With No Crying (2 page)

S
HE LOOKED TERRIBLY
young to be pregnant, but all the same she made a charming picture in her bright, flowered maternity smock, with her fair hair bouncing against her shoulders as she stepped along the sunny pavement. The women passing by, especially the older ones, whose child-bearing days were over, would give her a quick, furtive glance of curiosity not unmixed with envy; recalling, perhaps, the days when they, too, had dwelt at the throbbing heart of things, carrying within them the whole secret of life.

Eight months gone at the very least, they reckoned, slewing their eyes quickly away after a swift, knowledgeable glance at the billowing curve of gay cotton. More like nine, really—any minute, in fact—and yet how well she held herself still! Straight as a flower, her movements easy and graceful despite that hugely bulging belly: none of that ugly, waddling, side-to-side motion usually so characteristic of these last weeks of pregnancy. Remembering, perhaps, their own variegated discomforts and disabilities at this late stage—the varicose veins, the heartburn, the endless, lumbering tiredness—they envied her still more. Oh, well. Some girls have all the luck.

*

Miranda, looking neither to the left nor to the right, was
nevertheless
acutely aware of the sidelong, appraising glances; aware, too, of the covert envy and curiosity she was evoking. She could even, in a remote sort of way, enjoy it; for after all, these women were all of them total strangers to her, none of them was ever going to see her again. Not one of them would ever know that under the flamboyantly voluminous smock and the
carefully-contrived
padding, there lay a stomach as flat as a boy’s, and a hollow, empty womb.

Deceiving this crowd of casual, passing strangers was easy, even exhilarating. There were moments when she actually
felt
like a young mother, with a real live baby inside her, under the warmth of those anonymous, half-admiring stares.

It was deceiving her
friends
that was so awful—more and more intolerably awful with every passing day. Friends who had been so kind to her, so full of sympathy; who had taken her in so readily, and without question, passionately defending her right to unmarried motherhood, silencing any hint of criticism from
outsiders
, and resolutely refusing to let her take her turn at carrying down the garbage. By now, they were even buying advance toys for the baby, and beginning to knit things.

And all the time this thing that she nourished inside her, this thing whose arrival they all awaited with such generous
enthusiasm
, was not a real baby at all, but a monstrous bulge of lies and treachery, growing bigger and bigger day by day, just as a real baby would have done.

Numb with dread, and only dimly aware of the direction she was taking, Miranda continued on her apparently cool and
unflurried
way through the jostling crowds, the half-envious glances and fleeting smiles pattering like gentle rain upon the carapace of her guilt and fear. In the sweltering August heat, she was chilled through and through as though by some terminal illness.

On she went, slower and slower as her destination loomed nearer. With mounting horror, she visualised the warm and kindly welcome that awaited her, inexorably, when she reached the flat: the affectionate concern, the eager, solicitous questions.

“No, not yet,” she would have to tell them, yet again: and then (she had taken to adding this of late, in desperation), “They think I must have got my dates wrong.”

And someone would urge her to put her feet up. Another would bring her a nice cup of tea, sugared exactly right … and she would feel worse than any murderer, any traitor, because these were her
friends
whom she must betray, not her enemies,
and for her there was no possibility of any last minute reprieve. The dates couldn’t go on being wrong for ever; nor could the baby remain vaguely “overdue” much longer.

Catastrophe was upon her: humiliation beyond anything she could ever have imagined. And yet even now, even in this extremity of shame and terror, the idea of simply returning to Mummy and Daddy in their pleasant suburban house—with their pleasantly permissive principles and their vaguely Left Wing broad-mindedness about vaguely everything—never for one moment crossed her mind.

I
T WAS
M
AY
when it had all begun, one of the loveliest Mays in living memory. For Miranda Field and her friend Sharon Whittaker, it looked like being the best summer term ever. Already enjoying many of the Upper School privileges—a
coffee-machine
, for instance, and free periods for private study—they were nevertheless not yet properly in the grip of exams. O-levels were still a full year away and casting only the faintest of
barely-noticeable
shadows across the golden months intervening. In this timeless unrepeatable interlude between childhood and the burdens of preparing for an adult career, it seemed downright ungrateful—almost a sin, really—to be working at all hard, and so Miranda and Sharon (clever girls anyway, to whom the school work came easily) nudged and whispered their way through the sunlit, easy-going lessons, and spent the long, delicious hours of “private study” lying in the long grass that bordered the playing fields, giggling, imagining and egging one another on into being in love.

To an observer (if such there had been) looking down on them through the great white heads of cow parsley, and listening to the rapturous whispered confidences borne on the soft, sweet-scented airs of spring, it might have seemed that they were merely in love with love.

