Singled Out (9 page)

His first assault had met unexpected resistance. Following the sniggered after-lights-out dormitory advice that women always mean ‘yes' when they say ‘no', he had made a second attack which was near to rape. When Laura had managed, with difficulty, to repulse this, he had lost his nerve, and with it his erection. He had stormed out of their Mayfair hotel room and apparently spent most of the night walking the streets of London in fury.

They had left the next day for a honeymoon in the south of France. By the end of two weeks there, a kind of sex life had been evolved. Michael had agreed to be less violent in his approaches, and Laura had agreed to submit to them. She expected no pleasure from this compliance, and got none, but it was what her married state required of her. For Laura pleasure and fulfilment from sex were to wait until she met Philip.

As she looked at her husband across the table, as she heard him patronizing the waiter, Laura felt again the awkwardness, the sheer embarrassment, of their wedding night. She should have got out of the marriage right there and then. But she had still been numb, still half-there, still lacking the self-worth that could have given her the impetus to escape. So she had gone through the agonies of the relationship.

Once again, as it had been with her mother, as with Mr and Mrs Hull, the main priority for Michael seemed to be the preservation of a middle-class façade of happiness. Nothing made him more furious than the suspicion that Laura might have confided to someone any doubt about the perfection of their marriage. It was when Michael feared some such lapse or deception had been perpetrated that he was most likely to hit his wife. Then, and on those increasingly frequent occasions when drunkenness rendered him impotent.

Laura's crawl out of the marriage had been long and slow. First, against her husband's wishes, she had taken a job. She had not told him of her application to work as a secretary at the BBC, simply announced the appointment when she was accepted.

The job had broadened Laura's horizons, not only revealing creative skills and kindling professional ambitions within her, but also bringing her into contact with a lively variety of other women. Their relaxed attitude to relationships, and their lack of reticence in discussing them, made Laura question even more the advisability of her own marriage. Though she still held back from getting too close to any of these women, their influence was enormous.

The six-month contract in New Zealand had been the big break. Michael, needless to say, had made an incredible fuss about the suggestion and had tried everything in his power to stop Laura from going. He had even at one point hidden her contraceptive pills and tried to rape her into pregnancy. But Michael's power over his wife was diminishing. As her own confidence grew, she saw the fragility of his, and came to recognize his bluster for what it was – a mask for an ineffectual spirit and a frightened soul.

The New Zealand episode had achieved what she had hoped for professionally, broadening her experience and putting her in a position to apply confidently on her return for a job as researcher on
Newsviews
. Meeting Philip and discovering the potential of her sexuality had been a glorious bonus. But a bonus which, she soon came to recognize, could lead nowhere. Philip would never leave his wife, and Laura would never put the pressure on to try and make him. If she wanted a family life of her own, she would have to create it herself. On her own terms. Which was what she had done.

And now it was time to announce – not explain, announce – the situation to the man whom she unhesitatingly thought of as her ex-husband. In the same way as when she had left Mr and Mrs Hull, Laura's mind had long been made up that she would leave Michael. And, as it had been with the Hulls, she could not understand why Michael was taking such a long time to come to terms with the idea.

She ordered a hamburger, ‘variegated with strips of crunchy bacon and drenched in tangy blue cheese'. When the waiter had gone, she moved straight on to the purpose of their meeting.

‘Michael,' she announced, ‘I'm pregnant.'

‘What?' His first reaction seemed to be pleasure. Maybe he had hoped so many times to hear those words from her that logic was momentarily suspended. But the next second his face clouded. ‘What! But you and I haven't slept together for over a year.'

‘I am fully aware of that.'

‘But … You mean you've …? You little slut!' Laura was silent, waiting for the storm to blow itself out. ‘You little whore! Who is he? You tell me who he is!'

‘It's not relevant.'

‘Not relevant? Not relevant who my wife is committing adultery with!' His voice was getting louder. People at adjacent tables stirred in that distinctively British embarrassment which is prompted by any kind of scene. ‘Are you living with the bastard?'

