, fussy, nervous, like a little grey terrier. She had three grown-up children, and grandchildren, but said she did not want to be a nuisance to them, a remark that caused Dorothy to make dry remarks, which Harriet felt like accusations. Dorothy was not pleased to have a woman of her own age sharing authority, but it could not be helped. Harriet seemed unable to do anything much.
She went back to Dr Brett, for she could not sleep or rest because of the energy of the foetus, which seemed to be trying to tear its way out of her stomach.
‘Just look at that,’ she said as her stomach heaved up, convulsed, subsided. ‘Five months.’
He made the usual tests, and said, ‘It’s large for five months, but not abnormally so.’
‘Have you ever had a case like this before?’ Harriet sounded sharp, peremptory, and the doctor gave her an annoyed look.
‘I’ve certainly seen energetic babies before,’ he said shortly, and when she demanded, ‘At five months? Like this?’ he refused to meet her – was dishonest, as she felt it. ‘I’ll give you a sedative,’ he said. For her. But she thought of it as something to quiet the baby.
Now, afraid of asking Dr Brett, she begged tranquillizers from friends, and from her sisters. She did not tell David how many she was taking, and this was the first time she had hidden anything from him. The foetus was quiet for about an hour after she dosed herself, and she was given a respite from the ceaseless battering and striving. It was so bad that she would cry out in pain. At night, David heard her moan, or whimper, but now he did not offer comfort, for it seemed that these days she did not find his arms around her any help.
‘My God,’ she said, or grunted, or groaned, and then suddenly sat up, or scrambled out of bed and went doubled up out of the room, fast, escaping from the pain.
He had stopped putting his hand on her stomach, in the old companionable way, for what he felt there was beyond what he could manage with. It was not possible that such a tiny creature could be showing such fearful strength; and yet it did. And nothing he said seemed to reach Harriet, who, he felt, was possessed, had gone right away from him, in this battle with the foetus, which he could not share.
He might wake to watch her pacing the room in the dark, hour after hour. When she at last lay down, regulating her breathing, she would start up again, with an exclamation, and, knowing he was awake, would go downstairs to the big family room where she could stride up and down, groaning, swearing, weeping, without being observed.
As the Easter holiday approached and the two older women made remarks about getting the house ready, Harriet said, ‘They can’t come. They can’t possibly come.’
‘They’ll expect it,’ said Dorothy.
‘We can manage,’ said Alice.
‘No,’ said Harriet.
Wails and protests from the children, and Harriet did not soften. This made Dorothy even more disapproving. Here she was, with Alice, two capable women, doing all the work, and the least Harriet could do…
‘You’re sure you don’t want them to come?’ asked David, who had been begged by the children to make her change her mind.
‘Oh, do what you like,’ Harriet said.
But when Easter came, Harriet was proved right: it was not a success. Her strained, abstracted face as she sat there at her table, stiffly upright, braced for the next jolt, or jab, stopped conversation, spoiled the fun, the good times. ‘What have you got in there?’ asked William, jocular but uneasy, seeing Harriet’s stomach convulse. ‘A wrestler?’
‘God only knows,’ said Harriet, and she was bitter, not joking. ‘How am I going to get through to July?’ she demanded, in a low appalled voice. ‘I can’t! I simply can’t do it!’
They all – David, too – judged that she was simply exhausted because this baby was coming too soon. She must be humoured. Alone in her ordeal – and she had to be, she knew that, and did not blame her family for not accepting what she was being slowly forced to accept – she became silent, morose, suspicious of them all and their thoughts about her. The only thing that helped was to keep moving.
If a dose of some sedative kept the enemy – so she now thought of this savage thing inside her – quiet for an hour, then she made the most of the time, and slept, grabbing sleep to her, holding it, drinking it, before she leaped out of bed as it woke with a heave and a stretch that made her feel sick. She would clean the kitchen, the living-room, the stairs, wash windows, scrub cupboards, her whole body energetically denying the pain. She insisted that her mother and Alice let her work, and when they said there was no need to scrub the kitchen again, she said, ‘For the kitchen no, for me yes.’ By breakfast time she might have already worked for three or four hours, and looked hag-ridden. She took David to the station, and the two older children to school, then parked the car somewhere and walked. She almost ran through streets she hardly saw, hour after hour, until she understood she was causing comment. Then she took to driving a short way out of the town, where she walked along the country lanes, fast, sometimes running. People in passing cars would turn, amazed, to see this hurrying driven woman, white-faced, hair flying, open-mouthed, panting, arms clenched across her front. If they stopped to offer help, she shook her head and ran on.
Time passed. It did pass, though she was held in an order of time different from those around her – and not the pregnant woman’s time either, which is slow, a calendar of the growth of the hidden being. Her time was endurance, containing pain. Phantoms and chimeras inhabited her brain. She would think, When the scientists make experiments, welding two kinds of animal together, of different sizes, then I suppose this is what the poor mother feels. She imagined pathetic botched creatures, horribly real to her, the products of a Great Dane or a borzoi with a little spaniel; a lion and a dog; a great cart horse and a little donkey; a tiger and a goat. Sometimes she believed hooves were cutting her tender inside flesh, sometimes claws.
In the afternoon, she collected the children from school, and, later, David from the station. She walked around the kitchen as suppers were eaten, encouraged the children to watch television, and then went up to the third floor where she hastened up and down the corridor.
The family could hear her swift heavy steps, up there, and did not let their eyes meet.
Time passed. It did pass. The seventh month was