And perhaps they were. But what of it? There is nothing “mere” about this kind of love, especially if you are not quite fifteen and drunk with the returning sun. And in any case, they had each of them, according to her questing fancy, given to this abstract passion a temporary incarnation and a name from among the remote and inaccessible sixth-formers at the top of the school. Thus Sharon was madly, hopelessly in love with the school
cricket captain, one Gordon Hargreaves, tall and fair, lithe as a whip, and as brilliant at work as he was at games; while Miranda, not to be outdone, had succeeded in working herself into a delicious state of unrequited passion for the Secretary of the Sixth Form Chess Club, a dark, saturnine youth with shining
almond-shaped
eyes and black, springy hair lifting from his scalp as if blown by some eternal wind. His name was Trevor Marks, and he played the zither as well as chess; and sometimes Miranda, catching the faint, distant twang of the instrument through the windows of the Sixth Form Common Room, would almost faint for joy standing out there on the gravel path in the sunshine, the books for whatever class she was on her way to clasped ecstatically against her pounding heart.

The joy of it was beyond belief; and while the magical
springtime
burgeoned towards summer, and branches heavy with may looped low above their giggling heads, they would whisper low to one another about the latest crop of wonders. How Gordon the cricket captain had been glimpsed putting his cycling-clips on and mounting his bicycle yesterday afternoon just by the school gate; or how Trevor (Miranda’s one) had almost collided with her as he raced down the steps of the Science Block, evidently late for something.

Suppose they had
actually
collided, Miranda rapturously
surmised
, her eyes half-closed against the incredible blueness of the sky: suppose he had knocked her right to the bottom, and had then kneeled by her, white-faced with concern, his hand on her breast to make sure her heart was still beating…. And then again (for fair’s fair, and Sharon was entitled to her turn) suppose that, mounting his bicycle, Gordon Hargreaves had caught sight of Sharon, her newly-washed hair lapping almost to her waist, and had paused for a moment to wonder who she was, and why he’d never noticed her before? Leaning his bicycle carefully and deliberately against the fence, suppose he’d strolled towards her, with a look of growing wonder in his laughing blue eyes…

Supposing … supposing …! It was no wonder that the actual experiences of the supposedly-luckier girls who had real-life, flesh-and-blood boy friends, seemed tame indeed in comparison,
not to say depressing. Listening, on Monday mornings, to the variegated setbacks and traumas endured over the weekend by their ostensibly more fortunate classmates—the tales of
telephone
calls that never came; of dates that ended in tears and recriminations; of being kept waiting; of being stood-up; of being kissed “like that”, and of
not
being kissed “like that”; of unloving words and of uncouth behaviour; of being taller than him and looking like a pair of Charlies walking along together—listening to all this, Miranda and Sharon could hardly help, sometimes, giving way to a deep, secret conviction of their own superior good fortune.

Because, of course, there was no way in which
their
loved ones could fail them in this sort of distressing fashion—or indeed in any fashion. Since neither Gordon the cricket captain nor Trevor the chess champion had ever spoken to either of the girls, or were even aware of their existence, there was absolutely no way in which they could let them down. No way in which they could slight them, neglect them, be unfaithful to them or even (God forbid!) bore them.

*

There is something in human nature which cannot leave well alone, which is somehow impelled to interfere, to provoke change, in no matter how blissful and ideal a situation. Thus it was with Miranda and Sharon, the precipitating factor in their case being the school dance, billed to take place at the end of May, on the last Friday before half-term.

Naturally enough, the occasion seemed, in prospect, to present unprecedented opportunities to anyone in the throes of
undeclared
and unrequited love. For the dance was one of the few occasions in the school year when the normal barriers of hierarchy, age and status could be expected to break down, and it would actually become possible for a fourth-former to walk up to a top prefect and say—Well, say
something,
anyway …

What
they would say, when and how they would summon up the courage to say it, required quite a bit of advance planning, and in the end they settled for a scheme both simple and ingenious: each girl, at some time during the evening, was to
walk boldly up to the
other
one’s beloved and offer to introduce him to “my friend”. The idea seemed to both of them a brilliant one, and very nearly foolproof, for this way each girl only risked a snub from the boy she
wasn’t
in love with, and so suicide would be unnecessary.