‘No.'

‘Then why the hell …? Why did you let yourself get knocked up?'

‘I didn't let myself get knocked up. I chose to become pregnant.'

Realizing the notice he was attracting, Michael lowered his voice and leant forward to Laura. ‘You can get rid of it,' he murmured. ‘It's not so difficult to arrange these days. There's a chap I play cricket with who got his girlfriend in the club and –'

‘I am going to keep the baby,' said Laura coolly. ‘I just knew you'd find out about it some time and thought it better you should hear the news from me.'

‘You “thought it better I should hear the news from you”?' Michael hissed. ‘You cuckold me with some worthless fucker and you “think it better I should hear the news from you”?'

Again she was silent. Suddenly Michael lost control. And seemed to lose the volume control on his voice at the same moment. ‘You little cunt!' he screamed.

Laura realized the drawback of her choice of venue. In a restaurant he despised as much as this one, Michael didn't care about drawing attention to himself. She should have chosen somewhere more formal, some regular haunt where he was known perhaps. Better still, she should have asked him to take her to his club, where women, only admitted to certain rooms and at certain hours, were made fully aware of the enormous privilege accorded them in being allowed to share overcooked nursery food with its members.

Still, too late for such thoughts. She'd just have to let his anger run its course. Michael hurled abuse at her for a little longer. The other diners did that very British thing of averting their faces, as though the shame was theirs.

The wind was suddenly gone from Michael's sails. He sank wearily back on to his bentwood chair. An almost audible sigh escaped from the other diners. It seemed that the awkwardness might be over.

‘You realize this means I'll have to divorce you, Laura,' he said.

She sighed patiently. ‘That's what I've been asking you to do for years.'

The thought of divorce had sobered him. ‘It's a big step,' he ruminated. ‘Nobody in my family has ever been divorced.' He looked up at her with sudden magnanimity. ‘Tell you what, Laura, we'll forget this has ever happened.'

‘What on earth do you mean? We can't forget I'm pregnant. I
am
pregnant.'

‘I mean, forget about your … lapse. Pretend
that
never happened.' She looked at him curiously, still unable to catch his drift. ‘For God's sake, Laura, I'm making you an offer very few husbands in the world would make. I'm saying we'll forget the … circumstances of your pregnancy.' He straightened up. His jaw was outlined by nobility. ‘I'm saying I'm prepared to bring up the baby as our own.'

It was a second or two before she could reply. Then, slowly, patiently, Laura said, ‘That is not what I want, Michael. The decision to get pregnant was mine. The decision to bring up the child on my own is also mine. None of it has anything to do with you. So far as I am concerned, Michael, I have no desire ever to see you again.'

This time he really did go berserk. He grabbed the wine bottle like a club and advanced on her. She had to be rescued by the waiters, who pinioned his arms. Only when they had actually called the police did Michael break free and hurry off out of the restaurant.

The other diners cleared their throats, started light conversation and studiously avoided looking at Laura. She ate her hamburger and drank the entire bottle of wine.

Laura didn't get any more trouble from Michael. For a few days she walked around in fear, even going to the extent of carrying in her handbag the gun she had procured when doing the
Newsviews
feature on illegal firearms. But her husband made no attempt to accost or even contact her.

When she calmed down, Laura could see the logic of this. For someone of Michael Rowntree's conventional outlook, her pregnancy really would be the final straw to break the back of their marriage. She reckoned the next time she would hear from her husband would be through his solicitors. In spite of this, she could not lose the old feeling that Michael was spying on her. More than once she thought she'd glimpsed him in a crowd, following her at a distance. But maybe she was imagining it. She felt so ghastly, on the edge of nausea most of the time, that paranoid visions might well be another symptom of her general malaise.

She had hoped to have the kind of pregnancy in which the mother-to-be glowed throughout, given new energy and certainty by her condition. Instead, Laura felt positively ill for the first three and a half months. She threw up every day on waking, and had to make many unscheduled – and deviously explained – rushes to the Ladies during the day. All the time she felt lumpish, drained and as if she was about to succumb to gastric flu.

