The Facts of Life (17 page)

In the end it was she who heralded the change to his life, with the staggering announcement of her pregnancy.

‘Are you sure?’ he asked.

She told him precisely how she could be sure and it struck him how easily women could pretend to be pregnant since the proof all lay in areas from which ignorance and fearful disgust kept men at a long arm’s length.

When his happy surprise had subsided and he had drawn her on to his lap on the piano stool, she ran a fingertip softly across his brow and down his cheek and said, carefully, ‘If it’s … If it’s a girl, I think we should call her Miriam.’

His embrace froze for a second then he hugged her anew to hide his true feelings behind a mute show of approval.

Citing a passage from
A Husband’s Love
, she said her pregnancy should not be affected by their lovemaking, but he found himself awed by the thought of the little thing within her, and was possessed by irrational fears that his entry would somehow damage it, causing it to deform or bleed away. He even woke terrified from a dream once, in which it had bitten his penis clean off at the fleshy base. Sally tried to comfort him.

‘It’s perfectly safe,’ she urged. ‘You’re not
that
big!’

He knew she was laughing at him. He could hear the chuckle behind her words.

Change bred change. Despite her protest that the prospect of a baby need not affect her working ability and that they would ‘manage somehow’, he began looking for work that was better paid and which he could combine more naturally with composition than his previous job in the bookshop. Thomas made discreet enquiries around the colleges but found that none of the choirmasters or organists was on the verge of leaving. Besides, Edward was loath now to take work so far from home. Depressed at the prospect of someone saying yes, he began to offer his services around local schools as a piano and singing teacher.

The answer came, indirectly, from Miriam. As a sop to his devout grandparents’ memory – ‘alleviating the curse’. Sally called it – Edward contacted Rosa Holzer about a proper disposal for Miriam’s ashes. Having berated him for his sinful ignorance in having his sister cremated, and sighed that she did not know where the world was heading, Rosa agreed to organise a small memorial service at her local synagogue followed by a late lunch at her new house in Golders Green. She was plainly flattered to have been consulted.

They travelled up in the train, with the mortal remains in Sally’s bag between them. Some fifteen people attended. Edward had not realised that so many friends of the family had survived the war and were living in London. His eyes remained dry throughout the service and, oddly, it was Sally who shed tears. She blamed it on the haunting singing of the cantor, who she said had a voice to wake the dead. Edward had become hopelessly christianised by his boarding-school years and found himself as confused as her in the turbulent sea of Hebrew prayers.

There was a flower bed to one side of the gloomy cemetery where the ashes were used to fertilise a camellia Rosa had bought for the occasion. Its glossy foliage looked alien against the frosted London soil and was already thick with flower buds for the spring.

‘It’s a Williamsiae,’ Rosa assured them. ‘Such a lovely, feminine pink.’

Sally had been nervous of meeting the witch-like woman again, but her blurting out about her pregnancy and her hope for a daughter she could call Miriam worked on the old woman’s features like a charm. The news even drew out a smile and an almost earthy chuckle from among the sighs that came as naturally to Frau Holzer as breathing.

Sally later joked that she felt the curse on the marriage was modified if not exactly lifted; a long, enchanted sleep, perhaps, instead of certain death. But it was for Edward to fear the old woman’s influence, for she telephoned the morning following the ceremony with ambiguous good news.

‘Jerry Liebermann. You must have talked with him, Eli. The big fat man with the handsome son about your age. Heini, he’s called. No? Well he talked to
you …
So.
Now
you remember!’

Edward remembered a man who claimed to have been at school with his father in Berlin, who had left Germany in the early thirties and who was now a major force in the British film industry. He had seemed more interested in Sally than in Edward, persisting in embarrassing her with his bullying flirtation – ‘But your figure, the way you walk; don’t tell me you’ve never acted. Of
course
you’ve acted! I’ve seen you in something.
April in Venis? The Moon in June
?’

‘He wants to try you out as a composer,’ Rosa said with satisfaction.

‘A composer?’

‘That’s what you
do
now isn’t it?’

‘Yes, but what does he want with my music? A wedding march? A requiem mass?’

‘Here’s his number, Eli.’ Rosa would not even acknowledge his artistic qualms. ‘Take it. You’ve a wife and child to support now. Offers like this don’t grow on trees.’