Simple enough in conception, the plan proved by no means so easy of execution. The difficulties surged in upon them in a blast of noise and heat and colour the moment they set foot in the big hall where the dance was being held. Somehow they hadn’t quite envisaged all this crush… all this din. Even to
find
their
unsuspecting
prey would be a mammoth task; and as for waiting around for an appropriate moment—
“Not
while he’s talking to someone,” they’d promised each other beforehand, “
and
not if he looks busy… or preoccupied… or in a hurry”—such niceties would clearly have to go by the board. They’d be lucky if they even got a glimpse of their respective victims, either of them.

Still, they weren’t the sort of girls to give up easily. Twice… thrice… they prowled the length and breadth of the dance hall, peering ferociously into the undergrowth of bright dresses and swaying bodies; and it was only when, after a few more turns, they decided to give themselves a breather out in the cool of the corridor, that suddenly it all happened. All at once the swing doors at the far end burst apart at the impact of a fresh band of revellers, and almost without warning Miranda found herself less than a yard from her friend’s beloved as he hurried past with an ice-cream cone in each hand.

There was no escape. It had happened: and only now did Miranda realise how deeply she’d been counting on the
probability
that it wouldn’t. She felt her mouth go dry, and her knees shook, even though he
wasn’t
the one she was in love with.

“Would you like to meet my friend, Sharon Whittaker?” she blurted out. He stopped at once, looking a bit surprised, but smiling down at her amiably enough.

“Sorry, love—” he gestured apologetically with the near-side ice-cream, “Later on—d’you mind?” and with another vague gesture of distracted goodwill, he disappeared through the door into the crowded dance hall, and vanished from their sight.

Well, at least he hadn’t snubbed her. He’d been nice enough, it hadn’t been a disaster; but on the other hand you couldn’t call it a success, either. Disappointing, especially for Sharon.

Still, he might come back. His words had vaguely implied something of the kind, had they not? For a while, the two conspirators hung about in the doorway, their eyes darting this way and that among the crowd, bright and intent as blackbirds watching for worms.

But he didn’t come; and presently, when they began to realise it was hopeless, it became necessary to apply their minds to the next item on the agenda—Trevor Marks. It was Sharon who must stick her neck out this time, and see if she could do better on Miranda’s behalf than Miranda had on hers.

Systematically she set about her task, working her way back and forth across the packed dance floor, quartering the ground, with Miranda like a gun dog close on her heels.

It didn’t take so long this time. Within a very few minutes they had their quarry cornered, and proceeded, with a fine display of averted eyes and calculated unconcern, to close in on him. It so happened that at this particular moment Trevor Marks was deeply engaged in conversation—but what of it? The
conversation
was only with another boy, and therefore didn’t count. Planting herself sturdily in the victim’s direct line of vision, Sharon boldly interrupted in mid-sentence whatever it was he was saying.

“May I introduce my friend Mira—?” she was beginning—then took a step back in surprise as he immediately whirled round on her with a dazzling smile, beaming it first upon her and then swivelling it expertly towards Miranda.

“Hi!” he greeted them collectively. “Can I get you both a drink?” Cider?—No, wait, I’ve a better idea. Stay here, don’t go away, there’s good girls, I’ll be back in a sec.—”

But by the time he returned, a glass of foaming beer in each hand, Sharon had loyally (and according to plan) disappeared.

“Where’s your friend?” he asked, glancing round enquiringly; and Miranda, opening her mouth to reply, found herself
incapable
of uttering a single word. It was as if she’d suffered a
stroke, like an old woman of ninety, right there on the dance floor.

Never mind about being witty and brilliant, as in her dreams; all she could pray for now was the strength to say
something.
Anything.

“I don’t… that is… well, she was here a minute ago,” she managed at last, and tried to hide her burning cheeks by raising her glass and taking a gulp of beer. It tasted awful.

“Oh.” He didn’t pursue the subject; and after a few more halting exchanges (“What class are you in, then?” “Four A.” “You like it there?” “It’s O.K.”), the conversation ground to a halt.

She was boring him, she knew, but there was nothing she could do about it. She was like the princess in the fairy story, only in her case it was not toads but monosyllables that leapt out every time she opened her mouth. Presently (and who could blame him?) he gave up, and stood lounging against the wall in silence, watching her drink her beer, waiting for her to finish.

How she got it down she did not know, it was so bitter, and such a lot of it, but she could hardly abandon it unfinished with him standing watching her like that through half-closed eyes. But she came to the end of it at last, and no sooner had she set the glass down than her companion seemed suddenly to spring to life. Seizing her by the elbow, he proceeded to steer her swiftly and purposefully through the crowd in the direction of the main doors.

“Let’s get out of here!” he mouthed into her ear—the din by this time was terrible—and then, as the crowds began to thin out a little as they neared the exit, he added softly, “Feel like a stroll outside?”