What made the situation more difficult was her determination not to let anyone on the
Newsviews
team see how she was suffering. This was sensible with regard to the men, particularly Dennis, for whom the slightest lapse from health or good humour would provide a cue for more misogynistic gibes, but Laura also kept the way she felt from her female colleagues. This was instinctive. Although she got on perfectly well with them in a work context, she didn't have any close women friends. Only to Rob, at the end of a particularly heavy day, might she now and then let the mask slip and hint at how wretched she was feeling.

But the wretchedness was purely physical. Never for a moment did Laura question the wisdom of the decision that had put her in this position. It was still part of her life-plan, and the knowledge that she would now achieve motherhood before the deadline of her thirtieth birthday never failed to prompt a little surge of confidence and satisfaction.

In the fourth month of her pregnancy, Laura suddenly felt better. The change was instant and, though brief moments of nausea recurred, she knew the worst was over. The improvement started on the sixteenth of February. It was a Saturday so, after getting up to make a cup of tea – she still couldn't tolerate the aroma of coffee – and pick up the post, Laura allowed herself the luxury of a lie-in. In the cocoon of sheets and blankets she felt secure, and it was a while before the realization trickled through that she didn't want to throw up.

The improvement in her mood was boosted by the receipt of a Valentine. Two days late, but it was always hard to judge the posts right from New Zealand. ‘I will love you always,' the printed message read, and Laura believed it. Underneath Philip had scribbled, ‘It was wonderful to hear your voice.'

In a way, the inadequacy of the message had a calming effect. It seemed to encapsulate the hopelessness of their relationship, and the impossibility of its ever being more than it was. The occasional card, perhaps now and then a snatched, awkward phone conversation – that was all that could be hoped for.

Laura had recognized this truth long before, but perhaps only recently had she fully accepted it. Her decision to get pregnant had been one of the consequences of that acceptance. So now, though Philip's card brought a pang, it was not the old anguish. Now it was a kind of melancholy, a rueful recognition of the untidiness of a world in which the obvious harmonies are not achieved and the loose ends are never adequately tied up. Laura Fisher had put all thoughts of Philip behind her, and was moving on.

She was also, she knew, doing her job better than ever. Through all the discomforts of early pregnancy, she had raised her work-rate, endlessly scouring her brain for new ideas and ways of enlivening old formats. She was determined to prove her worth to Dennis, partly so that he would have no excuse for blocking her return to
Newsviews
after the birth; and partly because she was damned if she was going to give him any prompts for disparaging put-downs about hormones.

At work she told everyone that the baby's estimated time of arrival was late August 1974, a month later than the real date. She reckoned that this precaution would save her from over-zealous solicitude as her time grew near.

‘Thank God I haven't got your job,' said Laura. ‘Don't somehow think I could do it.'

The vision mixer, a pretty girl in her thirties, grinned back. In the Control Cubicle other production staff shifted in their seats, twitchy with pre-transmission nerves. Laura, in a voluminous Indian print dress, sat awkwardly, dwarfing a swivel chair. The distended belly that would have prevented her from reaching the vision mixer's controls swelled massively in front of her, so that the only comfortable posture she could find was with her legs apart.

Even then ‘comfortable' was a relative term. The aching in her back had been continuous for the previous month. And in spite of the studio's air conditioning, Laura could feel the sweat trickling down to the waistband of her knickers. On a table beside her stood a glass jug and paper cup of water, from which she kept sipping. She didn't look forward to having to go out into the sticky July evening when the programme and the inevitable after-show drinks ended.

She was studio director that Friday. Dennis, characteristically, seemed to take delight in testing her, building up the pressure, looking forward to the moment when she would refuse one of the duties he imposed on her, ‘because of her condition'. Laura, equally characteristically, took on everything he offered and determined to show him just how well she could do it.