Edward made the call. He did not wait for Sally’s return from work so he could ask her advice. He rang. He committed himself. Half an hour of music was required that could be chopped and edited later. An introduction and finale. A march. A waltz. A polka. And some ‘horse music and train music’ as Jerry Liebermann put it. The film was an adaptation of
Anna Karenina
, to be called
Desire
and to star a young actress called Myra Toye. Edward and Sally had seen her in a few films already, and, in his opinion, she was more suited to modelling bathing costumes than personifying complex adulterous passion.

‘Very romantic. Very Russian,’ Jerry enthused. ‘We’ve got all the best boys on it. Rosa tells me you write plinky plonky music. Stravinsky stuff. We won’t be needing that here. One note of that and you’re out. Except maybe in the train bit. Give us a really blistering chord for the death. No, Teddy – I can call you Teddy, can’t I?’

‘Well, actually –’

‘Great. Teddy? We need Tchaikovsky really, only the real thing’s been used to death already. Maybe throw in a touch of Rachmaninoff. Now don’t say no. You can do it blindfold. And
don’t
pretend you don’t need the money, ‘cause I saw the state of your suit and I bet it’s your best and only. Am I right?’

When Sally came home for lunch that afternoon, she paused just inside the front door, surprised at the delicious harmonies and soaring melodies flooding from Edward’s fingers. When he told her the news she laughed and kissed him, happy as he had seemed on hearing of the baby. The money Jerry offered, it was true, was spectacular compared to anything either of them had ever dreamed of earning. She recalled the flirtatious little man with his bizarre accent – half cockney, half German – his sombre, painfully respectful teenage son – ‘Shake hands with the lady, Heini. Show her you’re a gentleman’ – his chauffeur, cigars and pinkie ring.

Edward watched her joy and welcomed the sense that two swift telephone calls had corrupted him utterly. Here was the absolute change he needed. Here was the outward show of rot he deserved. No tortured chords for the sister-smotherer but a slow professional suicide by sweetness and facility, candied harmonies, corrupt, forgettable pastiche. All day, all week, undemanding, flashy melodies poured from his pen at a speed he would never have believed possible. He pilfered shamelessly from Russian symphonies, opera and ballet scores. He borrowed whole chord progressions, changed two notes to disguise a stolen eight-bar theme.

Rosa Holzer and Jerry Liebermann had snatched his soul as Miriam’s due. Playing through a gaudy ballroom waltz, to which Sally was already humming along on the landing, he knew himself reborn: Edward Pepper, the Fleapit Faust.

With the progression of her pregnancy, Sally felt herself increasingly a stranger among familiar faces. She had heard, times beyond numbering, how the gestation of her child was a woman’s most beautiful time. Now that she knew the truth first-hand, she spat upon the saying.

On her bad days, which were many, she was a seething, distended bag of hormones. She cried easily, over mere trifles. Her hair was greasy. Spots appeared on her forehead. She developed a craving for raw celery, a vegetable she had always avoided, even when cooked. She would devour whole heads of it at one furtive go, jealously munching over the kitchen sink, gums sore with the stuffs lingering stringiness, tongue bathed in a green, mineral spittle. She had back-ache, an inside-out belly button and the unpredictable wind of an incontinent ninety-year-old. The scientist in her regarded these developments with a certain horrified fascination but knew that only the perverse would call her beautiful.

She passed swiftly through a phase – inspired by her reading of Dr Pertwee – of encouraging Edward to make love to her despite her condition. Now she colluded in his squeamishness. She saw his boyish shock when she undressed her scary hugeness. Where once his love had encompassed her from scalp to toenail, now it shrunk to three small circles, shone discretely on to her face and hands, as though the rest of her were temporarily absent. Leaving the house for the studios – which he had to do increasingly, for all Jerry Liebermann’s initial promises – Edward bent carefully to kiss her lips, hands in his pockets or tucked behind his back, like a boy playing bob-the-apple. It made her feel like an old-fashioned doll, her face made of china and the rest, if one stripped away the clothes and cotton wig, a sausage of faded pink cloth, lumpily stuffed, not intended for even a loved one’s scrutiny.

Reluctantly, she relinquished her work for Dr Richards. There was a possibility he might still have a job for her when the baby was old enough to be left with someone, but he was too busy to do without help for long. Besides, they were not yet sure enough of Edward’s new earning power to even think of hiring a nanny or a nurse. She became fearful of riding the motorbike and allowed her fears to be worked upon by her mother’s reiterated suggestion that women on both sides of the family were prone to miscarriages and going into labour prematurely. She stayed in. Appalled at her extravagance with Edward’s new money, she approached a shop in Rexbridge which made deliveries.

