At this he looked pained and unhappy. He stood up, thrust his hands in his trouser pockets and paced about.
‘I have to say this, Amory. I feel it’s all my fault, somehow.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘I pressed you to go on that march. I insisted. Look what’s happened in the world since. It wasn’t important. Why was I so obsessed with it?’
‘You weren’t to know that,’ I said. ‘It was just rotten bad luck. What if I’d been hit by a bus? Would you blame yourself?’
‘It was because you were carrying a camera.’
‘If I’d turned up another street it wouldn’t have happened. It was just bad luck.’
He sat down and took my hand again.
‘Bless you for saying that. But I can’t help feeling that my. .’ He searched for a word. ‘My eagerness. That my urging had—’
‘Nothing to do with it.’
He sagged. Smiled. Kissed my forehead.
‘Am I allowed to smoke a cigarette out here?’
‘As long as I can have a puff.’
He smoked a cigarette — I shared it — and he said he wanted to send a specialist down from London, an eminent gynaecologist. Cleve was worried that a diet of white food and iron pills wasn’t good enough, wasn’t modern medicine.
‘Well, of course,’ I said. ‘That’s very kind of you.’
When he left, he said, ‘As soon as you’re well, we’ll reopen the office. Get you back to work. Get you taking photographs again.’
Sir Victor Purslane had overseen the delivery of some dozens of babies to minor members of the royal family and major aristocrats and charged twenty guineas per half-hour for a consultation in his Wigmore Street rooms. He was very tall and thin, with the slight stoop that very tall men affect. He was bald and his grey side-hair was swept back in two oiled wings above his ears. An elegant, expensively suited, faultlessly polite man, if not handsome — he had small watery baggy eyes.
He was escorted to my room by a guard of honour of two nurses and Dr Wellfleet, the director of Persimmon Hall. The great man had deigned to visit the provinces; the obeisance was almost grotesque.
He examined me thoroughly, internally and externally, he looked at my X-rays, he consulted the records from the London Hospital, Whitechapel, and the daily reports from Persimmon Hall. However sizeable the reimbursement Sir Victor was receiving from Cleve, I still sensed in him an urge to be gone as soon as decently possible, gamely resisting the temptation to look at his pocket watch, hanging from its gold chain and tucked in his waistcoat. Persimmon Hall was not his natural habitat.
Eventually Sir Victor did look at his watch and exhaled.
‘You’re going to be disappointed, Miss Clay,’ he said.
‘Disappoint me, Sir Victor.’
‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you. Why you’re bleeding like this.’
‘Oh.’
‘The trauma you suffered was the cause — but you know that as well as I do. Better.’ He seemed uncomfortable, for a moment. ‘Modern medicine. . Its triumphs. . We think we understand all about the human body, have solved its mysteries. But actually I think we know very little.’ He reached into his pocket for a small battered silver case and selected one of the five cigarettes it contained and lit it.
‘Last week,’ he went on, ‘I was present at the delivery of a perfectly healthy, bouncing baby boy. Eight pounds. He died yesterday. I haven’t a clue why.’
‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio—’
‘Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Exactly.’
He stood up and placed his palm on my forehead and smoothed my hair back. It was a spontaneous, unreflecting gesture, perhaps prompted by his recollection of that baby’s unaccountable death — and here he was confronted by another mystery. As soon as he realised what he was doing he took his hand away, quickly.
‘Time, Miss Clay. Time. You will be well but your own body will have to do all the work. We doctors and our medications can’t help you. I’ve no idea how long it’ll take but, in some months, I surmise, you’ll start to feel truly better. You’ll know it yourself. You’re a young woman in her prime. Nature will effect her cure.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Don’t thank me. That’s the good news. Now for the bad.’
‘Bad?’ I felt a spasm of alarm.
‘In my judgement, as a result of the severe internal injuries you received in the attack, I believe you will never be able to bear children.’
I looked at him in astonishment. I’d never considered this, not for one moment.
‘Really? Are you sure?’ I said vaguely, feeling hot, all of a sudden.
‘The continual bleeding. The clotting that was observed in the blood in the initial weeks. Everything points at permanent infertility.’
‘Right.’ Now I felt tears prickle at the corners of my eyes. ‘I’ll have to think about that. Take it on board.’
‘Yes, of course. And now I really must go for my train.’
He shook my hand formally and left.
*
THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977
Today was one of those weird Mediterranean moments you are sometimes blessed with on the west coast of Scotland. A sky of unobstructed azure, no breeze, a constant, steadily warming sun, razor-edged shadows. If only we had cicadas. . Flam and I walked down from the cottage to the little bay and I had a picnic lunch there — a cheese sandwich, an apple, a square of chocolate and iced gin and tonic from a Thermos flask.
When I think back to my encounter with Sir Victor Purslane and his pronouncement I can still remember the sense of shock I felt, but the strangest consequence of his visit was that the bleeding stopped, almost immediately. Two days, four days, six days went by — no blood. He was correct in another matter: I sensed the change in myself — something had happened, some corner had been turned, I knew, and I began to feel better, slowly and surely. I felt less tired, felt my natural energy returning, I wanted to eat food that had colours in it. My weight loss arrested itself and my pale face began to recover its usual healthy mien.
Dido made one of her rare visits bearing her weekly bouquet herself.
‘My God,’ she said. ‘What’s happened? Health — picture of. You’ve got to leave this ghastly place.’
And so I returned home, to Beckburrow, and reclaimed my old bedroom. A nurse was hired to look after me but she left before two weeks were up as she had nothing to do. I began to eat food that the family ate — steak pies, roast chicken, broccoli, raspberry crumble — and I went for walks, progressively longer, with my genial, ever-beaming father.
My parents had been informed, by handwritten letter from Sir Victor, of my now infertile state. There was little emotion expressed. In fact my mother — mother of three — said quietly to me one day when we were alone, ‘You may find it’s a blessing in disguise, my dear.’
Xan was at the house a great deal as I convalesced, I remember. He was an undergraduate at Balliol College, Oxford, of all astonishing eventualities. After years of dullard mediocrity, he had experienced a sudden spurt of intellectual energy, as if a dam had been broken. His Higher School Certificate results were excellent. When he went for his interview at Balliol he wore a canary-yellow suit and a matching bow tie. Asked his ambitions, he said he wanted to be a poet. He was awarded a £100 exhibition.
I started to become interested in the world again and what was going on in it. I listened to the wireless, I read newspapers and learned that Germany had annexed Austria, that a 500-ton meteorite had landed near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that something called ‘instant’ coffee had been invented and that Orson Welles had broadcast The War of the Worlds and caused widespread panic.