Needless to say, her mother and father had been thrilled at the news. They came over a few times, when one of her mother’s admirers of either sex could be prevailed upon to act as chauffeur. She was making the most of being under strict doctor’s orders to take things easy for a while. They smiled at Sally with a kind of unconditional, subtly cannibalistic pleasure, making her feel less an intelligent woman, more a side of beef. In her ever more substantial presence, her mother abandoned the role of queen bee for that of mother hen and clucked, actually clucked, around Sally with cushions, magazines and cups of tea. Her father merely sat, but his tired old face, which for so long had seemed set like an unsuccessful milk shape, in a permanent expression of depressive apprehension, was now unnaturally creased up into a no less fixed proud smile. Whenever she swayed up out of her chair, he raised his hands in an Italianate gesture of admiration towards her bulging midriff, as if surprised afresh at this biological wonder. It irritated Sally beyond measure that, after years of striving, with slide rule, exam paper and stethoscope, to add their approval to Dr Pertwee’s, she should find their highest, most heartfelt accolade ultimately bestowed on something she could have done a decade ago, without a single qualification; something as passive as lying on her back under an appropriate man at an appropriate time. She kept their visits to a minimum by pretending Edward was working from home far more than he was, and needed peace.

The truth was that he was often having to spend the night away, in cramped studio digs. Smaller, swifter projects than the
Anna Karenina
film were also being pushed his way.

She pestered him for details of the famous people he encountered, genuinely fascinated, but he dismissed her curiosity. As her own life was diminished however, she found it hard to suppress the impulse to live vicariously through his. She had been unable to hide her delight at the newly tuneful music he was writing. She saw too late that her pleasure goaded him, betraying as it did the wifely insincerity of her support for the ‘serious’ work she had heard previously. His melodies entered her brain and she found herself singing them even as she strove to make no remarks in their favour. He kept her questions at bay, wounding her as he was wounded, and so her curiosity quickened into a lively envy that burned in her gut whenever he left her side to enter his life elsewhere.

With the speed of a fairy’s swishing wand on a soap poster, he became a busy man, Sally, a housewife. This, too, was a galling source of pleasure to her parents. Not only were they impressed at Edward’s new connection with the glamorous world of cinema in a way they had never been by the mere fact of his being a composer and pianist, but her mother’s every comment implied that Sally was now in her rightful place. Her mother had worked all these years only from necessity, it seemed, never gaining one ounce of pleasure from the independence granted her. She managed somehow to imply that Sally’s transformation from white-coated medic to heavily expectant
Hausfrau
was a step
up
woman’s evolutionary ladder, like the acquisition of a second car, a washing machine or a son at a fee-paying school.

In her letters to Dr Pertwee, Sally tried at first to maintain a cheerful front. She laughed at herself, blustered away her doubts and suspicions with a gabbling, newsy tone. This cracked, in time, shortly after one of Edward’s longer absences, and she began to fire off shorter letters, biliously truthful about the frustration she was feeling. In her letters back from Corry, Dr Pertwee judiciously held back from discussing any cracks that were appearing in the love’s young dream but urged her not to waste her time, not to vegetate. Sally could hardly clean the house more than she did: with so little furniture, attic to basement housework was the labour of less than a day, and every stick of woodwork already shone with fragrant polish. She filled her other days with books. She began to work her way through the mildewed gardening encyclopedia Edward had unearthed beneath some seed boxes in the cellar storeroom. Breathing its sickly-sweet scent, she acquainted herself with every plant in the garden, and memorised the elegant Latin name for each, the way she had familiarised herself with muscles, bones and arteries as a medical student. Choysia ternata. Iris foetidissima. Lilium Candidium. She drove the names into her head by making an effort to ‘greet’ plants with their full names as she walked in the garden after breakfast. She cultivated a taste for novels, too, something she had always regarded as a waste of time but which now, with hours of leisure heavy on her conscience, she passionately understood. Slumped on the sofa, a cushion behind her aching back and a rug about her for warmth, she devoured whatever the library van had to offer – Mary Webb, Stella Gibbons, Rumer Godden, Ngaio Marsh, snobbish but oddly addictive Angela Thirkell. She read more from compulsion than pleasure, tossing one book aside and beginning another with barely a pause to digest what she had just finished. She swept dispassionately through other women’s courtships, marriages, adulteries and trials of strength, pausing to smile only at the rare mentions of pregnancy, as from one sufferer to her fellow.